Once upon a time, oracles were people who spoke under divine inspiration and authority. This meant that they had to be people of great integrity. Bribes were not unknown - even the Oracle of Delphi was accused of taking bribes - but the resulting corrosion is difficult to repair.

Academics, particularly scientists, have become the modern oracles. That is why scientific corruption is so dangerous. We are all familiar with politicians accepting bribes - er, campaign contributions - but we are less prepared for scientists who accept financial compensation from corporations that they then support in public issues: "As a scientist, and with objectivity unimpaired by any financial considerations ..." The latest episode concerns reports on fracking , injecting fluids to fracture rock in order to free crude oil, natural gas, or whatever free-flowing substance one is after. There are a number of environmental issues, and a number of academics have publicly stressed the economic benefits and downplayed the environmental and health consequences. It turns out that a few of these optimistic academics had cozy financial relationships with the fossil fuel industry.

Cozy relationships between academics and wealthy patrons go back to Aristotle and Alexander, and we all remember the Kings of Egypt and Israel and their pet priests. But oracles and academics have obligations to the public, and their obligations to the public come first.

Political puppets have been around ever since shamans used sympathetic magic to torment politicans by sticking pins into dolls. Politicians never liked this, which of course makes the practice of burnings and hangings in effigy -- as well as parading around in grotesque masks -- even more fun. Protesters are planning helicopter puppets, elephant puppets, Romney puppets, and even snake puppets to greet the Republican delegates. Getting into the spirit of the thing, Tampa has barred sticks, masks, strings, and puppets, and the spokesperson for the Tampa Police Department said that puppet "heads have been used to hide weapons and other matter, fecal matter." Assuming we all watch the same movies, the weapons the spokesperson was speaking of are probably throwable knives ...

Of course, visitors (presumably including protesters) will be free to bring their Glocks. And realistically speaking, if you wanted to convey really nasty contraband to the site, a conservative briefcase would attract a lot less attention than a Rick Scott puppet wielding an AK-47 (a real one: plastic AK-47s are banned). But adult realism is so boooring, and the city government and the police want to be more than just tedious chaperones. So on with the show!

Meanwhile, the Tampa Tribune cheerfully reminds us that the Republican National Convention will be the second most-covered media event of the year, following only the summer Olympics in London. And we're getting ready...

The convention starts the same day classes begin at both the University of Tampa next door and the University of South Florida uptown, and Tampa's traffic gridlock is already among the nation's worst. August 27 will be an interesting day for traffic enforcement ...

At home, Conservative Party MP Tory Aiden tweeted a whine that the Olympics opening was "[T]he most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen" -- and you must admit that things have come to a pretty pass when a TORY member of Parliament sends a TWEET whining about a "leftie multi-cultural" show put on by his own party's government. The Mayor retorted (in a speech, not a tweet) that "I'm a Conservative and I had hot tears of patriotic pride from the beginning".

But worse was to come from across the sea, for Mitt Romney was on an international tour to display his credentials as a diplomat and head of America's conservative party. Mitt Romney told NBC that "It's hard to know just how well [the Olympics] will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting. The stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging." To this, the Mayor responded to a crowd in Hyde Park (where else?) with "There's a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we're ready. Are we ready? Are we ready? Yes, we are!".

Chastised by the Mayor, both naifs quickly apologized and retreated. In Romney's case, the retreat was over a thousand miles, where he is seeking a more sympathetic audience -- in Israel. This ought to be interesting ...

It turns out that Romney went to Israel in order to conduct the first American party fundraiser in Israel; he raised a million smackers.

The New York Police Department has been in simmering water for some time because of spying on Muslims. It seems that Muslims in New York pose a certain security risk -- apparently we're still living in the shadow of 9/11 -- so the police have to keep an eye on them as they keep house, raise kids, go to work, visit mosques, etc. But now it seems that the NYPD is watching Muslims in New Jersey. Well, Jersey is the home of cement shoes, so perhaps one can't be too careful -- although the stereotype associates cement shoes with a different religion. And don't leave your electronics equipment lying around ...

The Rock is going to fall on us warned Harry Chapin's madman, but of course, Chicken Little said the sky was falling down ...

Writing about public resistance to the idea that our climate could be undergoing an ultimately disastrous shift -- a shift that would compromise our food supply, render many major cities uninhabitable (or habitable only at great expense), and greatly magnify global tensions in a world awash with weapons of mass destruction -- Beth Gardiner suggests that the problem is psychological: we are wired to think that things will continue to continue as they are. Lawyers, insurance salesmen and funeral homes are familiar with this prejudice: we're never going to get sick or die, so we don't need wills, insurance or funeral arrangements, and we really, really don't want to hear the latest about Greenland's ice melt this symmer . In fact, it's all a plot by liberal pro-government types who are trying to force us to write our wills and raise our taxes.

