Some details on the grain trade deal from Al Jazeera:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/29/zelenskyy-visits-port-as-ukraine-prepares-to-ship-out-grain

[...] The security concerns and complexities of the agreements have set off a slow, cautious start, with no grains having yet left Ukrainian ports. The sides are facing a ticking clock — the deal is only good for 120 days.

The goal over the next four months is to get some 20 million tonnes of grain out of three Ukrainian sea ports blocked since the February 24 invasion. That provides time for about four to five large bulk carriers per day [...]

Getting the grain out is also critical to farmers in Ukraine, who are running out of storage capacity amid a new harvest.

“We are ready,” Ukraine’s minister of infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, told reporters at the port of Odesa on Friday.

He said that 17 trapped vessels were already loaded with grain, and another was now being loaded.

He hoped the first vessels would start leaving port by the end of this week.

“After the signing of the grain initiative in Istanbul, the Ukrainian side has made all the necessary preparations for … the navigation of the Black Sea, to start exporting our grain products from our ports,” Kubrakov said.

But he said Ukraine is waiting on the UN to confirm the safe corridors that will be used by ships.

‘Logistical issues’
Martin Griffiths, the UN official who mediated the deals, cautioned that work was still being done to finalise the exact coordinates of the safest routes, saying this must be “absolutely nailed down”.

Lloyd’s List, a global publisher of shipping news, noted that while UN officials are pushing for the initial voyage this week to show progress in the deal, continued uncertainty on key details would likely prevent an immediate ramping-up of shipments.

“Until those logistical issues and detailed outlines of safeguarding procedures are disseminated, charters will not be agreed and insurers will not be underwriting shipments,” wrote Bridget Diakun and Richard Meade of Lloyd’s List.

They noted, however, that UN agencies, such as the World Food Programme, have already arranged to charter much of the grain for urgent humanitarian needs.

Shipping companies have not rushed in since the deal was signed a week ago because explosive mines are drifting in the waters, ship owners are assessing the risks and many still have questions over how the agreement will unfold.

Ukraine, Turkey and the UN are trying to show they are acting on the deal. Turkish defence minister Hulusi Akar told Al Jazeera on Thursday that “the deal has started in practice” and that the first ship leaving Ukraine with grain was expected to depart “very soon”.

Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed similar optimism in a news briefing, framing the deal as a significant step forward between the warring sides.

“This is not just a step being taken to lift the hurdles in front of the export of food. If implemented successfully, it will be a serious confidence-building measure for both sides,” he said.

The deal stipulated that Russia and Ukraine provide “maximum assurances” for ships that brave the journey to the Ukrainian ports of Odesa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny.

Smaller Ukrainian pilot boats will guide the vessels through approved corridors. The entire operation will be overseen by a Joint Coordination Centre in Istanbul staffed by officials from Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and the United Nations.

Once ships reach port, they will be loaded with grain before departing back to the Bosphorus Strait, where they will be boarded to inspect for weapons. There will likely be inspections for ships embarking to Ukraine, as well.

France did invest in renewable, though less so than Germany. I think some 20% of our electricity is from renewables now, vs. 40% for Germany.

Indeed, Germany should have kept its nuclear plants. That was a knee jerk reaction.

We don't take kindly to people inquirin' 'bout climate change 'round these places. — Tzeentch

Enquiring is a-okay. Lying is not.

What is this "trigger point" you keep talking about? — Metaphysician Undercover

@Tate is pulling it out of his rear end. This is CC denial, hidden behind yet another mask.

why did one part remind me of an American musical? — Amity

Because it is not you usual ballet, it "quotes" or includes elements of European cabaret culture, Broadway musicals à la Cats and Hollywood musicals.

The show was filmed onstage during COVID (I think) so~ it's a different feel than your usual TV ballet: the dancers are filmed up close and they look into the camera. It takes some getting used to.

In fact, we're in interglacial period. Which means, sooner or later, we're going to enter the ice age. But not yet. — L'éléphant

That is not happening: the ice caps are fast melting. The Artic one will be history soon, by 2040 or so. Then, in the absence of the moderating factor that the artic ice cap represents, summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere will most certainly shoot up.

Antarctica is a bigger piece but all models predict that summer ice there will be gone in a few centuries.

Tate's "ice age" (defined by the presence of ice caps) is ending. Because of us.

