Coming up with new ideas to justify funding can be a real headache in academia given the necessity of  having to publish to meet funding requirements.  For if there is one thing that  academia is short of, and this site is not (if the web is anything to go by: check the flab) - it is new ideas.  But it's more than that, because if they have one (a new idea)  then it can present real problems trying to publish it - if it's in any way controversial.   The workings  of  The Church and its demand  for ABSOLUTE OBEISANCE first needs to be understood before you can work within the system. 

First you have to understand that you NEVER come out with your good idea and shout "Hey, folks, what do you think of this absolutely fantastic, terrific good idea?"   What you have to do is build it up piece-by-piece, getting the wink and the nod - the 'ok'  - from everyone else for its various component bits without actually telling them what it's all about.  What is a good idea is to imply it's not a good idea at all.  What's even better is if you juxtapose it with what it's NOT about, just in case anyone gets suspicious that you've got one.  As best you can, you give all the different parts of the idea a separate status, so that in the end when you've got them all together (and this is if you've done the job right) then all those pieces look as if they are supporting what they're NOT.  And so, with all the pieces stacked up and referenced courtesy of peer review who have been fooled into thinking that review was actually contributing to something, then you can step in and provide the floor plan of how they really fit.  At which point nobody can do anything about it.  It's a no-problem, lay-down misere.

So, you begin.  ...What you do, ...first, ...at the very end of your RRP (regular rote piece), ...is you slip in a little innocuous something (it can be an image or a paragraph)  that is not attached to the foregoing text or argument, but has in its future portent what might be called 'memic appeal' - a sort of feelgood allure and interest to everyone - along loosely parallel lines to the theme in the piece, but not directly connected, ...something that appeals to 'primal instincts' - like jigsaw continental fits (which people know about from doing jigsaws), and convection currents in the mantle, (which  everyone knows about  from eating porridge and cooking soup).   Then, when that is in print, ... in the public domain, ...'peer reviewed' as it were (which it never really was),  then you can use it as 'authority' to pin your next piece on, and claim that, yes, it has been peer reviewed, which it has in a way, ...but hasn't in another. ..Well, you don't really have to attach it to anything, ...sometimes it's better if you do, sometimes not, ...depends...but just do the same again.  ...And so forth. 
 

Doing it 'that-a-way', telling it in disguise in bits and pieces as the above illustration begins to do is non- confrontational, and allows the Church to look the other way, ...collude even.  It feeds the Milk Cow  and lets sheep safely graze.  Doing it 'this-a-way',  just coming  straight out with it and telling it like it is  (like here) creates uproar, because it holds science accountable to its funding public.  Which way would you rather have it?   Be careful, ...in an organised society it  really is a moot point, is it not?

But, getting back on track (just for a moment) the transition from latitudinal to longitudinal opening of the mantle illustrated above lacks the connection to torsion which is inscribed beneath those big black arrows!    You can see the dichotomy that faces the Church here.  For once all of that stuff on the ocean floors is included - all of the fine stripey of transform faults and ridges, the helical torsional aggregate symmetry of which is now blindly (conveniently might be a better word) ignored in plate tectonics,  then they are well down the road to Earth Expansion which follows axiomatically from that recognition. 

And that's the problem.  Where convection  is the Holy Grail of the Church of Plate Tectonics,  global torsions  are its nemesis.   Whoever picks up this aspect (Carey's "Tethyan Torsion")  in the present religious climate of plate tectonic fundamentalism, sups not from any grail, but from a poison chalice.  That is why no senior figure in the Earth Science community will challenge plate tectonics.  It is high career risk, with a probable failure outcome.

Good on you Robert Stern.  Now,  .. Show 'em!  Go the next step and include the field facts hiding behind those Big Black Conceptual Arrows.