Dear Nobel Committee: Don’t Even Think About Giving a Prize to Kim Jong Un

It has been a year of bad ideas and contempt for reason, a year of assaults on integrity and attacks on independence, a year of rewards for dictatorial oppression and respect for distortions of the truth. And this Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee might stand up and say, “Hold my beer.”

According to the website Oddschecker, which gathers odds from across betting platforms, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, along with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, are the leading contenders to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Stunningly, at press time the several betting websites that Oddschecker follows on Nobel prospects predict a greater than 50 percent chance of Kim winning. The leader of one of the world’s cruelest social experiments, with 25 million people stuck in a medieval personality cult, and more than 100,000 people languishing in concentration camps, might win one of the world’s most respected prizes. Sigh.