At the end of the last thrilling episode the Republic of Vermont joined the United States in 1791. Having defeated, or at least bribed, its arch-enemies New York and New Hampshire the Freemen[1] of Vermont had a fiercely independent attitude that lasted a long time. For example, when a massive flood hit Vermont in 1927 the state turned down the offer of federal assistance.[2]
Now the balloters[3] of Vermont regularly return Bernie Sanders to the U.S. Senate and the 14th star is considered one of the bluest of the constellation. What happened?
Originally the unit of organization in Vermont was the town. Towns were responsible for all roads inside town borders, for the care of the poor, and for the education of the children. These things are expensive particularly when your town’s economy is a few farms and a dry goods store, has a major road going through the middle, and the poor people keep having kids. Seductive offers of state assistance started immediately. “For a modest tax, paid by all drivers in the state, the state will assume responsibility for that high-maintenance road!” The towns resisted but the ratchet goes only one way. The State Highway System was created in 1931, the Social Welfare Act was passed in 1967, and with Act 60 the state took control of the school property tax in 1997.
Another factor is the reverse Free State Movement that happened in the 1970’s. Tens of thousands of literal hippies moved to Vermont and because the state’s population was so small the like-minded influx had a real effect. I met one of these 15 years ago when he was in his 90’s. He was still a fire-breathing leftist.
But the biggest factor is the change in the composition of Vermont’s legislature. Originally each town sent a representative to the House and each county sent a representative to the Senate. This gave the state’s many small rural towns power in the House over the few populous rich towns and gave the state its original governmental character. It all changed with the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case Reynolds vs. Sims when it was decided that it was unconstitutional for state representatives to be elected by region, they had to be elected by population.[4]
So Vermont now has 109 House districts and 16 Senate districts each with, you’d think, the same number of people. But the Vermont legislature has its own interpretation of the decision. If town boundaries and populations make it too difficult to create single-member districts of equal population then multiple-member districts can be created. I live in a two-member House district composed of four towns and a two-member Senate district composed of 12 towns.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision was supposed to enforce the ideal of one-man one-vote. But I can vote for two Representatives and Senators while other people can vote for only one. Of course my districts represent twice as many people as those of a single-member district and it really isn’t possible to create contiguous single-member districts that are fair[5] so one might conclude that the Vermont legislature is just trying to do its best.
One would be wrong because there are also gratuitous multiple-member Senate districts. These were originally created because it was considered anti-community to break up the populous rich towns into chunks. While some people can vote for a single Senator other people can vote for three.
The three-member Senate districts are rich and urban.[6] Vermont has the same rural-conservative/urban-progressive political split as other states.[7] The result is a complete reversal of the old one-Representative-per-town power structure with a few progressive towns now dominating the Senate.[8] The current Democratic-Progressive/Republican ratio is 23 to 7.
During the redistricting required by the 2020 census it was proposed that Senate districts all be single-member. The proposal failed.
So with all this good leadership, why isn’t Vermont a socialist utopia? One reason is that Vermont frequently elects a Republican[9] governor as is currently the case. This moderates some of the nonsense coming from the legislature. But the main reason is that there simply isn’t enough other people’s money to jumpstart the process. There are no lucrative industries to nationalize. There are no money printers create prosperity out of nothing. Vermont is a poor state and no amount of wishful thinking on the part of the legislature can change that.
Not that the legislature hasn’t tried. In 2011 Vermont passed the country’s first Single Payer law. The law is still on the books but implementation has been delayed until the problem of financing it can be solved. The initially proposed 11.5% payroll tax and 9.5% additional income tax proved to be unpopular and the Democratic governor who signed the bill declined to run again when his term was up.[10]
Vermont has high levels of regulation and high taxes across the board but the people in the rural areas are sane and the state is simply too poor to inflict catastrophic damage. In my opinion it’s a stable situation and that’s what I want at this point in my life.
Footnotes:
[1] Historically voters in Vermont were required to take the Freeman’s Oath:
You solemnly swear (or affirm) that whenever you give your vote or suffrage, touching any matter that concerns the state of Vermont, you will do it so as in your conscience you shall judge will most conduce to the best good of the same, as established by the Constitution, without fear or favor of any man.
Mine was administered by the Town Clerk. In 2007 the law was changed so that the oath could be self-administered.
[2] But because so many bridges needed to be rebuilt the power of the State Highway Department was significantly increased.
[3] I’m trying to find a more descriptive word for what actually goes on these days.
[4] The inconsistency with the U.S. Senate is obvious.
[5] For the House. It’s possible for the Senate.
[6] Vermont is a poor rural state. The words “rich” and “urban” are relative.
[7] In my town in 2020 Trump beat Biden 478-434. Jorgensen came in third with 8.
[8] To be fair Republicans are also outnumbered in the House 104-46.
[9] Vermont Republicans are like middle-of-the-road Democrats elsewhere.
[10] Vermont Governors serve a two-year term and are almost always reelected.
Love the reference to Reynolds v. Sims, one of the most under-recognized aggressive leftward shifts the courts have imposed upon the country. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth is made about gerrymandering today, but when the districts rarely changed they couldn’t be easily gerrymandered.
Pardon me but bullllllshit. Gerrymander dates to the very first days of drawing up districts.
