Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.

I'm tempted to make any number of sarcastic comments about the super-bizarre federalism debate going on, but I think anything I say would be less funny than some of the posts already out there, so just follow Will's links.

Instead, I'll add a quick update on chocolate. After writing about dark chocolates yesterday, I decided I didn't need to work up to 99% chocolate, but should just go buy some immediately. The only store I found that sold some, oddly, is Michel Cluizel of Paris, who sells the evocatively named Noir Infini. Oddly, because Cluizel is located in a carpet shop on Broadway. It makes more sense when you arrive, I admit. The store also includes a "Le Pain Quotidien", and various other lounging opportunities.

In any case, I bought both a 85% and a 99% chocolate bar, both wisely marketed in a 30g (i.e, 1 ounce size) You can see pictures here. The boxes remind me, possibly intentionally, of the slim cigarilloes my uncles used to smoke when they were younger. The Noir Infini is the kind of chocolate one would take to the type of bar I don't go to.

Aside from the wrapper, the chocolate itself is an almost incandescent brown, with a malevolent bronze glow. The taste - bitter, harsh, but with a smooth texture, and more and more delicious as you work slowly through the bar. It's like radicchio almost out of season, or something equally raw and alluring.

I'm not sure I liked it. But I'll be buying more. As Will said in the comments to my previous post, "99% chocolate bars do border on inedible, but are nonetheless extremely good. The contradiction is left as an exercise for the chocolate-loving reader."

EDIT: Please read this extraordinary 10-part deconstruction of the Texan(?) chocolatier Noka. I think I learned more about chocolate from this article than I knew existed.

A rather odd argument has broken out about federalism, libertarians, the Liberty Fund, and to what extent certain structures of government are tainted by the bad uses to which those structures have been put. Ann Althouse writes the igniting post, Ron Bailey and Virginia Postrel have reactions, Orin Kerr, Eugene Volokh, Ilya Somin, Dan Drezner, and Amber Taylor have more.

I was originally tempted to dismiss all of this with Gary Lawson's flippant quip that decentralizers should be associated with a guy named Faubus no more than the centralizers should be associated with a guy named Taney. But now I have read Jacob Levy's incredibly lucid and persuasive response to the flap, and think that he has everything basically right.

Federalism is valuable as an instrumental good to protect liberty, and the uncertainties are sufficiently large that it is almost impossible to evaluate the American system of federalism out of its historical context. But it is also a complicated question how Jim Crow, slavery, and all of the other goods and evils of the past two centuries of American government cache out, and what amount of bitter are necessary components of what amount of sweet.

This is also why federalism is a different question than flying the confederate flag, and why flying that flag in Indiana is very different than flying it in South Carolina. [Indcidentally I was intrigued, and not displeased, to see that the President of the University of Texas is contemplating whether to remove the university's statues to confederate war heroes.]


Like Levy, I tend to think that more decentralization of government power than we currently have would be a net good thing so far as freedom is concerned, but I recognize both that that is a complicated and somewhat unscientific estimation, and that people who disagree are not necessarily themselves morally tainted by the fact that Woodrow Wilson is responsible for the perpetuation of Jim Crow.