In a semi-comatose, vague kinda hand-waving way :roll: — Amity

Welcome anyway! And no offense, but that could fit any and all TPFer... Me included!

In your honor, a teaser from a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake by the Monte Carlo Ballets. This show is highly recommended if you can find it. The story is about a girl beloved by prince Siegfried, but who turns into a swan at night due to being under a sorcerer's spell.

Somebody like you, I guess. Personally I turn into a pig at night.



I found the dance of the swans scene:


And an unusual yet charming backstage footage to boot:

For what it's worth, a defense of Russian literature from Michael Shishkin, short on specifics (this is the Atlantic, not a literary magazine) but well written:

Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
I understand why people hate all things Russian right now. But our literature did not put Putin in power or cause this war.

By Mikhail Shishkin

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russian-literature-books-ukraine-war-dostoyevsky-nabokov/670928/?utm_source=feed


[...] The world is surprised at the quiescence of the Russian people, the lack of opposition to the war. But this has been their survival strategy for generations—as the last line of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov puts it, “The people are silent.” Silence is safer. Whoever is in power is always right, and you have to obey whatever order comes. And whoever disagrees ends up in jail or worse. And as Russians know only too well from bitter historical experience, never say, This is the worst. As the popular adage has it: “One should not wish death on a bad czar.” For who knows what the next one will be like?

Only words can undo this silence. This is why poetry was always more than poetry in Russia. Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camps when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them. [...]

Russian literature owes the world another great novel. I sometimes imagine a young man who is now in a trench and has no idea that he is a writer, but who asks himself: “What am I doing here? Why has my government lied to me and betrayed me? Why should we kill and die here? Why are we, Russians, fascists and murderers?” [...]

Amity!!! You're back?

Not to defend @Tate's crypto-denialism, but it is true that some mods can be a bit overbearing...

This was brought up originally to show that the science of global warming is not simplistic. — Tate

Yes, it was a lame attempt of yours to get back at me, when I stated the well-established fact that Americans have been effectively kept uninformed and misinformed about climate change for decades by fossil fuel interests.

You took offense and pulled the glaciations out of your rear end to try and prove me simplistic. Remember that the truth may sometimes be quite simple. In this case: the truth is that the US were conned by big oil into disbelieving CC, and what the con men stole was our future.

This simple, easily verifiable truth bothered you for some reason, perhaps because you are American and nationalistic, or perhaps because you personally were a victim of this misinformation campaign so my point felt like a personal accusation to you. Whatever the reason, you tried to muddle the issue by talking about glaciations and posturing as the sophisticated guy in the known... How did that work out for you? :kiss:

it provides fodder to deniers — Tate

Is that what you are trying to do?

Man, you tend to delete in a hurry.

You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case
Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face
Mother will never understand why you had to leave
But the answers you seek will never be found at home
The love that you need will never be found at home

Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy
You were the one that they'd talk about around town as they put you down
And as hard as they would try they'd hurt to make you cry
But you never cried to them, just to your soul

Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away
Crying to your soul
Cry, boy, cry

Arguably, only these relationships exist and "objects" are just a cognitive shorthand evolution led us to, a way of compressing huge amounts of information into actionable intel for survival — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wouldn't go so far as saying that only relationships exist, as it seems to me that if relationships exist, we must logically assume the existence of some things that the relationships relate. By definition of what a relation/relationship is.

So objects (things) exist, and they enter in relationships, which also exist.

This said, according to Kant, we can only access relations. Our senses connect objects with us; perception is a type of relation, and it can only be a relation. Therefore, following Kant, we cannot access the thing in itself but only phenomena, which are a type of relationship.

The interesting point is that, even if objects (things) exist, we cannot access them but through some type of relationship. So for us, only relationships exist, in a way. Everything is relative, nothing is absolute, at least in our perception of the world.

It would no longer be the immaterial mind interacting with and acting upon the physical body. It would be the immaterial mind interacting with the immaterial compositions of matter. — Watchmaker

I think you have a point, but I'm not sure. I would like to rephrase in terms of the aristotelian duality between matter and form.

For Aristotle, a form cannot exist without some matter, it has to be the form of something (contrary to Platonic forms, which are purely ideal), and matter cannot exist without taking some form, some shape. There is no shapeless matter. At however level you look at it you will find structures, symmetries, shapes. Relations therefore. I think we can see symmetry, for instance, as a reflexive relationship (a relationship of something to itself).