Many states had at least one house of the state legislature whose “districts” were counties. Both then and now states rarely change the shape of their counties. So while their original shapes may have been gerrymandered, over time those now-fixed shapes lost their political advantage because conditions changed. Moreover, the precipitating factors
which led to the string of decisions ending in Reynolds v. Sims included Southern states that refused to redraw their popular district boundaries despite changes in population according to the U.S. census. This of course was presented as a sort of reverse gerrymandering: the districts were portrayed similarly to the “rotten boroughs” of early 19th century England, where people were being disenfranchised by unequal representation. They “needed” to be redrawn but weren’t.
Bi-cameral legislatures at the state level have always been stupid, as there is no sovereign political interest at play within a state as there is at the federal level. Nor does dual popular representation make an improvement.
Just because the Warren Court fucked something up doesn’t mean it was good before they got their hands on it.
Bi-cameral legislatures at the state level have always been stupid, as there is no sovereign political interest at play within a state as there is at the federal level
This is a consequence of homogenizing forces and not an intrinsic characteristic of federal systems.
Yeah, I don’t know what the excuse was other than “it gives more jobs to politicians”, but it has been stupid from the get-go. Even Nebraska has double representation in the unicameral legislature.
If nothing else, bicameralism with one non-popular house means urban population centers (most of which already have self-government municipally) cannot steamroll over the suburbs and rural areas politically at the state level (they might still get their way, but they’ll have to compromise more). Even today, in many states, this would effect a significant rightward pull on state legislation.
Of course, this would be more potent if it could be paired with other measures at the state level, such as restricting state-to-state immigration, restricting the franchise, having tiers of state residency and citizenship, etc., all of which are also forbidden by the Supes.
@kbolino is right, bicameralism at the state level that provides representation of areas in one house and popular will in the other does have a purpose in providing some balance to the competing interests even found within the same state and provides a check on the mob. Bicameralism with both houses being selected using the same method however is indeed silly redundancy.
There is no magical ‘interest’ that springs forth from rural areas contra urban ones within a state. It is what is of interest to the people in each.
Now, if we were going to grant counties to be sovereign entities within states and not merely administrative regions, then county representation would make some degree of sense.
Otherwise you are merely indulging in a particular sentimentality.
juris:
The counties here in Ohio are their own level of government. Cuyahoga (where Cleveland is), created a whole council and county administrator a while back.
I would argue that there are in fact different interests that spring from rural and urban (and suburban) areas within the same state, as each such area will have different industries dominating and sometimes even different cultures and so will therefor have different views on the rules promulgated by the state. Residents of an urban area will tend to be less concerned with regulations on farming than those of rural areas, while on the subject of manufacturing regulations the reverse will also be true. Views on traffic laws and public transportation will also vary wildly, and I’m sure there are many other such cases of naturally arising different interests.
Neither is there at the federal level and that was true even before 17A. It, like at the state level, is just another speed bump to pushing legislation through. As are limited legislative sessions. All of which is increasingly being thrown out.
Remember that under the AoC, Congress was each state having one vote. That’s essentially the Senate in the subsequent set-up. Dual representation in Congress made some sense since it preserved state equality (in the Senate) and allowed popular representation in the House.
The Confederation era was a wild time. Quoth Wikipedia, of all places, “There was no president, no executive agencies, no judiciary, and no tax base.”
I’ll be in my bunk.
And no sustainability!
The sustainability of the Constitution was already called into question by Andrew Jackson’s time, and the fitness of same was shown to be a farce in Lysander Spooner’s time.
To the extent the Constitution has proven more “sustainable” than the Articles, it is by being so malleable that it can hardly be said to have sustained at all.
I’ll defer to Dr. Franklin’s statement on the likelihood of the long term success of the govt (vis a vis the people under that govt). You have no answer to that, because people will fuck anything up.
I would like to present the Member of Parliment for Old Sarum…
I vaguely recall a discussion about this topic from the early days with a poster who sadly has since disappeared…
Pan Zagloba (sp?) IIRC
Snow.
Socialism.
At least Cali has better weather.
Nice write up Richard, I enjoyed it
Thanks!
If you like four distinct seasons Vermont is where it’s at. I lived in California for five years and spent the entire time waiting for Winter to come. It drove me nuts.
California is a big state, you have to go to the right parts to get winter – and then you can really get winter.
I seem to recall living there for decades in the Olden Times, maybe I shall return one day……
California is like Vermont in that regard, a fine place to visit.
Are Vermont Democrats like RINOs?
What til someone tells them how much it will really cost.
Vermont hired the consultant who was behind Obamacare to advise on Single Payer. There was a minor scandal when it was discovered he was billing tens of thousands of dollars a month and not reporting any work done. NBD for most states but it was considered a Lot Of Money in Vermont.
His mistake was not providing a steady stream of fluff deliverables. He could then at least assert that he was providing a service. He’d still probably get canned as a cost-cutting measure, but the pro forma deliverables are required.
ISTR California pushing a tax in the 30 to 40 percent range for their version and it still wasn’t enough according to someone who crunched the numbers.
Considering the size of the poor population in California that makes sense; you aren’t just paying for people like yourself.
To be honest, Vermont Skeeves me out when I’m there.
I’m okay with driving Rt 9 to New Hampshire and beyond, but when I had a job interview in one of the towns… It was unsettling. Few other state-sized places have the same feeling of wrongness about them. It didn’t help that I got lost thanks to poor signage while trying to find my way back out again.
We do that deliberately. It’s tons of fun:
Lost motorist: “Excuse me, how do I get to Burlington?”
