The review is unintentionally hilarious. The comments more so.
It provides context from the left for our debates here on hormone and surgery treatments of minors.
The New York Times is racked with internal dissent over internal dissent — a development stemming from multiple open letters sent last week to newspaper management taking issue with the paper’s recent coverage of transgender youth.
Seems there is a war among the woke over who is the most woke, and who is insufficiently so. (more…)
After the Ohio disaster, it is timely to review rail safety in Virginia.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation is the federal rail safety regulator in cooperation with state authorities.
FRA’s Office of Railroad Safety employs 400 railway inspectors. Federal safety management teams are organized by railroad or type of railroad.
The FRA summary of State rail safety participation states:
state programs emphasize planned, routine compliance inspections; however, States may undertake additional investigative and surveillance activities consistent with overall program needs and individual State capabilities.
FRA both conducts and pays for training of state inspectors.
Code of Federal Regulations 49 CFR Part 212provides state rail safety participation regulations.
Railroad Regulation represents one of the original areas of responsibility assigned to the State Corporation Commission (SCC) when it was created by the Virginia Constitution of 1902.
Virginia statutory authority is found in Code of Virginia Title 56 Chapter 13.
Virginia today has two Class I (major) railroads (Norfolk Southern and CSXT), nine Class II (short line) railroads, and more than 6,700 miles of track. (more…)
Virginia has now entered the feeding frenzy stage of the assault on Bert Ellis’ character. Abandoning all journalistic standards of impartiality and fair play, mainstream media outlets compete with one another to publish anything they can find to compromise Ellis, a member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin and narrowly confirmed by the General Assembly.
Following a Washington Post piece yesterday that highlighted such transgressions as referring in private correspondence to a UVa employee as a “numnut,” Virginia Public Media has joined the fray. Among the new affrights uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act is the scoop that Ellis also referred to UVa administrators as “schmucks”!
It is laughable that anyone would deem such language used in personal communications to be worth publishing — as if no one else in public service speaks this way in private. Ironically, the only thing remarkable about Ellis’ use of language is how restrained it is. It is less vitriolic, for example, than the language used by Jeff Thomas, the leftist author who filed the FOIA request and peddled his findings to the media. VPM reporter Ben Paviour quotes Thomas as accusing “these people” of “lashing out with these venomous personal attacks at innocent people.”
Venomous? Really? Ellis didn’t “lash out” or “attack” anyone — these were private communications. The victims never knew about them…until Thomas uncovered them and persuaded Paviour to publicize them!
Such are the New Rules of woke journalism.
But there’s more. Paviour included one exchange in his piece that had no business appearing in any article. The fact that he chose to include it exposes the shoddiness of his journalism. Here is what he wrote: (more…)
I have a new hero. I don’t know her real name but in her Southeast Washington D.C. neighborhood, they just call her “Grandma.”
Last Friday Grandma was on her way to chemo when a 15-year-old punk walked up and ordered her to hand over her car keys.
“I have a gun,” he said.
“Baby, you’d better shoot me because you’re not taking my car,” she shot back.
A struggle ensued — Grandma’s hand was sliced by the keys — but she screamed for help and help arrived. Her grandson and some other neighborhood boys heard the commotion, and ran to her defense.
The would-be car jacker was taken away in an ambulance.
Score one for the good guys. And for Grandma. (more…)
The General Assembly is scheduled to adjourn on Saturday, February 25. Time to check on the status of some issues that have been discussed on this blog.
Budget bill. The budget bill contains not only the usual appropriations, but also all those tax cuts proposed by the Governor. There is activity behind the scenes, but, so far, no public hint that any sort of compromise is near.
Utility bills. One major utility regulation bill has been passed, but the others are in conference. I will defer to Steve Haner to comment on these as he deems fit.
SCC judgeships. Last year, the General Assembly could not agree on a person to fill a vacant SCC judgeship. The House supported one person; the Senate favored another. In late 2020, one of the two sitting judges, Judith Jagdmann, announced her retirement with a year left on her appointment. That left two vacancies, seeming to solve the problem: Each legislative house could have its own favorite. But, there was a fly in the ointment. ne vacancy, Jagdmann’s, was only for the year left on her term. The other vacancy was for a full six years. Who was going to get the short straw? Another impasse. (more…)
As a contribution, I am going to review the facts on the ground in Richmond — in its most crime-ridden neighborhoods and its worst public schools.
Which are overwhelmingly Black. And co-located.
In a city with a Black mayor and a Black school board. And a BlackCommonwealth’s Attorney, Colette Wallace McEachin, who, since 2019,
has helped to make Richmond a safe, just and equitable city for all, including victims, witnesses and offenders.
Her office offers many alternatives to incarceration for most non-violent offenders.
She really wrote that. And she has “worked toward dismantling “the school to prison pipeline.” Excellent news.
But, in the real world, Richmond schools and many neighborhoods are beyond tragic.
That doesn’t mean order cannot be restored. Or that poor Black children from dangerous neighborhoods can’t learn.
