In the Introduction to the first (1927) publication of Rose de Freycinet’s journal, Baron Henri de Freycinet wrote that although it had been rumoured in Toulon that, to better accommodate his wife, Louis de Freycinet had disembarked his First Lieutenant LeBlanc before departure, the maritime prefect had no difficulty in doing justice to this malicious remark. It was a summary that was some distance short of the full truth.
It is often said in Ayn Rand’s favour that she was not a racist . But is that true?
‘Is a degree in Physics a necessary prerequisite to argue that an anecdote in history is not well documented (or perhaps even to write history of science)?’
One surprise for Rose when she was on Mauritius was an encounter with another naval wife in a somewhat similar position to her own. There were, however, also very important differences.
It takes a very special sort of arrogance to suppose that all climate scientists who accept Anthropogenic Global Warming as a reality are not only venal, self-serving and corrupt but also so mind-bogglingly stupid that they will repeatedly issue diagrams containing errors of the magnitude suggested by the overprints. The sort of arrogance, perhaps, that believes an argument is enhanced by spelling climate as ‘klimut’ and science as ‘siyenz’.
One thing that a pandemic does is concentrate the mind on essentials, the availability of medical care being about the most essential of all. Here in the UK most medical care is provided to most people by the National Health Service, but ‘socialized medicine’ was, of course, anathema to Ayn Rand.