In the previous post I criticized Virginia’s response in 2020 and 2021 to the COVID epidemic, particularly the shutdowns that ignored the impact on jobs and the economy, foregone medical procedures, K-12 schooling, mental health and addiction. Let me emphasize: that’s not to say that COVID was not a huge public-health issue then… or that it doesn’t continue to be one.
The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) has revamped the COVID-tracking features on its website, lumping in COVID with influenza and RSV under the heading of “respiratory diseases.” COVID is much diminished as a public health threat from its peak, but according to VDH still far exceeds influenza as a cause of mortality. Here’s a look at the past eight months:
Hmmm… Whatever could the explanation be? Image credit: ChatGPT
Opioid deaths in Virginia have declined markedly since the end of the COVID epidemic, reports Virginia Public Media (VPM). The fatalities, many of which were attributable to fentanyl overdoses, peaked at 2,229 in 2021 and have fallen to a predicted 1,552 this year — down 30%.
That number is still frightfully high, of course. It exceeds the 907 automobile deaths, 520 homicides, 54 workplace fatalities, and 38 child-abuse fatalities all combined in 2023.
What accounts for the drop, even as the flow of fentanyl across the U.S. border with Mexico continues unimpeded? VPM cites Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Right Help, Right Now initiative which invests in education, prevention, recovery and treatment efforts. The article also describes at considerable length the increasing availability of naloxone, a medicine that quickly reverses an opioid overdose.
Those measures have been very helpful, I’m sure. But the account overlooks the obvious: the overdoses peaked during the height of the COVID epidemic, and the numbers began declining as the epidemic receded. Could there be a connection there?
Once again the University of Virginia Board of Visitors is conducting the ritual of pretending to be involved in setting rates for tuition, fees, room and board, this time for the 2025-26 fiscal year. The board’s Finance Committee met earlier this month for an hour and forty-five minutes to hear presentations by UVA staff. Other than an introduction by Finance Chair Robert M. Blue, the minutes record no comments or questions by any board member.
Blue framed the purpose of the meeting as, in the phrasing of the minutes, “educating and orienting committee members to some key issues that align with actions on the agenda in December.”
He then turned over the meeting to Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis to provide “some useful historical context to set the stage for upcoming actions, and to help committee members make decisions from an informed perspective.”
Gaining an “informed perspective” did not extend to allowing committee members to ask substantive questions about UVA’s cost structure or high-tuition/high-aid financial model. Several board members appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin have pushed for cuts to the university’s administrative staff but have been unable to open up the issue in the finance committee, much less in the full board. Finance Chair Blue and Rector Robert Hardie (who functions as chair of the full board) are both holdovers from the Northam administration. With President Jim Ryan, they control the agenda. Divisions among Youngkin appointees and don’t-rock-the-boat guidance from the Governor’s Office have stymied any action by reformers.
The United States has spent trillions of dollars on poverty programs, yet hard-core inter-generational poverty and its attendant social ills remain endemic. Federal and state benefits are not lavish, and they are contingent to some degree upon recipients finding work, or at least looking for work. But anti-poverty programs are doing a terrible job of lifting people out of poverty. While individual programs might make sense, the system of programs is dysfunctional. Ameliorating poverty will require addressing the system.
A mother and child living in the Richmond area and “on welfare” can reap about $1,900 a month ($22,800 a year) in benefits, as seen in this JLARC graphic:
I cannot imagine trying to support a child on $22,800 a year, which is only a tad above Federal Poverty Level of $20,400. It must be noted, however, that JLARC’s list does not include Medicaid (average spending per enrollee in Virginia of $7,000) or the Earned Income Tax Credit (worth up to $4,000 for a family with one child). Nor does it take into account private charity such as food banks or the vast underground economy, estimated at more than $1 trillion, in which many people (including the poor) take money under the table.
Following up from my article on partisanship in town and city elections…. Voters in Fairfax City opted for the non-partisan slate backed by former State Sen. Chap Petersen (D) and Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity (R), but the Democrat-endorsed candidate for mayor and two of her Democrat-endorsed council candidates won.
Voters were tasked with choosing six of the 11 council candidates running on the Nov. 5 ballot.
Mayor Catherine Read and Councilmembers Billy Bates and Stacey D. Hardy-Chandler, the Democrat-endorsed candidates, won. Voters also selected four from the non-partisan slate, but only three were decided because the other race is still too close to call.
Once inaugurated, President-elect Donald Trump is expected to immediately mount a major effort to roll back the anti-hydrocarbon fuel agenda of the Biden-Harris years. The positive impact on Virginians will be limited because of our own similar anti-hydrocarbon laws at the state level.
The centerpiece of Trump’s multiple energy campaign promises is expansion of production of American oil and gas, with the hope that greater supply will drop the retail cost. World markets might have a say in how much prices change, but should those prices drop, Virginians would benefit.
Trump has also promised to dismantle the network of interlocking regulations which it took President Biden only three years to jam through a friendly Congress and a compliant federal bureaucracy. Many of the key regulations are already fully adopted and repealing them must follow a process. Most are subject to litigation seeking to prevent their implementation, and the litigation battle would continue but reverse, with plaintiffs seeking instead to demand their implementation.
A good example is the set of new standards for electric power plants, a 2.0 version of the Clean Power Plan which former president Barack Obama imposed, and which Trump repealed and replaced in his first term. A changed leadership at the federal Environmental Protection Agency would be expected to start to dismantle or dilute the regulations. Lawsuits to stop them will be replaced by lawsuits demanding they remain.
