Bacon's Rebellion

  • Too Bad RTD Didn’t Read “Lies, Damn Lies and Race-Obsessed Statistics”

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    James A. Bacon

    by Carol J. Bova

    Almost a year ago, I wrote about a March 3, 2021 Virginia Department of Health blog post, in which VDH claimed in an article about COVID-19:

    In Virginia, Hispanic and Black age-specific death rates are much higher than White age-specific death rates. The age group with the largest disparity was 35-44 year olds, with the Hispanic death rate 10.9 times higher and the Black rate 6.3 times higher than the White death rate. After this age group the size of the disparity steadily decreases. Among persons 85 years and older, the Hispanic rate is similar to the White rate, and the Black rate is 1.1 times higher than the White rate.

    It’s too bad Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters don’t read Bacon’s Rebellion (or, if they do, they don’t pay any attention). The RTD could have saved itself a lot of embarrassment for its use of outdated and blatantly misleading statistics in a recent article in which it asserted that, three months into the COVID epidemic, Latinos in Richmond were 38 times more likely to be infected than white residents and 17 times more likely to be hospitalized. (more…)

  • Speech on Virginia Campuses Less Unfree than Elsewhere

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    James A. Bacon

    Free speech sign in front of George Mason statue at GMU.

    by James A. Bacon

    Three of Virginia’s universities scored in the top 25 in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 2021 annual free speech rankings of more than 150 higher-ed institutions across America, but Virginia Tech, once in the top 10, fell precipitously to the bottom third.

    The College of William & Mary ranked 10th for free speech, George Mason University 12th, and the University of Virginia 22nd. Virginia Tech ranked 107th.

    The rankings are relative. W&M, GMU and UVa score well compared to other institutions. Nevertheless, a significant percentage of students at all three institutions express discomfort with discussing controversial ideas and question the commitment of their university administrations to support free speech. With free speech and free expression under attack everywhere, it can be argued that Virginia institutions are the least bad of a bad lot.

    Also, it is important to note that FIRE surveyed students, not faculty or staff. The findings do not reflect the disturbing trend at many higher-ed institutions — including UVa and W&M — of requiring job applicants and employees to submit written statements describing their commitment to the principles of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion as part of their evaluations. (more…)

  • A Narrative About Virginia’s Rural Hospitals that Obscures the Facts

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    Becker’s Healthcare, a widely read medical news organization, published a story on Friday, “892 hospitals at risk of closure, state by state.” Rural hospitals were the topic.

    It cited as its source a report from a non-profit named The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR), which presents itself as “a national policy center that facilitates improvements in healthcare payment and delivery systems.”

    The CHQPR report Rural Hospitals at Risk of Closing claims that twelve of Virginia’s “27″ rural hospitals are at immediate risk of closing. It certainly engaged my interest.

    Another CHQPR report, The Crisis in Rural Health Care, has an interactive map where the twelve perhaps can be found.

    But the sources of both reports are a mystery, at least to me.

    • First it must be noted that the Virginia Department of Health lists only 20 rural hospitals in the state.
    • Only five of them lost money in 2020 (see the column “Revenue and Gains in Excess of Expenses and Losses”).
    • Four of those are owned by large and profitable health systems that use them to feed more profitable cases to other system hospitals.

    It is dangerous to the cause of improving rural healthcare to create “reports” like this. (more…)

  • A Disastrous Week for UVa

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    James A. Bacon

    Open letter from Bert Ellis, president of The Jefferson Council, to members of the University of Virginia community.

    Last week will go down as one of the worst weeks in the history of UVA.

    The Honor Code is Effectively Dead

    By a margin of over 4 to 1, UVA students voted in a referendum to permanently change the Honor System to eliminate expulsion as the sanction for an honor offense in favor of a two-semester leave of absence… the equivalent of a time out.

    A 3rd year law student (who’s next stop on his path to save the world is to study global affairs at Beijing’s Tsinghau University) led this effort. In his view, the Honor System is inherently racist because more people of color or more international students are found guilty of honor offenses than their exact percentage of the UVA student population.

    He argued, “we can no longer support a sanction that is historically allowed and could prospectively allow the most severe outcome to fall disproportionately on some communities more than others.” (more…)

  • VMI Conflict Now Focused on DEI Implementation

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Aside from the occasional Washington Post hit job, the Virginia Military Institute has faded from the daily headlines. But the controversy over race has not diminished in the slightest, and several conflicts are percolating out of public view. For now I’ll settle for outlining the big picture, and I’ll fill in the details in subsequent posts, as I can.

