Margaret Thatcher just passed on. Who is she? Too young are you?
I recommend you check out a good article today in The Economist online
HERE. Its a pretty good summary, although I do not agree with the sideline in the article that suggests businesses are over-regulated in general in the West. I don't think all of our investment banks trashed our economy in 2008 because of "over" regulation!
Margaret Thatcher not only did much around 1980 to show that women can run big old world powers (UK) as well as any man, but she was also a conservative politician who understood science. Likely, this is because she actually went to college and obtained a degree in Chemistry from Oxford.
As conservative as she was, she was not a hate monger nor dismissive of science as some liberal plot to harm business. She herself worked in the business of plastics and food products before turning to the study of Law to help her way into her growing passion for politics. While her mentor at Oxford, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, was liberal and Baroness Thatcher's political opposite, they discussed their differences as civilized academics and respected each other. Apparently, Thatcher placed her research mentor's portrait in her office upon becoming Prime Minister and they were always in communication.
This VERY economically conservative Prime Minister also did not run from the science of global warming. She was the first leader from a big economy to raise the issue, in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1989.
Tough but not uncivilized.
