Conversations in the Book Trade

Monday, July 10, 2023

High School 3

THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE

HIGH SCHOOL 3

Int. A city bus. Evening.

Tom is riding home. The steady motion of the bus. The rain outside.

Sunday, July 09, 2023

High School 2b

THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE

HIGH SCHOOL 2b

Int. A high school classroom in 1976. English class. Day.

It’s raining outside. The students seem numbed out by the topic at hand: the blood motif in Macbeth. One student, TOM, seems particularly uninterested. Yet at the same time, he listens carefully to Mr. Barrett’s words, searching, it would appear, for vital meaning.

Saturday, July 08, 2023

Cluster munitions

Via Bard, July 8/23:

Question: Are Russia and Ukraine currently using cluster munitions in the Ukrainian war?

Response: Yes, both Russia and Ukraine have used cluster munitions in the Ukrainian war. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission has confirmed that the Russian military used cluster weapons in Ukrainian settlements at least 16 times during the first month of the war in 2022. At the end of March, the head of the UN Human Rights Council, Michelle Bachelet, reported at least 24 cases since the invasion began.

Human Rights Watch has also documented the use of cluster munitions by Ukrainian forces. In a report released in July 2022, the organization found that Ukrainian forces had used Turkish-provided cluster munitions in and around the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine. The report found that the use of cluster munitions by both sides had caused civilian casualties and had posed a serious risk to civilians.

Cluster munitions are banned by more than 100 countries under the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The convention prohibits the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions. However, neither Russia nor Ukraine is a party to the convention.

The use of cluster munitions in the Ukrainian war has been condemned by human rights groups and humanitarian organizations. They have called on both sides to stop using the weapons and to clear any unexploded ordnance that has been left behind.

Friday, July 07, 2023

신도리/ Shindori

Wednesday, July 05, 2023

Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant

There has been danger of a nuclear catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant throughout the duration of the war in Ukraine. Recently, however, the Ukrainians have been warning that Russia has mined the plant for potential sabotage.

The danger of a catastrophe is not as high as it was in the video above. This is because the plant , at the behest of IAEA inspectors from the United Nations has been placed in cool shutdown.

From CNN (July 6/22): “What Grossi is doing is completely unprecedented in the history of the IAEA,” Alberque told CNN. “The whole thing was saying: Russia’s basically going to have to kill me, in order for me not to make this nuclear power plant more safe. It was astonishing.”

The IAEA staff’s mission, Alberque said, was to “establish a precedent here, that we’re willing to get involved and to try to take this chess piece off the board.”

Russian occupiers, however, continued to prevent Ukrainian operators from putting each of the reactors into a safer “cold shutdown” status. This means when the reactor’s temperature is below boiling point but electrical pumps moving water through the core must still keep working to cool the fuel and avoid meltdown – which requires an external power supply.

The safety of the plant was threatened further by the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam on June 6, which lowered water levels used for cooling the plant precipitously. Ukraine accused Russia of deliberately destroying the dam – a claim that Moscow has denied. Shortly after this, the final reactor unit at ZNPP was put into cold shutdown status on June 8.

Nevertheless, there is a general threat that the Putin government — which has engaged in nuclear saber rattling throughout the entire war — will deliberately set in motion some form of nuclear incident.

Part of what makes the situation unstable and worrisome is the psychology of Putin himself.