Pun Salad

The miracle of modern life — modern life itself, really — has one ultimate source: the division of labor. The division of labor is not just a term from a dusty undergraduate economics textbook — it is the secret sauce, the fuel in the rocket engine of capitalist development that has transformed our world. It took about 66 years go to from Kitty Hawk to Neil Armstrong landing on the moon — Jeff Goldblum is 66 years old. In the course of one Goldblum — one Goldblum so far — we went from standing on the Earth and wondering about the moon to standing on the moon and observing the Earth.

And nobody did that. An enormous number of people each did a little part.

Because of the division of labor, the people who are searching for a cure for HIV do not have to spend their days baking their own bread — or growing their own wheat, grinding it into flour, gathering the rest of the ingredients, and then, finally, if they haven’t starved to death in the interim, baking their own bread. We like to say that “all work has dignity,” and that is true, and worth remembering. But it is a much more profound observation when understood in the context of human effort as a whole: The team that cures HIV will go to Stockholm to collect the Nobel prize, but the guy who delivered their late-night pizzas, the Uber driver, the police officer, the crew that fixed the potholes in the roads, the laborers who framed and roofed their houses and laboratory buildings — they all play a part. The work we do, no matter how seemingly unexceptional, is what makes the life we live together — this remarkable, wondrous life — possible.

The great and obvious flaw of ideological media is that its practitioners are biased. But all editors and reporters are biased; it’s an inescapable part of the human condition. We can and should try to correct for it, but our corrections will never be as good as those applied by someone with a completely different set of biases — the person who says, “That can’t be right” and sets out to prove why it isn’t.

Of course, those partisans will often be blindly determined to prove writers wrong when we aren’t; often we will waste time arguing the inarguable. We will watch with distress as the readers of our opposition come to believe things we know just ain’t so.

But we will also watch them curb our own worst instincts, correct the stories we never should have run, force us to be better lest they catch us in an error. However annoying we may find it, honestly partisan writing is certainly better than the alternative, which is more people such as Claas Relotius.

Under the final rule, a food producer marketing a food that is genetically modified (GMO) or that contains GMO ingredients may comply with the rules in any one (or more) of four ways: 1) by clear wording on a food label; 2) by using the USDA's new symbol "BE" to designate that it is bioengineered food; 3) via a QR code printed on a food label; or 4) by giving the consumer the option to send a text message to the manufacturer seeking more information. Food manufacturers will have until 2022 to come into compliance with the rule.

These silly rules took years to develop. That's largely a function of the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Act, the terrible 2016 law that required the U.S. Department of Agriculture USDA to develop regulations to implement the law. I argued earlier this year that the real reason the rules took so long to write is that the law mandating their creation is pretty much unworkable. As generally happens, a bad law has produced bad regulations.

Live free or die.

Unless, that is, your idea of freedom involves marijuana.

New Hampshire’s libertarian streak has long been a source of pride for residents, but for cannabis users, that self-image isn’t living up to reality. With pot legalization sweeping through New England, New Hampshire is now an island of prohibition.

A Broadway musical that tries to recreate the magic of Hamilton fails after opening night, disappointing Vermonters. Coolidge employs rap lyrics to capture the life and times of the 30th president, Calvin Coolidge. However, that doesn’t seem to work for the famously taciturn “Silent Cal.” The failure augurs poorly for Pierce!, an extravaganza about New Hampshire favorite son Franklin Pierce, who is rated among the worst presidents by historians. Critics are generally unkind to the off-off-Broadway production. A Union Leader review holds a contrarian view: “The boffo song Live Free or Die won’t leave a dry eye in the house,” it says.

Newly elected NY Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, 40 Democrats in DC, and many pop media “reporters” seem trapped in a Neverland of perpetual adolescence, an eternal twilight of collectivist “us-we” terminology, soothsaying economics, and mythological “history” foist on them by government-run schools.