Vermonter: “Well sonny, if I was goin’ to Burlington I wouldn’t start from here.”
Due to bad signage people inadvertently drive into my town’s village area. I’ve been tempted to use that line but I never have.
I did manage to backtrack and find the place where I’d taken a wrong turn.
I still can’t explain the “don’t stop here” feeling.
It was the locals playing banjos, wasn’t it?
I still can’t explain the “don’t stop here” feeling.
I always got that driving through Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Now I occasionally get it driving through some backwoods areas here in SW VA. I mean I live in the bumfuck middle of nowhere boondocks, but some of these places are isolated to the point of making me feel I still live in a city by comparison. Needing to cross over a single lane wood bridges, etc. Boarded up trailers and just a general Wrong Turn horror movie feel.
Generally I go through these areas to pick up a farming implement or livestock off craigslist. I’m looking around thinking uh-oh, and then my destination inevitably ends up being a beautiful farm with a winding tree lined driveway and well maintained grounds. The contrast is striking. Almost like in Harold and Kumar when they go inside the house while their car is getting repaired.
That’s one thing I’m still getting used to in the south. You will drive past a beautiful farm, plantation, or mansion – not a half-mile down the road will be a shitbox trailer home. Every time.
Somehow in the north, they segregated their neighborhoods and even towns by income pretty effectively. I just never thought much about it having lived their most of my life.
To an extent. There are roads here in the Catskills where there are run-down houses with a car on the lawn not far from pretty nice new-builds.
But I’ve been on VT-9 too, from the NY border to Brattleboro, and I got the feeling there was both a lot of beauty and places where gentrification clearly hadn’t arrived.
Middle of PA off the turnpike for me.
These must be the same people famous for using former places as landmarks and giving directions relative to the way the roads used to be laid out.
“Past the old oak, which they cut down, you’ll find old route 3, which they done tore up, and you’ll need to take that past the old perkins place, which burnt down…”
I’ve run into that in a lot of places.
“Go past the old drugstore [which isn’t a drugstore anymore], turn right [onto unnamed street], etc.”
Went to college in Maine before GPS. Asking for directions from a local in the boonies was a good way to get more lost.
Gee, I thought the “directions based on no-longer-existent landmarks” was a Dayton, Ohio thing, especially using obsolete industrial and local retail sites.
I thought it was a Louisville thing. The “Old Sears Building” being a classic. It may have been a Sears in my lifetime, but not much of it. But it is still referred to as the Old Sears Building.
Also, Louisville likes to refer to roads by the name they used to be.
On the latter, I was disappointed when Walnut Street Baptist Church (which wasn’t located on Walnut anyway) didn’t change their name to Muhammad Ali Baptist Church when the road changed names.
It exists in New England.
I don’t remember it in PA.
A few years back I was working in Warsaw, Indiana. One Saturday afternoon I was walking out of the gas station/convenience store with a bottle of pop in hand, and a guy approached me. “Excuse me,” he said, indicating the north-south highway through town, “does this road go to Goshen?”
“No,” I said. “The road doesn’t go anywhere. It just stays right there where it is. But if you drive up that road, you’ll get to Goshen.”
He looked at me like I had three heads. I mean, words mean things, right?
Deliberately ignoring the vernacular makes you the odd one out.
I’ve been the odd one out most of my life, and I’m content with that.
If you stopped carrying those two fake heads, it might not happen as much.
Who said they were fake?
^ This.
There is a certain sort of person I see now and again that has a very nervous, twitchy, furtive affect about them. They always turn out to be “visiting from Vermont.”
I have no idea if that’s true, and if so wtf causes them to act like that.
Meth and outstanding warrants.
A friend who read a pre-post version of this told me that in olden days each Vermont county sent two people to the Senate, not one. I apologize for the error.
I think it’s great. I hope you do more! Articles, not errors. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I don’t have a Master’s degree*
*See this morning’s discussions.
But Dr. Science does! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nLLUUiThjII
I still love him.
— Futurama
I’ve surprised most of the girlfriend’s family when they learned that I didn’t have a college degree.
I do have a degree. Of all the classes, I’ve used… maybe two in my professional life.
Certainly haven’t used my Criminal Justice minor for a damn thing besides arguing on the internet.
Picking up on the discussion of the Ukrainian war, I think this is one of the more credible sources.
Looks like another State-run outlet:
The info seems solid, though. I don’t see a lot of cheerleading, and I see a fair amount of “can’t be confirmed”. I don’t know of a better source.
Of course that odious little asslicker Kristol insists on “Dr.”.
Though that name looked familiar. Turns out the Institute for the Study of War is where BBC is getting their daily assessments from. Interesting.
Yeah, that’s how I found them. BBC was my go-to, and then I went up the chain.
Seriously, if anyone has other sources that seem solid and reliable, let me know.
The map seems to be accurate. The commentary, less so. Russia may be losing ground, or it may not, but much like the IJN reporting many glorious victories getting conspicuously closer to the home islands, the Russians seems to make an awful lot of progress for the side that’s constantly losing.
My takeaway is that they are saying the fighting is basically stalled right now; the Russians have (sensibly) consolidated their lines after a limited withdrawal following the failure of their schwerpunkt in the northeast and are gearing up for another push. The Russians are mounting penny-packet offensives (maybe probing or spoiling attacks) and not making ground, the Ukrainians are making “tactical” counteroffensives (also likely probing or spoiling attacks). I see some Ukrainian claims of significant(ish) advances to be “not confirmed”. The Russian advances seem to be along the coast; I wonder if they aren’t planning to hold in place in the northeast and shift to closing off the coast. They are creating a long, thin, difficult to defend front in the south, though.
