SLORC wins on Earth, Orcs win on Middle Earth…

At Reason, Jesse Walker has an amusing guide on “How to Win a Nobel Peace Prize.” He points out three options. The first, “Be a famous humanitarian,” is obvious enough. If that’s too hard, you can “Start an international organization. Or, if you can swing it be an international organization,” like the United Nations, Amnesty International, or Doctors Without Borders.

But if that is still too hard, there’s Option Number 3: “Kill a lot of people, then stop.” That’s how the Kissinger/Le Duc Tho and Arafat/Rabin/Peres combinations got their prizes. Think of the possibilities:

By this method, the prize could conceivably go next year to Dick Cheney, the Janjaweed, or anyone else in a position to bring a war to a temporary stop. That someone could be you!

My advice to anyone who wants to follow in the footsteps of Linus Pauling and the Dalai Lama is to fuse approaches two and three. Start an NGO devoted to murder and mayhem—something on the SPECTRE/Al Qaeda/Medellin Cartel model—and then agree to a truce.

So it’s too bad for SLORC that Aung San Suu Kyi has already won hers.