Bacon's Rebellion

  • Recidivism: The Rest of the Story, Part 2–Explanations for Increase

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    A previous post discussed how Virginia’s most recent recidivism rate was an increase over the prior year’s rate. The Department of Corrections (DOC) offers two major possible explanations for the increases in recidivism: more technical violators and more “jail-only” offenders.

    Technical violators. A recidivist who is a technical violator is someone who has been returned to prison, not due to having committed a new crime, but because he has violated one or more conditions of his probation and the judge has chosen to revoke his probation and reimpose part or all of what remains of his suspended sentence.

    The percentage of technical violators making up the recidivist cohort had decreased in recent years to below 10% in FY 2013. However, in FY 2014, the percentage more than doubled to 22.3% and has remained at that level.  After a slight dip in FY 2015, it increased by more than two percentage points in FY 2016. (more…)

  • Wokeness at the Table

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Do you wake up every morning wondering what mundane aspect of ordinary life will suddenly be declared racist and evil?

    Me too.

    Gird your loins, here’s the latest: Table manners.

    Do you teach your children and grandchildren good manners? You know, napkin on lap, elbows off the table and the proper use of utensils?

    Congratulations. You’re a colonizer.

    How dare you suggest that your children shouldn’t eat with their hands? Why, you’re barely better than a slave owner!

    Yep, that’s the thesis of an article in “Parent’s Today,” a publication that I didn’t know existed until this weekend when an article, “Why The Way We Teach Kids Table Manners Is Actually Kind Of Racist” went viral on social media. (more…)

  • What Is a Farming Landowner to Do?

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    James A. Bacon

    by Jim Kindig

    My 3rd great grandfather came to Augusta County in the 1820s, cleared land and established crops on land that is still in our family. Several of my neighbors could tell similar stories. We love farming, but it’s a hard life. Incredible increases in productivity have kept agricultural commodity prices depressed for 80 years. To keep up with the latest and greatest agricultural machinery and technology, farmers have borrowed heavily, using their ancestral lands as collateral. One or two bad years, and they go broke. Many see no way out of their cycle of indebtedness.

    Today there is light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, and that light comes from the sun. Large-scale solar farms offer landowners a low-risk means to keep their farm land. They can lease acreage to a solar developer for a guaranteed income over 25 years. At the end of the lease, they can easily convert the land back to agricultural production with no degradation of soil quality or health. (more…)

  • Fredericksburg’s Tree Tyrants

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    James A. Bacon

    Sallie Daiger sits on the porch of her pre-Civil War home on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg.

    by James A. Bacon

    I was driving up Interstate 95 to Fredericksburg one Saturday in April when I got a call from my mother. Pick up a rental chain saw on the way into town, she said. She wanted me to cut down a crape myrtle in front of her house. I knew well the tree she was referring to. She’d planted it as a sprig twelve to fifteen years before, and it had become a nuisance. Branches slapped against the telephone lines overhead, draped over the sidewalk, and shed debris on cars parking in the street. My sister, a housekeeper and I had taken turns pruning it, but the branches quickly grew back. I agreed that it was time to take the wretched thing down for good.

    I’m no expert with a chain saw, but it wasn’t a difficult job. I lopped off the branches previously amputated with a hand saw, and carved out chunks of the trunk to chest-high level. Then I attacked the base of the tree, cutting around the rim as deep as the chain saw blade would go. I’d made it about 60% of the way through the trunk when a neighbor approached me in a state of alarm.

    Frank Widic was a tree steward with Tree Fredericksburg. I had to immediately stop what I was doing, he told me. The crape myrtle was located on city right-of-way, and I was forbidden by ordinance from cutting it! I protested that the city had done nothing to maintain the tree, and that it needed to come down. That didn’t matter, Widic said. He  put me on his cell phone to talk to Anne Little, president of the nonprofit Tree Fredericksburg organization.

    Little was even more emphatic. City rules were very clear, she said. I had to stop. If I didn’t, she was obligated to notify the police. Whoah, thought I. This was way above my pay grade. I handed the phone to my mother, who was watching events unfold from a perch on the porch. (more…)

  • The Impact of English Language Learners on Virginia Public Schools

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    We will briefly discuss here English learners in Virginia schools and the enormous impact they have. They truly offer to enrich the experience of all kids in our schools, but they need a lot of help and there are a great many of them.

