Tyler Cowen rhetorically asks whether anyone would buy fluoridated water:

But hey, when you buy bottled water isn’t fluoride what you’re trying to avoid?

It may not make sense in urban areas, but if you get water from a well (or even from some rural water utilities), the water isn’t going to be fluoridated. Presumably, this product is aimed at parents in rural areas (or who live in areas with bad drinking water supplies, like Washington, D.C.) who want their kids to have more cavity-resistant teeth. So it makes sense to me, at least, especially when you consider the alternative is trying to make your kids take fluoride tablets every day (something I had to do while growing up).

I hate to rain on the poor guy’s campaign, but Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik’s first fundraising mail didn’t exactly get off to a good start. In addition to making the mistake of targeting me (although, if I had some cash, I might actually be willing to part with a few bucks of it), the letter also managed to give a return address in “Austin, Texax.”

Victor of The Dead Parrot Society is back from a trip to Mississippi with James Bates, who’s a photojournalist putting together a portrait of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Interesting stuff.

Eugene Volokh finds a shocking relationship between ice cream consumption and sex crimes. Fun with stats ensues.

(This item is blogged so I remember to shamelessly rip it off when I teach methods in the fall.)

I can’t answer all of Will Baude’s questions, but I’ll give two of them a shot:

Why is a turnpike called a turnpike?

For that matter, what exactly makes a particular stretch of limited-access highway a turnpike?

Turnpikes were originally named “turnpikes” because that was the name of the turnstiles that were used at the toll gates; they started out as “turnpike roads” but the name was shortened to simply “turnpike” or even (particularly in the South) “pike.”

In general, a modern turnpike is a fully-controlled access highway (what engineers and Californians call a “freeway,” Britons would call a “motorway,” and francophones call an autoroute) that charges a toll for use; however, there are exceptions—most notably, the Connecticut Turnpike (part of Interstate 95), which stopped charging tolls after a nasty multivehicle accident at a tollbooth in 1985. Also, some contemporary turnpikes only charge tolls on part of their length—the Maryland Turnpike starts near Baltimore and runs to the Delaware border, but the toll is only charged at one location on the route.

So, in sum, the name “turnpike” is generally applied to roads that are, or used to be, toll roads, and there’s no particular logic to whether or not a particular toll road will be called a “turnpike.”

I think this report says pretty much everything you need to know about the Mississippi Democratic Party’s attitude toward its African-American base: like children, best seen (particularly when voting), but not heard.

Link via Radley Balko. More discussion from the Jackson Free Press lefty echo chamber here.

Signifying Nothing will be offline this coming weekend (most likely, beginning sometime Friday); we should be back up and running sometime on Monday, July 19, depending on the vagaries of my new cable company and the general level of progress in moving into my new home—most specifically, whether or not I manage to reassemble my computer desk properly. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

I’ve posted a review of Memoir '44, a boardgame about the Allied Invasion of Normandy, at Settling Catan.

Unlearned Hand fesses up to liking Avril Lavigne’s new album. I generally agree; it’s better than most sophomore efforts, and it more than surpasses the “three good songs” test.

Brian J. Noggle muses about Subway’s decision to stop giving out “Sub Club” stamps in some markets. Considering the existence of superior competitors, like Jimmy John’s and Lenny’s (to leave aside national chains like Quizno’s, Blimpie, and Schlotsky’s), I think Subway may be making just a minor tactical error here.

In this otherwise sensible Clarion-Ledger op-ed praising Bill Cosby for his recent remarks imploring poor blacks to do more to help themselves, Ole Miss and Marshall prof Burnis R. Morris pulls out a strawman to joust with:

However, I fear Cosby’s comments will be taken out of context and open a floodgate of criticism against the disadvantaged. Cosby’s constructive criticism is useful because of his credentials, but all messengers don’t wish success for the poor.

Are there really that many people out there who “don’t wish success for the poor” beyond the lunatic fringe like the Klan, who are hardly a large segment of society who can “open a floodgate of criticism”? Libertarians and conservatives (and even many liberals) favor welfare reform, and even cutbacks, not because they don’t want the poor to be successful, but because they believe that existing welfare programs don’t actually help the poor become more successful, instead miring them in a cycle of poverty and dependency.

One can legitimately debate the merits of these reform proposals (see, for example, this Tyler Cowen post on taxes and public assistance in industrialized democracies), but implying the goal of most reformers is to hurt the poor is pretty asinine.

Ahem.

