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Bacon Meme of the Week
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Virginia Democrat Wants SOLs Offered in Foreign Languages
by Kerry Dougherty
Image credit: ChatGPT Hey Virginians, remember that $1.2 billion surplus in the state budget that Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been trying to return to taxpayers?
Unsurprisingly, Democrats in Richmond are finding ways to spend it. All of it.
Take State Sen. Barbara Favola, for instance. Please.
She’s introduced SB753, a measure guaranteed to cost a bundle.
The bill would require Virginia to administer the statewide standardized tests known as SOLs in languages other than English, despite the fact the ENGLISH is the official language of the commonwealth.
“Requires (i) the Board of Education to develop Standards of Learning assessments in native languages other than English that are most commonly spoken in the Commonwealth; (ii) each school board to make available any such native language assessment to any English language learner student who speaks any such language natively and is identified as having limited English proficiency; (iii) the English language learner faculty at any such student’s school to make the final determination as to whether administration of any such native language assessment is appropriate; and (iv) the provisions of the bill to be implemented by the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year. Finally, the bill directs the Department of Education to submit to the U.S. Department of Education by August 1, 2025 any amendments to its consolidated plan under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act, that are necessary to implement its provisions.”
Good Lord. Do you suppose the Democrat from Arlington knows just how many languages are spoken by students in Virginia schools?
I do.
According to the Virginia Department of Education there are 117,000 students enrolled in English as a Second Language programs in public schools. There is no data on how many of these students are in the country illegally. Continue reading.
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Bacon Bits: Lonely and Creepy
The loneliest Metro stop. The Loudoun County Gateway Metro averages 317 riders daily, according to The Washington Post. It’s the least busy of the Metro rail system’s 98 stations. Opened to much fanfare as part of the $3 billion Phase 2 of the Silver Line in Northern Virginia, it is a sad reminder of broken promises. Not only was Phase 2 four years late and $250 million over budget, it’s not generating the hoped-for traffic or stimulating the hoped-for development around the Gateway station. Writes the Post: “From the platform, there are no buildings visible other than the station’s five-story mostly empty parking garage and a boxy internet data center a short walk away. On several recent visits to the station, the eight bus shelters in its sprawling parking lot were empty. Often the only person there is the station manager sitting behind a window in a booth.”
Amazon delivers. Maybe the Gateway Metro station will get a few more riders when Amazon resume working in the office five days a week effective January 2. Between Amazon HQ2, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon fulfillment, the Seattle-based corporation has leaped out nowhere over the past decade to become one of Northern Virginia’s largest employers, according to The Washington Business Journal.
Creepy beyond words. Virginia Commonwealth University has introduced an Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbot names Ramona (in homage to the school’s mascot, Rodney the Ram…. except Ramona is a she/her) to help with alumni fundraising. Ramona contacted 1,000 alumni last month and received a “better-than-normal” response rate, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Click on the link and check it out. The chatbot has entered the “uncanny valley,” in which it falls just shy of appearing indistinguishable from a real human, which real humans find vaguely disconcerting. For me, the giveaway is the failure of Ramona’s mouth and lips to precisely synch up with the speech — Ramona does better than any animation I’ve seen before, but she’s not… quite… there. I see no harm in this particular application of AI. It’s kind of cool, actually. But only God knows where the technology will take us when the “pig butchering” fraud farms in Southeast Asia learn how to mimic real people.
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Healthcare’s Tangled Ball of Confusion
by James A. Bacon
The cold-blooded killing of United Health CEO Brian Thompson has unleashed a wave of invective against health insurance companies. There is widespread sentiment that insurance companies (along with their much-detested brethren, the pharmaceutical companies) are the root of all evil in American healthcare. They make profits, goes the claim, by denying healthcare to people. They cause immeasurable human suffering. Medicare-for-all, they suggest, is the answer.
The U.S. healthcare system is indubitably a hideous mess. Health insurance companies contribute to that mess, but they are hardly the root cause of it. A single-payer healthcare system is no answer at all, just an invitation to more of the over-regulation, rent-seeking, and dysfunction that plagues the American political system.
The problem starts with the idea that Americans see “healthcare” as an entitlement. Denial of any healthcare procedure, regardless of cost or circumstance, is regarded as an affront to justice. The problem, given peoples’ unquenchable desire for health and longevity, is that demand for healthcare is effectively infinite. New pharmaceuticals and medical procedures have been introduced with great regularity, and they will continue to be. Ozembic. Artificial organs. Gene therapy. CAR-T cell therapy. Transgender therapy. Designer babies. It is a fundamental law of economics regardless of how a healthcare system is structured: Society cannot pay for all the healthcare that everyone wants. Healthcare must be rationed. The only question is how.
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News Update: Santa Returns Safely to North Pole
News flash: Bacon’s Rebellion has learned that Santa Claus has returned safely to the North Pole after experiencing the most hazardous flying conditions since forever.
