Bacon's Rebellion

  • No Known Case of Teacher Catching COVID-19 from Pupils

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    James A. Bacon

    Perhaps Virginia teachers terrified of returning to schools this fall should read this article in the Financial Times (of London):

    There has been no recorded case of a teacher catching the coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, according to one of the government’s leading scientific advisers.

    Mark Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member of the government’s Sage committee, told The Times that it may have been a mistake to close schools in March given the limited role children play in spreading the virus.

    Who is Mark Woolhouse? Other than the fact that he is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, I don’t know. Does he have credibility? I don’t know. But the Financial Times does, and other UK newspapers are reporting this story as well. Inevitably, someone will dispute Woolhouse’s reading of the data. This may turn into a case of dueling experts. Still, it’s worth asking if we’re in the grip of mass hysteria over COVID-19. It’s worth pondering if we’re letting fear destroy our society.

    — JAB

  • Charlottesville Elites and Virginia’s New Ruling Class

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    James A. Bacon

    Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

    by James A. Bacon

    Before it sold off its national newspaper division to Lee Enterprises for a measly $140 million in March, Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway owned most of the newspapers in western and central Virginia, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Roanoke Times, the Daily Progress (in Charlottesville), and the News Virginian (in Waynesboro). Reporting by these newspapers dominated news coverage of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and shaped the pro-environmental narrative that ultimately defeated it.

    Earlier this month Dominion Energy, the pipeline’s managing partner, announced that it was abandoning the project and, indeed, was selling its multibillion-dollar gas distribution business to…. Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Upon consummation of the $4 billion transaction, Berkshire Hathaway’s energy subsidiary will carry 18% of all interstate natural gas transmission in the United States.

    Coincidence?

    Charles Munger Jr., son of Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charles Munger.

    Arthur Bloom, managing editor of the American Conservative website, doesn’t come right out and say that Berkshire Hathaway used its power of the press to force Dominion into abandoning the pipeline and unloading its gas distribution, but he does suggest that such a thing might be possible. In “The Great Virginia Pipeline Swindle,” he writes:

    What is beyond dispute is the death of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline has now resulted in a substantial acquisition for Berkshire Hathaway, after various people connected to the company have worked to kill it.

    (more…)

  • Who Wants to Visit New York Anyway?

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    This is rich.

    One of the worst governors in the country — Andrew Cuomo — announced yesterday that Virginians are not welcome in New York and neither are folks from 30 other states. Unless we quarantine and show a clean bill of health, that is.

    He’s afraid we’ll infect New Yorkers with COVID-19.

    Hilarious. Is there anyone left in New York who hasn’t been infected?

    Someone needs to remind the governor that it was New Yorkers who spread the virus to the rest of the country. According to The New York Times:

    New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.

    The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast.

    (more…)

  • Private Immigrant Prison Has Virus Crisis

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    Peter Galuszka

    By Peter Galuszka

    A private prison for undocumented immigrants in Farmville is having its own COVID-19 crisis after 90% of its detainees tested positive for the virus.

    Court papers have shown that 267 inmates at the prison run by Richmond-based Immigration Centers of America have tested positive for the virus and another 80 were still awaiting results as of last week.

    What seems to be an increasingly dire situation at the Farmville Detention Center on the outskirts of town has been highlighted by WRIC, the Daily Beast and HuffPost.

    Officials at the prison are the target of a lawsuit by the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (CAIR) and the facility was the scene of a disturbance earlier this month when inmates refused to assemble one morning early this month and guards used pepper spray in the ensuing fracas.

    Part of the problem started on June 2, when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department sent along 74 immigrant detainees from Florida and Arizona. The Farmville facility could have refused, but the owners make profits on the per diem rates they are paid by the federal government. The City of Farmville gets a cut of the per diem as well.

    According to WRIC, 90% of the inmates are infected. (more…)

  • Check out My Political-Economy-of-Healthcare Webinar

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    James A. Bacon

    I’ll be talking about the political economy of healthcare in Virginia 7:00 p.m. Wednesday (tomorrow) in a webinar hosted by Your Freedom Hub. Bacon’s Rebellion readers recalling the posts that Jim Sherlock and I have written about the power of hospital cartels will find the subject matter familiar. But I’ll be previewing some new data showing precisely how oligopolistic market power translates into higher charges for everything from colonoscopies to tonsillectomies.

