In 1989 Theodore Dalrymple paid a visit to North Korea’s Pyongyang Department Store Number 1: 

It didn’t take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways – yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the ‘customers’. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking. 

Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty ‘customers’, who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.) 

They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that – despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation – they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf. 

And then things started to get strange.  

From The Wilder Shores of Marx, 1991. 

“Russian villagers collecting scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies.”

Photographed by Jonas Bendiksen. Via Peter Risdon. Related, this.

By Saturn’s rings.

As seen by Cassini at a distance of three million kilometres from Titan. One of these. See also this, this and this.

A vision of tomorrow, and at least one classic sentence, courtesy of the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley: 

Prospect magazine carries a thoughtful, slightly wistful piece by the former Labour MP Chris Mullin in which he calls for the abolition of the private car.

Yes, Mr Mullin would have us inhabit a world denuded of the automobile – a mode of transport he regards as “a disastrous invention” – and with it some rather obvious but unmentioned freedoms. Instead, he thinks we should want to live in a more bipedal and egalitarian world. A world not unlike, 

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, before the coming of market forces.

And naturally, Ms Ashley is very much intrigued: 

That might be going too far for today’s politicians, but the effect of hard times and the oil price on budgets, and the sheer misery of modern car commuting, suggests that a more radical agenda could be popular. That means much bolder support for cycling, with cars banned from many more roads and parks. It’s one of the few radical shifts in lifestyle that is easily deliverable and for which there is no real drawback.

Banning cars from roads is easily delivered and has no drawback, see? At least, not for Ms Ashley, who cares so very much and thinks so very deeply.

As do other cerebral and compassionate Guardianistas:

Cars should be banned – they are unhealthy, dangerous, a lazy and destructive option. The only people who should be allowed them are: (a) people who work far from their home where public transport is not sufficient (they would have to provide evidence upon trying to buy a car); (b) people with 3 children or more (for transporting kids + big weekly shops); (c) disabled people who would find it difficult to use public transport. All would have to provide proof when buying their car. Everybody else will have to use trains, buses, trams, their feet, bikes.

And, 

It is also vastly selfish to drive around with empty seats.

Though not, perhaps, as selfish as wishing to impose on others a “radical shift in lifestyle” and limited mobility. Unless shrinking a person’s world and robbing them of autonomy is now considered a virtue. Curiously, the Guardian comments are largely fixated with the respective hazards posed by cyclists and motorists, and which party smells more. Ms Ashley and Mr Mullin’s wild fits of authoritarianism, and those of their admirers, don’t cause much fuss.

A time lapse compilation of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station, August to October, 2011. Edited by Michael König. 

Readers may have noted the NowhereIsland art project, in which assorted radical freeloaders – referred to as a “think tank” – were shipped to the Arctic at public expense to ponder the possibilities of progressive utopia and generally engorge their cultural glands. While moored at Nyskjaeret, an apparently unclaimed island the size of a football pitch, our merry band of thinkers gathered sand and rock and loaded it onto a barge, thereby creating a floating “visual sculpture” of tremendous, indeed profound, political significance. Said work will subsequently “tour” the south coast of Britain, leaving better, more enlightened people in its wake.

The project’s intellectual lynchpin, artist Alex Hartley, has explained why his subsidised trip was so imperative:

It will gather ideas around climate change, land grab, colonialism, migration… all of these issues that can be put onto the blank canvas of this new land… My plan is to take a part of the island into international waters and declare it as a micro-nation so people can register to become citizens… We have just declared our statehood. This moment marks seven years of work inspired by a simple question: What if an Arctic island went south in search of its people?

If this all sounds a little familiar, you may be thinking of this comedic excursion from 2009.

The project’s mission statement tells us,

NowhereIsland is established in response to the failure of nation states to adequately address interconnected global crises, such as environmental exploitation… NowhereIsland embodies the global potential of a new borderless nation, which offers citizenship to all; a space in which all are welcome and in which all have the right to be heard.

