Pun Salad

■ We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming, with Proverbs 28:27:

Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close their eyes to them receive many curses.

Again with the poor. (Yes, when I read the Old Testament, I can come off sounding a tad Jewish.) Allow me to share a paragraph from P. J. O'Rourke's latest book How the Hell Did This Happen?:

In 1966, at the height of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," the U.S. poverty rate was 14.7% and 28.5 million Americans were living in poverty. Now the U.S. poverty rate is 14.5% and 45 million Americans are living in poverty. Thus Democratic politicians care so much about poverty that—far from warring on it—they have become a kind of conservationist group, devoted to preserving it forever. Democrats are the Sierra Club of Poverty.

I have to go with P. J. over Proverbs.

■ NR's Kevin D. Williamson sounds the alert: Here Come the Pizza Gestapo. At issue: the new federal restaurant regulations that demand "posting signs in the shop with calorie counts for every item on the menu and for every variation on that item." Yes, even at Domino's, where the vast majority of orders are placed not "in the shop", but over phone and Internet. And where there are (you may be aware) myriads of different combinations of pizza toppings. And nobody pays attentions to calorie counts "in the shop" anyway.

So: useless and expensive. But:

But Uncle Stupid is dead serious about this: Violating the new federal pizza rules is not a civil offense but a criminal one. A pimply-faced teen-ager who throws an extra handful of cheese onto a large Cali Chicken Bacon Ranch pizza could be thrown in the federal lockup for a year.

There's been a lot of whining about Trump's proposed FDA budget cuts, but obviously he didn't cut enough.

■ The WSJ interviews Jonathan Haidt on the Cultural Roots of Campus Rage. Very sober and serious, and I will spoil the very end for you, sorry:

If you lean left—even if you adhere to the campus orthodoxy, or to certain elements of it—you might consider how the failure to respect pluralism puts your own convictions at risk of a backlash. “People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always, ‘[Expletive] you!’ ”

He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”

■ And, this being Pun Salad, I can not resist (heh):

As one commenter says: terminally funny.