I do wonder if Russia has depleted its supplies of precision long-range missiles as much as is claimed. I continue to wonder about the dog that isn’t barking – the Russian air force.
I find the historical parallel between the tractor factory in Stalingrad and the steel plant in Mariupol to be bitterly ironic. Of course, Stalingrad wasn’t cut off, and Mariupol is, so the ending will be different.
Where else do you go for good info, kbo?
I haven’t found any place, sadly. There’s only real pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian sources, and most English-language media is the latter. I’ve seen a number of cases where people have gotten tactical situations correct but strategic aims wrong and vice-versa. I don’t know what things are like inside the warzone (obviously) but outside the warzone it’s just a massive stream of propaganda.
I like this take:
First Priority—Avoid U.S. War With Russia
Lol.
And I noticed that the president of Raytheon was with Lloyd Austin in Ukraine. They aren’t even pretending anymore.
Dr. William Kristol, Director, Defending Democracy Together
HERR DOKTOR Bill Kristol, Defender of the Faith, Cuckold
Yet another goddamned Kagan.
These are the developments they should be talking about. It’s like they want to drag Poland into the war and then the rest of us.
https://news.antiwar.com/2022/04/25/polish-pm-says-warsaw-has-delivered-tanks-to-ukraine/
Or maybe this lunatic
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/04/25/former-us-nato-commander-wants-to-put-troops-on-the-ground-in-ukraine/
Fucking lunacy.
You know who else is pouring weapons into Ukraine?
Yeah,the OSCE.
This is ridiculous.
Oh, FFS. (Assuming that’s true, which wouldn’t surprise me.)
I was thinking more “Putin”, but its a long list.
I’ve read that many Euros are completely freaked about the weapons being dumped there. They know where they will eventually end up.
This is amazingly stupid.
But Putin has legitimate interests in “integrating” Ukraine and annihilating anyone who disagrees with him!
I’ve bitched previously about the Kagan angle to that outfit. And that their “analysts” are fucking kids who pretend to be world savvy experts and washed up apparatchiks.
Kimberly and her husband doing their war tourism
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_and_Kimberly_Kagan_in_Basra.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
I’m not too worried about the war widening into other fronts. Given recent events (especially the retreat from Kiev), Russia seems to be either unable or unwilling to muster the kind of force necessary to fight a wide-ranging war. They aren’t going to be attacking anyone else any time soon, I don’t think.
I had always wanted to move back to VT at some point (I grew up in Essex Jct), but their commie bullshit made it a no-go in short order. IIRC, they’ve also been fucking with their best-in-nation gun laws (or hitherto lack thereof)
Yeah, it used to be that the *only* gun law was that you weren’t allowed to have a loaded long gun in a moving vehicle, and that was passed because of drive-by hunters.
The legislature is trying to nibble at the edges of Vermont’s gun freedom but I think they know that even “reasonable” regulation is a non-starter with the voters.
Lots of my VT friends are gun grabbers, and my first thought is always “it’s easy to be anti-gun when you live in a state where guns are everywhere & easy to buy. Take a trip to Cabrini Green and tell me how that works out”
Thanks, Richard!
I’ve never been to Vermont, but I’d like to visit before the commies completely destroy it.
In my opinion it’s a stable situation and that’s what I want at this point in my life.
Amen.
I remain unconvinced that Vermont is even a real place.
It isn’t. When the war between NY and NH flares up again, we’ll resolve the ownership dispute of that worthless trapezoid of land.
TPTB did ask for more fiction…
?
The single most redeeming feature of VT in my opinion.
That is way TF north. Still might go.
I guarantee you that Lily will love it.
When I was in Afghanistan, our Lieutenant was from Vermont.
Since it was a HQ unit, he was voluntold to have dinner with the Senator from VT that was visiting.
He assumed it was Sanders and was furious, but luckily it was the other one.
Vermont seems to be an odd mix of people, but I’ve never been up there.
Thanks for this.
MID-WEEK IN PICTURES: MUSKAGEDDON EDITION
Awesome. Thanks for the link!
Senator Patrick Leahy, the most senior of all U.S. legislators, is retiring when his term is up. It’s likely that Vermont’s sole Representative, Peter Welch, will succeed him. This is how former Representative Bernie Sanders got his start in the Senate.
This was supposed to be a reply to ron73440.
Thanks, Richard. I didn’t know a whole lot about Vermont. These have been enjoyable. More to come?
agreed. interesting.
I’ve been thinking about a list of things to do for potential visitors. This one is pretty obvious:
https://www.boston.com/travel/travel/2022/04/22/vermont-has-the-best-public-square-in-america-according-to-usa-today/
Burlington is an interesting place psychology-wise. According to the infallible Wikipedia:
“The population was 44,743 at the 2020 census. It ranks as the least-populous city to also be the most-populous city in its state.”
Geez that is tiny. The suburb of Dallas I live in is approximately 8X as populous.
That looks cool. I think I would really enjoy VT-NH-ME. Hopefully I can get over that way one day.
Tallest midget? Jumbo shrimp?
I love riding motorcycles in VT. There are some really weird and wild towns in the state. Bristol VT has a few good places to eat and watch the local Hippies prior to making the ride to the top of Mad River Glenn on VT-17.
