It's "only academic"- intellectual dishonesty in the Academy

http://tinyurl.com/y86pt4a
Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies. By PETER BERKOWITZ
Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?...
****Here is an amusing example of academic dishonesty, or is it hypocrisy or inadvertency or just plain lying? At least it shares with Climategate an appeal to authority or consensus, albeit one close to home and at odds with the point claimed.****Mirror, Mirror Textbook economics is "a bizarre point of view"--according to the textbook's author!. By JAMES TARANTO
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls "the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties": Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. "What Democrats believe," he says "is what textbook economics says":
But that's not how Republicans see it. Here's what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning's position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."
Krugman scoffs: "To me, that's a bizarre point of view--but then, I don't live in Mr. Kyl's universe."
What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called "Macroeconomics":
Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker's incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of "Eurosclerosis," the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.
So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl's "bizarre point of view" is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.
It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes--the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist... ****A Nobel Prize is evidence that the recipient is/was brilliant or insightful about something. It doesn't betoken wisdom in all things or, even, anything current. We have seen that a Nobelist can even be literally crazy (e.g. John Forbes Nash ).Mr. Krugman joins such worthies as William Shockley, the admittedly brilliant pioneer of semiconductor physics who, nevertheless, was at the level of the Ku Klux Klan in his racist views.The real lesson of all these examples: appeal to authority is not a proper argument, only evidence, logic and an appreciation for scientific method ( which does not acknowledge "consensus" as a positive)are valid.****