And it's not just climate change. Moody's has just cut Germany's outlook from 'stable' to 'negative'. Germany is the great engine that everyone is counting on to pull the Eurozone out of its debt crisis and thus prevent the current world-wide non-recession from sinking into a non-depression. Graeme Waerden of the U. K. Guardian enumerated the reactions to Moody's shift, one of which was that Ladbrokes has decided that the odds of Germany's credit rating being downgraded are now 1 in 2. But the Wall Street Journal bravely announces that Moody's Negative Outlook Unlikely to Dim German Debt Allure. After all, we wouldn't want to have to do something about this, would we?

During the Cold War, the USSR would celebrate May Day with military parades, accompanied by weapons (including nuclear missiles). Such displays are as old as the species, and, as the Left is prone to observe, serve multiple purposes. While the Democratic Convention prepares to meet in North Carolina, the Republican Convention will be coming here, to Tampa, America's Next Great City. (We landed the convention after much mewing and lobbying.) Meanwhile, just in case Occupy Tampa or the Klingon Empire attack the convention center, the US military is prepared to intervene. A leftover from the 1960s -- and it sounds like a Nixon holdover -- Operation Garden Plot is in place, although highly placed sources cannot give details. Since Central Command is itself on the tip of the Tampa Peninsula, one wonders what additional security measures the highly placed sources might have in mind. But considering that Tampa strip clubs getting creative to cash in on RNC -- including hiring Sarah Palin look-alikes -- maybe this is just part of the show. The courts are also preparing for rowdies: the courthouse has announced that the courts will be open for business from 8 am to 8 pm daily that week, but don't let that dampen your attitude.

Roger Ebert suggested that the gratuitous and fantastic violence in the pre-release publicity for The Dark Knight Rises may have played a part in (allegedly -- don't forget the "allegedly") inspiring James Holmes to seek "a publicity tie-in. He was like one of those goofballs waving in the background when a TV reporter does a stand-up at a big story." Harry Chapin wrote a song about that.

This is the anniversary of an even greater mass shooting -- in Norway, a nation not noted for lots of free-floating guns. But Anders Breivik's tribalist fantasies and Ebert's point about pre-release publicity suggest that the NRA may be right when it claims that people, not guns, kill people; but the NRA may be a right in a way they may find offensive.

Cops and soldiers have guns, but how many cops or soldiers get out their guns and shoot up a bunch of people in their free time? It happens, but not that often. Switzerland is awash in guns, for militias (real ones, like the ones the U. S. Constitution cites in the Second Amendment), and Switzerland has about as many gun crimes as we have shark attacks. Of course, these are people who have a professional attitude about guns as tools. These are not people who tell tall tales about how they were burgled by ninjas one night and thank God they had their gun handy. These are not people who carry guns all the time just in case of a bit of road rage. These are not people who buy into the NRA's fantasies.

In response to the Colorado shootings, the creators of The Dark Knight Rises has put away its wurlitzer, for the moment. But the Christopher Nolan and Warner Brothers never pretended to be serving up anything more than cotton candy. On the other hand, the NRA claims, loudly and ferociously, that the fantasies it serves up are real.

Money as a medium of exchange seems relatively recent: the old belts of polished shells or wheel-shaped stones were valued because of the labor that went into making them, and they were used as a social and political lubricant. But when someone long ago - a very long time ago, considering ancient Egypt's gold transactions - got the idea of minting money, it facilitated markets that spread around the world. But there was a problem, as James Surowiecki recounts in a Brief History of Money: if money is made of a precious metal (like gold), then that metal will add another level of unpredictability in an unpredictable world.

While people may think that gold has some kind of fixed value, the gold glut of the Sixteenth century helped undermine Spain and Portugal, while the gold drought of the Nineteenth century helped bring on a depression that lasted a quarter century. This helped inspire two schools of thought, which the curmudgeonly Charles Kindleberger called the banking school and the currency school. The Currency School (currently manifested in monetarism) believed that money has a value of its own that shouldn't be fiddled with, while the Banking School (currently manifested in Keynesianism) believe that currency should be manipulated to moderate the ups and downs of the economy. The basic point of disagreement is whether money is a social convention that should be managed, or whether we should let it manage us.