The weirdo town of Lincoln has a lost world vibe about it. It is one of those old mountain pass towns made before modern road construction and demolition was possible.
Bristol is one of my favorite towns. Please tell me you got to Bristol Falls, the best little swimming hole in the world?
Nope, I was covered in ballistic Nylon and Leather. We basically use the town as a stopover for lunch and bio-breaks before or after hitting a challenging mountain ride full of switch backs and no shoulder high speed turns. I’ll have to check it out. I have a yearly trip to NE and the Adirondacks that could be based around there.
Here’s a drone of the falls
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-WtK-a-Arw
The initially proposed 11.5% payroll tax and 9.5% additional income tax proved to be unpopular
Unfortunately there are many places where voters are either not taxpayers, are happy to fork over their money and others, or the programs start with low teaser tax rates and ratchet up to infinity.
My experiences in VT:
Woodstock’s downtown is adorable, has a general store that makes the best store-bought cookies I have ever encountered, and also has a commie feminist bookstore and a storefront for Sea Shepherd. The general store also had the best Sweet Sixteen apples I’ve ever encountered. Much better than the ones I get locally. The cashiers there were gossiping amongst themselves about which individual trees were producing the best fruit
I witnessed the cultural inculcation of the next generation of hippies at Brattleboro. The podlings acted in such a remarkable manner as I did when I was in high school.
The view from the top of the Bennington Battle Monument is much less impressive than you’d think because the windows are so narrow.
I got into a theological debate with an ancient docent at the Congregationalist church where Robert Frost was buried.
There is some little town where the sidewalks are literally marble.
I visited the “Lincoln Family Home” in Manchester and was impressed by how well maintained it was — especially the telescope in the observatory. It also had the most beautiful monkshood growing in the garden. I don’t know if the books on the shelves are original or if they were later set dressing. If the former I don’t know what it means htat there were multiple copies of some books. Was sharing books not a thing back then?
TL;DR: I like VT.
All those are flatlander places! (yes, there is a north-south divide in VT)
The view from the top of the Bennington Battle Monument is much less impressive than you’d think because the windows are so narrow.
Yes. Doubly so if it is a cloudy day.
Ugh.
I’ve got a USB flash drive that I need files from. Win 10 won’t read it now.
Anyone have ideas about how to recover?
Try a different USB port and/or a different computer. If they all have the same problem, the drive is probably dead. There are ways to forensically recover some data from even dead drives but that will generally cost money because it requires special tools and expertise and it’s no guarantee; some drives are too dead even for forensic recovery.
In particular, if you have a Mac or Linux machine you may have better luck there. Windows seems awfully finicky about flash drive formatting, whereas I’ve found other platforms to be more forgiving.
Did both. Same results.
Drive flashes, and windows pop up says “please insert drive in usb”
Put it in some rice.
Check the thermostat?
Try turning it off and then back on again.
Did it, and uninstalled 2 recent Windows updates that loosely coincided with the inability to read the drive.
Wiggle it.
At work?
The combo of your avatar and that reply amuses.
May just be a sparkplug needs replacing
Serious possibilities:
– Bad MBR; fixable but hard to fix in Windows
– Solder issue; fixable but a total pain in the ass
– Wear leveling exhaustion; totally bricked w/o custom firmware (which might not even exist)
– Short circuit or other electrical damage; totally bricked
The rice trick is actually not a terrible idea (harmless but also probably won’t fix the problem). If you by some fluke of fate have an entirely metal/silicon (no plastic) flash drive, you could try baking it which sometimes fixes solder/tin whisker issues.
Dammit. The rice trick was supposed to be a joke.
Windows hardware still recognizes that it’s a Sandisk Cruzer flash drive, but it’s not seeing files.
Windows explorer won’t “fix” file systems it doesn’t see, apparently.
Well that points to MBR problem, which is rare but as I said fixable. However, it’s still a tricky bit of work as a wrong turn can wipe the drive.
Who are you so wise in the ways of jump drives?
There’s always the possibility that I’m wrong.
I’ve had to deal with and fix enough problems with the damn things that I was forced to learn (some of) how they work.
Originally each town sent a representative to the House and each county sent a representative to the Senate.
Before I left PA, I remember people floating the idea of each county electing two Senators, i.e. similar to the US Senate. Of course, it went nowhere. At the time I didn’t know about Reynolds v Sims.
If town boundaries and populations make it too difficult to create single-member districts of equal population then multiple-member districts can be created.
NH is similar, but only for House seats. There has to be one Representative per roughly 3,000 people. There are rules about breaking up municipalities. I live in a municipality that can’t be broken up and has more than 3,000 people. I live in a district represented by multiple State Representatives. I only have one State Senator representing me.
elects a Republican[9] governor as is currently the case.
Scott is a RINO. Oh. Footnote 9. Yeah.
Vermont Governors serve a two-year term and are almost always reelected.
Same with NH. The only governor during my time in NH that wanted to be reelected but wasn’t was Craig Benson.
According to some Vermont natives I know (who now live in Massachusetts), Sanders during his initial campaign for Congress (I think US Rep, not Senator?) actually traveled around the state. Usually candidates for statewide office just visit Burlington and Montpelier. Sometimes Brattleboro. Rarely anywhere else. Folks outside of those areas were impressed. I didn’t look at vote totals to see how he did across the state. Since then, he makes sure he brings Federal money to Vermont. Those Vermonters described Sanders as, “He’s an asshole, but he brings home the bacon. So he gets reelected.”