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The Struggles of the Lumpenprofessoriate
by James A. Bacon
David Austin Walsh David Austin Walsh is a leftist lecturer at the University of Virginia who specializes in the history of conservative and far-right politics. He is also something of a social-media influencer. He has 36,600 followers on his X account. So, when he xeeted (the new verb for tweeting) about the cold-blooded shooting of an insurance industry CEO on the streets of New York City earlier this month, he attracted attention.
“It’s actually kind of touching,” he wrote, “that the one thing that can bring together our fractious and disunited country is celebrating the assassination of a health insurance CEO.”
Was Walsh joining in the celebration of the assassination? Another xeet implied that United CEO Brian Thompson deserved his fate: “Anyway try to live your life in such a way that if you’re murdered the entire internet doesn’t think that you had it coming.”
In reply to a query from Bacon’s Rebellion, Walsh said he does not condone the deeds of accused killer Luigi Mangione. “Let me be emphatic: I do not, for both moral and pragmatic reasons, approve of Mr. Mangione’s actions – the former because I cannot endorse assassination as a legitimate political tactic; the latter because the likely consequence of such actions will be an increase in the repressive apparatuses of both corporations and the state.”
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Save Data Centers from the Luddites
Image credit: ChatGPT by James A. Bacon
Luddites, unite! You have nothing to lose but your fossil fuels!
Concern among environmentalists is growing in Virginia as it dawns upon them that Artificial Intelligence creates demand for data centers, which in turn boosts demand for electricity… which in turn emits carbon dioxide… which in turn drives global warming.
A case in point can be seen in an op-ed, published today in the Daily Progress, by Eric Bonds, a sociologist who teaches human rights, climate change and environmental justice at the University of Mary Washington. Writes Bonds:
There are limits to how much electricity we can produce for data centers without also shattering our commitment to shift away from fossil fuels. Ultimately, a transition to renewable energy will require that we slow or stop the current data center boom in order to get there.
Bonds is absolutely correct that there are limits to the amount of energy that can be economically produced in a Net Zero electricity regime. But has it occurred to him that AI can be part of the solution?
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Bacon’s Rebellion Goes Global!
We’re not ones to obsess over our readership statistics. We create the best content we can, and if people choose to read and share, we love it. If people don’t, well, we’ll keep cranking out the blog posts anyway because we don’t have anything better to do with our lives! But as the year winds down, I couldn’t help but notice that Bacon’s Rebellion — a blog dedicated to inherently local content — is viewed around the world. See the number of page views above.
We’re not exactly altering the global conversation, but I couldn’t help but notice that we get a remarkable amount of readership in Iceland. So, here’s a shout-out to our Nordic friends! I don’t know what you get out of Bacon’s Rebellion, but if you’re reading this, please log in to the comments and let us know why on earth you read this blog.
Year-End Pitch
To faithful American readers, this is the only year-end donation pitch I’ll make. We’re profoundly grateful to those who contributed financially this year — you made it possible for us to transition to a more secure, stable, and up-to-date blogging platform. We’re also thankful to those who contribute on a monthly basis, allowing us to pay our recurring bills. If you find value in our mission of maintaining a platform where a civil exchange of views on Virginia public affairs can take place, please visit our “Fund the Rebellion” feature in the left-hand column and throw a few coins into our tin cup.
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Jeanine’s Memes
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In Defense of Mark Warner
by Paul Goldman
Senator Mark Warner I find the attacks against Senator Mark Warner on this site most hypocritically amusing. It seems you are all afraid to appropriately criticize President-elect Trump, Elon Musk, and the GOP House majority. Despite you all claiming to be such great defenders of fiscal responsibility. Let’s review some facts.
(1) Under his watch, President Trump accumulated more national G.O. debt than all previous one-term Presidents combined. He ran in 2016 saying the national debt is way too high. Then ballooned the national debt even further. Becoming the King of Debt. Despite saying as a candidate he would cut the debt. He repeated his anti-debt rhetoric this year. Let’s see how he compares to all two-term presidents by the end of this second term.
It’s not all on him of course. A bipartisan majority in both chambers has long backed all the new red ink year after year. Senator Warner included. But at least Mark is not pretending like you all on this site to be fiscal conservative Southerners. He’s voted for more deficit spending than any Senator in state history. But again: he’s not denying it. He has voted to raise the debt ceiling. You can debate the wisdom. Accumulating debt for infrastructure needs can be smart. Using debt to cover annual expenses usually dumb. But at least credit his honesty.
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Bacon Meme of the Week
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Bacon Bits: Social Mayhem Update
George Mason is rolling in his grave. An 18-year-old freshman at George Mason University was arrested Tuesday for allegedly plotting a mass casualty attack on Israel’s General Consulate in New York City, The Washington Post reports. Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan, an Egyptian national faced with deportation proceedings, was arrested in Falls Church and, as a bonus, was banned from the GMU campus! (GMU, you may recall, recently issued No Trespass Orders against two Palestinian students after a police raid on their family’s home uncovered a cache of weapons and ammo.) Apparently, some GMU students are failing to absorb the values of the University’s namesake. As the principal author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, George Mason argued that all men should enjoy full toleration in the exercise of religion. And, yes, the toleration extended even to Jews.