    There were 104,411 English learner students enrolled in Virginia public schools in 2020-21, about 8% of the total enrollment. See the breakdown by school division here.

    That was down more than 12,000 from the year before, perhaps reflecting COVID-related failures to register for school rather than leaving the state. We are about to find out. 

    The 2019-20 numbers represented a 44% increase in 10 years.

    The huge influx of kids on our southern border this year will affect these numbers next month, but we have no idea how much because we don’t know where they have gone.

    A lot of these kids, in addition to the challenges of language barriers, are also what are designated Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE). VDOE does not yet collect data on that sub-group.

    It is easy to predict that those kids may have had a harder time with remote learning than native English speakers. In recognition of that problem, English learners were given priority for return to school in person in some districts. (more…)

  • How Not to Treat a Conservation Easement

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    James A. Bacon

    Abandoned camper. Photo credit: Wikipedia

    The Commonwealth needs to tighten up its system for granting and overseeing conservation easements, the Virginia Office of the State Inspector General (OSIG) has found.

    One of three conservation-easement properties visited by OSIG auditors did not meet Conservation Value Review Criteria adopted to provide for quality conservation value. The inspectors saw “trash, old tires, scrap metal piles, old campers, inoperable vehicles, and a manure storage area that contained deceased cattle parts on the property.”

    Additionally, easements between $500,000 and $1 million lacked restrictions for water quality, historical preservation and agricultural use when compared to easements resulting in tax credits of $1 million or more. (more…)

  • Making Money from Cultural Cleansing

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    James A. Bacon

    This imagery was in preparation of the $430,000 contract with the University of Virginia to remove the George Rogers Clark bronze sculpture located at the UVa Corner Park.

    by Carol J. Bova

    Richmond business owner Devon Henry is best known for his role as owner of NAH, LLC, for procuring a $1.8 million contract from Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney to take down Richmond’s Confederate statues. While Stoney’s handling of the contract outside the normal procurement process became a political liability — a special prosecutor and the Virginia State Police are still investigating the deal — Henry has become the go-to guy for taking down monuments to Confederate generals and other symbols out of fashion with Virginia’s political class.

    Henry built a construction company, Team Henry Enterprises, winning bids as a minority contractor, primarily from the federal government. In 2018, Team Henry broke into the state/local contracting business with a contract to erect the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, which after eleven revisions totaled $5.5 million. (more…)

  • Slow Service: The New Normal

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    We waited at least 20 minutes after we were seated to place our drink orders. Another 15 to get our cocktails. Another 30 for appetizers (cups of soup) and another 30 for our entrees.

    It was so late when we finished, we skipped dessert.

    Welcome to the “new normal” in dining out: Painfully slow service.

    It seems it’s the same almost everywhere. Restaurateurs, unable to hire employees who are cashing fat government checks for doing nothing, are hobbled by lack of workers.

    Shoot, one oceanfront restaurant recently posted a notice on its marquee that read something like, “Be Patient We Have No Staff.” Another Beach establishment is plastered with “help wanted” signs — even in the ladies’ room.

    I’m not complaining about my Saturday night dining experience, simply observing. Despite the desultory service, dinner was delish and the company was even better. Our server was cheerful, just slow. (more…)

  • J.D. Vance, the “Childless Left” and the Commonwealth of Virginia Education Elite

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    J. D. Vance, the author of the acclaimed biographical work “Hillbilly Elegy,” is a candidate for the Republican nomination in Ohio to replace retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman.

    I haven’t studied that Senate race, and don’t have a favorite, but Mr. Vance has raised an issue for our time.

    He has last week called out “the childless left” for their lack of “physical commitment to the future of this country.” From the N.Y. Post:

    “The left isn’t just criticizing our country … it’s trying to take our very sense of national pride and national purpose away from us,” he said, blaming figures such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, along with AOC, for stoking “cultural wars.”

    “Harris has called herself the “momala” of her two grown stepchildren, Cole and Ella Emhoff.  Booker, Buttigieg, and Ocasio-Cortez have no children.”

    “Vance offered a startling solution to what he called the “civilizational crisis”: extra voting power for parents.”

    “The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds,” Vance said.”

    “Instead, he said, “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children.”

    “Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions? … Yes,” he concluded.”

