Bacon's Rebellion

  • Northam’s Vaccine Quotas

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    James A. Bacon

    by Carol J. Bova

    Reporter Sabrina Moreno asked Dr. Danny Avula at a Virginia Department of Health (VDH) teleconference on March 26 if Virginia planned to do what Maryland’s governor had done a few weeks previously in reserving a portion of doses at each of its COVID-19 vaccination sites “for priority populations, you know, Black and Latino populations, lower income areas, to kind of help with that equitable distribution.”

    Dr. Avula, who is state vaccine coordinator, said:

    We’ve been doing a lot of that in a lot of our mass vaccination events… We do a combination of weighting our pre-registration… Say for example, if we have a 2,000-person event in Richmond, we would set a certain number of those slots for people that are on the wait list, and then a certain number of those slots for people on the wait list who are African-Americans, so that we can more mirror the demographics of the population.

    He went on to say that different health districts might vary in their weighting methodology, “but we definitely have been weighting the preregistration lists for African-American and Latino communities. And I think it’s made a difference.” (more…)

  • Incautious Messaging and Cautious Optimism

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    James A. Bacon


    This is the third column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University.

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    Except for the occasional late-night Facebook message, James Madison University has rarely responded to anything I’ve written. And those messages are like drunk dials from an ex; I appreciate the attention, but I wish they still loved me in the morning. One exception came the week before the September meeting of the Board of Visitors, a Virginia term for what the rest of the world calls a Board of Trustees. A JMU senior communications official responded to a Facebook question on one of my threads from a JMU parent. The official said she could contact the Board of Visitors through a link that he provided.

    My friend composed and sent a long discussion of her feelings about JMU’s reopening plans. She lives in Tidewater, but has family in Harrisonburg and follows my COVID numbers posts about cases here. Later she and others who’d commented at the link provided by JMU, found out through a story in the Richmond paper that the comments were never shown to the board members.

    People were allowed to comment before the board meeting. The comments weren’t forwarded to the board. You can’t make this stuff up. There’s no law that says they have to allow comment at all, and no law that says anybody has to read the comments. One more reason Virginia should tighten FOI requirements. (more…)

  • Bacon Meme of the Week

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    James A. Bacon

  • Yes, the Virginia Beach Gang Shootings Should Be Investigated

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    James A. Bacon

    Virginia Beach shooting scene. Credit: WAVY TV.

    Delegate Jay Jones, D-Norfolk, and other state legislators have called upon Attorney General Mark Herring to conduct an investigation into the shooting death of Donovon Lynch by a Virginia Beach police officer during a wild exchange of gunfire at the Oceanfront a week ago. Herring had said he supported a Virginia State Police investigation, but Jones, who is running against him for the Democratic Party nomination for attorney general, wants something more high-profile.

    Any time a citizen is killed by a policeman, an inquiry of some sort is called for. Given political realities today, an investigation outside the normal intra-departmental review is prudent if the victim is African American. Under the curious circumstances of this particular incident — the policeman had failed to activate his body camera — it is not unreasonable for Jones and his friends to demand an even closer level of scrutiny.

    But if there is to be an investigation, let’s not focus solely on the one shooting. Let’s dig into the entirety of what happened at Virginia Beach that night, in which one other person was killed and eight were injured, including a policeman who was struck by a car. (more…)

  • Board of Education Changes to Virginia Teacher Evaluation Guidelines Are an Embarrassment

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    sherlockj

    UVa Ed School

    by James C. Sherlock

    Education schools have a lot to be proud of, primarily their production of teachers.

    They also have a lot to answer for, including most of what passes for research and every bit of their practice of constantly changing the language of education to cover the lack of new and contributory ideas. Education schools regularly pass new terminology for old ideas off as new research.

    I give you as exhibit A the new Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers, revisions to existing standards approved a couple of weeks ago by the Virginia Board of Education. Go here, download Item H. and take a look at the revisions. At least scan it. You will get the idea.

    I removed from my copy of that working document the changes that deleted previous language and was left with 117 pages of guidelines for evaluating each teacher. Up from 75 pages in its predecessor.

    If Board members had any sense of the absurd in their own work, or the real world in which teachers teach and principals evaluate, they would not have approved it. It is a profound embarrassment. (more…)

  • The Rebellion Takes to the Air Waves

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    James A. Bacon

    Don’t have time to read Bacon’s Rebellion’s full post about the Barnes & Thornburg questionnaire used to divine perceptions of racism at the Virginia Military Institute? Catch the highlights in John Reid’s interview of me on WRVA this morning. Click here to listen. — JAB

  • Halt 5G in Virginia Now!