Thanks Richard!
Pre-virus Bernie was always hosting “Town Meetings” in odd and sundry places[1]. I don’t know him personally but I have friends who do. Vermonters luuuuv their Bernie. His office has a reputation for getting stuff done, like getting balky veterans benefits approved. Personally I’m glad he’s not in Vermont state politics any more.
Footnotes:
[1] OK, this describes all of Vermont.
[1] OK, this describes all of Vermont.
🙂
Talcum X already back on Twitter.
lol.
Predictable.
LOL
His whole life is based on Twitter – WTF was he gonna do?
I dunno, spend some time at the beach, get a tan?
Kamala has the vid
Good news though. No VP contact with Biden. Or the AG or Press Secretary.
Apparently Biden doesn’t actually interact with anyone else.
And apparently nobody sees any reason to interact with Harris.
Willie Brown disagrees. I don’t know if you can get the vid that way though.
Not the pathogen you have to worry about there.
… and her staff sees many reasons NOT to.
How are they all getting it? Everywhere else in the country deaths and “cases” have dropped like a rock.
constant testing.
I got it from
AgnesAstridLucky Pierre!
These people have a compulsive need for constant affirmation and validation. They simply cannot stay away from group gatherings full of oily smarm and oozing sycophancy. Epidemics run through social networks, and boy, do they have those in spades.
A new variant engineered to go after Lizard People that are failures?
According to Kamala, a virus is a smaller organism that invades a larger organism and that’s a good thing.
We have family who have a vacation home in rural Vermont, which we visit with them occasionally. It’s a great place to visit. My impression has always been that Vermont is the West Virginia of New England–without the economic powerhouse that coal mining used to be.
I think of Vermont as a weird mix of hippies, old family swamp Yankees, and rich retired people.
Parts of NH are grittier and have a more working class feel.
Can’t be as bad a place like Fitchburg, MA.
I’m going to reset my disagreement with kbolino here, and expand on the problem.
There is no magic set of words, held in our hearts, impressed on to paper with ink, or carved into goddamn stone tablets that people will not FAIL to abide by. You can’t lay the blame on the words (in whatever medium) for that. Sure, our Constitution has been abused – and arose as an abuse (as the AoC would see it). The AoC was deemed inadequate by the people living under it, yet you (and a few others) would make a fetish of it; I alternate on finding that amusing or aggravating.
I do not lay any blame on the words as such. They are simply there. To the extent I recognize them as powerless unto themselves, I encourage others to do the same.
The Articles could not last. At the very least, they failed to prevent a secret conspiracy of elites in Philadelphia from drafting their replacement and then, after going public, illegally overturning them; unlike the Constitution, the Articles explicitly laid themselves out as a perpetual and irrevocable system. This may sound like bitterness, but it’s just an unflattering portrayal of the truth. We can’t go back, but we don’t have to lie about what happened, either.
Moreover, I would contend that this process has been repeated throughout our country’s history, but has become less and less explicit each time. The current legal regime we live under is not even the original Constitution, it is the Civil Rights Act. We only inherit the basic structure of visible government from the Constitution, much as it inherited the concept of sovereign states from the Confederation while also gutting their essence.
People can fuck anything up, yes this is true. But it’s not an excuse. There is no reason I have to abide by somebody else’s fuck-ups forever. If we could “return” to some ideal era of Constitutional government, sure that’d be great. But we can’t. If nothing else, that’s what led us here. So we have to find something else to aspire to. I don’t know what Franklin or the other founders would think of where we are today, they’d probably (even he) castigate us all as degenerate losers, but it also doesn’t matter. We don’t live for them. Maybe they lived for us, and maybe we’re failing to live up to their designs, but they’re still dead and their designs have still decayed.
I reject Whig history. If adherence to the Constitution is just another cudgel my enemies can use to beat me with, then I will discard it.
This. I have been saying for years the Constitution is functionally dead, the equivalent of those statues of the saints that get paraded around at religious festivals.
It still has occasional tactical uses, but let’s kid ourselves.
What part do cultural institutions play? It seems to me that the Constitution was a summation of cultural values (or aspirational cultural values). It worked for a while because most of that society bought into those values. When that changed, the unfitness of the Constitution was made obvious.
Not sure what the hell to do about it, though.
Abandon it for dead and push the culture.
Case and point: The revoking of Disney’s special privileges
The federal government certainly doesn’t care about the Constitution. Even when they break the rules, they don’t suffer any consequences. So why shouldn’t they push the envelope?
Cultures. We’re way too big to have a shared culture. Which is actually pretty cool.
Which is actually pretty cool.
It can be. Or not. Depending on when the cultures come into conflict and how that conflict escalates.
Case and point
Acktually, it’s “case in point”.
/sorry not sorry
they don’t suffer any consequences
Exactly. And we, the people, tolerate that. That’s our mistake.
The Iranian Revolution was more democratic than the regime it created and the regime which preceded it. Democracy is only expressed in fits and spurts. The long tail between outbursts of democracy is either monarchy or oligarchy.
What part do cultural institutions play?
A huge part, I’d say. There seems to have been a gradual but complete shift in the center of power away from the formal state, the church, the local press, the local farm/business, and the family towards the bureaucratic agencies, the academy, mass media, big business, and cross-sectional “identity groups” (of all kinds). Much of this was either driven or accelerated by industrialization. The U.S. was created right at the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and, along with Britain, was a very early adopter.
