One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.

Hannah Dreier on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism:  

In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Paediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.

And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line. Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organising lines each morning, not to buy bread, but to eat trash.

And from a safe distance, our betters speak. 

Being, as you obviously are, a crowd with your boots on, and all collaring the jive, you’ll want to lamp Cab Calloway’s 1939 Hepster Dictionary. 

By all means slide your jib in the comments.

Via Obnoxio. 

Speaking, as we were, of clown-shoe identitarians:   

Update:

Somewhat related, this: 

Act casual, say nothing. || Moonshiner’s cow shoe. || Meanwhile, in Scotland, life goes on as normal. (h/t, Holborn) || I suspect these are bigger than yours. (h/t, Pogonip) || Hey, it’s a job. || Ideal for peeling grapes and then sewing them back in their skins, the Da Vinci robotic surgical system. || Renting pandas. || Chimney pots. || Where did all the sperm go? || Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 19. (h/t, Stephen) || This. (h/t, Julia) || That. || Gusty. || Going rogue. || Girth, thickness and ellipticity: On the shapes of eggs. || “The germs which are in the mouth have spoken to a child!” (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Tristan goes exploring. || Roman roads of Britain. || Ice fishing basics. || Da Vinci’s notebooks. || Sequel of note. || And finally, how to attract a crowd.

Ben Sixsmith finds another Guardian writer with a spiteful confiscation fetish: 

What I found most unpleasant in [Abi] Wilkinson’s article [advocating a 100% inheritance tax] is her acceptance that there could be “a small allowance for objects of sentimental value.” It brought the reality of the idea home. Imagine relatives being forced to beg to keep their family heirlooms. Your granddad’s books? Well, okay. It’s not as if they’re first editions. Your mother’s piano? Sorry, pal. Too big for this allowance. Your grandmother’s house? Forget it. We’re selling it off.

Michael Aaron on the mental contortions of being “woke,” and why they spread: 

How could it be possible that so many people, large cohorts of students, and indeed entire academic disciplines, are so bamboozled into believing much of postmodernist rhetoric, including that science is a symbol of the patriarchy (you’ve got to click on the link, the title is “Science: A masculine disorder?”) and that the concept of health is merely another tool of Western colonial oppression?

Lee Jussim on the bias of assuming unfair “gender bias”: 

The societal push to equalise gender distributions may be deeply dysfunctional, because it can succeed only by having the perverse effect of pushing people into fields they do not prefer. Of course, on moral grounds, we want to ensure that all people have equal opportunities to enter any particular career. But if there are bona fide gender differences in preferences and interests, equal opportunities may never translate into equal outcomes.

And Shannon Spada on political asymmetries:

A recent poll conducted by Pew Research Centre produced results suggesting… that Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say that it would “strain” their relationship to learn that a friend had voted for the other party’s candidate. Among all respondents (not just college students), 35 percent of Democrats said that a friend voting for Donald Trump would strain their friendship, while only 13 percent of Republicans said that a friend voting for Hillary Clinton would have the same effect.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.