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    James A. Bacon

    Virginians for Safe Technology has launched a petition to halt the deployment of 5G wireless technology. Bacon’s Rebellion does not endorse the petition but does believe that the issues it raises are worth discussing. Next-generation wireless is critical infrastructure. The sooner the concerns are addressed, the better. — JAB

    To our elected and appointed officials and the big business Non-Governmental Organizations tasked with making decisions regarding technology across the beautiful State of Virginia on our behalf:

    We, the people of Virginia, do not consent to this involuntary exposure of 5G blanketed wireless radiation and we believe current and future generations of Virginians deserve to be protected.

    Thousands of peer reviewed research studies show the negative health effects of radiation from wireless technologies. As such, 5G Next Generation and beyond (5G+) wireless technology poses significant risks to humans — especially young children — animals and the environment. (www.BioInitiative.org) Yet, 5G+ has never been required to be safety tested for mmWave phased array health effects by you or the industries implementing this technology, and thus constitutes a human experiment without consent.

    (more…)

  • Priorities: Pupils or Pot?

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    You can tell a lot about a politician by his or her priorities.

    Take Gov. Ralph Northam, for instance.

    On February 25th the General Assembly passed a bill requiring Virginia public schools to offer in-person instruction to all students. The original bill, proposed by Sen. Shiobhan Dunnavant, was quite simple and to the point.

    Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:

    1. § 1. That each local school division in the Commonwealth shall make in-person learning available to all students by choice of the student’s parent or guardian.

    2. That an emergency exists and this act is in force from its passage.

    After much foolish debate the second part of the bill was struck. The politicians on the left decided there wasn’t an emergency. No need to force schools to fully reopen before July.

    As if we needed more proof of the power of teachers’ unions in Virginia. (more…)

  • Everybody’s Next One

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    James A. Bacon

    JMU President Jon Alger (center)

    This is the second column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University.

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    JMU was a first choice for many of its students, but has a perennial reputation as Virginia’s safety school. The joke is that JMU stands for “Just Missed UVA.” The acceptance rate has been rising since the 1980s and the enrollment rate, the “yield” in admissions terms, has been dropping at the same time. The two lines crossed sometime in the 1990s. The flip-side of “Born to Be Wild” was a song called “Everybody’s Next One.” The flip-side of U.Va., and of William and Mary, is JMU.

    JMU isn’t often a leader or an innovator. Maybe it was in some ways when Ron Carrier was president. He could be bold to the point of brash and brash to the point of bullying. There were stories about him. There were fewer about his successor, Lin Rose, and none about the president in 2020, Jon Alger. A JMU communications official had once complained to a local newspaper editor about the difficulty of promoting the school with Alger at the helm, because Alger was seen as awkward and uninteresting. (more…)

  • The VMI Questionnaire: Honest Inquiry or Stacked Deck?

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    As part of its “equity audit” at the Virginia Military Institute, the Barnes & Thornburg law firm is conducting a survey of VMI cadets, alumni, professors and staff to gauge perceptions of racism at the military academy. The stated goal is to “better understand the environment and culture of VMI as an institution.”

    But many VMI alumni are wondering if the real purpose is to generate data to support a predetermined conclusion: that VMI is a hotbed of racism. As part of its contract with the Northam administration, Barnes & Thornburg will issue recommendations to address the investigation’s findings. Not only are traditions surrounding the academy’s controversial Confederate heritage at stake, but so, too, are such core VMI institutions as the adversarial rat line and the single-sanction honor code.

    A copy of the questionnaire was dropped on my doorstep late one night last week, and I have been examining it closely since then. Having had some experience years ago as publisher of Virginia Business magazine in composing readership surveys, I know how important it is to word questions carefully. After reviewing the VMI racism survey, I can see why alumni are alarmed. Given the way the questionnaire was constructed, the investigators could well find data to support whatever conclusions it wants.