However, there do seem to be “original sins” in our system, and I don’t mean slavery per se. “Separation of church and state”, while never formally written down anywhere, was Jefferson’s conception. Well we seem to have fully excised the (formal) church from the (formal) state, but what of the converse? Few today would argue that churches should be completely immune to state law in the same way that even prayer is now verboten in most state agencies.
“All men are created equal”: No, they’re not. Rich people “shouldn’t” get away with crimes just because they’re rich, but they still do, and there are a thousand other little hypocrises besides. Yet this establishes the basis of postmodernism: if all men are equal, none can be judged, except according to their own standards. And so hypocrisy becomes the only real crime. Now the challenge is just to smuggle power back into postmodernity: there’s no crimes except hypocrisy and racism. And it’s obvious which of those two is worse.
the Articles explicitly laid themselves out as a perpetual and irrevocable system
Which was one of the flaws in them.
The current legal regime we live under is not even the original Constitution
Only because the people tolerate it. That’s the problem. And you won’t ever devise a better system until you find a better people.
And you won’t ever devise a better system until you find a better people.
The Roman Empire in the East lasted 1000 years after the fall of the West. The pyramids of Egypt were older when Caesar looked upon them than Caesar is today.
Francis Fukuyama was wrong.
Duration is one metric, but not necessarily the best. You don’t imagine that I was arguing for Fukuyama do you?
You may disagree with Fukuyama but I still disagree with the both of you: this isn’t the best there can be.
Ah, now there’s the idealist coming out.
I think we had a pretty good thing, and fucked it up.
Fukuyama thinks we’d already hit perfection and only needed to lead the rest of the world to it.
Ok, fine, but how do we un-fuck it?
I am as stumped at how to un-fuck it as you are to describe what the best there can be actually is.
Cut me some slack. It took 550 years from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence.
As to the questions of “interests”, I can only say this: individual interests plainly exhibit clustering. We can analyze to the ends of the earth and back the how and why of this clustering, but we can’t deny its existence. At its absolute best, electoral politics is no more and no less than an expression of these clustered interests. In practice, electoral politics introduces layers of indirection that obfuscate these clusters, and there are anyway non-overlapping clusters when you look at different kinds of interests (e.g., one group may be pro-X and anti-Y but another disjoint group may be pro-X and pro-Y and yet another may be anti-X and anti-Y, so on). Thus, electoral politics “devolves” quickly into a contest of personalities, only loosely aligned with interests, built around friends and enemies. It is also plainly evident that, at this time, urbanites and ruralites have between them different favored personalities, disjoint clusters of interests, and other disparities. This is hardly the only axis along which those statements are true; coalition-building is a huge part of politics, even though our two-party system also obfuscates that fact.
Any time a question becomes political, society has already abandoned the best solution. There’s probably an issue of scale implicit in that. Once an issue is ‘political’, we’ve already decided that force is the answer.
Do not let this idea be a thought-stopping cliche. If politics is not the answer, then look upstream of politics. How are decisions actually made, if by the time they hit politics, they’re already late-stage?
All progressive thought (in this country) traces back to the 3rd Great Awakening. The idiots running around today don’t understand that legacy.
Well, you’re not wrong.
The point being they don’t even understand the inherent religious basis for their political beliefs.
Which leads us to the very first NRx realization: progressivism is religion smuggled into secularism, bypassing the alleged protection from establishment of religion by not calling itself a religion.
Yet again, it goes back to what people actually do, not what some document says.
I feel like we’re in violent agreement here. Four comments in a row that I don’t disagree with.
I’m waiting for somebody to chime in “get a room”
Christ! Will you two just get a room, already?!?
According to the Dashboard, it looks like this site officially passed one million comments today.
Total Comments on the Dashboard: 1,000,647
Comments on Today’s Articles So Far: 645
And there were some comments made today on yesterday’s final article.
If I’m reading it right, that’s a cool milestone.
That would be the SECOND time it’s passed a million comments. The first time, SP took the first 3 years of operation and put them in archives.
Yeah, the comment numbers are past two and a quarter million.
Interesting. I had remembered there was an archive, but forgot it took the posts out of the regular system. So I guess this marks two million comments then.
I see now where my confusion came from: not *all* of the articles/comments were taken out of the system and put into the archive. It looks like SugarFree’s posts were not archived, which is why there are still articles and comments in the system from 2017.
Yes, I remember that.
Two million comments is not bad.
Sure but how many of those were lazy links to Twitter?
Fuck you. My links are curated, not lazy.
You’re a veritable Maker of links…
Can’t wait to see what the prize is for the millionth comment. Machine gun? Harrier jet? Cannon? Half dozen orphans? Solid gold monocle?
Gender reassignment surgery
It’s called gender affirmation now, bigot.
This is a test. My last three comment attempts went to /dev/null.
Sean:
If it’s just a bad partition table then a data recovery program should work. Back in the day I had licenses for NTFS and FAT32 versions of GetDataBack:
https://www.runtime.org/
But there’s a free version of the well-regarded Recuva:
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva
This is a test. Squirrels are getting fat on my comments.
Sean: If it’s a bad partition table then try a data recovery program. Recuva is well-regarded and has a free version. I’m not posting a link because that may be why my comments won’t post.
Thanks!
