Nicholas Casey on Venezuela’s end-stage socialism: 

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná… marched on a supermarket, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves. They showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food… Economists say years of economic mismanagement… have shattered the food supply. Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural centre lie fallow for lack of fertilisers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories…

In response, President Nicolás Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba. “They’re saying, in other words, you get food if you’re my friend, if you’re my sympathizer,” said Roberto Briceño-León, the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a human rights group.

Readers may recall this video of a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, in which shoppers are clearly both thrilled and morally elevated by the egalitarian retail experience. Taking turns to smell the one piece of grey meat available, and then leaving it where it is, was, I’m assured, a way for the proletariat to celebrate the obvious superiority of socialism.

Meanwhile, in North Korea: 

About a third of the students who go to the farms [for a month of state-mandated rice-planting duty] get out of about half the work because they work as informers for the government.

And Douglas Murray on Europe’s migrant avalanche: 

Most of the people coming to Europe who came in the last year are not refugees, they are economic migrants; they are seeking a better life. Now, Europe cannot be the place where everybody in the world who wants to seek a better life is allowed to come and settle. It’s not possible for economic reasons; it’s not possible for geographical reasons; it’s not possible for housing and welfare reasons, and it’s not possible for cultural reasons… How do we know that most of the people who are coming are not even legitimate refugees? We know it because no less a source than the European Commission itself has now told us as much. Earlier this year in an interview, Frans Timmermans, the European Commission Vice President, admitted that in his estimate at least sixty percent of the people who came to Europe last year have no more right to be here than anybody else.

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

The classic concern that marriage was a patriarchal institution that held women back needs to be revised, maybe even dramatically revised in 2016… What we see, basically, is that daughters are more likely to flourish educationally and even later on in life professionally, across class lines, when they’ve had an involved dad who’s engaged with them in their lives. And so there’s a way in which both fatherhood and marriage, done right, are, I think, acting in service of women’s progress.

As a riposte of sorts to Laurie Penny’s recent blathering on the evils of monogamy and family stability and the alleged thrills of single motherhood and “uncoupled women,” here’s Christina Hoff Sommers interviewing Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, in which the advantages of marriage are discussed, with data and correlations, along with the consequences of its abandonment.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Why foxes don’t rule the Earth. // The origins of dubstep. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // Sleep with the bees. // Sci-fi background noise generator. // The names of colours. // Where flight attendants chill. (h/t, drb) // Forbidden images. // Captured motion. // Gad Saad chats with Robert Spencer. Somewhat related. // On thinking about gears. // Little bug gears. // Vertical forest, Milan. // At last, a seven-person tricycle, only $20,000. // “A man is being sought by police after a discussion about the shape of the earth got out of hand.” // The chemistry of dentistry. // “No other bite kills more humans.” // Blimps. // A brief history of sending children through the mail. // How to straighten the curly tail of a pig. // And finally, I think we can safely say that their marriage had its problems.

“The argument was due to someone farting,” police were told by a man who went to the hospital for a dislocated shoulder.

Via the Miami Herald.

Kevin D Williamson on entrepreneurship and its obstacles: 

[Alexandra Scott] launched, with her brother’s help, a lemonade stand, with the intention of using her profits to help other children with cancer. They raised $2,000, which is a fair amount of money for a lemonade stand… Once her story hit the headlines — we do sometimes forget that the press can be an awesome instrument for good — that $2,000 became $1 million, and that $1 million became a movement, with children around the country opening their own summer lemonade stands in tribute to Alex and, later, in tribute to her memory. Alex died of cancer at age eight… As the idea of [children] selling lemonade for charitable purposes caught on, police around the country and the turbocharged bureaucracies behind them found themselves faced with an unexpected public menace: outlaw lemonade. 

Ed West on classroom indoctrination and the whitewashing of leftist history:

[Dennis Sewell] quotes from the exam board Edexcel “on the subject of Conservative ideology” in its most recent A-level Government and Politics syllabus, which he describes as “downright scandalous.” It defined conservatism as “fear of diversity” and support for “social and state authoritarianism.” Conservatism views people as “limited, dependent and security-seeking creatures” and supports “resurgent nationalism… insularity and xenophobia.” The entry on socialism, however, describes it as defined by “social stability and cohesion, social justice, happiness and personal development” and the worst thing that can be said about it is an allusion to “conflict as a motor of history.” Sewell writes: “The actual marking schemes, used in real exams and deciding students’ real results, are even worse.”

And Rich Lowry on English literature degrees and The Great White Horror: 

In a petition to the English Department, Yale undergraduates declare that a required two-semester seminar on Major English Poets is a danger to their well-being. Never mind that the offending poets — Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, et al. — are the foundational writers in the English language. It is as if chemistry students objected to learning the periodic table of elements or math students rose up against the teaching of differential calculus… The petition’s implicit contention is that the major poets are too circumscribed by their race and gender to speak to today’s socially aware students, when, in fact, it is the students who are too blinkered by race and gender to marvel at great works of art. It takes a deeply impoverished imagination to read Shakespeare and regard him simply as an agent of the patriarchy.