So for Aristotle, matter and form coexist in a duality.

If I am correct, your intuition, replaced in this framework, would be that our mind is itself a structure, a set of relationships. Our mind is a form. And as such, it can naturally and logically access forms in the world around it, and it can shape the world around it.

This seems to dispose of the interaction problem, a strong objection to substance dualism (which says that the soul and the body are substances of contrary natures, yet they somehow causally influence each other...).

the usual sense of solidity — SophistiCat

I was about to say, the concept of "solidness" has weak solidity.

in the field described it as "a science of wild guesses.". — Tate

Wild guesses do not apply in thermodynamics... It is a proven fact that CO2 traps more heat than N2 or O2, the other principal components of the atmosphere. Based in this fact, pumping CO2 in the atmosphere was bound to raise average temperatures.

Many people have been conned into doubting CC for far too long, by a well-oiled machinery of deception.

Many of them in the US.

https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/

Why did the recycling movement in the 90s succeed where action on climate change fails? Was it a much different government administration and publicization strategy, less dilution of memes via internet? Was society simply more organized and leadership competent? — Enrique

The reason action on climate change failed is that it was strongly opposed by big oil companies and similar interests, who managed to pull the wool over the American public's eyes for decades, and made them believe that it was a "hoax".

Global warming was a common theme in science fiction in the 1980s. — Tate

Sci-fi, huh? Strange to rely on movies to get exposed to a leading scientific problem... You guys don't study science in the classroom much, apparently. That would explain your surprise.

So no, the news wasn't broken to Americans by Al Gore. He was just unusually successful in raising alarm. — Tate

I was just responding to your original claim that before Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, almost nobody knew about CC.

Our chemistry and physics teacher described the different heat retention capacity of different gazes, and then explained that there was a big issue related to that and currently debated in climatology, that the CO2 content in the atmosphere was rising since the industrial revolution, and this would theoretically lead to what she called "global warming" in the future.

That was in 1980. It was the first time I heard about what we would later learn to call "climate change", I guess because "global warming" sounds too scary... Hysterical, right?

Then in the 90's there was all the discussion about the Kyoto protocol. Al Gore, in 2006, broke the news to Americans only, or to the few who believed him, anyway.... The rest of the world was well aware a decade before at the very least.

Which is the only inference that is warranted from Isaac's statement, that he approves of people trying to find peace through pragmatic compromise rather than more bloodshed. — boethius

So he misunderstood my post, because I have no objection to any of that.

It wasn't clear until the 1980s that the climate was warming. I'm not sure why you would argue otherwise. — Tate

I am not arguing otherwise.

Sure, but responding to a post does not somehow imply you take the opposite position to everything in said post. — boethius

Normally, it implies you respond to the post, not to something else.

Well, that seems of the two options you thought of, the wrong one. — boethius

Hey, it's not my fault if they can't even write their propaganda in legible English.

you would need to argue that Isaac has the same understanding of "no more" as you did ( — boethius

Be serious now. He was responding to my post where I clearly wondered about why the Baltic States should exit NATO.

I doubt it. In the 1970s it wasn't clear if the climate was cooling or warming. The effect of the Milankovitch cycle wasn't discovered until the mid 1970s. — Tate

The potential heating effect of certain gases such as CO2 was well established in the lab by the end of the 19th century.

The fact that CO2 concentration were steadily growing in the atmosphere was first demonstrated in the 60 by the works of Charles Keeling and others. The first decent model dates from the 1960's as well, and it correctly predicted a rise in global mean temperature.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. John­son’s Science Advisory Committee asked Roger Revelle and Keeling, then serving on the committee’s Environmen­tal Pollution Panel, to write a section of a report -- titled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment -- on atmospheric CO2, or the “invisible pol­lutant,” as the report identified it. Here is a quote from the summary:

« Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there. The estimated recoverable reserves of fossil fuels are sufficient to produce nearly a 200 % increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. By the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25 %. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere ».

FYI, originally, the discussion is about a peace proposal made by a certain David T. Pyne in the columns of the National Interest. It include amongst its many provisions favorable to Moscow, item # 14: "no more NATO members along Russia's borders".

