-
Jeanine’s Memes
-
Off the Interstate: Virginia Gold
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
This solitary place name marker is next to an abandoned gas station in Fauquier County. Unlike other such markers that I have written about, this one is not on a back road; it is along heavily-traveled Rt. 17 between Fredericksburg and Warrenton.
This marker is different in another respect: It merits an official highway historical marker. That marker informs the reader that “Thomas Jefferson stated in NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA (1782) that he found gold-bearing rock weighing approximately four pounds near this site.“ It goes on to note that 19 gold mines had been in operation in that area.
The Division of Geology of the Virginia Department of Energy reports that “gold was mined extensively in Virginia from the early 1800s until the peak of gold production in 1849.” After large deposits of gold were discovered in California in 1848, production of gold in Virginia decreased significantly. The last recorded production was in 1947. The division has identified almost 500 former gold mine sites in the Commonwealth.
Most of the former sites lie within a “gold-pyrite belt,” a nine-mile to sixteen-mile-wide, nearly 140-mile-long geological unit that extends from Fairfax County to southwestern Buckingham County. The largest concentration of historical gold mines are in Buckingham, Fluvanna, Louisa, Goochland, and Spotsylvania counties.
(more…)
-
Capping Marine Mammal Harassment Constrains Offshore Wind
by David Wojick
Image credit: Bing image Creator Prior to approving offshore wind development NOAA routinely authorized the loud noise harassment of large numbers of whales under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). New research by Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis shows that this harassment is causing a lot of whale deaths.
For example, it is known to cause deafness which can easily be deadly. But harassment need not cause deafness to cause death. Offshore wind arrays that occupy a hundred square miles or more are typically built in low ship traffic areas with high traffic nearby. Harassment can simply cause the whales to avoid the low traffic area and spend more time in heavy ship traffic leading to an increase in deadly collisions.
The same is true for lightly versus heavily used fishing areas where avoidance leads to increased entanglement. Ship strikes and entanglement are the two leading causes of whale deaths. Ironically the wind defenders say that increased ship strikes and entanglements show that wind is not causing increased death rates when they are actually strong evidence against wind.
(more…)
-
UVA Has Ignored Its Longstanding Antisemitism Problem
Joel Gardner is president of The Jefferson Council. by Joel Gardner
The Daily Progress recently reported on perhaps the most staggering antisemitic incident in what has become a long list of antisemitic incidents at the University of Virginia.
According to the story, a Jewish student had been continuously subjected to antisemitic ridicule and bullying by one of his housemates, which culminated in written threats and ultimately the alleged perpetrator brandishing a gun at him in his own room. The target of these threats courageously reported the incident to the police and the alleged offender was arrested, released on bail and reportedly suspended from classes. Another housemate who allegedly supplied the perpetrator with the gun was also suspended from classes.
Quite an outrageous story—but one you wouldn’t know about if you hadn’t read it in the DP—because neither the UVA administration nor any of its news organs has publicly commented on it. This is not surprising since this has been the administration’s modus operandi when it comes to antisemitic behavior. Yet given the fact that three UVA students were murdered by a handgun just two years ago, one would expect a serious public reaction to this event by the administration.
The truth is that UVA has had a longstanding antisemitism problem that was exponentially exacerbated following the brutal massacres in Israel that occurred on October 7, 2023. The fact is that UVA’s administration has watched as one serious antisemitic incident after another occurred after 10/7 without public comment as to the antisemitic nature of these incidents —
and perhaps even worse, it has consistently refused to admit that antisemitism on Grounds is a distinct and singular problem. For proof, as one famous sports commentator in NYC used to say, “Let’s go to the videotape.”
-
Bacon Meme of the Week
From The Babylon Bee
-
Sentara’s Opportunity to Improve Hospital-to-Nursing Facility Patient Transitions
Courtesy of Sentara Norfolk General Hospital by James C. Sherlock
Sentara Healthcare in October announced an important initiative to improve the quality and availability of primary care. It will double number of advanced practice providers (APPs) in its primary care facilities.
APP refers to nurse practitioners, physician assistants, clinical nurse specialists, certified registered nurse anesthetists, or certified nurse midwives.
In order to shift administrative duties away from physicians and APPs, the teams will also include medical assistants, clinical pharmacists, and others. Hopefully the others include dietitians.
It is a great idea.
I have a suggestion that can leverage that investment in a way that offers to both:
- benefit patients, hospitals and skilled nursing facilities; and
- save a great deal of patient, payer and facility time and money.
-
Youngkin’s No-Lose Proposition
by James A. Bacon
Tattooed alien with guns. Image credit: Bing Image Creator Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to eliminate sanctuary cities in Virginia. He faces tough opposition from Democrats in the General Assembly, but I see the issue as a political winner no matter what the legislative outcome.
The Governor announced yesterday that he plans to introduce a budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year that would withhold police and jail funding from localities that refuse to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities seeking to detain illegal immigrants already in local custody.
