Comment on The Belmont Club "G & D"

Tcobb,
politicians don’t like ... the competition

Close but no cigar. It is the "scientists" in the AGW mix who have reduced Geophysics to the stature of Parapsychology. They combine the ethics of Peter Venkman with the social skills of Egon Spengler. Question them and they will say, "Back off man, I'm a scientist."


By comparison the politicians practice "honest graft." The politicians, money people and foundation administrators are the same moral giants who consider a tsunami as an occasion to fly in, book rooms in 5 star hotels, exhaust every working girl within 1,000 miles, and leave after complaining about the service when the bar runs out of Chivas. For them Copenhagen is just another stop in the Five Mile Circus. The technical prigs like the AGW scientist seethe at the mention of the prostitutes for a few reasons;
1) They are just hired help and not in the same social circle as the caviar and call girl set
2) They can't afford professional talent and it puts their Volvos and Graduate assistants in a bad light.
3) They have a suspicion that even if they showed up with Big Al's bankbook they still couldn't get any.

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maz2,
(who quoted Michael Totten on Stalin and Bolshakov the Cinema Minister)
The dramatization of that amazing story is The Inner Circle (1991) with Tom Hulce starring as Ivan Sanshin the projectionist, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Every year I used it to teach my students what Stalinism was like. For reasons that I can not fathom it is not available on DVD. The only clips on Youtube have someone’s artistic expression replacing the soundtrack.

Update, thanks to JFSanders031 for finding a link, but no embed.

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How is it possible for a group of smart people ...?

Here is my fearless prediction. Traditional Physicists, Biologists and Agronomists will distance themselves from the Hot Air institutes. This will be done with a soft hand on the shoulder and a gentle indication that "Climate Science" is a refuge for the weak that was sucking money away from real science anyway. Faculty in traditional departments often approach the funding available from new departmental structures with all the badly concealed contempt of a Minister soliciting a contribution from a brothel. Rivalries run deep, Economists still question the integrity of Sociologists. One once told me they had "the most methods and the fewest results." Anthropology, like Climatology, is suspect because it crosses so many boundaries that it is hard to pin down. That makes it harder for an outsider to judge the integrity of research. Tight financial times mean that every department is fighting to survive and the people in the old units will move to shut down newer less reputable committees, if the government cash stops flowing.