JEN PSAKI APPROVES: North Korea tells starving citizens to eat less: Report.

North Korea is telling its hungry citizens to be prepared to eat less for a few years.

Pyongyang, which closed its Sino-Korea border early last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, said there is only a slim chance of it reopening before 2025. This situation, which includes the restriction of trade, puts a significant pinch on the country of 25 million where people are already starving to death because of skyrocketing food prices, according to Radio Free Asia.

“The food situation right now is already clearly an emergency, and the people are struggling with shortages. When the authorities tell them that they need to conserve and consume less food until 2025 … they can do nothing but feel great despair,” an unnamed resident of the northwestern border city of Sinuiju told the outlet this month.

Flashback: White House: Cancel Christmas? “Forget malaise, and let’s start talking Grinch. With supply-chain issues still festering for months and inflation beginning to roar, retailers wonder whether they can provide the goods for the holiday season on which they rely for fiscal solvency. The White House offered its advice yesterday, which was. . . get used to disappointment.”

No word yet when Pyongyang Department Store Number 1 will be opening a branch near you:

I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.

I decided to buy something – a fountain pen. I went to the counter where pens were displayed like the fan of a peacock’s tail. They were no more for sale than the Eiffel Tower. As I handed over my money, a crowd gathered round, for once showing signs of animation. I knew, of course, that I could not be refused: if I were, the game would be given away completely. And so the crowd watched goggle-eyed and disbelieving as this astonishing transaction took place: I gave the assistant a piece of paper and she gave me a pen.

The pen, as it transpired, was of the very worst quality. Its rubber for the ink was so thin that it would have perished immediately on contact with ink. The metal plunger was already rusted; the plastic casing was so brittle that the slightest pressure cracked it. And the box in which it came was of absorbent cardboard, through whose fibres the ink of the printing ran like capillaries on the cheeks of a drunk.

At just before four o’clock, on two occasions, I witnessed the payment of the shoppers. An enormous queue formed at the cosmetics and toiletries counter and there everyone, man and woman, received the same little palette of rouge, despite the great variety of goods on display. Many of them walked away somewhat bemused, examining the rouge uncomprehendingly. At another counter I saw a similar queue receiving a pair of socks, all brown like the plastic bowls. The socks, however, were for keeps. After payment, a new shift of Potemkin shoppers arrived.

If Orwell had come across the above passage, he would have said, “I can’t put this in 1984; no one would believe it!” If you’ve never read Theodore Dalrymple’s visit to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1, definitely read the whole thing.