Rather, just like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the Confederate battle flag motif used in Southern state flags, it was a belated addition of the Eisenhower era. Both the cross and “under God” were added as part of a wave of religious iconography that swept the nation in the 1950s in response to fears of “godless communism,” while the Confederate flag was added to demonstrate contempt for the growing civil rights movement — and to rally local support for continued enforcement of Jim Crow laws.

(Minor) point of fact: the Confederate battle flag emblem was first incorporated in the Mississippi state flag on February 7, 1894—Mississippi’s legislators must have been quite prescient to forsee a conflict over civil rights arising in another six decades or so.* The only other state to incorporate the battle flag “motif” into its own was Georgia, which did so in 1956; however, the use of Confederate imagery in the Georgia state flag dates back to 1879. No other state adopted the battle flag in part or whole, although South Carolina put up the flag in 1962 over its statehouse, but never incorporated the design into its flag.

Dan Drezner is having trouble figuring out why Nicole Kidman is going through a bit of a dry spell on the dating scene. My working hypotheses:

• Men think she looks like Virginia Woolf when not wearing makeup.
• She’s too young for Russell Crowe.
• Her gaydar is broken (insert your own Tom Cruise joke here).

Update: Xrlq in comments points to this Kim du Toit post, which blames the drought on her previous association with Lenny Kravitz.

James Joyner ponders at a distance the following hypothetical exchange:

• A says to B, “I have X.”
• B says to A, “So I’ve heard.”
• A says to B, “And I have to offer it to someone.”
• B says to A, “Funny how that works.”
• A says to B, “If I offered you X, would you take it?”
• B says to A, “No, I wouldn’t take it.”

Here’s your ontological question: did A offer X to B? If not, what is the substantive difference between “If I offered you X, would you take it?” and “Would you like X?” if A intended to offer X to B had B answered in the affirmative?

My advice to Dan Drezner: move to Mississippi (or Utah or Massachusetts), where your vote won’t matter anyway. (Of course, the cynic might say that the likely prospect of massive voting fraud in Chicago makes Dan’s vote not much more likely to make a difference.)

Having said that, casting even a meaningless directional vote for Michael Badnarik is going to be tough, for reasons explained by Jacob Levy* (via Will Baude), even though—if push comes to shove—I’m slightly more inclined to write in “Stephen Harper” (q.v.) or “Condi Rice” than vote for either Bush or Kerry in the event I don’t vote for Badnarik.

Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong and the Volokh Conspiracy (at the moment, Tyler Cowen and Eugene Volokh) ponder the “alternative history” question of what the world would be like without a successful American Revolution. I don’t have much to add, but it’s an interesting concept to ponder. My gut feeling is that separation was inevitable by 1820 or so; the resources of the period (most notably, the lack of real-time communication and fast intercontinental transportation) probably just couldn’t sustain any form of unified government over an area separated by thousands of miles of sea.

Innocents Abroad has an interesting guest post from Steven Teles about what tangible benefits John Edwards can bring to the Kerry campaign. Chief among them: quite possibly the Florida panhandle.

Also, the Clarion-Ledger wastes ink interviewing a bunch of people* who agree that Mississippi isn’t in play, so Edwards being on the ticket isn’t going to change the disposition of the state’s six electoral votes. But at least it gets this quote:

Hinds County Democratic Party Chairman Claude McInnis said he hopes Edwards will attract Mississippi voters to the Democratic ticket.

“This is a strange voting state. Almost every need in the state is Democratic — Medicare, public education, social services — yet voters vote Republican,” he said.

“I hope Edwards can reach people here. We’re ready for something different.”

One suspects that if the average Mississippi voter didn’t think the national Democratic party stood on a platform of abortion-on-demand, gun-grabbing, and letting the Supreme Court decide every other issue that ought to be decided through the political process, they might be willing to pull the lever (or dimple the chad or beat the hell out of the touchscreen, as the case may be) for Kerry-Edwards.

Say what you will about Formula 1 racing, but Michael Schumacher has taken things to a whole new level; as BigJim points out, he’s won nine of the ten F1 races this season. This past weekend, he managed to take one more pit stop than the rest of the field and still left everyone in his dust. This guy is simply unreal.

Though you have to hand it to his teammate, Rubens Barichello, for the most audacious on-track move of the race, a nifty pass that gave him third place on the next-to-last turn before the chequered flag.

Well, the ice maker is fixed, with plastic tubing this time so we won’t be having another lightning strike (through it, at least) in the next week, and the DSL seems back to normal after a reboot or two.