NYC charter schools have proven for years that Black kids from the very same type of disadvantaged, dangerous neighborhoods that some of the Richmond kids call home can succeed at the highest level.
It just means the Richmond kids from tough neighborhoods don’t learn.
We are going to look at what are measured as the 10 most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Richmond, where the kids from these neighborhoods go to school, and the performance of those schools.
After maligning Virginia Military Institute alumni dissident Matt Daniel two days ago, The Washington Post aims its guns today on Bert Ellis, a conservative alumnus and member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, with the publication of text messages obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They were private communications. Like everyone else in the universe, Ellis expressed himself with candid language he would not have used in the public domain.
Make sure you’re sitting down. You might want to take a dose of anti-anxiety pills. Ellis actually called people “numnuts.”
He also had the temerity to express dissatisfaction with the Ryan administration’s obsessive focus on race, including its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives.
In truth, there is remarkably little that is worthy of note in Ellis’ text messages. Yet the Post quotes Jeff Thomas, the leftist chronicler of Virginia politics who obtained the FOIA documents, as asserting that the documents “demonstrate Governor Youngkin’s Board appointees are ignorant reactionaries consumed by hatred and neo-Confederate fantasies.”
The text messages demonstrate no such thing. Ellis has never been consumed by the destruction of Civil War statues or the assault on Southern heritage. Rather, he has lamented the trashing of Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers. There is nothing in the text messages to suggest the existence of “neo-Confederate fantasies” — nor, for that matter, the notion that he is “consumed by hatred”… unless you consider calling someone a “numnut” an indicator of unquenchable animus. (more…)
Success Academy kids in line entering their NYC school. Courtesy NY Post. Credit Steven Yang
by James C. Sherlock
I am no stranger to writing about charter schools in Virginia.
The half-dozen or so we have in the state have no effect, and expansion is blocked by the fact that charters in Virginia have to be approved by division school boards.
Which are elected by teachers, not students.
The result, very predictably, is that the places that need them most, the horrible schools in Virginia’s minority-majority cities, have exactly one charter. Total.
Charter school politics among the progressive minority politicians who dominate those school boards match that of the Democratic majorities in both houses of the New York State Assembly. For the same reasons.
New York City, as written about in an extensive series by the New York Post, illustrates both the advantages and the political challenges of charter schools in an urban environment.
The people of that heavily Democratic city have exceptional experiences with and have created long waiting lists for the 275 public charter schools already operating in the city that enroll 142,500 students (with tens of thousands on waiting lists), 15% of all public school kids in the city.
Voters polled want more charter schools by a ratio of two to one.
Every New York Governor since George Pataki has supported charter schools. Former Gov. David Paterson, a Democrat, pushed through a charter school expansion with the backing of then-President Barack Obama.
Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul is proposing as many as 100 more in her budget.
She ran on a pro-charter platform. She won by 6% against a Republican candidate who also supported increasing the current cap (275 in NYC, 460 statewide) on charter schools.
Roughly 80% of charter students are from low-income families, and 90% of them are black or Latino, according to the non-profit Charter Center.
You would think her proposal for charter school expansion would sail through the New York State Assembly, with Democratic super-majorities in both houses.
When we talk of coal today, which is seldom, it is usually not treated well.
It is easy to forget (if some even know) that coal powered the industrial revolution, made America the richest nation in the world and fueled American war production that supported allied victories in both world wars in the 20th century.
Coal powered nearly everything starting in the early part of the 19th century. Power plants, trains, ships, and virtually anything else powered by steam used coal to boil the water.
The iron and then steel-making process depended then, and still does, on coking coal.
Coal — and the co-dependent railroads — played big roles in Virginia history.
I strongly recommend to you Virginia Coal, An Abridged History. It was published in 1990 by the Virginia Center for Coal & Energy Research at Virginia Tech.
Here we go again. The Richmond Times-Dispatch is using “statistical disparities” as evidence of racial bias in Henrico County schools.
Under pressure from federal authorities to address racial disparities, Henrico County is endeavoring to enroll more students from minorities in the county’s “gifted” programs. States the article: “The Richmond Times-Dispatch reviewed annual reports on the demographics of the Henrico students identified as gifted and compared them with the division’s enrollment demographics…. As of the 2021-22 school year, Asian and white students were 4.9 times and 3.5 times likelier than Black students to be determined gifted.”
Why does such a disparity exist? Black parents in Henrico, wrote the RTD, claim that Black students are not being identified as gifted due to behavioral issues, according to an external audit of the program.
The article leads with a story of a bright biracial lad whose teachers acknowledged that he was mathematically gifted but did not admit him into Henrico’s gifted program on the grounds of immaturity. He acted out because he was bored by remote learning during the COVID shutdowns, said his mother, Amanda Reisner. “That didn’t set right by me. Maturity has nothing to do with giftedness.”
Reisner’s remark raises an interesting question of whether students (of whatever race) should be denied admittance to a gifted program if they are unable to conform to expected behavioral standards. But let’s set that aside and focus on how the RTD uses statistics to make admissions into the gifted program a racial issue. (more…)
Take our word but not our numbers, Bluestone Town Center (BTC) backers seem to say
The moral of this story is: what the City Council doesn’t know won’t hurt the HRHA.
