Humble servant of the Nation

Aung San Suu Kyi in good company with appalling Nobel prize winners

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Forget the lotteries or a long shot quadrella. The easiest way to make a million dollars and earn the respect of your peers to boot is to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

The rules are invariably flexible. A winner has to do something ‘good’ within fairly broad confines of what good is but then can do a lot of stuff that is extremely bad. Or you can do many bad things early on and then do a little bit of good and next thing you know you’re standing on the stage at the Stockholm Concert Hall, smiling for the cameras with the presentation cheque in hand.

The 26th President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Before becoming president, the redoubtable Teddy was both Secretary of the Navy and the leader of the Rough Riders, a US volunteer cavalry outfit that saw action in the Cuban theatre of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Teddy frequently charged ahead of his men and blasted away at anything that moved. He wrote a rather chilling piece of reportage where he spoke of his euphoria after killing his first man at the Battle of San Juan. Even his admirers, of which I am one, would acknowledge Teddy liked war a little bit too much.

Full column here.

332 Comments

  • Tracy says:

    Ooh crap, forgot to remind you about EPL Jack, apologies.

  • Razor says:

    If Abbott comes back and runs on no subsidised renewables he will win and win easily. Big Green will go nuts!

    • Henry Blofeld says:

      Have to agree with you Razor. We are fed up with all the “cave dwellers” who pushed Australia into this ridiculous position we are in with regard to Electricity supply. Closing any Coal Fired Power Stations while there is no reliable replacement is almost sabotage imho. Dare I say it “go hard Tony!”. Milton will be pleased if Tones makes a comeback although doubt the general populace would welcome it. Still that’s untested. Cheers. P.S. 1st cab off the rank for incoming PM Tones is to replace Julie Bishop!

      • Boadicea says:

        Which would be a shame. I think Julie Bishop is doing a great job on the international stage. I can’t imagine Wong, or whoever they’ve got in the job these days, matching that.

    • Bella says:

      We’re wasting time & destroying our planet while folks with flat-earth convictions keep us lagging behind so many other enlightened countries. While this sorry, disorganised joke of a government are being paid off by dirty coal we will continue to hear the battle cry of ‘clean coal’ & other stupid lies designed to play us for fools.
      If Anti-Environment Minister Frydenberg & Turncoat Turnbull have no guts & no vision for alternate energy sources we are dead in the water anyway with the Paris Agreement. Shame on them.
      Just last Wednesday Germany was powered by 63% renewables mate so if you think the majority of Australians will vote this rabble back in, with any leader, by blocking subsidies for renewables or investing our tax dollars into big polluters, you read far too many alternate truths from the Oz.

    • Dismayed says:

      Razor says: September 16, 2017 at 10:45 am Try and comprehend something other than that which reconfirms your already (wrong) bias.
      http://reneweconomy.com.au/blackouts-baseload-debunking-myths-aemo-reports-liddell-16700/

      • Razor says:

        That link said absolutely bugger all. Lots of if, buts and maybe’s. It even talks about battery storage which doesn’t exist yet! You have to be kidding.

  • Not Finished Yet says:

    About ten years ago I was talking about women with some friends. It was not a conversation that Trump or Mayweather would have enjoyed because we were talking about the women we most admired. Because it was a serious conversation among men, celebrities did not get much of a look in. My list included people not widely known, including my wife and goddaughter. I am not embarrassed to say that Aung San Suu Kyi was fairly high on my list. You saw through her well before I did JTI, and she has not been on my list for a while now.

    Tracy, et al. Just keep in mind that the comments on the other side of the wall are neither reflective of the Australian population at large or, indeed, of the readership of The Australian. If they were the Federal parliament would be approximately made up of 40% right wing extremists, 50% Coalition voters and 10% the rest of the political spectrum. My advice is to let them rant away on the other side of the wall but not get drawn into commenting over there. Alright Penny, I suppose your very brief comment was harmless enough.

  • wraith says:

    OOOh speaking of religion and all… where’s that errant priest got to? Havent seen one from PLMO in a while. Hope he is okay. Oh and a ps. to Penny, How is the old Plumber travelling? can you find out if he is winning the fight for me?
    Not like that lamb to be silent.
    cheers all

  • wraith says:

    @ Penny

    ” Buddhist term ‘karma” thinking that the religion is all about peace…it isn’t, it’s just like all other religions, a load of garbage.”
    .
    Perfect truth from Lady Penny. Religion. It divides, it causes hatred and gives fools the right to kill in the name of their god. Along with a myriad of other heinous crimes of the mind it allows. Should be banned outright, and yet, we have to respect it. Why?