    I don’t agree with Mr. Vance’s broad prescription for calibrated voting rights.  I don’t think he does either. In fact I believe that Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, used that statement to bring public attention to the issue rather than expecting his specified outcome. But I think it may be appropriate to consider his point in a narrower context in Virginia. (more…)

  • Confederate Statues and Judicial Fiats

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    The Roanoke County Courthouse is located, oddly enough, in the independent city of Salem. Nearby, within the sight of the courthouse, there stands a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of a building owned by Roanoke College. The college would like to remove it, but the statue is situated on a scrap of land owned by Roanoke County, and only the Board of Supervisors is empowered to make the decision. The County has not been moving on the matter as expeditiously as some would like, and now Roanoke County Circuit Court judge Charles Dorsey has determined that the statue “obstructs the proper administration of justice in the Roanoke County Courthouse.”

    The arguments in favor of keeping the Confederate statues are familiar to us all, and I will not re-hash them here other than to note that this particular statue, raised in 1909, does not glorify the Confederacy, the ante-bellum era, or the mythology of the Lost Cause. The placard says simply that it was erected “in memory of the Confederate soldiers of Roanoke County. … Love makes memory eternal.”

    My interest here is not to re-litigate the propriety of maintaining a statue that honors nameless Confederate soldiers but to highlight Dorsey’s judicial activism. Impatient with the processes of representative democracy — the county board will not take any formal action until January 2022 — he has issued an order:

    Either the Court must be removed to an appropriate location or the monument must be removed during the operation of the Court, the Court so finds, and the same is ORDERED.

    (more…)

  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    James A. Bacon


    Sunday-Funday Memes from The Bull Elephant

  • Recidivism: The Rest of the Story, Part 1 — How Large Is It?

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Recently, Governor Northam issued a press release applauding the Department of Corrections’ (DOC) most recent recidivism rate of 23.9% and noting it was one of the lowest in the country. All that is true and is highly commendable, but, as Paul Harvey used to say, “Now, for the rest of the story.”

    Source: Virginia Dept. of Corrections

    While a recidivism rate of 23.9% is excellent, it is actually an increase over the most previous rate of 23.1%. Although DOC likes to say that the most recent rate is “only” 0.8 of a percentage point more than the previous year, over the last four years, as shown by the accompanying graph, the recidivism rate rose from 22.4% to 23.9%, an increase of 1.5 percentage points.

    Furthermore, although Virginia’s rate was among the lowest recidivism rates in the country (second lowest), for each of the four years prior to the last, the state had the lowest rate. In summary, although Virginia has an excellent recidivism rate, the rate has been increasing and Virginia has slipped a notch in relation to other states. (more…)

  • How Bad Are Virginia Public Schools’ Personnel Shortages?

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) maintains a job board for itself and for school districts seeking personnel of all sorts. It shows about 1,6oo openings, but some of the postings are more than two years old. And the real number is somewhere around 7,000.

    It is useless.

    Apparently VDOE, in its striving under the whip hand of the Governor and General Assembly to regulate and oversee the minute details of school division compliance with massive changes to laws, lacks the personnel or inclination to keep its own job board up to date. Embarrassing.

    So, VDOE may have no estimate what the shortages will be next month.  If it does, it is not sharing.

    The current signs are not good. (more…)

  • Bacon Meme of the Week: Bacon-Wrapped Bacon with Bacon

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    by

    James A. Bacon

  • “Let Them Die” Redux

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    “Let them die” — words and applause heard around the world.

    by Asra Nomani

    Harry Jackson, the first Black president-elect of the PTSA at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, stood before a crowd of parents here at Luther Jackson Middle School last week to oppose the divisive ideology of critical race theory that has put forward flawed policies in K-12 schools across the country, including separating students into racial “affinity spaces” and eliminating merit admissions to TJ, America’s No. 1 high school.

    Across the circular driveway, outside the front doors of the school, the first vice president of the Fairfax NAACP, Michelle Leete, stood in a counter protest, extolling the crowd of about 100 people gathered before her with a very different message.

    Reading from a speech printed out on papers in her hand, Leete declared, “Let’s deny this off-key band of people that are anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-equity, anti-history, anti-racial reckoning, anti-opportunities, anti-help people, anti-diversity, anti-platform, anti-science, anti-change agent, anti-social justice, anti-healthcare, anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-children, anti-healthcare, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-admissions policy change, anti-inclusion, anti-live-and-let live people.”

    Then she punctuated her protest with this proclamation: “Let them die!” (more…)

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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