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Recent Posts
- A Rejoinder on the TJ “Fall”
- Greedy Cities and Speeding Ticket Chicanery
- TJ High School Falls From 1st to 14th Place
- Freebees Aren’t Free
- Extensive Plagiarism Alleged for UVA PhD Dissertation
- Some Rural Localities Hit With Big Jump in Local Composite Index
- The Budget Do-Over: A Game of Chicken?
- Jason Miyares–Judicial Activist?
- State Legislatures Control Budgets — Virginia’s More Than Most
- Jeanine’s Memes
- Bacon Meme of the Week
- Ready for Taxes on Netflix, NFL Sunday Ticket?
- Keffiyehs, Yarmulkes and “Belonging” at UVA
- Public School Enrollments Still Declining
- The Incredibly Shrinking Newspaper
Author Archives: James A. Bacon
Bacon Meme of the Week
Posted in Bacon and Pigs
UVA As a “Maze of Predatory Systems”
by James A. Bacon
If you visit the latest exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, “EscapeRoom,” it takes no more than five or ten seconds for the artists’ message to sink in — the amount of time it takes to read the signage at the entrance:
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts the frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. … EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems.
Inside, the exhibits contributed by multiple artists elaborate upon the white-supremacy theme. Five 3D-printed pieces of porcelain, for instance, are described as giving “materiality, scale and dimension to the many ‘tools’ that mediate state violence visited upon Black victims: horses, batons, guns, tear gas, and more.”
A mobile made of steel sheet metal “examines violence visited upon Black people at the hands of the American state. It attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.”
To set foot in the EscapeRoom is to enter a world of victimhood that would have been entirely justified a century or two ago but seems tragically out of date 60 years after the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the enactment of the Great Society’s war on poverty, and the dramatic transformation of attitudes toward race in America — not to mention the implementation of Racial Equity Task Force recommendations at UVA itself that made the exhibit possible in the first place. Continue reading
Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Race and Race Relations, Virginia history
Tagged James A. Bacon, University of Virginia
In Their Own Words: Jefferson, Whiteness, and Dicks in the Sky
Meet Marisa Williamson. The Harvard-educated assistant professor in the University of Virginia art department works in video, image-making, installation and performance art around themes of “history, race, feminism, and technology,” according to her UVA faculty page. Most recently, she co-curated the EscapeRoom exhibition at the Ruffin Gallery, which we highlight in a companion article.
Williamson, who has worked at UVA since 2018, was one of the first faculty members hired under the “Race, Justice and Equity” initiative made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
She described her approach to art in a 2021 conversation with Tori Cherry, a Charlottesville artist and UVA Grad, hosted by Charlottesville’s New City Arts.
“One of my big goals is to unsettle and to figure out how to haunt, how to keep things moving, how to agitate through these various forms of performance and monument,” Williamson said. Continue reading
Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Race and Race Relations, Virginia history
Tagged James A. Bacon, University of Virginia
Factoid of the Day: Nation’s Worst Mail Delivery
How bad is on-time mail delivery to Central Virginia? According to U.S. Post Office inspector general figures, it is the worst in the country. Postal service is so bad that a Richmond electoral official warned voters not to risk letting their ballots, in the words of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “be swallowed by a dysfunctional Postal Service.” — JAB
VCU Wins Free Speech “Green Light” Rating
by James A. Bacon
Congratulations to Virginia Commonwealth University for winning a “green light” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) after making conscientious efforts to improve its formal free-speech policies. VCU is now one of five universities in Virginia and only 64 nationwide with the designation.
Since 2018, VCU revised several policies governing dorm room decorations, computer use, student conduct, sexual harassment, and reservation and use of campus spaces. But VCU’s sex-based misconduct policy remained a problem, according to FIRE.
“VCU’s old policy included a laundry list of behaviors, such as mocking and name-calling, that the school might have classified — and therefore made punishable — as sexual harassment. It was both overbroad and vague,” said FIRE in a statement.