Dozens of Virginia localities have adopted policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities to varying degrees. With the term “sanctuary studies” in bad odor, some have rebranded their policies as “building trust” with immigrant communities for purposes of combating crime. But the practical effect is the same.
If Democrats want to take the pro-criminal side of the immigration debate, then they’re committing electoral suicide. Do they really want to be painted as defending the rights of violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang members like Melvin Canales Saldana — sentenced to life in prison for involvement in multiple murders — to stay in the U.S.?
(more…)
-
Still Crucial to Shine Light on Educational Disparity
Barbara Johns, a participant in the Prince Edward County school walkout. By Chris Braunlich,
More than 70 years ago, black and white students in Virginia received separate and very unequal educations.
In They Closed Their Schools, author Bob Smith writes that in Farmville, a city not unlike the rest of Virginia, the white public school built after a 1939 fire “had a gymnasium, cafeteria, locker rooms, infirmary and an auditorium with fixed seats.” Moton High School, built for black students in 1939, had none of these. Constructed to accommodate 180 students, by 1950 it held 470 – so many that the school held three classes in the auditorium (“one on stage, two in the back”), and occasionally a class on the school bus. The white schools had none of that.
Those buses had been discarded by the white schools, as were the textbooks, as were other supplies. Teachers were paid about 40 percent less than white counterparts. And the curriculum for black students emphasized vocational training, especially agriculture … which coincidentally allowed courses to be taught outdoors and relieve the overcrowding that forced students to be taught in “tarpaper shacks.”
That dual system muddled along for nearly four decades until, in 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Johns shined a spotlight on it when she led students in a walk-out to demand equal education. She faced opposition not only from a white education establishment but also from an older generation of black leaders worn down by time. Her own attorneys, notably Oliver Hill, questioned the effort but ultimately the light she shone resulted in her cause becoming part of Brown v. Board of Education.
Over time (too much time), educational inputs narrowed significantly. But educational outcomes remained lower than desired and achievement gaps remained large.
(more…)
-
Rolling Back “Protections” — What Does That Even Mean?
by James A. Bacon
Wordsmiths. Image credit ChatGPT “He who controls the language controls the masses,” left-wing activist Saul Alinsky famously wrote in his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals.” A modern-day example is how cultural elites have smuggled their language about the transgender movement into popular discourse.
Axios Richmond had this to say this morning about a change in Chesterfield County school policy: “Chesterfield School Board voted early Wednesday to roll back some protections for transgender students that have been in place since 2021.”
The changes will (1) give parents more input about the counseling services their children receive, (2) require parental permission to call trans-identifying children by a different name, and (3) forbid the district from forcing students or staff to use a student’s chosen name or pronouns if it “would violate their constitutionally protected rights.”
Axios has framed the issue as “rolling back protections for transgender students.”
The reporters could have just as easily framed the issue as Chesterfield advancing the rights of parents… but didn’t.
(more…)
-
Flyover Country’s Budget Dilemma
by James A. Bacon
Dwayne Yancey, founding editor of Cardinal News, may be the most prolific purveyor of commentary in the Old Dominion (although I try to give him a run for his money). He loves making deep dives into the data. He’s often insightful and his tone is always reasonable. I do quibble, however, with the way he has framed his commentary today.
“Those of us who live in rural areas like to think of ourselves as independent and self-reliant,” he writes. Ironically, the data show that rural American communities are among the most dependent in the country upon government transfer payments.
Yancey is too stout of an advocate of rural/western Virginia interests to draw the same conclusion that some of our friends on the left do: that such dependence marks residents of “red” flyover country as hypocrites. He notes correctly that the dependence upon federal largesse reflects the fact that rural populations are older than suburban/urban populations and, therefore, a higher percentage qualifies for Social Security and Medicare — which, I might add, they have been paying into their entire lives.
“This isn’t a case of lazy, shiftless Americans milking the system so they can live on the dole, the classic tale of the “welfare queen,” Yancey says.
(more…)
-
Index Taxes for Inflation Before Raising Legislator Pay for Inflation
By Steve Haner
Only part of the story, the part that best justifies a big pay increase. The Virginia General Assembly is maneuvering to raise its own pay to adjust for decades of inflation. To do so without showing similar consideration for the impact of inflation on Virginia taxpayers should be cause for a voter revolt.
No tax code indexing, no pay raise.
To its credit, the staff at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) has been fair in noting the impact of inflation on Virginia’s frozen tax provisions and bracket amounts, as well as on the frozen legislative salaries. It focused on the tax code first, before producing this week’s report on legislative compensation.
The report recommended the first pay raise since 1988 and was reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as the conclusion of a fiscal “watchdog.” JLARC is a creature of the legislature, producing a report commissioned by a legislative resolution. The legislators who sit on it, with Democrats now in the majority, cannot hide behind their hired staff on this one.
