Glenn Lagasse @glagasse

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.

For over 60 years, the Kennedy Center has been the nation's crown jewel for the fine arts. It has long been revered throughout the world as a leading example of how a great country can showcase its own artistic excellence and the broader human experience. Today, it voted to close its doors because a very small, petty, and insecure clown didn't get his way in putting his name on a building he didn't create and for which he could take no credit.

You’ve had like 100 fucking food recalls in the last 2 weeks alone. Shut the fuck up

Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy

2 months ago

Two years ago today, President Trump and I promised we would Make America Healthy Again. Now, just 19 months into the Trump administration, HHS has delivered the most sweeping public health reforms in modern history. See Big Wins here: hhs.gov/promisesmade-p…

9K 9K 54K 4.5M 1K

Every God Damn time it has been this way my whole 51 years of life.

Fun fact: The Strait of Hormuz was open every fucking day when Obama and Biden were president.

Todd Blanche fired the DOJ pardon attorney for refusing to restore gun rights to convicted domestic abuser Mel Gibson…as a favor for a friend of Trump Then he sent US Marshals to her home to intimidate her into silence This man cannot be AG👇 -TN contrariannews.org/p/over-100-jud…

Yes. I read it as a child. Because it’s a children’s book. We keep lowering standards for children’s media and then wonder why kids can’t read or grasp complex concepts. Running into words you don’t know is part of the learning experience. Not an insurmountable obstacle.

pete @pete_churchill

3 months ago

@bazashc Have you ever read it??? It’s 100% not a children’s book and whoever says that is lying to you. Not only is the vernacular dated and elaborate but the sentence structure and lengthy writing is often hard to get your head around as an adult. Love that book! but it’s not for kids

70 18 536 2.1M 133

This is total insanity. Words fail to explain how anyone let alone a plurality of voters thought giving an obviously demented person control of the most powerful government in the world was a good idea. We will be lucky to come out the other side of this alive.

Chemtrails don't exist Turbo cancer doesn't exist Covid does exist Covid vaccines worked Ivermectin doesn't work for Covid Ivermectin doesn't work for cancer Vaccines eradicated smallpox Vaccines don't cause autism Thanks and have a wonderful day

STRANGE HOW ELECTIONS IN AMERICA WERE CONSIDERED SAFE UNTIL A SERIAL LIAR WHO'S ALSO A CONVICTED FELON TOLD AMERICA THEIR ELECTION ARE RIGGED. 🙄🤡

A message to all sane Republicans: He pardoned 1,600 violent criminals. You said nothing. He bulldozed the East Wing. You said nothing. He interfered with the release of the Epstein files. You said nothing. He took over the Kennedy Center and renamed it after himself. You said nothing. He accepted a $400 million airplane as a personal gift. You said nothing. He threatened Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. You said nothing. He tariffed just about everyone but Russia, causing inflation and instability worldwide. You said nothing. He attacked a nation during mediated negotiations. You said nothing. His ill-conceived war killed 175 children on day one. You said nothing. He alienated and insulted our allies. You said nothing. His ICE Army terrorized and murdered U.S. citizens. You said nothing. He committed murder on the high seas. You said nothing. He co-opted the Justice Department and directed it to prosecute his political enemies. You said nothing. It’s time to start talking.

He gets a ballroom. An Arch. A new reflecting pool. 10 billion directly into his pocket from taxpayers. Billions from special interests seeking favors and pardons. What has America gotten? Tariffs, a new war, higher gas prices, inflation. Truly a golden age.

The New York Times @nytimes

5 months ago

Breaking News: The Justice Department is said to be considering settling a lawsuit President Trump filed against the IRS over the release of his tax returns. nyti.ms/4wl9069

761 904 2K 3.5M 371

I’m a chemist. I need to say this - because it’s getting dangerous out there. It’s called chemophobia. And it’s turning scientifically illiterate panic into a personality trait. People are now terrified of: • “artificial chemicals” • molecules made in a lab • pesticides at parts-per-billion • ingredients they can’t pronounce Meanwhile they drink alcohol, inhale smoke, burn fuel, eat plant toxins and scroll on phones built entirely by chemistry. The hypocrisy is unbelievable. Chemistry is not some dark force attacking humanity. Chemistry is: • medicine • fertilizers • vaccines • materials • electronics • clean water • food preservation • modern agriculture • literally your own body Without chemistry, modern civilization collapses frighteningly fast. And yet social media has convinced millions of people that “chemical-free” is a meaningful scientific concept. It isn’t. And when fear replaces chemistry, people stop trusting: • vaccines
• medicines
• food safety
• crop protection
• innovation itself A scientifically illiterate society becomes easy to manipulate. So yes - I will keep defending chemistry. Because chemistry is not the enemy. Chemistry is the reason most of us are alive long enough to complain about it.

MAGAs never ask why so many people loathe Trump. It's not from jealousy or TDS - it's because he's a corrupt monster who's destroying America. That's not irrational hatred: it's a concern for our future

@DrNeilStone 🤚

I repeat: this is madness.

Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar

7 months ago

BREAKING The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, U.S. officials said, as thousands of American soldiers and Marines arrive in the Middle East for what could become a dangerous new phase of the war should President Donald Trump choose to escalate. Such

531 658 3K 2.3M 272

This is truly insane, and it should be front page news across America.  Denmark secretly deployed soldiers to Greenland prepared to blow up airport runways to stop a U.S. invasion. They brought blood supplies to treat the wounded. France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden quietly coordinated against us. This was not a drill. This was our closest allies preparing to fight Americans. Let that sink in. NATO allies. Countries whose soldiers have fought and died alongside ours for decades. They looked at this president and decided they had to prepare for the worst. Fewer allies does not make America great. It makes us more isolated, more vulnerable, and it hands Russia and China exactly what they have always wanted: an America abandoned by its friends. The American people deserve to know how badly this president has damaged our standing in the world.  bbc.com/news/articles/…

Trump declares almost 50% of Americans to be public enemy number one – right after Iran. This is no longer politics; this is open civil war from the mouth of a president. Anyone who brands half of their own people – millions of ordinary Americans who simply vote differently – as the "greatest enemy" hasn't understood America; Trump hates it. This rhetoric isn't "tough," it's treacherous. It destroys precisely what makes America strong: the idea that Americans, despite all their differences, are one nation. Trump has just proven that he doesn't want to be president of all Americans – but merely the leader of a faction that considers the rest the enemy. Insane. And extremely dangerous.

Robert Mueller was a hero who served this nation with honor for his entire life. When you die, Americans, and people around the world, will dance in the streets for weeks because you’re a low, degenerate, criminal fraud who left a full stain on the Presidency.