  • Trivalve says:

    We should never lose sight of how much we don’t know about other places and people. Burmyanmar (I just made that up I think) was a very strange place for a very long time and no-one should think that too much has changed. Just because they built a new airport, a few hotels and let foreigners in to see Bagan doesn’t mean that a lot has changed (they have traffic problems in Yangon now though. This = $$$). I don’t know (and outside of the country, how many do?) how much power ASSK really has and what she has to do to hang on to it. Maybe she agrees about the Rohingyas – who knows? I spent some time there in 1990 – 91 when she was under house arrest and SLORC was in full power. Weirdness was everywhere, from the all day political harangues and armed forces (Tatmadaw) songs on the TV, to the daily terrorist attack that blew up the power station at 3pm, to the exhortational billboards and the old men selling 1936 Hino truck spare dashboard parts on the footpaths (and there was a market for them). We went past Chez Ang every day, walled off as it was and I used to wonder what was going on in her mind. We were taken to the Yangon yacht club just along the lake for drinkies. The Tatmadaw were rounding up protesters outside whilst we dropped in for a sail and a couple of G and Ts. Seriously weird. The flashest hotel in town, the Inye Lake Hotel, had missing (never fitted) windows and no service of any kind. The banknotes still came in multiples of 9. It was all about getting some foreign exchange into the place without challenging SLORCs SLORCness. They had closed the universities and a lot of the students worked for us. They told us that we should not be there, but they needed the work regardless. Many working women were moonlighting as prostitutes just to get ahead.

    Fast forward – I went back a couple times in 2010 – 2012. Lots of changes but underneath, it’s still largely about foreign exchange I feel. And whist I don’t pretend to understand the place, I have the strong suspicion that the affection that Buddhist Burmese have for ASSK is really for her famous father, General Aung San. If you see a hut, office or other outpost of the NLD, there are pictures of her face, but bigger, full length pictures of him in uniform. That’s the first thing to recognise – the devotion is more about him than her I suspect.

    Like to say more. Have to go and jump in a helicopter. May get back to this.

    • Trivalve says:

      So an intriguing side of this whole shebang is that the generals and the Tatmadaw in Myanmar, whilst remaining very Buddhist, don’t show very mush of the go-with-the-flow nature of their philosophy (as it claims to not be a religion). They got very narky with the monks after 1988 when they stopped giving them supplication or whatever it is that Buddhist monks do for adherents, and quite a few monks disappeared. This is a country where the faith is totally embedded in their way of life and there are reminders of that everywhere in the zillions of pagodas. The behaviour of the generals towards their own people and of the greater part of the nation towards the Rohingyas is appalling but they appear to have no shame. Indeed there was something of the DPRK about the way they behaved for a long time and, as I noted above, it has not yet gone away. The difficulties that they have had with the Karen and other separatists cannot be ignored in all of this either.

      So I guess what I am getting at is that we can judge ASSK from a distance but understanding where she’s coming from or what her position really is not easy, although what is easy is to point fingers from elsewhere. Probably they fear the 130 million or so Bangladeshis on their border, but pushing their own muslim population over it is not going to help much.

      Over the wall I get the the impression that the only good muslim is a dead one. Charming crowd.

      PS, Jim the Plumber, I dropped you a brief message over there but it was removed. Wondering how you’re travelling?

      Gotta go.

  • Dwight says:

    Dowsabel? As a wordsmith Jack, I thought you’d find the suggestion to resurrect these 30 words Quixotic: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41266000

    Don’t think I’m willing to try on dowsabel.

  • Huger Unson says:

    It drifts into Buddhists vs Muslims then into Humanity vs Colonists when the pitch is more likely China vs India.
    Anyway, if I may say, the Geelong effort was reminiscent of another Nobelist, Bob Dylan, leading in this clip of Watchtower. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2RFKxAiH84

  • Razor says:

    Well people for those of you who like a flutter your uncle razor has a cracker for you today!

    Sydney race 5 number 1 all up Melbourne race 5 number 6.

    Happy days and enjoy the win!

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