The Nobel committee has once again refused to abide by Alfred Nobel’s will or even the name of the Nobel peace prize. Rather than awarding anyone working to abolish or reduce standing armies or to create peace, the committee has picked another random good cause and pointed out the tangential relationship it has — as virtually everything has — to war. Even the journalists at the announcement seemed confused, but the corporate media cannot be expected to diagnose the problem, which is a society fundamentally averse to ending the institution of war. Some U.S. media outlets were hoping the prize would go to a Russian opposition leader, which would have increased weapons sales, and numerous past prizes have gone to major weapons dealers and war makers, so perhaps we should be glad it wasn’t something worse than a program doing good work that’s more acceptable than the good work for which the prize was created.