    Click here to sign up for the webinar.

    — JAB

  • Debunking the Lie of Unequal Funding, Part II

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    A month ago I demonstrated in “The Big Lie of Unequal Funding” that there is no meaningful difference on average in the amount of money spent on black and white school children between school districts across Virginia. I drew that conclusion based on average spent per pupil in each school district. The comeback from those who want to believe that systemic racism exists is that while spending may be equal on average across school districts, spending might well be unequal within school districts. In other words, I did not prove that school districts didn’t discriminate against blacks by funneling more money to individual schools in whiter, more affluent neighborhoods.

    It so happens that the Virginia Department of Education has just updated its School Quality Profiles, and it provides numbers for spending per school. We can now test the proposition that Virginia school boards discriminate on the basis of race by funding white schools more than black schools.

    I have just run the numbers for Henrico County, my county of residence, and I conclude conclusively, that, yes, Henrico schools do discriminate. They spend more, on average, on black students than other students. Henrico elementary schools spend 6.8% more on blacks than non-blacks, 6.2% more in middle schools, and 3.8% more in high schools. (more…)

  • Creeping Totalitarianism: Now They’re Indoctrinating Kindergartners

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    James A. Bacon

    “Confronting the Weaponization of Whiteness” — coming to a school near you. Image from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Tolerance” website

    by James A. Bacon

    Loudoun County Public Schools are adding “social justice” to the mission of teaching elementary school students. The County has teamed with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm, Teaching Tolerance, to develop its new curriculum, reports the Washington Examiner.

    “Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history,” the curriculum reads. “Long before we teach algebra, we teach its component parts. We should structure history instruction the same way.”

    Loudoun schools have always taught the ugly realities of slavery, typically beginning in the 4th grade in concert with the Standards of Learning. (more…)

  • Some Kids Need School More than Others

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Let’s stop pretending there’s any chance at all that public schools will be open five days a week this fall.

    They won’t. Not around here, anyway. Not in many places.

    The teachers have spoken. Their unions, er associations, have made it clear that they don’t want to return to their classrooms yet. They’re afraid. Some say they don’t want to return until there’s a COVID-19 vaccine.

    And so schools will remain closed and it will be another semester of distance “learning” for students.

    Last year’s educational catastrophe was on the Governor, who closed schools without warning, leaving teachers scrambling with online classes.

    This year’s experiment is being pushed by educators. If it fails, if thousands of kids are lost and left behind, it’s on them.

    (more…)

  • VEC: 1.5 Million Unemployment Claims In 2020

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    Steve Haner

    Virginia and US employment fluctuations since 2004, showing the dip in 2009-10 and plummet in the last four months. Source VEC. Click for larger view.

    By Steve Haner

    By the end of this amazing year, almost 1.5 million Virginians may have filed claims for unemployment insurance payments, leaving the state’s once-record unemployment trust fund balance of $1.5 billion reduced to $750 million in the red, legislators were told this morning.

    That $2.25 billion swing is due to $2.6 billion spent out of the state fund, to cover basic unemployment benefits. To date, the federal government has supplemented that with another $6.3 billion paid to Virginian under special COVID-19 related benefits, which do not come out of the state trust account.  (more…)

  • Civil War within the Northam Administration on School Reopening Guidelines?

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    sherlockj

    by James Sherlock

    Steve Haner wrote a very important essay today about the new workplace guidelines about to be published by the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry(DOLI).

    In a similar vein, the progressive warriors in the lower levels of the Northam administration are trying to offer stricter school reopening guidelines than the Governor. States this Department of Labor and Industry (DOLI) document:

    Public school divisions and private schools that submit their plans to the Virginia Department of Education to move to Phase II and Phase III that are aligned with CDC guidance (6 feet social distancing) for reopening of schools that provide equivalent or greater levels of employee protection than a provision of this standard and who operate in compliance with the public school division’s or private school’s submitted plans shall be considered in compliance with this standard.

