Barry Hirschowitz

Founder/CEO at CellData

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

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.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations.

Because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from – if they disappeared when Yandex went offline. This proves, again and again, that Europe is not the source of the problems. Europe is not the one making everything more difficult.

Most importantly, we need people in America, every morning, when the day in Europe is already moving toward evening, to really see what is happening. To see the truth.

From a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum. (3/3)

[Save East Po @SaveEastPo]

What happened today was a blitzkrieg on a public park. A cherished DMV space. If you are not livid about the circumstances that led up to this and what exactly the Federal government did in the past 24 hours I don’t know what to tell you.

Let’s do a quick timeline:

1. Last night, a Friday before a long weekend, at 5PM, government lawyers filed a notice that tree cutting would begin in earnest today. The stated reason was a pretext - apparently fulfilling a 2019 Cultural Landscape Review on East Potomac. This was clearly an excuse to bring the gangs in.

For months the government has stated there is no plan, nothing has been decided, going to follow the law. Ya, right.

2. At 5:30AM this morning, 3-4 dozen workers assembled at East Potomac Park. The blitzkrieg began shortly thereafter. They were given clear orders to fell as many trees as possible.

3. For hours, from 6AM until 4PM today, nothing but chainsaws. Healthy trees, old trees, all would come down. No clear estimate for the extent but at least 100 trees came down.

The devastation is apparent. Entire groves cleared. Not a single animal on the peninsula. Not a sound aside from the roar of chainsaws. Earth ripped to pieces.

Anybody that thinks it is acceptable to shred public lands to appeal to the vanity of the President of the United States needs their head examined.

We have been sounding the alarm on this for months. For months we knew this day would come. Where the President would, under dubious legal pretexts, sic his goons on a beloved public space.

This is not a local issue. This is fundamentally a question of if we the people own our public lands or the temporary resident of the White House does.

@jamie_raskin @JaredHuffman @DonBeyerVA @glenniveymd @MarkWarner @AlsobrooksForMD @timkaine @ChrisVanHollen

[Dave Troy @davetroy]

For those not familiar, I called out Massie years ago. And yeah you need to know he has proposed legislation to withdraw the US from NATO and to “End the Fed,” which are both top Putin wish list items. Here’s my piece from February.

https://t.co/wMKJzuc5oC

[Derek 🐂 Bullish on Baltimore @MobtownDare]

we dont hate these people enough.

its time to get angry.

[Brett Erickson @BrettErickson28]

BREAKING: Just mere HOURS after President Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine, Russia struck the main Kharkiv power plant.

It is very obvious that Trump is just trying to WILL a ceasefire into existence and attempt to jawbone the energy markets in the process.

With this taking place alongside Iranian escalation in Hormuz, and Saudi/Yemen escalations…

Trump has TOTALLY lost all control.

[Travis Akers 🇺🇸 @travisakers]

The Community Notes incoming for @nicksortor look really bad and he has likely set himself up for a major libel case.

[Laura Bassett @LEBassett]

Elon immediately suspended this account that showed Nick Sortor’s recorded call to the mental health facility was AI generated and is preventing community notes on the Sortor post.

It’s all hands on deck trying to make the fake Talarico story stick

[Susan @susanbordson]

@RadioFreeTom @JackieIversArch I know it's become repeated ad nauseum, but the U.S. political press STILL covers *this* president's words very differently than they have every other president

They GIFT him far more tolerance for his outrageousness and his unmatched lack of adherence to facts

[EU says Elon should not lie abt my blue check @emptywheel]

Two more dead servicemembers that Putin helped to kill, and yet Trump is rewarding Putin.

https://t.co/PsAkfyOBSI

[Tom Hoefling @TomHoefling]

A bellicose Donald Trump speaks threateningly to Ukraine, but never has even a cross word for the aggressors, his Kremlin masters, of course.

[Ivan 82 LEGEND @striga_iva37288]

@SenAdamSchiff You know it , world knows it just dumb maga inbreeds don’t.

[Senator Adam Schiff @SenAdamSchiff]

We went from sanctioning Russian oil to buying it in three weeks.

Instead of ending his disastrous war in Iran, Trump is now funding Russia's war in Ukraine.

We used to hold dictators and autocrats accountable.

Now our president negotiated a deal to fund Putin's unjust war.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Putin helping Trump and Trump helping Putin. Same as ever.

[Stuart Stevens @stuartpstevens]

Republican Party is functioning as asset of Russian Federation.

[Nate Sibley @NateSibley]

The Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act of 2022 prohibits the import of diesel into the United States unless the president submits to Congress a certification that Russia has agreed to withdraw from Ukraine, recognized Ukraine's sovereignty, and poses no threat to NATO.

How is this consistent with the law?

[Amanda Carpenter @amandacarpenter]

Trump & Hegseth aren't just proposing to livestream an execution for people who want to watch.

They're proposing to broadcast a man being shot to death, even if deserved by our system, and even if you agree with this version of the death penalty, knowing that the footage will be clipped, shared, and pushed into social media feeds.

Including those of our children. The gruesome image will be everywhere.

Parents will have virtually no control over whether their kids see it. Once those images are released, there is no taking them back.

Hope all the parents in the Trump Admin are cool with that.

[Patrick Skinner @SkinnerPm]

As a homicide detective, I can say with all of my being that there is no lesson learned in seeing someone die. But there is a price. And that price is your peace. Your decency. And the soul of our society.
We don’t have to be this way, this fake tough but real ugly way. Stop

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

I oppose the death penalty, but I didn't always feel that way. I understand the people who support it - because I once was one of them.

But either way, the death penalty staged as a public spectacle is an abomination and stains us all.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

When Republicans talk about "deregulation," here's what that means in practice:

Companies are allowed to cut corners on food safety to increase their profits and our food becomes unsafe to eat, and shortages drive up prices for consumers.