* Australia is looking to moving towards gender-blind selection for all military posts – up to and including the special forces. The physical standards project is aiming to look at what each job requires. Currently women “make up more than 13 per cent of the Australian Defence Force, can serve in 90 per cent of its roles”. The first woman in the SAS will have a hell of a time – but no doubt it will happen.

* Also from Australia, a piece exploring the Aboriginal homeland movement and its relationship to recent moves on Aboriginal issues is a sensitive and nuanced exploration. Once again, as I learnt as a journalist covering these issues many years ago, there are no easy answers.

* Helene Pleasants wasn’t famous or rich, but as this piece from the New York Times shows, she certainly made an impact – being an editor’s editor.

* There are now women members of the MCC – just very, very few of them – and it is in no hurry to admit many more.

* And a belated pointer to last week’s Britblog roundup, over at Suz’s place – a rich seam of material.

Spent last night eating Spanish tapas (with a smattering of Indonesian dishes) in a small Burgundy village, the meal accompanied by a traditional Parisien chanteuse with accordianist, at a table where the language was mostly Dutch – although with some English in deference to my total lack of that language. We had a brief interlude of (blessedly quite good) karoake German, and the table definitely having the most fun in this Dutch-run chamber d’hote were four local women having a night out “sans maris”.

There’s a lot to be said for Europe…

I was talking to a French estate agent yesterday and she reckoned that there’s the greatest risk of ticks in the vicinity of oak trees. Is this true, and if so why?

When you open Google maps in France, you start with a map of France. When you do it in the UK, you get a map of the US. Huh?

The book is clearly envisaged at least in part as a reaction to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices, which this author sees as groundbreaking, even as he takes issue with it: “Shklar makes the case for ranking the vices according to the nature of the threat that they pose to liberal societies. The vice that emerges as the worst of all, and by far, is cruelty…. she wants us to stop spending so much time worrying about hypocrisy, and to stop minding about it so much. But it is difficult not to mind about hypocrisy, for two reasons. First, it is so very easy to take a dislike to it — on a basic human level, there is something repulsive about hypocrisy encountered at first hand, since no one enjoys being played for a fool. Second, for everyone who does take a dislike to it, it is so very easy to find. … Because people don’t like hypocrisy, and because hypocrisy is everywhere, it is all too tempting for democratic politicians to seek to expose the inevitable double standards of their rivals.” (p.2)

“Hobbes would have us believe that the reason he cannot stand Presbyterians (the primary focus of his fury in Behemouth) is because they are hypocrites, but it is just as likely that the reason he thinks they are hypocritical is because he simply cannot stand them.” (p.18)

“Any politics founded on the idea of equality will produce politicians who have to be of a type with the people they rule, and yet recognisably different, given the fact that they also have to rule them.”

Runciman introduces me to a writer I haven’t previously encountered, Bernard Mandeville, best known for his The Fable of the Bees, first published in 1714, and the subject of much scandal in 1723. He seems to have been a man who really grasped the nature of early capitalism, saying that there really couldn’t be too much “real virtue” around, since that involved constraint and conquest of the passions, particularly greed, pride an avarice – all essential to keep the economy thriving. But pretending to be virtuous (what Runciman labels first order hypocrisy) was fine, since it would help you get ahead – and indeed the possibility of scorn and opprobrium would teach people to be hypocritical rather than honest.

Believing your own publicity, however, what Runciman calls second-order hypocrisy, was dreadful and dangerous, because it meant succumbing to the very thing you were trying to control and manage.

In Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness (1720) “Mandeville makes it clear that politicians are bound to appear to be hypocrites to the wider public, because all politicians are scheming men of fashion. This is what makes them suited to their role, but it is also what makes them so hard to take.” (p. 64)

Similarly Orwell sees good and bad hypocrisy, Runciman says: “The first is the relatively innocent hypocrisy of demoracy that is underpinned in the English case by the sentimentality of the working classes and the stupidity of tose who rule them. This innocent stupidity is exemplified for Orwell by the ‘morally sound’ willingness of the English upper classes to get themselves killed in wartime. Even the Bertie Woosters of this world, who can’t be relied on for much, can be relied on for this … the playacting is taken seriously, and so helps to preserve the system from the degradation that comes from merely going through the motions.” (p. 180)

Putting this into a modern context, Runciman relies particularly on Mandeville in stressing the essentiality of distinguishing between the two orders of hypocrisy. He contrasts Bill Clinton, “a faith-based politicians, his faith being limitless faith in his own goodness of heart”. (To which one might add this was Blair’s fault too – added in this case by a frightening belief in a personal hotline to god.)

He says the virtue of Hillary Clinton, however, is that she is unlikely to lose awareness that her public persona is a construct. Following Mandeville, Runciman says that hypocrisy consciously designed to pander to the electorate and support personal ambition ” politicians who are forced to combine these different forms of hypocrisy are less likely to be deveiced about their own characters, or at least about the character of political hypocrisy, than politicians who believe themselves to be sincere”. (p. 216)

The great and the good have got together and concluded we might not be doomed. But it is worth focusing on the fact that huge advances have been made in many areas – and that the world is more peaceful than probably ever before.

But you’ve got to wonder about what hopes there are when in Australia, a land wracked by drought and afflicted by climate change household energy use is still increasing. “Last year the total amount of energy used by residential consumers grew by 3.9 per cent, above the long-term average rise of 2.5 per cent and the biggest jump in four years.”

But to be positive – another attempt is being made to deal with the legal issues of cohabiting couples – which tends to particularly cause problems for women. This is an obviously sensible plan that the religion-infected, cowardly government we now have dropped earlier this year. (The same government that has put a medically important bill on hold — and with it the prospect of positive abortion law reform — for fear of the effect on a byelection.)

And also in the positive line, advertising methods that have been used for wholly pointless consumerism are at least being applied to basics that save human lives. (In a piece that provides an interesting insight into advertising psychology.)

And who says heterosexuality is “normal”? Seems the Anglican church should read a survey from Scientific America reveals its frequency of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, and considers its potential evolutionary benefits.

* There’s a warning for Britain in a piece on the consequences of social inequality:

Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation. Tax policy and social-welfare programs, then, take on importance far beyond determining how much income people hold onto.

* There’s hope for my squash game yet: in a piece on a 41-year-old American Olympic swimmer:

Hirofumi Tanaka, the director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, found that both elite and nonelite runners and swimmers could maintain personal bests until age 35, after which performance declined in a gradual, linear fashion until about age 50 to 60 for runners and 70 for swimmers. Deterioration was rapid from there. … At Yale University, Ray Fair, a runner and an economist, crunched statistics on aging and peak athletic performance and created what he calls the Fair Model. The model provides a table of coefficients that enable an athlete to take a personal-best time and compute how long he or she should expect to take to complete that same event at a specific point later in life (assuming he or she has continued to train at the same level). … “I am struck by how small the deterioration rates are,” Fair wrote in a paper titled “How Fast Do Old Men Slow Down?” “It may be that societies have been too pessimistic about losses from aging for individuals who stay healthy and fit.”

* A horrifying report about a herbicide that has infilitrated the British food chain (and no doubt elsewhere).

It appears that the contamination came from grass treated 12 months ago. Experts say the grass was probably made into silage, then fed to cattle during the winter months. The herbicide remained present in the silage, passed through the animal and into manure that was later sold. Horses fed on hay that had been treated could also be a channel.

The worst bit? “Guy Barter, the RHS head of horticultural advisory services, said… ‘Our advice is not to eat the vegetables because no one seems to have any idea whether it is safe to eat them and we can’t give any assurances,’ he said.