Nice article, Richard. I occasionally watch documentaries or youtube videos of people who have thrown their hands up and gone back to farming. Inevitably, the hippies always end up in Vermont and sell goat-milk soap.
The friend who read the pre-post version of this suggested I was being too critical of the back-to-the-earth hippies and he has a point. Farming is hard and Vermont Winters are hard. Anyone who can do both for any length of time deserves some respect.
Certainly, farming is difficult. We had to put a calf down this morning that wife the has been bottle feeding twice a day for two months. Some sort of bovine muscular dystrophy that took away its ability to walk. She’s heartbroken over it.
I don’t think you were being too critical at all. I do get a kick though that farmers with a sort of quirky outlook seem to end up in Vermont. Must be something in the ice cream.
Damn, I wanted to see that calf on the Bovine Jerry Lewis Telethon!
sell goat-milk soap.
Can confirm. The state is lousy with that stuff. Every coffee shop has a selection for sale.
Neph and other music loving Glibs–I’m thinking about going to this in August in NJ:
https://www.songkick.com/festivals/2831649-hitide-summer-holiday/id/40291139-hitide-summer-holiday-2022
Messer Chups and Black Flamingos, who I’ve seen before, will be playing, as well as Man or Astro-Man?, Los Straitjackets, and other bands you might enjoy.
It’s 3 days–I’d really like to see MOAM (it’d be the first time) and Messer Chups and Black Flamingos again. I don’t know what days each will be playing.
Also I just bought tickets for Metallica in Pittsburgh the prior week. this summer may be my last chance for a while to see much live music…
Getting married?
He’s undergoing mitosis.
I believe that’s how that works but I’m not a biologist.
I’m not sure
Looking at the date, I’ve got a conflict at least on the 20th.
I’ve already pulled the trigger for the Flogging Molly/Interrupters tour and the Punk in Drublic tour, as well as booking a room for BrewDog’s AGM.
The 20th is Saturday, which happens to be a special day to at least one other Glib and me
I’m having a hard time finding out whether there are any stupid COVID rules in New Jersey regarding concert venues. I did a search on Asbury Park Lanes and COVID but haven’t found anything helpful. I’m hoping that nonsense will be over by then.
I had to wear a stupid mask the whole time at my doctor’s appointment today.
My podiatry appointment, that is.
(devil’s advocate – a lot of patients are old people, I guess?)
At least you had to wear a stupid mask, rather than being naturally stupid…
Let’s not jump to conclusions.
No. NJ has currently dropped that BS. The state legislature slapped Murphy and he can only follow CDC requirements and not recommendations.
That’s good news, thanks!
The state legislature slapped Murphy
?!?!?!?!
I apologize in advance for continuing to flog the Scott Atlas book on Covid craziness in Washington.
Of course Fauci comes off as being a very bad dude. What I didn’t expect were the huge “contributions” of evil/incompetence from:
Dr Birx
Jared Kushner
Mike Pence
The book could even have been about climate change or ozone. It’s seeing how “science” meets politics that is astonishing.
The ghost of Lysenko lives on
Science never stands a chance in that confrontation.
It’s a good book, isn’t it?
Pence didn’t surprise me.
Kushner did. I guess I bought the bullshit about family loyalty in the Trump clan.
Birx being the power behind the throne was interesting.
“Dr. Birx”
Look who’s got a new book!
“The findings may offer some comfort to parents who have been waiting anxiously for a vaccine to be approved for the youngest children. Many of those children now seem to have acquired at least some immunity.”
Let the vaccine craziness continue! Where in a group the side effects from the vaccine have a much higher chance of harm than good.
Most Americans have been infected with the coronavirus at least once, the C.D.C. says.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/health/cdc-covid-infections.html
Most Americans have been infected with the coronavirus at least once, the C.D.C. says.
It’s almost like respiratory illnesses spread like wildfire.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04/26/fractal-burning-tiktok-wisconsin-died/
Yikes.
At least 33 people — ranging from rookies to experienced electricians — have died from fractal wood burning since 2016, according to the American Association of Woodturners.
Dang, that’s a pretty high number for something that can’t be that widely practiced.
I’m recalling when the contractor goofed and touched the wire he was installing to the hot panel. Quite an explosion of light and sound.
Ban it immediately. Clearly dangerous, like ghost guns. Don’t give guns to ghosts.
Try and pry the gun from my cold dead hands!
No kidding.
Yet,
A disassembled microwave had served as the power supply.
“People trying the craft often pick apart microwaves or car batteries to remove the power supply, which is then connected through jumper cables to nails attached to a piece of wood slathered with a conductive solution of baking soda and water.”
I never knew there was “power supply” in a car battery. Sulfuric acid and lead plates, sure, but who knew about the power supplies?
Maybe the lead plates are used as shielding? I don’t know. So are they using the power supply from the microwave or the actual microwave emitter?
The power supply itself, IIRC.
That is a shocking development (too soon?)
I see watt you did there.
Ohm, man…Swiss is gonna come in with a narrowed gaze…
Narrowed gauss
*Narrows Gaze*
Thankfully he doesn’t seem too charged up about it.
He’s pretty well grounded.
The swiss are known for being neutral.
Yusef is doing it right. He uses a neon light power supply; high voltage but lower energy.
Microwave guts are playing with the dragon’s tail.
It helps that Yusef is a seasoned electrician. Don’t try this at home, kids.
^this!!!!! if you don’t absolutely know what you are dealing with STAY AWAY
This afternoon’s lazy laugh.