… Oh, a thousand pardons. I forgot. Hassan’s contemplated atrocities weren’t antisemitic, they were only anti-Zionist.
The pause that refreshes. Classes at Alexandria City High School have been canceled for two days after fights broke out leading to injuries to students and staff. Two students were charged with assault and battery after school resource officers (SROs) responded to multiple altercations, according to the Associated Press. In 2021, City Council eliminated funding for the SROs but reinstated the officers after a series of fights and a student was caught bringing a gun to school. Last year, the School Board approved the installation of metal detectors at two unnamed Alexandria schools in a pilot program. I’m guessing, though, that the discipline problem probably runs deeper than SROs and metal detectors.
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Mark Warner: DNC Parrot
by Kerry Dougherty
One thing you can say about Sen. Mark Warner: The man knows how to parrot DNC talking points.
Virginia’s beta senator was busy yesterday. No, not trying to get his fellow Democrats in the House to sign on to a clean continuing resolution that would fund disaster relief and the military for the next two weeks.
Nope. Like all dutiful Democrats, Warner was a keyboard warrior, X-ing away. They‘re uniformly indignant that an unelected genius and patriot was able to persuade normal people that the 1547-page stopgap measure that Congress was about to pass was full of pork, simply by telling the folks what was in the bill.
It was packed with the exact kind of waste and abuse of tax dollars that Donald J. Trump was elected to stop.
Pay hikes, free NFL stadiums, repair of the bridge collapse in Baltimore by taxpayers instead of the vessel’s insurance carrier, funding for gain-of-function research, expansion of the emergency pandemic powers of government in case another “pandemic” arrives.
There’s more. Lots more.
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Cut Scores and Lies of Omission
by Todd Truitt
Virginia is in the process of raising the minimum cut scores for passing English and math Standards of Learning (SOL) exams — scores that the U.S. Department of Education (USED) declared in 2021 were the lowest in the nation. A USED official publicly testified in 2022 that Virginia’s cut scores were not “reflecting the reality” and were “too low.”
Those important facts were missing from Anna Bryson’s “news” article last week in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which reported that higher cut scores likely will not be in effect until the spring 2026 exams. Bryson wrote that Governor Glenn Youngkin had campaigned on raising standards and, after taking office in 2022, vowed to raise cut scores to the highest in the nation. “But that never happened,” she opined. Instead, “the administration spent much of its time and political capital on history standards and transgender policies.”
From my personal involvement in education policy as an active Democrat and former chair of the Math Advisory Committee for Arlington Public Schools, I knew there was more to the story. I talked to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) to find out what did happen and what the plan is. Bryson’s selective omissions and opinion-based framing, I conclude, fit a pattern of bias in her state education coverage.
U.S. Department of Education Tells Virginia to Raise Its Cut Scores
USED reported in 2021 that Virginia’s 2019 SOL cut scores for 4th grade math and reading and 8th grade reading were the lowest in the country. Had USED incorporated actions taken under former Governor Ralph Northam further lowering the reading cut scores in 2020, its analysis would have made Virginia look even worse.
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What the #&%@? A Hamas Advocate on the VMI Faculty?
by Sal Vitale
For several years, I, along with other concerned alumni, diligently worked to restore the “Old Corps” leadership and ideals to the management of the Virginia Military Institute Alumni Association. Our efforts faced resistance from those in charge, and now we find ourselves also grappling with issues far beyond governance of the Alumni Agency (VMIAA) and its affiliated organizations, including the Alumni Association.
A particularly troubling matter involves the selection of Philip Crane as a Visiting Professor under VMIAA’s Peay Endowment, whose public involvement in antisemitic activities and support for Hamas raises serious questions about the Institute’s stance on crucial moral issues. This matter requires immediate attention and full transparency from VMI, its Board of Visitors (BOV) and the VMIAA to preserve the integrity of the Institute and its alumni body.
For years, our group of alumni worked diligently to ensure the concerns of VMI graduates are heard and acted upon. One of our key goals was to reinstate proxy voting for the VMIAA Board members, to ensure those selected truly represent the alumni body and not just the interests of a small group. We also pushed for better access to alumni contact information to foster meaningful communication and ensure that all viewpoints are considered when important decisions are being made.
Unfortunately, our efforts were thwarted at every turn. The VMIAA has repeatedly denied us access to critical resources, including alumni contact lists, citing unfounded concerns about personal data usage. We await a ruling from the Virginia Supreme Court on this matter, but a much graver issue demands immediate action: the hiring of Crane, a VMI graduate himself, as a visiting professor.
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