In early August, the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (FSNMP) placed a sign inside the Stonewall Jackson Death Site. Known to many people as the Jackson Shrine, it’s a plantation office building where Jackson died after being mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
The sign said this: “Stonewall Jackson led an army that fought against the United States with keeping slavery as one of their [sic] goals. Why then did this place become a United States National Park Site?” FSNMP says the park “is committed to telling a fuller, more inclusive history of the Stonewall Jackson Death Site.” This sign is part of an FSNMP initiative to “spark conversations and to broaden the story of the site and context for Jackson’s death and memory.”
If the first things that come to the National Park Service’s mind, when it thinks of the most noteworthy aspects of Stonewall Jackson’s legacy, are that he fought for the Confederacy and the Confederacy supported slavery — then we really do need to have a conversation.
FSNMP placed three signs in the Death Site in early August. None mentioned Jackson’s reputation as one of America’s greatest battlefield generals. (Patton told Eisenhower he would be Ike’s Jackson, and Chesty Puller carried a biography of Stonewall.) No mention of First Manassas, the Valley Campaign, Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas or Chancellorsville.
In the 14th century, a popular movement known to historians as “flagellants” spread across Europe. Followers practiced “mortification of the flesh” by publicly pummeling themselves with knotted whips. By practicing self-denial and imitating the scourging of Jesus, they hoped to hasten the second coming and end of times.
A similar movement has taken root in the United States today, although adherents don’t inflict physical pain upon themselves. Rather, they flagellate themselves with shame for their sins — or, actually, the sins of their ancestors, such as racism, misogyny, slavery, and the dispossession of native lands.
John McWhorter, the center-left African-American author of Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, makes the case, as his book title suggests, that wokeism bears all the hallmarks of a religion. Wokeism comprises a closed system of unfalsifiable beliefs and exhibits no tolerance of dissent. Transgressors risk condemnation and ostracism. Practitioners engage in performative rituals such as public acts of contrition and apology.
As a living, breathing confirmation of McWhorter’s argument that wokeism is a religion, I present to readers a “Prayer for Truth, Reparation, and Healing” composed by the Truth and Reparations Task Force of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia.
American G.I.s with the fallen at the Battle of the Bulge.
The Battle of the Bulge took place almost 80 years ago to the day. (The last-ditch German assault began December 16.) Roughly 75,000 Americans were killed, wounded or went missing. They fought, suffered, and died to defeat the scourge of Nazism and uphold our freedoms. We remember their sacrifices – and the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of other Americans in countless other battles — once a year on Veteran’s Day.
While cultural elites wallow in guilt and shame over our past as white settler colonialists, we should remind ourselves of the great things our nation has accomplished. We emerged from a world in which the universal condition of mankind was hierarchy and servitude, in which cruelty and oppression were ubiquitous, and in which kings, princes, potentates and warlords fought ceaselessly with one another.
Our nation bequeathed to the world the immortal words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And we have striven to live up to that ideal.
American conservatives revere the Founding Fathers of the American republic as exemplars of the classic virtues — for good reason — but our nostalgia for the past does have blind spots (and I’m not talking about just slavery, an evil that everyone acknowledges). We rarely remark upon the fact that leadership of the early republic consisted of a goodly number of ditherers, drunkards, self-dealers and profiteers. As George Washington wrote to Benjamin Harrison, most members of Congress were idle, dissipated, and extravagant, and consumed by “an insatiable thirst” for getting rich.
That the newly formed United States managed to surmount the inevitable quirks and flaws of human nature Richmond author Suzanne Munson attributes in her new book, “First in Law, First in Leadership,” largely to the labors of one of America’s most insufficiently appreciated founders, George Wythe.
Wythe, a professor of law at the College of William & Mary, did more than shape the minds and character of luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, who would become presidents; John Marshall, the most consequential Supreme Court justice in history; Henry Clay, the Kentucky legislator who became Speaker of the House; and senators, governors, judges, and other leaders too numerous to mention. He transformed the practice of law into a learned profession.
“Wythe taught more American leaders than any other mortal has since or ever will,” Munson quotes Taylor Revely, president emeritus of the College of William & Mary.
Oh, and by the way, Wythe was an ardent opponent of slavery who impressed his anti-slavery views upon Jefferson and many others. In 1806, as a judge later in life, he ruled in the case Hudgins vs. Wright to free a slave woman, Jackie Wright, and her two children. Drawing upon Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, he argued that that individuals “should be considered free until proven otherwise,” and that “freedom is the birthright of every human being.”
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner warned Thursday that massive cuts and dislocations to the federal workforce under president-elect Donald Trump would be a “disaster for Virginia’s economy. … We would get hit worse than any other states.”
“When you think not just [about] the contractor workforce up in Northern Virginia, but all the folks … who are at our military installations as we go down through the peninsula into Hampton Roads, we would get hit worse than any other states,” Warner said, as reported by Virginia Business. “These kinds of attacks that Mr. Trump has made on the federal workforce, I think is unwarranted.”
Warner has good reason to be afraid. But what Virginians will mourn, much of the rest of the country will celebrate.
Trump has pledged an all-out war on what he calls the unelected “deep state.” He has said he will fire rogue administrators, slash federal payroll in the quest for efficiency, and relocate federal agencies and jobs to locales outside the Washington metropolitan area. He will have many people cheering him on, and I expect this is one campaign promise he will endeavor to make good on. We need to take it seriously.
The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….
This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
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