In addition to damaging the copper pipe that feeds water to my icemaker, the lightning also took out one of the two inputs on the DirecTiVo in my bedroom, one output of the multiswitch on the dish, and (apparently) put my DSL modem in flakeout mode, where it loses sync once every 10–20 minutes.

The good news is I’m ditching the DSL and my current dish when I move to Jackson at the end of next week. The bad news is I was hoping to use the DirecTiVo in Jackson, but, since the primary input was the one that was fried, it’s not going to be a happy camper any more after the next time my power goes out. Now off to get a replacement pipe at Home Depot and some dinner…

According to this story at IOL, Japan’s defense ministry plans to release it’s annual white paper in manga (comic book) format.

"We'd like to be able to reach the younger generations, those in their 20s and 30s," a ministry spokesperson said.

“We hope the public reads the report so that we gain their understanding,” Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba was quoted by Kyodo news agency as telling a news conference after the white paper was released.

Yes, I’ve become enough of a blogging whore to do the “daily roundup” post. At least for today.

• Michael Jennings uses soccer to explain how messed up British television regulation is.
• Kevin Aylward ponders the deeper meaning of the John Edwards “sigh of relief” from Democrats. Who’d have thought the “electable” guy would need the help of one of the less electable guys to become more electable?
• Also on the Edwards front: Stephen Bainbridge thinks John Edwards needs a new middle name. I suspect he overestimates the number of Americans who have been sued lately.
• Matt Stinson somehow got wind of all this in China, and reveals he doesn’t particularly miss the smiling countenance of Larry Sabato.
• Steven Taylor preferred Gephardt, but seeing as he wasn’t voting for Kerry anyway…
• Amber Taylor (presumably unrelated to Dr. Taylor) rounds up International Kissing Day in the blogosphere.
• Sebastian Holdsclaw ponders lies, George Bush, and Michael Moore.
• Dan Drezner warns wanna-be Larry Sabatos that they may be in danger of being schmoed.
• Finally, on a lighter note: it’s just like Dewey Defeats Truman, but without the Chicago machine resurrecting the dead to vote!

Dan Drezner ties together the twin themes of less-than-civil bloggers and bad comment hoodoo recently discussed in these parts.

One thing I will say, as a veteran of online fora in general (as an ex-MUD administrator and someone who’s been a part of Usenet since 1992), social problems rarely have good technical solutions. Technology can help—particularly when battling other forms of technology, like comment spam—but dealing with people and their idiosyncracies is a whole other beast.

As far as the negativity Dan has observed and been subjected to in academia, I have to say I’ve largely been spared it (although I will say I was deeply annoyed with the completely worthless one-line review I received for a manuscript once); I don’t know if that’s a function of one’s subdiscipline or perhaps just an example of my relative youth in things academic.

Update: More on this theme from Matt Stinson, who's strongly tempting me to join him in the media black hole that is mainland China.

Somehow, a lightning strike by my house a few minutes ago managed to burst the copper tubing between my wall and the ice maker in my fridge. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.

Update: Things have also been deeply flaky with the DSL since the lightning strike. Grr…

One thing I’ve been kicking around in my head lately while I’ve avoided working on my R&R is that there’s a qualitative difference between the chief executives chosen in presidential systems versus those from parliamentary regimes. In general, it seems (offhand) that parliamentary systems produce better leaders, but I’m not sure why.

Consider the United States. I can think of only one truly great president during the modern two-party era, and it’s Abraham Lincoln. And he’s only great because he won the Civil War. The rest seem to be a succession of mediocrities, a few of whom are “great” solely in relation to their presidential peers. FDR was better than Hoover, but he couldn’t hold a candle to Winston Churchill (though, I suppose, he was better than Neville Chamberlain). Reagan beat the crap out of everyone since Kennedy, but—let’s face it—he was a mediocrity compared to Margaret Thatcher. Bill Clinton or Tony Blair? No contest, Blair by a mile. Hell, John Major was better than 41 and 43 combined.

Lest we consider this a solely American phenomenon, let’s cross the pond and consider the succession of political hacks and nobodies that have led France as president since World War II. De Gaulle is only memorable because he was a jackass of the highest order. Mitterand? Chirac? Great leaders only in their own minds. Give me Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl, or even Gerhard Schröder any day.

I don’t have a good reason why this should be the case. Maybe it the experience of herding cats as a legislative leader makes prime ministers and chancellors better national leaders than the CEO-like experience of being a governor (the most common path to power our presidential system). Then again, Chirac was a party leader in parliament for years, and the experience seems to have improved him little. So, perhaps it’s just “grass is greener” syndrome—something to ponder the next few months while these two mediocrities duke it out.