The report and its accompanying slide deck are short and worthy of review. Most people are aware that legislators are paid a salary, but JLARC gets into the details of the full compensation General Assembly members receive for their services. To borrow a phrase from the Bard, there is no reason to sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the poverty of legislators. Quite the contrary.
-
Is Newer Necessarily Better?
by James A. Bacon
Image credit: Bing Image Creator Governor Glenn Youngkin will propose $290 million in extra funding for new public-school construction in the 2025-26 fiscal year, the Governor’s Office announced yesterday. That will bring the total amount of construction dollars in the biennial budget to $700 million, and the total allocated since Youngkin took office in January 2022 to nearly $2 billion.
Naturally, the Virginia Education Association says that’s not nearly enough. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, VEA President Carol Bauer said years of underinvestment and inflation mean the backlog of new school construction is increasing about $1 billion yearly. The governor’s one-time funding proposal, she said, “doesn’t even keep pace with the annual growth of our backlog, let alone make meaningful progress in reducing it.”
Moral of the story: No amount of money is ever enough. The education lobby always wants more.
No one is asking some basic questions: Could school districts extend the lives of existing buildings by spending more on maintenance? Do new schools even improve academic achievement? If not, what’s the need for them? Could money be spent better in other ways?
(more…)
-
Shed a Tear for Virginia’s Poor, Persecuted Antisemites
Image credit: NBC via YouTube by James A. Bacon
George Mason University has issued No Trespass Orders against two leaders of the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization, Jena and Noor Chanaa. In writing about the inevitable controversy, The Washington Post led with the angle that faculty, staff, students, and advocacy groups are accusing the university police of acting improperly in banning the two women and also in searching their family’s home.
Only by the fourth paragraph does the Post get around to noting that, oh, by the way, here’s what police found in the Chanaa home: four guns, 20 magazines with 30 bullets each, Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and arm patches in Arabic which, when translated, read “Kill them where they stand,” and patches that call for “death to Jews and America.”
The discovery of an arms cache hasn’t stopped self-styled defenders of Muslim rights from bestowing victimhood upon the sisters — see this open letter — and it hasn’t stopped the WaPo from using their claims to distract from news of armed pro-Palestinian militants in Northern Virginia.
“This case reeks of racial and religious profiling,” said Abdel-Rahman Hamed, the family’s attorney, in a statement. “The items found were part of a historical collection, not evidence of any threat. … This is yet another example of the police state targeting American Muslims without cause.”
(more…)
-
Combative CEO of Ballad Health Blames His Own Doctors for Hospital Quality Issues
Image: Ballad’s Johnson City TN Medical Center by James C. Sherlock
Carol Bova and I have written often in this space about the largest government-sponsored hospital monopoly in America, Ballad Health in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee and Virginia. Ballad is made up of 20 hospitals that exclusively serve 1.1 million people.
Ballad was established jointly in 2018 by a Tennessee Certificate of Public Advantage, or COPA, agreement and by a Virginia Cooperative Agreement.
It was done for three reasons stated by Tennessee:
it is the policy of this State, in certain instances,
- to displace competition among hospitals with regulation… and to actively supervise that regulation to the fullest extent required by law,
- in order to promote cooperation and coordination among hospitals in the provision of health services; and
- to provide state action immunity from federal and state antitrust law to the fullest extent possible to those hospitals issued a certificate of public advantage
Those charters effectively formed an interstate version of Virginia’s Certificate of Public Need (COPN) law that was created for the same reasons, but is not nearly as honest in declaring its intent.
On December 6th, Brett Kelman of KFF Health News published an expose of Ballad in the Tennessee Lookout. The article challenges the notion in the COPA that quality of care in Ballad hospitals is actively supervised by the two states and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS).
Readers perhaps will find most interesting the combative interview with Ballad CEO Alan Levine.
In it Levine disclaims Ballad’s responsibility for quality of care in its hospitals.
(more…)
-
Data Centers: Will Virginia Bend the Knee to the Green Lobby?
Image credit: ChatGPT by James A. Bacon
Electricity demand from data centers in Virginia potentially could double over the next 10 years if unconstrained by infrastructure limitations, according to an independent forecast produced for the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). Billions of dollars of new solar farms, wind farms, gas-fired generators, battery storage facilities, and electric transmission lines would have to be built to meet the demand. Meeting even half the demand, says the JLARC report, would be “difficult to achieve.”
“The biggest challenge would be building new natural gas plants. New gas would need to be added at the rate of about one large, 1,500 MW plant every two years for 15 consecutive years,” the report concludes.
Building out the infrastructure would be expensive, and electricity rates would rise. A typical residential customer of Dominion Energy could see inflation-adjusted costs rise by $14 to $37 monthly, the report says.
The study, “Data Centers in Virginia,” lays out the trade-offs facing Virginia, which has the largest concentration of data centers in the world, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) drives demand for energy-intensive processing power to heights unimagined only a few years ago. Chasing the economic opportunity would dash green dreams of a carbon-free electric grid.
(more…)
