Ann Althouse has another . . . odd entry in the debate about Ann Althouse's views of federalism. Without wishing to touch-- because it is so hard to imagine saying anything more successful at refuting Althouse than her post itself-- the strange attacks on Jacob Levy, I did find this challenge worth responding to:

I said that if you are devoted an abstract theory of government that would have allowed racial segregation to persist indefinitely, then it raises the question whether the reason you like this theory so much is either that you actually desire segregation or that you are insufficiently concerned about it. Once this question arises, you need to talk about it, and the avoidance of the question makes those who have the question feel even more dissatisfaction with the theory.

My home made pizza isn't as good as this guy's (linked from Stuart Buck), which is extraordinary (but which depends on rigging your home oven so that you can set it on self-clean, and yet still open, which I'm not going to do in my rented place), but it is very good. I craved pizza during the fantastic Boise State Fiesta Bowl victory last night, so I set to. For those who want to skip to the good part, completed pictures are here and here, and here I should say - given the caveats below, I do often produce better pizza, but this is as well as I've done without my stone and without white flour.

A couple of notes -

1) this was made mostly with King Arthur's "white" whole wheat flour. That accounts, I think, for the lack of color on the surface crust. Pure white flour browns better, I've found. The use of whole wheat was not intentional - I ran out of white flour.

2) Here's the dough. I use no oil in the dough itself (it's just flour, salt, yeast, and water), but I do very lightly oil the plastic bowl I rise it in. The ball you see there is for two pizzas of the size I made.

3) Here's the pizza before cooking. Two things here - I hate heavily topped pizzas, so my toppings are sparse. Second, my pizza stone (i.e, an unvarnished ceramic tile from Home Depot) is broken, so I just used a cookie sheet. Even without the stone, the results aren't bad.

4) I got the bottom to char properly by just throwing the thing on the bare floor of my gas oven, which is really hot. It occurs to me that I've just discovered how to make naan at home, which depends on blisters of this sort. I will experiment soon.

Matthew Yglesias discusses the relatively uniform structure of state governments:

U.S federalism is somewhat unusual in that the states have essentially total autonomy in terms of how they want to arrange the institutions of state government. The federal constitution only contains a vague requirement of a "Republican form of government" which seems to offer a lot of leeway. Nevertheless, 49 out of 50 states choose bicameralism. Zero states out of fifty opt for parliamentary-style governance where the state executive must maintain the confidence of the legislature. All fifty states, including tiny Rhode Island, implement a an interstitial country (or "parish") level of government between the state and towns and cities. All the states elect their legislators on the basis of single-member constituencies. You'd think that some state, at least, would try something different along some of these dimensions and see how it works out.

It's worth noting that some of the institutional uniformity you see here is the result of the Supreme Court decisions in the second half of the 20th century: multi-member districts have been rendered impossible to consistently defend after the Voting Rights Act and accompanying caselaw; the one-person-one-vote decisions have destroyed a great deal of diversity in state and local representative government, and so on. This doesn't necessarily negate the point that states are now kind of similar (although compared to what?) but does suggest that your reference to the Republican Form clause probably doesn't explain what's really going on.

The New York Times has a story today about how content regulation on YouTube and similar mainstream sites has caused young users to begin substituting toward sites that run a looser ship. One can make the typical uninformed empirical speculations about whether this is a "race to the top" or a "race to the bottom," but for the moment, I won't bother.

I was more annoyed by the article's title: "Using Web Cams but Few Inhibitions, the Young Turn to Risky Social Sites." What bothers those who object to child sex, child webcams, and what-have-you is not really the "risk" but the fact that it is a risk of harm. If instead of causing massive damage to a few very unlucky children, the activity in question caused a small amount of damage to a whole lot of children, I take it that few of the critics would be mollified. I recognize that this usage has become quite commonplace, but I continue to think it's misguided and unwise to use the word "risky" when one is really talking about the harmfulness of the activity, not its risk profile.

We should worry-- to whatever extent-- about dangerous activities, not just risky ones.

UPDATE I'm pleased to see that the online version of the story now has a different title, "Young Turn to Web Sites Without Rules." The hard copy on my kitchen table has the "risky" headline.