I wrote originally about the 2020 changes to the school incidents reporting law.
I have removed the content of this column in order to reconcile issues with the current reporting law, including 2022 changes, with the Department of Education.
I will repost it when those issues are resolved.
by James A. Bacon
Washington, D.C. has a crime problem, and due to its proximity to Virginia, that means Virginia has a crime problem, Attorney General Jason Miyares wrote a week ago in a letter to Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Miyares attributed D.C.’s crime wave to lax-on-crime policies. “Your unwillingness to enforce your laws and hold violent offenders responsible puts your residents and mine at risk,” he said.
The letter prompted immediate pushback from those who maintain that either (a) Washington’s crime problem really isn’t so bad; or (b) it’s really Virginia’s fault for allowing so many guns to get into the hands of bad guys in D.C. “This is not just a D.C. problem. It’s a gun problem,” retorted Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak. “More Americans died from gunfire — homicides and suicides — than in any other year on record.” Virginia’s lax gun laws, she said, leave D.C. in the “crossfire.”
At the risk of agitating both sides of the gun debate, perhaps it’s possible that both Miyares and Dvorak are right. Maybe, just maybe, Virginia’s gun laws do (or did in the past) make it too easy for D.C. criminals to get guns. And just maybe D.C. law-enforcement policies do make it too easy for violent criminals to get out of jail. While we’re spreading around the blame, maybe we should acknowledge that there is something dysfunctional about an American culture and society that produces so many violent criminals in the first place (although we’re never likely to agree why). (more…)
by Shaun Kenney
Last week, The Republican Standard had the opportunity to follow Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears as she toured the Richmond Slave Trail — which included not only the site of the notorious Lumpkins Slave Jail but also the site where Gabriel Prosser was executed and presumably buried in 1800.
Winsome Earle-Sears brought a narrative rooted in the role of hope in human liberation, whether it was in her own tradition from Jamaica to the hopelessness that seems to infect so much of our political discourse today. TRS was able to sit down with the Lieutenant Governor in order to explore her thoughts on this topic and many others.
We just toured Lumpkin’s Slave Jail site. Clearly this is a place with a lot of hurt and anguish, but a little bit of courage and heroism. Where do you think that resilience — that hope — comes from given the experiences of the past?
People look at me and think that I have courage, but I don’t. I have no special store of courage more than the next guy, but I have counted the cost and what I say and do comes with consequences.
There are times when people believe that I am not willing to take that stand, but God comes along and tells me to pick up my cross. Many people attribute that to me being a Marine, but it is really not: it is attributable to my Christian Faith.
(more…)
by Steve Haner
Maybe if a claim is repeated more than once, it won’t sound so absurd? Perhaps that is why the Richmond Times-Dispatch felt it necessary to print two stories today about the recent ludicrous claim that “climate change” is making it easier to hit a home run.
“Since 2010, more than 500 dingers can be linked to warmer than average conditions because of climate change, according to a new study,” is the summary in a photo cutline illustrating one of the stories, a Washington Post reprint on page C-2. The paper’s full-time climate alarmism correspondent Sean Sublette also discusses the “study” in his column on his daily weather and climate crisis page.
Perhaps neither had seen that the Post’s original story quickly drew a response so strong as to constitute disproof, from another climate scientist, this one not a member of the climate crisis priesthood. The Unbeliever dared to compare the Major League Baseball home run statistics at the heart of the “study” with similar home run statistics from AAA baseball, the NCAA’s Division 1 baseball teams, and even the Japanese professional leagues.
The home run patterns there are different. It seems climate change is only happening in MLB stadiums. What a relief!
The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke, Jr. packaged his response on Twitter, and it was then shared by The Wall Street Journal. Very much worth a read. You won’t find any of the rebuttal data in that failed rag of a Richmond newspaper. (more…)
by Kerry Dougherty
Four words came to mind when news broke yesterday that a Newport News grand jury had indicted the mother of a 6-year-old school shooter: what took so long?
It’s been 13 weeks since a FIRST GRADER brought a handgun to school in his backpack and used it to shoot his teacher in front of his classmates.