    Barnes & Thornburg is scheduled to issue a final report in June. To maintain credibility, the report needs to release the entire survey result, including cross-tabs. Outsiders need to be allowed to access the data to verify the investigators’ conclusions. (more…)

  • Democrats Expand Worker Protections

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

    By Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Many commenters on this blog seem to view Virginia Democrats as elitists (the “Plantation Elite”) who either ignore or look down on the needs of most Virginians or elitists who are absorbed in advancing critical race theory and other woke ideas. While battles against these perceived threats have been raging on Bacon’s Rebellion, Democrats in the General Assembly have passed, over stiff Republican opposition, a raft of legislation during the past two sessions that benefit ordinary working stiffs.

    Some of this legislation has been high profile and has drawn fire on these pages, but most have gone largely unnoticed here and in the press. The best-known bills are those that increase the minimum wage and that authorize localities to engage in collective bargaining with their employees. These have been debated extensively on BR and I have no interest in resuming those debates here. (For the record, I support the minimum wage increase, but have strong reservations about public employee collective bargaining.) (more…)

  • Bacon Bits: More, More, More!

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    James A. Bacon

    More fiber. A joint venture involving Annandale-based Tenebris Fiber expects to begin constructing a 680-mile regional fiber optic network in Virginia. The network will run through Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William Counties and connect with a Virginia Beach cable landing station that links to Europe and South America with subsea fiber-optic trunk lines, reports Virginia Business. The network will support the continued expansion of Virginia’s data center industry.

    More rail. Virginia has finalized agreements with CSX, Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express in a $3.7 billion project to build a new rail bridge over the Potomac River, add new track in the Washington-Richmond corridor, and buy hundreds of miles of passenger right of way from CSX. “This transformative plan will  make travel faster and safer,” declared Governor Ralph Northam in celebrating the signature transportation achievement of his administration. “It will make it easier to move up and down the East Coast, and it will connect urban and rural Virginia.” Even more, he claimed, it will reduce traffic congestion, cut pollution and create “a more inclusive economy.” So reports The Washington Post. I have yet to see a cost-benefit analysis of this massive investment. But with Uncle Joe planning a $2.3 trillion infrastructure boondoggle, Virginia will be getting lots of free money, so who cares?

    More thought crimes. Kiara Jennings, who leads Loudoun’s Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee (MSAAC), said teachers who did not fully embrace the county’s diversity training should not be tolerated. “If our teachers and staff cannot be open and willing to learn how to be culturally competent then they do not need to be in the classrooms any longer,” she wrote in an email, as reported by The Daily Wire. The MSAAC then posted this on its Facebook page: “There is strength in numbers and we believe wholeheartedly, that united, we can and will silence the opposition.”

  • Fairfax County Should Be Renamed Fairtax County… Er, Make that Unfairtax County

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    by

    James A. Bacon


    Sales prices for houses have been soaring across the country — by double digits in many metropolitan areas — and so are real estate property assessments. When assessments go up, so do taxes, unless city councils and county boards lower tax rates. In the current environment, holding a tax rate steady amounts to a tax increase. Even a 5% reduction in the tax rate can amount to a tax increase if assessments are up 10%.

    The Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance has a few things to say about the long-term trend in Virginia’s most populous locality: (more…)

  • The Franchise and the Rat in the Cream

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    James A. Bacon

    JMU block party pre-COVID

    This is the first essay in a four-part series about the COVID epidemic at James Madison University.

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    The franchise. When the next friendly history of JMU is written, the booster writing it may include a chapter about the two visits by ESPN’s “Game Day” and how they helped introduce to a new audience the awesome campus and student body of James Madison University. The book may or may not mention the university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. If it does, will the relevant adjective be “dynamic,” a favorite of the school’s communication team? Or will it be “bumbling,” “mendacious,” or “calamitous”?

    It could go either way. For many years, those of us who worked at JMU got an email every summer telling us what parking lots we could use during the dynamic freshman orientation week. I realized every time that it had been written one year and used for ten more with the dates and maybe the parking lots changed. But the editor in me wanted to know why the adjective was there. Was it to distinguish it from the static orientation week? Or did the university’s communications people just love adjectives? (more…)

  • Board of Education Downgrades Qualifications for Science Teachers

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    “Every student succeeds” is the motto of the state education plan. Let’s take a look and see how this focus on “student success” is playing out in the day-to-day policy judgments of the Board of Education.

    This column has reported that the Board of Education, in pursuit of “equity,” is actively reducing the qualifications of teachers for classroom instruction.

    This one will explain how Virginia arrived at a passing score for the Praxis Middle School Science Teacher exam that allowed the applicant to get more than half of the questions wrong on the test and still step in front of your child’s classroom.

    The Board process made no reference at all to students. (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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