https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS7DDUEyzU8

It got a second life as the theme song for “The Golden Girls”.

Searching for “Natural resources of Ukraine” yields among other sites

https://ukrainetrek.com/about-ukraine-nature/ukraine-natural-resources
“Main Natural Resources of Ukraine” with categories such as:

Coal
Oil and natural gas
Oil shale
Peat
Iron ore
Manganese
Copper
Titanium
Uranium
Mercury
Gold
Graphite
Potash salts
Building materials
Building stone
Hydromineral resources (geothermal and mineralized groundwater)

A resource’s value depends on cost of extraction, demand, i.e., economics.

A mining engineer who specializes in coal or evaporites (salts) may not know much of value about iron ore, manganese, copper, uranium, titanium, or about civil engineering and hydropower dams, their operation, maintenance, or vulnerabilities to malign forces of man and nature.

So being respected for his work on Climate Audit is nice but …. caveat emptor.

Figured I’d change the mood a bit: Kipling.

That is sheer speculation. Not only do we not know whether he has such contacts, but we don’t know whom they might be or what their biases or motives might be.

Yes, you need to be skeptical of any information coming out of Ukraine.

I can think of a reason McIntyre might have good insights about Ukraine though. Being in the mining industry he might have solid contacts in Ukraine, since mining is one of the larger industries in eastern Ukraine (though mostly coal).

Oh, I consider friendship underrated and I’m not that keen on romance. Just because I notice something doesn’t mean I agree with it.

You are correct that romantic love, as currently understood, is comparatively new. It’s good to be reminded of friendship’s place in older times.

Nonetheless, I can’t think of a single book in the Bible devoted to friendship, but there is “The Song of Songs.”

Then there’s Gene Hackman in “Heist”:
______________________________

Delroy Lindo: Some say love [makes the world go round].

Gene Hackman: They’re right too. Love makes the world go ’round… Love of Gold.

Romantic love is a fairly recent preoccupation in Western culture; for most of the West’s history since ancient Greece and Rome, friendship was considered a more important human bond. Aristotle devoted an entire book (Book VIII) in his Nicomachean Ethics to friendship, and Cicero wrote a treatise on friendship (De amicitia) dedicated to his friend Laelius in 44 BC. The Greeks considered sexual passion a form of madness because it involved loss of self-control, as the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides indicate. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that romantic love became legitimated as the basis of marriage; read Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World if you can find a copy. De Rougemont was a French-speaking Swiss cultural theorist. There were plenty of songs and poems celebrating friendship in European literature up through the seventeenth century; the paucity of recent poems about friendship says more about the impoverishment of contemporary culture than about the worth of friendship in human life.

Romantic love may make the world go round for you, but there are those of us who prefer friendship.