It’s been 94 days since the 6-year-old sociopath got his hands on his mother’s gun and took it to school.
During the ensuing three months, prosecutors repeatedly said they weren’t sure the owner of the gun would be charged for the near-murder.
That effectively meant no one would be held criminally responsible for the shooting. It’s widely accepted that a 6-year-old cannot be charged with a crime.
Finally, on April 10, a grand jury indicted the gun owner — the mother of the shooter — and charged her with felony child neglect and a misdemeanor count of recklessly storing a firearm so a child could gain access to it.
(more…)
by James A. Bacon
If your son came home saying that a bully had hit and strangled him on the school bus that morning, and if you saw images circulating on social media confirming what he told you, how would you have reacted?
Like Taylor Brock, mom of a 7th grader at Walt Whitman Middle School in Alexandria, you likely would have gone to school authorities, reported the incident, showed them the video, demanded that the school keep her son safe, and call for the expulsion of the bully from school. Like Brock, you also might have posted a video (from which the photo above was taken) on your website and sought justice in the courts.
School authorities suspended the girl but allowed her to return. Brock was assured that her son and girl would not attend the same classes, and the two students were instructed to walk apart in the hallways. Brock was not satisfied. Reports the New York Post:
[Brock] said that when she asked school officials why they merely suspended the girl, they replied, ‘We have protocols we have to follow and execute punishment according to the School’s Code of Conduct.’ (more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Last September, Governor Youngkin issued an executive directive addressing teacher shortages in Virginia. That directive laid out numerous actions to be taken by the Superintendent of Public Instruction and other agency heads with regard to reducing the teacher shortage. In his remarks upon releasing the directive, he called the actions “transformational.”
It turns out there was a basic action that the Governor forgot about: processing licensure applications from would-be teachers in a timely manner. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports today that it is taking at least six months for the Department of Education to process licensure applications. In some cases, it takes much longer. The article tells of an applicant with seven years of service in the Army, a master’s degree, and three years’ teaching experience still waiting after a year for his application for a provisional license to be processed. (He teaches at Benedictine Prep School in Goochland County, and the school does not require its teachers to have Virginia teaching certificates.) (more…)
by Joe Fitzgerald
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. The Hopewell chemical plant where Kepone was born and raised has been cited 66 times over the past eight years for releasing toxic chemicals into the air and into the James River.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch tells the story better than I do. What makes this latest stream of toxins so poignant is the release this week of the book Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and its Legacy, by University of Akron history professor Gregory Wilson. (From the University of Georgia Press, or from Amazon.)
Wilson’s work is an excellent history that brings alive what so many of us remember from back then. People we knew, including my brother Tom, worked and suffered at the Kepone plant in Hopewell in the mid-1970s. The James River, the cradle of American settlement, was closed to fishing. People who couldn’t spell “ppm” could tell you how many parts per million of Kepone were in their blood.
Tom died last summer, age 67, of what some medical sites call a rare type of kidney tumor that had also attached itself to his stomach and bowel and maybe a couple of organs I’ve forgotten. Kepone? Nobody will ever know for sure. But Wilson’s book makes sure everybody who wants to will know what happened in Hopewell almost 50 years ago.
(more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch has a story that illustrates the importance and need for vigorous local journalism, while also illustrating the limitations of local journalism due to the lack of seasoned reporters and editors.
The story deals with the violation of environmental regulations by a chemical plant in Hopewell. The plant, a cornerstone of manufacturing in Hopewell, has been there a long time, under at least three owners. It is huge, covering about 200 acres. It is the facility responsible for dumping Kepone into the James River between 1966 and 1975, when it came under court order for the practice. The current owner is AdvanSix, headquartered in Parsippany, N.J.
As reported by the RTD, the plant has been cited 66 times over the past eight years for violations of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the company has violated the Clean Air Act “every month over the past two years.” (more…)
by James C. Sherlock
In the United States, the first references for judges and attorneys are the federal and state constitutions.