    An institution’s actual compliance with recommendations contained in CDC guidelines or the Virginia Department of Education guidance (now includes 3 ft. option), whether mandatory or non-mandatory, to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 related hazards or job tasks addressed by this standard shall be considered evidence of good faith in any enforcement proceeding related to this standard.

    They directly contradict school reopening guidelines updated July 1 by the Department of Education and published by the Governor on July 6.
    (more…)

  • A Radical Proposal for School Reopening: Let Kids Go to School Full Time

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    There are no easy answers to the question of how to open up Virginia’s public schools next month during the COVID-19 epidemic. While all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that the risk to school children of contracting and spreading the virus is low, the story is different for teachers, especially older teachers with preexisting conditions who are at elevated risk of hospitalization and death. On the other hand, the cost to school children of another year of sub-par learning is too great to contemplate. If Virginia handles this ineptly, we could produce the most ignorant generation since the introduction of universal K-12 schooling — exacerbating socioeconomic and racial inequity in the process.

    The “hybrid” model of two days at school, two days online, recommended by the Northam administration and under serious consideration in most Virginia school districts, strikes me as complicated, unwieldy, confusing and likely to fail.

    The worst thing about the hybrid model is that it provides a one-size-fits-all solution for each school district, which fails to take into account the variegated circumstances of students, families, and teachers. I’m thinking out loud here — consider this a thought experiment — but I would suggest a very different approach.

    Ditch the hybrid schools. Instead, give parents the choice whether to send their child to school full-time, like normal, or stay home and learn online full-time. No halfway in and halfway out. Likewise, give teachers the choice of whether to teach in-person at school or teach online from home. Freedom to choose — what a concept! (more…)

  • How Employers Must Prevent COVID, Or Else

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    Virginia Department of Labor and Industry

    By Steve Haner

    The first thing every employer in Virginia needs to understand about the state’s new COVID-19 temporary workplace standard (here) is it is universal. It applies to every workplace, public and private, for-profit and non-profit, with 10,000 workers or two. The rules are the same, “one size fits all,” without regard to the nature of the industry.

    The second thing every employer in Virginia needs to understand about the standard is that it is only temporarily temporary. The goal, and work will begin quickly, is to convert the set of requirements into a permanent regulation, with a permanent burden on employers going forward to protect their employees from a disease circulating widely outside their establishments.  (more…)

  • Virginia’s Special Session: Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Get ready, Virginia. Bad things are brewing in Richmond.

    On Friday, Gov. Ralph Northam announced that he was bringing the General Assembly back for a special session on August 18.

    Lucky us.

    The mischief that the far-left majority — bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg — could get into should alarm every moderate Virginian.

    There are only two topics that should be on the table for this extraordinary session:

    1) How to plug the massive hole in the budget that occurred when Northam’s shutdowns wrecked the economy and 2) How to rein in a governor who used his emergency powers to take almost total control of the commonwealth in March and who seems determined to govern indefinitely by edict without legislative oversight. (more…)

  • New Regions Won’t Fix Ignoring the Obvious

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Carol J. Bova

    Governor Ralph Northam opened his July 14 press conference with statements on the increase in cases of the COVID-19 virus in Virginia. “We have not seen the spikes that some other states are now seeing, but we’re seeing some troubling numbers and an increase in cases largely out of the Hampton Roads area.”

    He talked about the statewide positivity rate for COVID-19 testing, using graphs for five regional Health Districts and reviewed the seven-day average for each: Northern region, 6.7%, Southwest region 4.8%, Northwest region 5.9%, and Central region 6.6%. He then called out the Eastern region for a rate of 10.1%.

    There are at least two serious problems with his presentation.

    The regions cover too wide a geographical area to address as a single community, and each varies in population, density, culture, and composition. (more…)

  • Gerald Smith: Richmond’s New Top Cop

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    Peter Galuszka

    By Peter Galuszka

    FYI, here’s a piece I did for Style Weekly about Richmond’s new p0lice chief, the third in about a month, and his interpretation on the problems of law enforcement in this period of defunding.

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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