Are you joining me in Burlington, Vermont?

If you're on Spotify, you, like me, got its "Wrapped 2023," summarizing our taste in music based on what we actually listened to. It tells each of us that "one place listened just like you," as an image of the globe rotates and homes in on one place.

I got Burlington, Vermont:

Turns out Meade too got Burlington, Vermont — or "Burlington, USA" as Spotify puts it — even though he didn't have those same 3. 

Then I was watching TikTok and...

Vermont.

Video at Twitter here. 

An update from Montpelier at 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday #VTflood23 pic.twitter.com/bq619cnOnO

— Vermont Public (@vermontpublic) July 11, 2023

"I know this may sound radical, but we all agree that theft is not OK...People are trying to connect our work to a pro-cop or anti-cop agenda... Most of us just want to get people’s bikes back."

Said Bryce Turner, 27, a member of a Facebook group that tracks down stolen bikes in Burlington, Vermont, where the police force was reduced by 30% after a ballot measure influenced by the George Floyd incident.

Turner is quoted in "The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont/A hunt for stolen goods has put citizens and business owners in the center of a debate about policing and a growing, sometimes violent, problem with crime" (NYT).

"[I]n 2019, the tensions between local landowners and [mountain] bikers came to a head.... [A] visiting biker yelled at a landowner for riding a horse on her own property...."

"[When] three landowners pulled their property out of the trail network... which was well within their rights, [it] bifurcated the trails on Darling Hill, and... Kingdom Trails immediately shifted all its marketing efforts into education. It adopted a maxim from a nearby trail network, 'Ride with Gratitude,' to encourage good behavior, and remind visitors that it’s a rare privilege to ride on pristine private land — one they shouldn’t screw up...."

From "In Northern Vermont, Trying to Smooth the Ride for Mountain Biking/The Kingdom Trails Association has built a popular network of biking paths using private land. Now it’s trying to make sure the community is happy, too" (NYT).

It's an interesting process: Old logging roads were connected by making trails across privately owned land. There was a tradition of owners allowing hunters and hikers to use their land, so it was easy, initially, to get permission to make these trails. By 1994, they had "100 miles of carefully built biking routes across 104 landowners’ properties," and it became a vacation destination. That led to tourist-oriented business — bars and cafés and AirBnbs and so on — which caused inflation and didn't really benefit the landowners that the whole system depended on.

How do you inspire all the outsiders who are dropping in for a cute vacation to "ride with gratitude" and value the participation of the landowners?

The 14-year-old running for Governor of Vermont.

It's Ethan Sonneborn:

"ATVs and (off-road) motorcycles have a pretty bad name in terms of the relationship with environmentalists and things like that."

"They don't really care for ATVers ... but it seems like they're the only ones really saving anybody right now."

Religion, free speech, and license plates.

Here is a NYT op-ed about automobile license plates. The writer —Stefan Lonce, who has a book on the subject of vanity license plates — distinguishes 2 forms of religious speech via license plate. First, there are the specialty license plates. South Carolina has introduced a Christian-themed plate that looks like this:


Second, there are vanity plates, and the states sometimes reject the letter/word combinations a driver requests. There is, we are told, federal court lawsuit about Vermont's rejection of a vanity plate that would read JN36NT (which is a reference to a Biblical passage).

It seems obvious that the individual expression in the form of a vanity license plate is the preferable to the state's provision of the religious message on a specialty plate. The "I Believe" specialty plate is almost surely a state endorsement of Christianity that violates the Establishment Clause. (There's no array of specialty plates for different religions and no atheist plate. What would an atheist plate look like?)

But everyone knows that what's on a vanity plate is chosen by the car-owner and doesn't represent the state's point of view. Vermont seems to be overdoing a concern about Establishment Clause and blundering into a Free Speech violation (though, according to Lonce, the federal district court approved the state's decision). The trouble with vanity plates is that at least some of them do need to be censored — there are always some people who want "F**KYU" — so it won't work to have individual choice as the only filter.

Lonce thinks the problem of censoring vanity plates can be solved by setting up a national data base, pooling the efforts of all the states to identify the offending letter/number combinations. An alternative is just to get rid of vanity plates altogether, but states make a lot of money selling them, and people want to buy them.