“A single insult or joke does not qualify as sexual harassment,” explained Laura Beltz, FIRE director of policy reform. “It has to actually be a part of a pattern of conduct that meets that definition of harassment before being punishable. But that was not made clear under the old policy. For all students knew, they were always one strike away from getting in deep trouble on account of something they said.” Continue reading
The Use and Misuse of a UVA Lecture Series
by James A. Bacon
The “fixation” of modern-day Israelis on the Holocaust has become a “vast and ugly fig leaf” hiding oppression of Palestinians and giving Israelis license to brush aside moral qualms about their response to the October 7 terror attacks, Brown University historian Omer Bartov told an audience of 60 or so people Tuesday at the University of Virginia.
In vowing to “never again” let Jews fall prey to genocidal extermination, Israelis indulge in “self-victimization,” “self pity,” and “self righteousness,” said Bartov, an Israeli-born Jew who has built his academic career around the study of the Holocaust and genocide. “It’s not a condition conducive to understanding, toleration, and reconciliation.”
The lecture, entitled, “The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics,” was one in a series of events billed by UVA leadership as broadening understanding of the Middle East conflict. The lecture series is an outgrowth of the tension between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups at UVA. Jewish students have complained of a hostile environment that leaves them afraid to speak out or even openly identify as Jews. In a parallel initiative, the Ryan administration created a religious diversity task force to understand how Jewish and Muslim students, faculty and staff “experience life on Grounds.” Continue reading
Prison Population Down, Crime Up in 2022. Coincidence?
The population of Virginia’s state and federal prisons posted a 10.5% decline between 2021 and 2022 — the largest drop of any state, according to new Department of Justice data. Oregon saw the second largest decline at 5.2%. Many states saw increases in their prison populations, as reported by WRIC news.
The total prison population for Virginia in 2022 was 27,162. The numbers do not include inmates of local jails.
The fall-off in prison population was especially marked among females — 18%. The DOJ report did not break down state-by-state prison populations by race.
With the exception of drug offenses, which declined, the crime rate per 100,000 population increased in almost all categories in 2022, according to the Virginia State Police “2022 Crime in Virginia” report.
— JAB
GOP Clobbered Dems in Primary Turnout
by James A. Bacon
I’m no reader of the political tea leaves, and I will willingly defer to those better informed than I am, but it appears that the presidential primary vote in Virginia showed a greater level of enthusiasm for Republicans than for Democrats. That may simply reflect the fact that in the Republican primary Donald Trump had a credible (or semi-credible) challenger, while the Democratic primary offered no serious alternative to President Joe Biden. But I think there’s more to the story than that.
Top-line numbers: 690,000 votes were cast for Republican presidential candidates compared to only 346,000 for Democrat candidates.
Digging into the details, I replicate here two maps published by the Virginia Public Access Project. (Click here to view the interactive maps with a breakdown of turnout by locality.) The first thing to note is the scale used to measure the turnout in each locality — 1.9% to 20.9% for Republicans and 0.7% to 10.4% for Democrats. That alone tells you that Republican turnout was higher as a percentage of registered voters across the board.
Posted in Elections
Whoops!
by James A. Bacon
A recurring debate in Virginia’s push toward a net-zero electric grid has been whether demand for electricity in the Old Dominion will grow or shrink. Citing expansion of demand from data centers and electric vehicles, Dominion Energy has contended for years that demand for electricity would continue increasing at a steady rate. Environmentalists scoffed, saying that conservation measures would enable Virginians to meet aggressive goals to phase out fossil fuel plants and rely heavily upon solar and wind.
I highlighted this debate back in 2018 in this article. Dominion forecast a 1.4% annual increase in peak demand over the next 15 years.
“Actual electricity demand growth over the next several years will not come close to Dominion’s inflated 1.3% growth” as forecast in its 2017 IRP, wrote William Shobe, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the University of Virginia. “Something like 0.5% to 0.7% is much more likely. And this is with data center demand.”
“It’s time for Dominion to change its model and assumptions to reflect reality—there is less load growth than predicted, and what load is coming to the Commonwealth comes from companies demanding renewable energy options,” said Will Cleveland with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
So, what’s the story nearly six years later? Here’s the headline from today’s Washington Post: “AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.” Continue reading