Michael Totten has links, clips and coverage. See also Breitbart and Azarmehr.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives:

Spooky Action.

Jim Schnabel’s charmingly bizarre film about Cold War research into extrasensory perception as a tool of espionage. By turns intriguing and hilarious.

Rebellion, Revisited. 

Classroom impropriety and the grooming of young minds.

Even if we set aside the not insignificant issue of whether professors of, say, literary criticism have any business trying to “win over” their students and mould their political outlook, reasonably or otherwise, there is another problem. Is the student-professor relationship sufficiently equal and reciprocal to ensure evidence and reason prevail? Is there no pressure on students to defer, to please? Can we simply assume that improper leverage will never be brought to bear – for instance, in terms of grading or more subtle signs of displeasure? And isn’t there an unavoidable air of… predation?

Infestation.

A Guardian writer asks, Am I Fit to Breed? Other, less hesitant souls long for human extinction.

Explore the greatest hits.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot is feeling a little dirty, a little compromised. In a typically understated piece, titled Newspapers Must Stop Taking Advertising from Environmental Villains, Mr Monbiot ponders “the extent to which newspapers should restrict the advertisements they carry.”

Readers will doubtless be shocked to hear that newspapers, and their columnists, depend on advertising…

It pays my wages. More precisely, it provides around three-quarters of newspapers’ income. Without it, they would not exist: certainly not in their current form, almost certainly not at all. For all their evident faults, newspapers perform a crucial democratic service: without professional reporting, it is impossible to make informed decisions.

And here’s a small compendium of the Guardian’s “professional reporting,” without which “it is impossible to make informed decisions.”

The problem at hand, at least for Monbiot, is this. Advertising is bad, you see. All of it. Very, very bad.

I believe that advertising is a pox on the planet. It is one of the forces driving us towards destruction, as it creates needs that did not exist before and promotes consumption way beyond sustainable levels. I believe that it is also socially damaging, turning ours into a more grasping, more atomised society, focused on material display rather than solidarity and community action.

Sadly, no evidence is offered to support this tangle of emphatic supposition. Though questions do spring to mind. Exactly how would one go about measuring the alleged “atomising” and “socially damaging” effect of an advert for cheap flights or a car, or for something more mundane – say, a nice pair of shoes? Exactly how much shoe advertising, or shoe consumption, constitutes wickedness? Is there a preferred, morally elevated, level of shoe ownership?

[Adverts] generate behavioural norms, telling us, in effect, that the goods and services which are destroying the biosphere are acceptable, even beneficial. I believe that their presence in the newspapers makes hypocrites of all those of us who write for them. Our editorials urge people to reduce their impacts. Our advertisements urge people to increase them.

Actually, the charge of hypocrisy isn’t dependent on accepting adverts for things readers may want and for which they’re willing to pay. The prodigious hypocrisy of Monbiot’s employer, Alan Rusbridger, has previously been noted, and in Monbiot’s case there are other, more immediate, reasons to mutter “hypocrite.” Not least the amount of air travel the columnist indulged in to promote his book on the unacceptability of air travel, an activity he saw fit to equate with child abuse. 

Further to this, today’s Telegraph has an extract from Hyok Kang’s account of his childhood in 1990s North Korea, This Is Paradise!

I was born on April 20 1986 in a village not far from Onsong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, close to the Chinese border and Siberia. The city is divided into ku (districts) and ban (classifications) of 20 families. My parents lived in ban number three, in a semi-rural zone. The house was like dozens of others built on the same model and lined up in rows. There was a door, a single window, and a roof of curved orange tiles. The walls were white, but they had been painted blue to a height that I must have passed about the age of eight or nine. Each time the district officials came to check the hygiene of the houses, as they regularly did, they ordered us to change the colour of this lower part: to green, now blue, now light brown, but all the houses in our ban had to be the same colour; perhaps because dwellings, like everything else in North Korea, are the property of the people. That means that nothing belongs to anyone.

Via sk60, The Vice Guide to North Korea is worth watching. Shane Smith pays a visit to Pyongyang. Surrealism ensues. Part 1 is embedded below.

Parts 2-14 can be viewed here.  

It’s been several months since we last sampled Extensions: the Online Journal of Embodiment & Technology and I feel it’s time we once again bathed in its countercultural glow. Today’s offering comes courtesy of the artist and educator José Carlos Teixeira, whose work is “mostly focused on video, installation, and performance” and, naturally, addresses issues of pressing social import. Specifically, 

Issues related to language, cultural identity formation, human dislocation, boundaries of personal and social spaces, and the definition of physical and psychic territory by using strategies of collaboration and group performance.

Mr Teixeira completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in “Interdisciplinary Studio” at the University of California, Los Angeles and has been a recipient of the Fulbright / Carmona & Costa Foundation Grant, the Gulbenkian / FLAD Grant, the Samuel Booth Award, and UCLA Fellowships. The issue-addressing artwork featured in Extensions – titled It’s OK (united) #1 #2 #3 – three steps to a (r)evolution – is described as follows:

A video project that takes its departure from a critical reflection around dominant educational, socio-cultural and political premises in the West. The case of the United States seemed to be the most meaningful for me – not only because it is currently the country where I live and work (reinforcing the site-specificity quite prevalent in my videos), but also due to its paradigmatic and hegemonic nature.

After sharing a ponderous quote by the late Edward Said, Mr Teixeira explains the origins of this profound socio-cultural project:

It’s OK (united) was born during my trips on the bus, in the metro rail system, and sometimes while I was driving to different parts of the city of Los Angeles… As a repetitive common saying, [“It’s OK”] encapsulated paradoxes and contradictions, be it in the form of electoral results, in the state of war, in the lack of equality and freedom, in the discrimination and mutual racism I could witness almost every day.

Let’s see. Said, hegemony, paradoxes, contradictions, electoral results… War, equality, discrimination, racism… Human dislocation, social spaces, cultural identity, physical and psychic territory… Plenty of themes to draw on there and no shortage of looming gravitas. This must be building up to something ambitious, something vast. All that’s missing are some vague and dutiful references to globalisation, subversion and “The Other.”

Also, I was bringing up the question of what type of limits we have in the process of negotiation with the Other.

Ah.