I understood this to mean the removal of NATO membership for those NATO members already bordering Russia, i e. the Baltic States.

( It could also mean something else I guess: no ADDITIONAL NATO members, but those Russia neighbours already part of the alliance can remain in it )

So I wondered why the Baltic States should get out of NATO:

It's not a serious proposal, just a Russian wet dream, including as it does that the baltic states ought to get out of NATO. Why would they ever do that? — Olivier5

That's when Isaac chipped in with:

some people actually care about peace and are willing to take pragmatic steps to maintain it. — Isaac

So he was clearly talking about the Baltic States walking out of NATO to appease Moscow.

what kind of likely loss do you have in mind? — neomac

Progressive build up of Ukrainian NATO weaponry in the battlefield, resulting in progressive attrition of Russian fire power, as the HIMARS are achieving right now. As more HIMARS and precise long range artillery such as the French Caesar or the German PzH 2000 make it to Ukraine, as they certainly will, the Russian front will break at some point.

That's not the issue you're even discussing. — boethius

I'm afraid it is the issue we are discussing. Read the thread.

Al Gore was American. How many people knew about global warming outside the community of science nerds prior to his work? — Tate

It has been part of the national curriculum in French highschool since the 70's. I learnt about climate change at school in 1980. With An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore (2006), tried to break the wall of silence in the US, and it was a good thing to do, but outside the US there was no deficit of information. Climate change was not a controversial idea outside of the US by then.It was so well known that all nations of the world had signed the the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

The argument was already provided: if the baltic states joined NATO, it is most probably because they felt safer inside it than outside it.

This is a simple argument, based on the notion that Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians are rational people. You should have been able to understand it.

some people actually care about peace and are willing to take pragmatic steps to maintain it.

Such as not being part of a military alliance your massive, very militaristic neighbour considers a threat. — Isaac

One could argue that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are more secure inside NATO than outside of it. That'd be why they joined in the first place, no? If you care so much for their lives, don't throw them under the bus.

According to the senator from West Virginia, whether or not civilization as we know it is saved solely depends on next month's CPI report. — Mr Bee

Which is why BBB won't pass with any climate measure in it, and if by miracle it does pass, then it will be knocked down by the next president. The US is not able to do the right thing on climate, nor even to pretend.

I don't believe the US has ever been in a position to solve the problem. It's a global, long-term problem — Tate

Indeed but it was in a key position to encourage or discourage the efforts of others, and it did the latter, since the 90's or so until now. Very systematically too. The US owns this crisis. It's made in the USA. While the problem is global, the search for solutions is necessarily local. The US opted to deny the problem.

that proposal is unlikely to be accepted — jorndoe

It's not a serious proposal, just a Russian wet dream, including as it does that the baltic states ought to get out of NATO. Why would they ever do that?

The bitter truth may simple be that Russia can't lose. But it must not win either. — neomac

Oh they can lose alright. Just watch...

Because I’m not talking about history, I’m talking about solutions to climate change — which was what was asked for. Read it through again if you like.

The US’s responsibility in all this has nothing to do with available solutions, of which there are plenty. Whether they get implemented — yes indeed. But the question was about solutions. — Xtrix

Alright, there does exist technical and economic solution, such as degrowth, or renewables, or nuclear power, or taxing fossil fuels prohibitively.

Now if only American politicians would care, they could try and apply these solutions and save civilization as we know it. That'd be nice. Any moment now....

Ah yes, sorry. What I had in mind was a policy-driven reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. The kind of things Obama tried to do and Trump undid. Or prior, Clinton tried to do and Bush undid. Given the dominent position of the US geopolitically and in terms of their huge greenhouse gas emissions, the lack of serious, sustained effort and support from Washington sends a message to other nations that they don't need to make any effort, and worse, that they efforts if they decide to make them will amount to nought because the biggest world polluter is not doing its share.

Define 'reasonable'.

Historically speaking, the US has been and remains the main stumbling block to any reasonable solution. That's a fact. It's not about technology as much as about political influence.

I think it is the reason we are in this mess.
— Olivier5

I think so too. — Xtrix

Why would you say it's irrelevant, then? The US has been and remain the stumbling block to serious emission reductions. That's relevant. Your polity is fucked up, it's the best democracy money can buy. Corporations rule you. That's in essence why we're all doomed.