When I first heard about the scope of the BTC, I did some quick arithmetic and came up with an astronomical estimate of how many new K-12 students it would generate. I was wrong; the total was merely stratospheric.
Perhaps unwilling to accept the blog post of an ex-mayor, HCPS created its own model and discovered my revised numbers were pretty close. (For the record, proving me right is not why they created it.) They came up with a model that said 322 new students.
Worth noting, HCPS provided two sets of numbers. One was if they applied their model to 900 new housing units in Harrisonburg, and the second if they applied it to 900 in the southwest corner of town. The difference wasn’t significant. What was significant was the effort to share all relevant information.
In October, HRHA pointed out to HCPS that 60 of its units were for seniors, so HCPS reconfigured the estimate. (Because there’s a hell of a lot of H’s in this history, let me help: HRHA is Harrisonburg Redevelopment Housing Authority, and HCPS is still Harrisonburg City Public Schools. HRHA is partnered with EquityPlus, or EP, to apply for a rezoning to build BTC.)
The new estimate from HCPS was down to 273. A little more than half an elementary school. (more…)
It is reasonable to judge that in either the longer or shorter version of the history of the university, no single individual has done it as grievous a harm as the man who now serves as its chief academic officer.
Among the few propositions on which Loren Lomasky and provost Ian Baucom agree is that the University of Virginia would be better off with exactly one of them gone.
Wow! Cage match!
I guess you could say that Dr. Lomasky has had enough.
He opposes, obviously strongly, Provost Baucom’s strange intervention into academics school-wide after the November shooting of three young men at the University.
We also suspect the fight might reflect the history between the two men. Baucom was Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences during most of Professor Lomasky’s tenure there.
Libertarians like Dr. Lomasky seek, in his case as a career, to minimize encroachments on and violations of individual liberties and to maximize personal autonomy and political freedom.
They are believers in personal agency and taking responsibility for ones actions. They insist on academic freedom.
Nice to see the professor, who advocates all of that, call out the University of Virginia leadership in the person of provost Ian Baucom, who emphatically does not advocate any of it.
Not a word about that story yet that I can find in the mainstream media that cover Virginia. Fair enough. Perhaps we will see it tomorrow.
Nothing in The Cavalier Daily yet, which does,however, offer a riveting story pressing for free menstrual products in the dorms.
But Professor Lomasky also called out the DEI bureaucracy at UVa in the strongest terms.
I have no doubt that they have opened a “case.” (Update. I understand that Prof. Lomasky has been the subject of at least three investigations by the EOCR division of DEI).
For any organization to be successful, there must be clearly defined goals based on the desired outcome. The goals must be measurable, and the measure(s) of progress must also be defined. The greater the focus is maintained on those goals, the more likely the organization will attain them.
Virginia’s educators are at a disadvantage in that the goals (identified as priorities) laid out in the Board of Education’s Comprehensive Plan do not identify student outcome targets. The mission adopted by the Board (page 5) mentions the improvement of student achievement, but how much improvement is considered sufficient is not defined anywhere in the document. This document also does not specify any measures of student achievement that could be used to determine whether or not the board is accomplishing its mission.
The lack of adopted student outcome goals and measures could be a significant factor in the declines in student achievement in the past five or so years. Much has been written about the recent and significant decline in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in 2022, but student outcomes as measured by SOL tests were generally in decline prior to the pandemic. The only SOL scores that improved were in math, and then only because the Board of Education significantly lowered cut scores with the newest SOL test in 2019, which had the effect of making the new tests easier to pass.
There have been a number of decisions made by the Board in recent years that have been inconsistent with practices which improve student outcomes. These decisions in effect lowered the expectations for Virginia’s students and educators. Rarely do outcomes improve when expectations are lowered. For example, the degree to which student outcomes were calculated into teacher and administrator evaluations was decreased from 40 percent of the evaluation to no less than 10 percent in 2019. Also, that same year, the Board lowered the SOL cut scores in math, which effectively lowered the expectations in that subject. Two years later, the Board similarly lowered the cut scores in reading. (more…)
The Washington Post’s Ian Shapira has finally published his piece about Matt Daniel, head of the Spirit of VMI PAC and one of the more vocal critics of the current VMI leadership. It may be the most balanced piece Shapira has ever written in his coverage of VMI — admittedly, an extremely low bar to clear. Even though Daniel declined to answer his questions, Shapira made a decent effort to present his point of view by quoting from the public record.
I cannot say what accounts for this departure in Shapira’s journalistic practice, but it cannot entirely be coincidence that Daniel had pre-empted a feared hit job by publicly releasing a list of questions that the WaPo reporter had emailed him shortly before publication. (Bacon’s Rebellion reported on those questions here.)
Still, Shapira can’t help being Shapira, and he described two incidents that grotesquely insinuated that Daniel has Nazi and/or anti-Semitic proclivities. (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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by Dick Hall-Sizemore