Newsweek gave Joel Kotkin cover space for an op-ed piece asking Are Millennials the Screwed Generation? (Millennials being current young adults.) Like many across the political spectrum, Kotkin concludes that yes, the Millennials are major victims of current trends. He raises issues that progressives forced into mainstream view over the last few years -- the growing inequality in wealth, especially between the young and old, growing student indebtedness, and aging infrastructure. But then, after citing sources ranging from Richard Vedder to Charles Murray (!), without addressing the depths of the problem, or what to do about it, he swerves into a sports-column-type handicapping discussion of how this plays for the Democrats and the Republicans.

According to progressives, the economic problems of the millennial generation are the result of increasingly shortsighted policies pushed by the libertarian right out of indifference to their human cost -- or the long-term cost to the nation. For example, it is the progressives who have been calling, on the hour every hour, for more investment in infrastructure. Still, this op-ed is one of many signs that the libertarian right is beginning to publicly recognize the problem. Even more interestingly, in this column, Mr. Kotkin does not propose tax cuts for the rich as a solution. This may be a sign of progress.

New York Times columnist Dave Brooks calls himself a "moderate", but he is what used to be called an Eisenhower Republican -- or "limousine liberal" in Rightspeak. In answer to his question, Why Our Elites Stink, Brooks suggests that our elitists all want to be edgy rebels, not stodgy pillars of the community, and have abandoned the old virtues of sobriety, responsibility, integrity. Of course, these are conservative virtues, and such curmudgeonly complaints are typical of those made by grumpy conservatives.

When Ronald Reagan first ran for president, back in 1968, one common reaction among ordinary people was that "he's too radical for me." Reagan was the great beneficiary of Barry Goldwater's New, Improved Right. But this NIR is not particularly conservative, as conservatism is about tradition, pillars of the community, and occasionally even stodginess.

Now that the New, Improved Right has taken over the Republican Party, some conservatives are suffering buyers' remorse. Sitting on its perch in Sydney, in a country enjoying bipartisan politics similar to ours (except that Australia's drought is worse than ours), the Sydney Morning Herald reports that in the US, conservatives find Republican party line hard to follow. Gerald Posner is quoted asking, "Do you become more conservative? Or do you say, 'What am I doing with this crowd of lunatics?'" Brett Bartlett is quoted saying, "In a recent poll, only 31 per cent of Republicans believed Barack Obama was born in the United States. Who are the others? They are either stupid or crazy." Michael Fumento complains that "I'm horrified that these people have co-opted the name 'conservative' to scream their messages of hate and anger." David Frum, who gave George W. Bush his "axis of evil" line, says, "as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support."

Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO cheerfully reports that as more corporations discover that the American Legislative Exchange Council is more Right-wing than conservative, and hence controversial, More Major Corporations Dump ALEC Memberships. Yes, once upon a time, "conservative" was pretty close to "non-controversial" ...

The medical marijuana debate evidence for the thesis that for many people, political decision-making is a system of conditioned reflexes. It seems that the California legislature (who else?) funded a Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research to find medical uses for marijuana.

This is rather complicated, because current practice is to isolate specific chemicals, develop dosages for those chemicals as treatment for specific disorders. Marijuana is a kind of plant matter, with at least two hundred active ingredients (that we've catalogued so far), and isolating them and determining dosages for specific disorders would be a lot of work. The CMCR was funded on a shoestring to do that work, starting with identifying specific disorders that chemical components may be useful in treating.

And it seems that California pot research backs therapeutic claims; the next step being to identify which ingredients had which effects on which disorders (this sort of thing is where big medicine costs big money). But California is broke, funding for the CMCR is being cut, and Washington has a conditioned reflex whenever marijuana is mentioned: the National Institutes of Health (which funds medical research) said that "While there have been some small studies on the potential therapeutic benefits of smoked cannabis, the literature on its harms is much more well-established."

BBC North America editor Mark Mardell asks if the US is caught in the slow lane. It isn't just the economic decline; Mardell quotes British journalist Ed Luce claiming that America is losing its claim as the land of opportunity: "The American dream no longer exists. If you compare income mobility, for example, you're twice as likely to move up an income group - up a class - in Canada or Germany as you would in the US."

• Of course, this is part of the Left's critique ("critique" being a word the Left is fond of): opportunity declines during Republican presidential administrations, and since 63 % of the last 32 years have seen Republican administrations (the remainder being the Clinton and Obama administrations, which the Left only grudgingly regards as nominally Democratic), what would you expect?
• Mardell briefly mentions the Right wing criticism that it's all Obama's fault, which is a variant of the Conservative critique (yes, Leftists, Conservatives have critiques!) that Mardell doesn't mention: that in focusing on entitlements and regulations, the government has abandoned the engines of wealth and opportunity, and suffering the consequences.
• Mardell also does not mention the obvious Liberal retort, that it is the Right that has shut down the greatest machines of them all, the federal, state, and local infrastructure budgets. The Right's paralyzing fear of bankruptcy, claims the Keynesians, risks bankrupting the nation.

