Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is today’s theme! First the sheer level of it on display from Hilary Clinton who simply smirked when a quiet American 60 year old was forcibly ejected from her speech which was (believe it or not) celebrating protest – for the simple reason that he had his protest took the form of turning his back to her while she delivered her speech (the better for her to see the political slogan on his T-shirt!) It takes a high level of stupidity as well as hypocrisy on her part to be unable to appreciate the irony of all this.
Serendipity gave me yesterday a great book in the Anthony Frost English bookshop here in Bucharest – “Watching the English” by Kate Fox. It’s a highly amusing and extensive account by an anthropologist of the essence of Englishness. Her account of the various games and gambits of English introductions, for example, are quite priceless! Steadily, through her identification of the various rules and codes which govern such fields as work, play and sex she builds up a picture of what it is to be English. And “hypocrisy” crops up from time to time. Certainly the open and blunt talk of Americans (and the Dutch) is considered offensive..

Another good comment from the Real World Blog – this time about Adam Smithnot being the devotee of the market we are all led to believe.
Aand a Guardian discussion thread gives a good sense of how the British health service continues to be the subject of “reform” discourse – while still (attacked as it has been by successive governments) managing to show a lot of indices about efficiency!
The picture is Gillray's Mushromm on a dungheap!