Peace is just a word

The recent nobel peace prize shennanigans sparked an idea from David Carr -

I am thinking of starting a campaign to establish an internationally-recognised system of 'War Prizes'. It may seem more than a trifle insensitive but, really, it is the perfectly rational thing to do. After all war is a difficult and dangerous business and I think it is only fair that its most skilled practitioners are accorded some due level of public acclaim. We could even have categories of award such as 'Most Devastating Air Strike' or 'Most Creative Use of Field Artillery'.

It's worthy of consideration. The view presented by rest of his post is shared by yours truly; the peace prize is a sham, and if the Norwegian Nobel Committee isn't going to change that we should stop pretending otherwise. We're lending it unmerited credibility.

Inexplicably, the article he cites seems to ignore some of our newest laureate's more... notable remarks.

"We know that the developed nations are using biological warfare, leaving guns to the primitive people," the Standard quoted Maathai as telling a public workshop in the central Kenyan town of Nyeri on August 30.

"They have the resources to do this."

"AIDS (is) not a curse from God to Africans or the black people," she said, according to the paper's account of the meeting published a day later.

"It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did."

"Why is the rest of the world just watching, doing nothing while Africans are being wiped out? The rest of the world has abandoned us," Maathai said in this Saturday's issue of Standard.

Note that any actual observations of developed nations using biological warfare aren't required to arrive at this conclusion. With cognizance of the billions in AIDS assistance from the west being inconvenient to this conclusion, it is ignored in favor of the accusation that the west does nothing. The absense of actual efforts to control anything (aside from the tendencey to poke unsheathed penises into everything) is likewise no impediment to her deductive process. Her voluminous experience planting trees is sufficient expertise to determine that AIDS did not come from monkeys. Diagnosis: chronic moonbatitis.