Satire

This is satire … but, like all great satire, it exposes the truth. I didn’t know who wrote it but I know now.

Peter Girnus

“I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.”

Cheap Looking ChatGPT

"For agent-style workloads, Claude Opus 5.5 delivers over 5x the API-equivalent value of GPT-6.1 Sol at the same subscription price.

And the gap just got wider after OpenAI cut the usage limits on its $200 ChatGPT plan in half.

This is a usage-value comparison, not a claim that Claude is 5x smarter or better."

When you ask AI (ChatGPT) not to be so AI it's never going to be easy.

What are your thoughts on this?

Search Privately

Never be afraid to search privately. 

There is nothing to be afraid of in searching privately. Someone should be able to wonder or be curious about things without announcing them to the world. You should be able to look into something strange at two in the morning, or something foolish, or something you do not yet understand. 

Curiosity is not a confession. A question is not a crime. What you search for in the quiet of your own head space belongs to you. Keep your mind's door shut. Ask the question. Find out what you need to know. Then go and make the coffee. Put your feet up. 

Ten of the Best Years

It doesn't have to be that way. Or even this way. Just ten years of Porsche ownership. What does that do to a person? Probably not much really. But i'm not the best person to add. Click pic to read.

Transmit In Transit

It's even more complicated than it appears. It's "in transit". Click the pic etc.

Belief Systems

OK, I know I didn't really big up AI and I'm not doing it now. Honestly. It just so happened that I decided to ask it for, let's say, some opinions. It's all good, mostly. As ever click on the pic to read the full story.

DDP

A short tale of a car park encounter.

Hacks for Idiots

1. Drink water when you are thirsty.
You will live longer than if you do not.

2. Rise a little earlier if you must be somewhere.
Time does not bargain with men.

3. Write things down.
Memory is brave until Tuesday.

4. Leave your keys where you left them yesterday.
The house is not hunting you.

5. When you are cold, put on another jumper.
Winter has never respected optimism.

6. Take a list to the shop.
Hunger buys foolishly.

7. Charge your telephone before it dies.
Dead machines answer no one.

8. Put food in the fridge before it spoils.
Rot is patient.

9. Empty the rubbish before it begins to smell.
Decay always keeps it's appointment.

10.Wash the cup after you drink from it.
Tomorrow is improved by small work done today.

There are no hacks. 

There is only paying attention. 

Most of what men call wisdom is old enough to have forgotten whoever first said it.

The rest is advertising. Etc.

Small World

Short and to the point and mostly a list.

DCB

Blues from the Data Centre.

Chester & Vernon

Chester was fifteen that summer. He lived near a river that ran brown after rain and clear when the weather held. He had a bicycle with one bent pedal and a pet bullfrog named Vernon.

Vernon was pink.

The frog had been pink since the day Chester found him in a ditch behind the grain store. People talked about it because people always talked about things that were different. Some said he had been painted. Some said he was sick. Others said he was rare.

Chester did not know. He only knew the frog was pink and healthy and could jump farther than any frog he had ever seen.

There was another thing people said.

They said that because Vernon was pink, he must be gay.

This did not make much sense to Chester. Vernon was a bullfrog. He spent most of his time sitting on warm rocks, eating flies, and staring at the river as if he had important business there. He never discussed romance of any kind. The question seemed impossible to answer and not very useful besides.

“He is just pink,” Chester would say.

That was enough for him.

One hot afternoon Chester put Vernon in a basket on the front of the bicycle and rode toward the hills. The road climbed through dry grass and scattered trees. The sky was large and pale. The air smelled of dust.

They reached an abandoned cabin a while before sunset.

Chester had heard stories about the place. Old stories. Hidden money. Lost maps. People who had vanished or just left. Most stories improve when nobody can check them.

The cabin leaned to one side. One shutter hung loose.

Chester parked his bicycle outside and stepped in.

The room was empty except for a table and a chair. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. Vernon sat in the basket and watched.

“There is probably nothing here,” Chester said.

Vernon blinked.

Then the frog jumped.

He leapt from the basket, through the door, on to the table. From the table to the chair. From the chair to a shelf.

The shelf broke.

Something fell.

Vernon jumped clear, out of the way.

It hit the floor with a sharp crack.

It was a tin box.

The design on the lid had been mostly scraped away. The coloured enamel had faded.

Chester opened it carefully.

Inside there was not gold. There were no jewels. There was no treasure map.

There were letters. Hand written.

Dozens of them.

The paper had yellowed with age.

Not every word was clear or easy to understand but Chester tried hard to follow the different scripts.

Chester sat by the window and read until the light faded. The letters belonged to people who had lived in the valley many years before. They wrote about crops, weather, births, deaths, dances, and long winters. Small things. Ordinary things.

Yet they felt important.

When he finished, Chester placed the letters back in the box.

He decided that he shouldn’t just leave the box here.

The sun was low.

The adventure, if it had been an adventure, was over.

They cycled back home.

On the ride home Vernon sat in the basket, on top of the box of letters and faced the wind.

Chester carried the box to the town library the next day. The librarian thanked him and smiled in a way that showed she truly meant it.

People later asked Chester whether he had found treasure.

“Not exactly,” he said.

And that was true.

Years afterward he remembered the road, the cabin, the dust, and the letters. He remembered the pink frog most of all.

Some adventures are large enough for songs.

Others are only large enough to remember.

Chester never decided which sort he had that summer.

Neither, it seemed, did Vernon.

The thing was, being a frog Vernon never did quite speak his mind. The opinions of frogs are just not recorded anywhere.

History and life experience tells us this.

Vernon just ate flies and, when the mood took him or the need arose, he would jump a long way.

Lifted

Click on the pic to read. Thank you.