Quickies: Peacemakers

Among the least comprehensible practices of awards committees, from the highest to the lowest, is the habit of “peace” groups of giving their awards to persons who openly and actively foment conflict. The most egregious example is, of course, the Nobel Peace Prize, which goes to activists for massively divisive causes so regularly as to suspect that the name of the thing is an intentional sarcasm.

Today our own beloved InstaPundit accidentally lands in that very trap:

WELL, THEY’RE GIVING OUT NOBEL PEACE PRIZES TO JUST ANYBODY THESE DAYS: Nobel Peace Prize Again Goes To Group That Has Done … What, Exactly? “As these unworthies collect their laurels, authentic peacemakers — such as 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who was shot in the face by Taliban terrorists solely for urging girls to go to school — go ignored.”

Really, now, Professor! Two for the price of one. Granted that the awardees are fomenters of conflict of no uncertain kind, Miss Yousafzai has promoted a practice that’s at the very heart of conflict in the Islamic world: rights for women and girl children. She’s not wrong to do so, of course – indeed, she’s shown more courage and moral insight than the rest of her country taken together -- but is her crusade really about promoting peace?

The English language is looking a bit battered, these days.

Quickies: The Audacity Of...Greed?

Just a moment ago, a brief exchange with an old friend unaccountably put me in mind of Barack Hussein Obama's ghostwritten campaign book The Audacity Of Hope. Leaving aside that the title of that unreadable tome was lifted directly from a sermon by America-hating racialist pastor Jeremiah Wright, there's this as well:

What, exactly, were Obama's followers supposed to hope, audaciously or otherwise, for?

From everything we've seen to date, if it isn't great crashing waves and torrents of yummy stuff involuntarily paid for by the people who didn't vote for him, I can't think what it might be. Can you?

Yet the Left calls us "greedy." It is to laugh...hollowly, and with one hand on a gun.

"If It Saves One Life..."

On May 30th an ambulance was caused to stop, in the middle of the emergency transport to the hospital of a suspect who had been shot by police. The ambulance, operated by the Washington, DC Fire Department (Medic 19) was powered by a diesel engine equipped with an EPA mandated device which shuts the engine off when for any reason exhaust emissions fail to comply with government standards. The patient was pronounced dead at the hospital when he arrived there after being transferred to another ambulance. Asphyxiation has been ruled out as the cause of the patient's death.

DC Deputy Fire Chief John Donnelly says his department's challenge is to work within the federal agencies restrictions.

We should all feel relieved and safer as a result of the Environmental Protection Agency.