Professor Myles Allen tells the Daily Mail of classic lefty blathertalk:
If you suppose that the annual UN climate talks will save us, forget it. I met a delegate at the last talks in Doha in December who told me he had just watched a two-hour debate that culminated in placing square brackets around a semi-colon.I can tell you from experience that such things are not only possible but are happening as we speak.
I attended a three day Arts conference in Durban some twenty years ago...that's right twenty years...
and I experienced exactly the same inertia. Hours were spent 'debating' over the most trivial of details and in the end ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WAS ACHIEVED.
I experienced the same again in academia after being elected as the lecturers representative to the Academic board of the Institution I worked for. After time wasted on pre-meeting cocktail party rituals the subsequent meetings consisted of trivial 'debates' where a few narcissistic individuals who never seemed to tire of the sound of their own voices rabbited on and on about 'points of order' and how to increase their power/influence/remuneration. In all the time I attended these meetings nothing was ever achieved until a crisis made decisions inescapable. I resigned because I felt like I was going to explode at the inanity and sheer wastefulness of it all.
I realised that this is why private enterprise for all its human frailties like greed, manipulation and assorted ills, can still achieve so much more than a government bureaucracy even when corporate leaders fall into the traps of a bureaucracy. I experienced deja vu in the form of a company director (who had been an academic) who ran his board in the same way as an academic institution (politics vs. economics).
Needless to say the business was unsuccessful and collapsed, which marks the enormous difference between private enterprise and taxpayer funded bodies, the one dies while the other lurches on like a zombie draining funds and stultifying brains.
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