You just gotta love liberals, they're so well intentioned.   And they love to hold ceremonies to present awards to their friends.   Nowhere is the need for public recognition more obvious than the entertainment world which feels it necessary to recognize the achievements of ever growing numbers of its membership every single year.   Not only that, they have to hold multiple ceremonies for the same thing like the SAGs, the Oscars, and Golden Globes, just in case you missed one or the other.   But among liberals there is no higher award than the Nobel Peace Prize.   Entertainers do not generally earn this but they are frequently nominated.   This year the lucky recipients of nominations include Bono and Bob Geldof.

I'm still at a loss for words to describe how I feel about the past several attempts by entertainers to create an organization to do charity with other people's money.   These are among the most wealthy individuals in the world but when it comes time to give, they give something important more than their considerable fortunes, they give themselves.   They give themselves to plead and beg us and make us feel guilty enough to fork over as much money as we possibly can.   Then we are allowed to go our separate ways with the warm feeling inside of having cared, having given a piece of our much smaller "fortues," having contributed to solving the world's problems.   It is only years, perhaps decades, later that we learn how a few cents of each dollar we contributed actually reached its destination and from there was misdirected to some contrary purpose.

Still we hold the organizers of such self-agrandizing ceremonies as Live 8 in high esteem.   We even give the organizers nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.   What a hoot.   But that's no more of a hoot than many other interesting nominations for the prize.

Some notable past nominees:

Adolf Hitler
Josef Stalin
Benito Mussolini
Slobodan Milosevic
Stanley "Tookie" Williams

I guess it doesn't hurt one's chances of being nominated to be a murderer or even espouse genocide as the path to peace!   And sometimes even the winners of the prize are rather interesting studies in what the human world considers peaceful behavior.   Last year's winner of the peace prize was the UN's IAEA and its director Mohamed ElBaradei whose purpose in life has been to prevent the proliferation of nuclear arms.   I guess they got the peace prize because, to all observers, they tried really hard even if they didn't accomplish the goal or even make serious inroads.

The UN and its organizations are frequent nominees and often winners of the prize.   The UN's peacekeeping forces won the prize in 1998.   I suppose their tendency to not accomplish their mission while committing rape of women, including the very old and, of course, the extremely young, as well as other well-documented atrocities was not general public knowledge when the prize was awarded.   In 2001 Kofi Annan and the UN itself won the prize but that was before the largest corruption scandal in the history of the planet, the oil for food scandal, was uncovered.   yet what exactly did the UN accomplish that year?   What Earth changing accomplishment warranted the award?   But before I leave you, I want to remind you of another noteworthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Yasser Arafat.   Was he involved in less killing that year so they figured they better give him the prize to encourage such behavior?

Is it not appropriate that the founder (post-humously) of the Nobel Prize, Swedish inventor, Alfred Nobel, was the inventor of dynamite.