    Two things are going on. First, Superintendent Cedric T. Wins and VMI’s Board of Visitors are undertaking to implement the recommendations — or to put it more more accurately, the spirit of the recommendations — of the Barnes & Thornburg report that claimed to have found evidence of systemic racism and sexism at VMI. Second, many alumni are fighting back, and they hope to enlist the help of Governor Glenn Youngkin, who seeks to reorient Virginia’s policies about race away from Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), with all of its social-justice implications, to Diversity, Opportunity & Inclusion.

    VMI leaders, appointed by Governor Ralph Northam, are pursuing a DEI makeover of VMI on two main fronts. The first is a $6.1 million budget request to implement Wins’ “One Corps, One VMI Unifying Action Plan,” by funding 21 new positions and four existing positions. Wins maintains that 12.8% of the request is dedicated to DEI efforts and the rest toward “cadet life, academic support, and competitive salaries for faculty and staff.”

    However, VMI alumni have issued a white paper contending that 100% of the budget request is designed to build DEI bureaucracy and related initiatives, and that the Wins team is playing semantic games by suggesting otherwise. The white paper also suggests that the hires go beyond anything actually called for in the Barnes & Thornburg report. The funding request now is in the hands of House and Senate budget conferees. (more…)

  • More Burdens on Teachers

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    The General Assembly has passed legislation (SB 656, Dunnavant, R-Henrico) that would require schools to notify parents of “any instructional material that includes sexually explicit content” and permit parents to review such instructional material. Furthermore, the instructor would be required to “provide, as an alternative, nonexplicit instructional material and related academic activities to any student whose parent so requests.” This legislation has the potential to cause much controversy and problems for teachers.

    The problems will arise from the meaning of the term “sexually explicit material.” The legislation specifically refers to an existing Code section, Sec. 2.2-2827, which defines the term as follows:

    Sexually explicit content” means (i) any description of or (ii) any picture, photograph, drawing, motion picture film, digital image or similar visual representation depicting sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity, as nudity is defined in § 18.2-390, sexual excitement, sexual conduct or sadomasochistic abuse, as also defined in § 18.2-390, coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism. (more…)

  • Virginia Policy in the Face of Inflation and Recession

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    I now expect both higher inflation and a recession, perhaps a deep one.

    The West is at war, whether or not we are prepared for the effects on our federal and state governments.

    The bad guys have a lot of natural resources that help keep our economy running. They will cost more and supplies will be constrained. Defense budgets will have to rise. Our governments are waking up to that slowly and too late. We will discover the costs of too late.

    The greens should have already discovered the costs of too early on feeling good because a barrel of oil is produced by a dictator rather than in America. The costs of too soon.

    The classic way to repay a debt that otherwise cannot be paid back is to inflate the currency at which the debt is denominated. The federal government is extended beyond its ability to borrow and to pay back investors for inflation risk without more inflation. It will cost state and local governments far higher rates to fund new debt.

    Virginia is about to spend or refund rather than save money that was generated by the federal activity that raised the debt. (more…)

  • Primary Care Shortages in Virginia and an HEZ solution

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    I have written here and in newspapers across the state with a recommendation that Virginia emulate Maryland in the establishment of Health Enterprise Zones (HEZs) to bring primary care to Virginia communities that lack sufficient access to treat people before their conditions require hospitalization.

    Here I will provide data on Virginia primary care needs calculated separately for health outcomes and for health professional shortages.

    You will not be surprised to learn the locations with the measured shortages of primary care physicians do not exactly align with the areas with the worst health outcomes. That proves what we knew already. There are other factors in play in health outcomes.

    But we know absolutely that more primary care professionals in communities targeted for both criteria can both improve outcomes and greatly lower Medicaid costs. (more…)

  • Torturing Statistics Until They Confess: An RTD Primer

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

    by James A. Bacon

    Sabrina Moreno with the Richmond Times-Dispatch has written a three-piece series arguing that disinvestment in the Virginia Department of Health led Latinos to being “the most likely to get infected, hospitalized and die” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The fourth paragraph of the story makes the following extraordinary assertion:

    Three months after Virginia’s first case, Latinos in Richmond were 38 times more likely to be infected than white residents and 17 times more likely to be hospitalized, according to a Richmond Times-Dispatch analysis of COVID cases and hospitalizations.

    That would be an extraordinary indictment of Virginia’s public health system, if true. But it’s not. Even if those particular factoids happen to be accurate for a particular place in time, which I question, it is monstrously misleading. The article did not publish the data, taken from the VDH COVID dashboard, that I now present you… (more…)

  • UVa Board Extends Ryan Contract for Three Years

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    James A. Bacon

    UVa President James Ryan

    by James A. Bacon

    The University of Virginia Board of Visitors voted unanimously Friday to extend President Jim Ryan’s employment agreement for three years to 2028. His existing contract doesn’t expire until 2025.

