Reflections From a Murky Pond

According to “experts,” the absolutely safest roads in the world can be found in Norway, with the Nordic nation scoring an impressive 8.21 out of 10 on the study. Indeed, in Norway, only 2.7 people out of every 100 000 die in road accident per year, as opposed to, for example, 11.0 deaths per 100,000 per year in America.

But why is this so? The answer is, of course, both easy and not directly related to anything involving cars, roads, or driving. It’s a matter of linguistics and the polyglot norm of the Norwegians. Face it, anyone who can read English is going to slow down when approaching a fartsdumper (speed bump), and they’re all over the place.

Tags: Bokmål | Driving | Humor | Language & Idiom | Norway | Safety

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 23rd, 2022 at 8:20 am and is filed under Humor. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

If you’ve paid any attention to the news – or rather the fawning, biased non-news spewed forth from Obama’s MSM media shills – you know that on December 10, 2009, President Obama took a short break from his duties as POTUS in order to fly to Oslo, Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.

Even more than usual President Obama’s acceptance speech was a “wonder” to behold.

And The Nobel Prize For Irony Goes To… Barack Hussein Obama

Don’t get me wrong; I personally found very little that was glaringly inaccurate or offensive to America and Americans in President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. But it takes levels of narcissism, arrogance, and raw chutzpah that beggars the civilized man’s mind to use one’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to justify two ongoing wars and to lecture the audience on the meaning of “just war” and that we won’t achieve peace in our lifetimes.

Two personal points – One, Obama’s linking of himself with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was naught but shameful, racialist pandering more suited to an ACORN operative than the POTUS.

Bringing up Gandhi was especially sweet! It was a beautiful dig at the Nobel Committee for fives times refusing to award Gandhi the Peace Prize because it would have Norway’s political relationship with England.

If there’s an issue with President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech, it isn’t that its contents were untrue. It was that it was highly inappropriate for the circumstances, venue, and audience.  Some truths should not be spoken, at least not all the time and without concern. Look at what doing so did to President Bush’s international reputation 😉

Tags: Humor | Irony | Nobel Prize | Norway | Obama | Peace | Politics | War

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 7:46 am and is filed under Humor, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

President Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for being America’s First Black President.  The Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden and the Nobel Committee in Oslo, Norway seemed to be as enamored of the curiosity of a Black being POTUS as the rest of the world was in the wake of Obama’s election. I can think of no other rationale for a Committee of five persons elected by the Norwegian Parliament – called the Stortinget – to award President Obama the prize, such as it is.

This is when the puling Obama followers start raving that I’m a racist. 😉 That’s OK; they’re not deserving of having their opinions given any credence by myself of any other American.

I’m not going to bother going into whether or not President Obama – or the TOTUS – has done anything to-date  deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s an opinion that will undoubtedly vary between people depending upon what they hold as important, deeds or words and projected aspirations. That debate is utterly meaningless in the larger scope of things and completely immaterial to Obama’s receiving of the Nobel Prize.

What is important is that President Obama had done absolutely nothing to deserve the Nobel Peace Price, other than being a Black man who was a successful politician in America, at the time of his nomination for the prize.

To be considered eligible for an award, it is necessary to be nominated in writing by a person competent to make such a nomination. A personal application for an award shall not be considered.

Competence to submit nominations shall be incumbent on representatives, domestic as well as foreign, of the field of culture in question, in conformity with detailed regulations issued by the prize-awarding body.

Each year the prize adjudication shall embrace such nominations as have been submitted during the preceding twelve months up to February 1. If, in addition to the prize for the current year, the prize-awarding body has at its disposal prize money reserved under §5, the question of the award of the prize for the current year shall be decided before a decision is made concerning the amount reserved from the preceding year.

— Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, § 7

Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 and formally took office on January, 20, 2009. The nomination, from a qualified source, had to be submitted to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo before February 1, 2009. That would give a window of 11 days between President Obama Inauguration and the deadline for his nomination for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

11 Days!

What did President Obama do in those 11 days other than get settled into his new office? Did he do anything during the first two weeks he was in office that furthered the cause of Peace at all? The answers are respectively nothing and  no; President Obama achieved nothing to promoted Peace during those 11 days nor did he even attempt to do so.  It would be totally ridiculous to have expected him or any other POTUS to have done so.

But… Barack Obama did manage to, as a self-identified Black man, to get elected as the 44th President of the United States. I am forced to conclude that the Nobel Committee has awarded President Obama the 2009  Nobel Prize For Race.

Tags: Blacks | Nobel Prize | Norway | Obama | Peace | Politics | Racism

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 8:38 am and is filed under Politics, Society. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.