• High School English teacher Kay McSpadden wrote an op-ed piece on A teacher’s appreciation of the power of Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling's books enticed her students to read, and as the successive books in the Harry Potter series grew more challenging, her students became more able to read longer and more complex books. Of her latest cohort of seniors, who had managed to plow through the last sprawling volumes of Harry Potter, "Undaunted by the length of the Harry Potter novels, they hardly batted an eye when I assigned long, complex works by writers such as John Fowles or Gabriel Garcia Marquez." And "they were willing - even eager - to engage in meaningful discussion about what they read, treating each text as a worthy destination, pointing out the sites and stopping to admire the view. They have become - partly because of their early experiences with books such as the Harry Potter series - people who like to read."
• Meanwhile, two researchers at my own University of South Florida conducted a study of zero tolerance policies in schools -- in which minor infractions lead to police records -- and raise the issue of whether Zero Tolerance is a Pathway from School to Prison. "A combination of forces such as state policies, school district policies, law enforcement agencies and the courts punish youth of color for nonviolent infractions such as being late for school, excessive absences or just being obstinate and willful or talking back" -- infractions that used to land a student in the principal's office, not in court. Since encounters with zero tolerance policies greatly increases the chance of dropping out, and since drop outs are far more likely to wind up in prison, the researchers recommend that a "common goal for both public schools and the juvenile system must be success, which can be measured by increased graduation rates and reduced incarceration."

So how to pursue happiness? Nowadays, we go to the mall and acquire things. But a recent study published by Haas School of Business Associate Professor Cameron Anderson suggests that Respect brings more happiness than money -- or, perhaps, than the things that money can buy. "Respect and admiration in the eyes of others around you, or your sociometric status, matters a great deal," Anderson told The Californian, "even if income or wealth does not." This may explain one curious feature of many traditional societies in New Guinea: a wealthy man (i.e., an owner of many pigs) will often give away his wealth in order to acquire status. This is rare in the West, where despite eccentrics from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, most wealthy people hold on to their wealth; the proportion of income people donate to charity is lower in the high income brackets.

Ah, but for one's lobbyists to triumph over a socialist attempt to raise one's taxes, that does give one a sense of accomplishment at least, doesn't it?

Once upon a time, the star-spangled banner was a progressive symbol. A century ago, strikers would wave the flag to show that they were the people. We are reminded of this on the hundredth anniversary of Woodie Guthrie's birth, and that This land was made for you and me and critics, too. Guthrie was a leftist singing about how this land is supposed to be for all of us, but that it had been appropriated for the benefit of a few. Guthrie wasn't alone: Francis Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance and Katharine Lee Bates's America the Beautiful were composed by leftists expressing their ideals. This raises the question: how did the Right end up appropriating these symbols, symbols expressing ideals that much of the Right regards with abhorrence? Something for Leftists to think about on Guthrie's 100th birthday.

After the end of the Cold War, the mainstream assumptions had been that Russia and China had been socialist or communist, and that they had lost, and thus laissez faire capitalism had been vindicated, and we were all going to live happily ever after if Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations didn't get us. But after the 2008 meltdown, it seems that the next generation -- with no living memory of the Cold War, and only vague memories of Maggie Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev as marginal old coots -- have rediscovered Karl Marx. A U. K. Guardian columnist explains why Why Marxism is on the rise again; the discerning reader will notice that the word "pendulum" appears nowhere in this piece. In fact, the column starts with the claim that the Communist Manifesto is the second best selling book of all time -- a reminder that among other things, Leftists read books. On to the predictable hyperbole:

• "What's happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." MI-5 may well note this quote -- especially when defending its budget to Parliament.
• Professor Jacques Ranciere of the University of Paris VIII reminds us of Marx's central thesis: "The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?" Returning to the real world, that is not so clear: for one thing, is the ruling bourgeoisie acting with indifferent self-indulgence, or are they actually struggling, or what?
• And of course, there are fulminations. Professor Alan Johnson of Edge Hill University warns us that "a worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, has made a comeback." Johnson calls this the "new communism", but curmudgeons will remember that after Kruschev denounced Stalin, and on through the 1960s, all sorts of New Communisms floated around -- the term even appeared in Allen Drury's Advice and Consent.

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