    “Jim Ryan has been a strong and focused leader for this community under extraordinary circumstances,” University Rector Whitt Clement said, as quoted by UVa Today. “We are pleased that he has agreed to this extension and look forward to what the institution will accomplish under his leadership in the coming years.”

    UVA Today, the house communications organ of the Ryan administration, provided no explanation of why the Board thought it necessary to act now to extend a contract that lasts another three years, or why, if the Board was pleased with Ryan’s performance, it could not just pay him another bonus already stipulated in his contract. Last year, the Board granted Ryan a $200,000 bonus on top of his $695,000 salary.

    The timing suggests that the Board of Visitors, all of whose members were appointed by Democratic governors, were moving to lock in Ryan’s tenure, which could be threatened by new board members appointed by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin over the next four years. Whether coincidence or not, the Board’s Friday vote occurred the same day that Youngkin delivered a speech at UVa’s law school in which he denounced higher-education “cancel culture” as a toxic threat to American democracy. (Youngkin did not single out UVa or Ryan by name.) (more…)

  • We Need to Help That Poor Billionaire Out

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    With all the huffing and puffing about CRT, face masks, and “wokeism” at UVa, Bacon’s Rebellion has ignored what could be the biggest scam in the General Assembly: the subsidization of an ultrarich guy and his plan to build a football stadium and surrounding “mini-city” in Northern Virginia.

    The General Assembly is now in the midst of one of its periodic quests to lure a professional sports team to Virginia. This time it is the Washington Commanders, the team formerly known as the Redskins.

    Two bills have passed their respective houses in the General Assembly related to this issue: HB 1353 (Knight, R-Virginia Beach) and SB 727 (Saslaw, D-Fairfax).  Both would create an authority that would have the power to issue bonds to finance a portion of the cost of the project. It is estimated that the stadium would cost about $1 billion. The bonds would be financed with a mechanism commonly used with such projects: tax increment financing. Briefly, that would involve a portion of the increased tax revenue resulting from the project being dedicated to the debt service on the bonds. (more…)

  • JMU, Social Justice and the Office of Student Accountability and Restorative Practices (OSARP)

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    Yesterday I wrote of the pressures on Tim Miller, Vice President of Student Affairs at JMU, to balance competing views on masking.

    Mr. Miller has had plenty of practice. If he walked a tightrope on masks, he tried and fell flat on his face on diversity training.

    He also oversees something called the Office of Student Accountability and Restorative Practices (OSARP).

    Mr. Orwell, call your office.

    Diversity training. In a March 3 article called “Divided over Diversity,” the JMU newspaper The Breeze broke a story on the weeping, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments at JMU over internal diversity training. (more…)

  • Youngkin Decries Higher-Ed Cancel Culture

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Governor Youngkin at a Jan. 27 press conference. Image credit: Associated Press

    by James A. Bacon

    Glenn Youngkin didn’t have much to say about “cancel culture” in Virginia’s colleges and universities when he was on the campaign trail, aiming his fire instead at radical social-justice policies in K-12 schools. But at a speech delivered at the University of Virginia law school Friday, he criticized intolerance in higher education and made the case for intellectual diversity on college campuses.

    Vladimir Putin is a tyrant, Youngkin said in an address to The Federalist Society, but the greatest threat to American democracy does not come from abroad. Said he:

    The greatest threat to our democracy comes from a growing tendency to loathe rather than listen. It comes from a desire to bully and not persuade. Such a culture of contempt, this cancel culture, is toxic to our democracy, and unless the schools that exist to teach our young people take responsibility for being a solution, our democracy will indeed be in danger.

    (more…)

  • The Incredible Shrinking Virus

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    James A. Bacon

    Virginia confirmed COVID cases. (Shaded gray areas indicate illnesses may not have been reported yet.) Source: Virginia Department of Health

    It’s amazing how quickly COVID-19 has faded from the headlines.

    I guess good news is no news.

    A recent Centers for Disease Control study estimates, based on antibody testing, that 43% of all Americans have been infected by the virus. Naturally acquired resistance plus the high percentage of the population that has been vaccinated (76% at least one dose, 64% fully vaccinated, 28% boosted nationally) creates a lot of protection. Combine that with warmer weather, and we can expect COVID to largely fade from the scene this spring. From a peak of more than 120,000 confirmed and probably cases in early January, there were about 13,000 total  cases reported in the week ending Feb. 17. That number was undoubtedly lower the past week.

    On the other hand, 57% of the population has not yet been infected, and the efficacy of the vaccine does diminish over time, so COVID is not going away. (more…)

  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    James A. Bacon

    From the Bull Elephant

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

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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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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