Others have taken a less sympathetic view. Among them, Geoffrey Cox, Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon, who referred to the project as an “extraordinary folly”:

I think my constituents are going to find it quite astonishing that… we are spending half a million pounds digging up earth from somewhere in Norway and floating it down the South West coast.

Having survived this two-week taxpayer-funded odyssey in radical conjecture and dirt relocation, Laurie Penny – for ‘tis she – shares her thoughts:

I met a polar bear, a whale, some reindeer, several fat seals, an arctic fox, many drunk Russians, a statue of Lenin, and a very dear and well-meaning collection of British academics, activists and journalists… Crammed on a ship trying to teach everyone consensus decision-making whilst we held down our lunches as the Noorderlicht dived through the waves, trying to group-write a theoretical constitution for a speculative nation.

Good times. Though there were of course a few issues to contend with.

Every single one of us was white and middle-class.

Luckily, rote identity politics soon gave way to the romance of it all.

As we discussed our ideal society… it really did feel like the last colony ship off a burning planet – like we were the chosen, special ones strapped to a cosy life-shuttle, looking for a new world at the touching point of symbol and substance. This, surely, is how the privileged will experience the end times.

The chosen, special ones. And not, say, the ‘B’ Ark.

Zombie pays a visit to a San Francisco “nude-in” and isn’t impressed by what she sees:

Yet no matter how successful they are in smashing cultural norms, they still can’t escape the general consensus that day-to-day urban nudity has public health consequences. The nudists’ reply is that the public health argument is merely a smokescreen to justify puritanical repression. The anti-nudity advocates are being dishonest, the protesters argue; opposition to public nakedness is not based on concern about transmissible diseases, but rather on old-fashioned prudery. While that may be true, I counter with this: The San Francisco public nudists are also being dishonest; there is indeed a sexual component to their behaviour, and they are exhibitionists using politics to justify their thrill-seeking.

Readers of a delicate constitution should note that Zombie’s report contains photos of unattractive middle-aged men in a state of militant undress (boots, cockrings and bandanas notwithstanding). And I suspect most will come to appreciate why it is that attractive people get paid to take their clothes off, while fat ageing hippies and saggy-titted old queens generally don’t.

Some of you may also register a whiff of disingenuousness in exhibitionists accusing their critics of being repressive and stuffy. Exhibitionists may be eager to dispense with clothing in incongruous locations – say, a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection – but they desperately need an audience, preferably a clothed one, and preferably one that’s embarrassed, inconvenienced and unwilling. San Francisco is remarkably well-equipped in terms of nude-friendly laws, clubs and amenities, including a nude beach and nearby nudist colonies. As Zombie notes, what’s revealing is that such venues weren’t deemed sufficient for our wrinkly radicals:

These protesters and urban nudists don’t simply want to be naked in private or be naked around other naked people; they want to be naked around clothed people. Because that’s where the sexual thrill originates; violating a taboo. Being naked where nakedness is normal doesn’t count; eliciting shock or interest from unwitting strangers is the whole point.

Quite. Those indulging in their kink for being noticed are, in effect, saying: “Hey, you. Look at my bollocks. I SAID, LOOK AT MY BOLLOCKS RIGHT NOW, YOU UPTIGHT CONSERVATIVE PRUDES!” And while I doubt many readers here are prone to fainting at the sight of withered genitals and subsiding buttocks, they may conceivably object to being made an accomplice to someone else’s psychodrama. As one young lady points out, “Unwanted exposure to scrotum is never okay.”

Update, via the comments:

“This used to be a bedroom where the aliens could stay and sleep. This is an air bed and they can blow it up and be comfortable.”

Welcome to Planet Earth. A short film by Michael Livingston. Via Anna.

The bin liner poncho is a classy touch.

Behold the Urban Downhill Mountain Bike Race in Valparaiso, Chile. It gets a little hairy.