The Constitution of the United States, in its First Amendment, requires that:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
The Constitution of Virginia goes much further:
That the freedoms of speech and of the press are among the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained except by despotic governments; that any citizen may freely speak, write, and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right; that the General Assembly shall not pass any law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, nor the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances.
In service to those constitutions, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) may be the most vital non-profit in America.
It defends free speech, academic freedom, due process and freedom of the press for conservatives and progressives alike, picking up the banner cast away a decade or more ago by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Yesterday came a comment here on BR that has since been edited away.
I do not, however, believe in consequence-free speech (as many on the Right clearly do). If you are going be be [sic] provocative in your speech, you might expect reaction from your audience after a time.”
The author is at least observant.
Provocative political speech — with virtually every subject now being considered political — regularly provokes reactions, often repressive and sometimes violent, in the public square.
I disagree with his opinion on expectations, however.
The public square is not a back alley. It is where repressive and violent reactions to speech should be least-expected and never tolerated.
If they are tolerated, we have no society, no democracy, no ordered community of any kind. (more…)
From The Bull Elephant
by James C. Sherlock
There have been countless articles here on the tyranny of the left on Virginia college campuses. And nationwide.
I need not summarize them here.
But I think it useful on a weekend to consider the origins of that movement to better understand it.
It did not spring up randomly, and it continues to flow from its source, Herbert Marcuse and his book Repressive Tolerance (1965)*.
Marcuse abandoned the working class as a source of subversion of capitalism in 1964’s The One-Dimensional Man. He
put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one-dimensional society, the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other ethnicities and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable.
You may recognize that target coalition.
Herbert Marcuse has been the campus left’s philosopher since the 60’s radicals were suckled on his writings and remained in academia. Their students have come now to dominate the heights of the culture, including academia, Hollywood, the media, and teachers’ unions.
What I call the “stupid right,” more useful to the left than to conservatism, seeks to use some of Marcuse’s tactics in an equally destructive way. But they remain a fringe.
They seek a different coalition, most of which utterly rejects them.
Because they are destructive of society. (more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Friday afternoon I visited the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport, officially known as National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. It has been on my list of places to visit for a long time. If you haven’t been, I heartily recommend it.
As with anything the Smithsonian does, the number of objects on display is astounding. There are cavernous halls with planes and other aviation-related displays laid out all over the place—big planes, little planes, planes from the early 1900’s, modern planes, Nazi war planes, a Soviet MIG, satellites, a space shuttle. In addition, there are almost as many planes suspended from the very high ceiling. All of this can be viewed from three levels.
For someone who is not an aviation aficionado, all these items tend to blend together fairly quickly. It is almost impossible to take it all in in one day. It is best to take small bites, which is what I plan to do. I come to Northern Virginia frequently to visit my daughter and her family, so I can do that. (Admission is free, but there is a $15 parking fee.) If one can’t go back easily, but can devote most of one day to the facility, I recommend choosing a sunny day and take some lunch. After spending a couple of hours or so in the facility, go outside, eat your lunch, and then go back in, with your mind somewhat rested from all the stimulation. (more…)
by Bob Hurley
The next time you see a turtle think of what life on Earth might have been like 220 million years ago.
Turtles have been around for that long. They saw dinosaurs come and go; survived the Ice Age; and with their distinctive shells, have defended themselves against a variety of predators.
And we need them. Turtles are important in balancing ecosystems. They protect water quality by removing harmful bacteria, like dead fish and animals. They control aquatic vegetation; cycle nutrients; and contribute to new plant growth by dispersing seeds. A decline in their population can signal problems for water quality or habitat loss.
Today, their survival is threatened around the world and here in Virginia. The primary causes: unsustainable – and often illegal — capture and loss of habitat.
“Turtles are this incredible legacy to the history of nature on Earth,” said Tom Akre, a Sperryville resident, who is a program scientist at the Conservation Ecology Center at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) in Front Royal. “They haven’t changed in 220 million years and are now the most endangered group of vertebrates on our planet, with 60 percent of species threatened,” he said. “Turtles are the most traded four-legged animal group in the world, and that is a big cause for their decline.” (more…)
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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