Author: James A. Bacon
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UVA to Pay $9 Million in Mass-Shooting Settlement
The University of Virginia has settled with the families of five victims of a November 2022 mass shooting that occurred after a class outing to Washington, D.C. The university will pay $2 million each to the families of football players Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry and another $3 million to be divided…
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Is There an AI for Fact Checking AI?
Type “UVA Board Visitors members” into the Bing search engine, and the above information highlight appears atop the page. Just one problem. The UVA Board doesn’t have seven members, it has 17 members. For a source the text points to an article in UVA Today discussing board appointments by Governor Bob McDonnell in 2010. Admittedly,…
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The Junk Science Behind a Property-Valuation Study
by James A. Bacon When you examine every issue through a racial lens, everything looks like racism. It’s even easier to find racism everywhere when you resort to junk science (or social science, as the case may be). A case in point is a new study by Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia (Home), which…
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Wait, I’m Confused. Are Rising Housing Valuations Good or Bad for Black Neighborhoods?
by James A. Bacon It’s hard to keep up with the twists and turns of what progressives deem to be racist these days. Once upon a time, gentrification was considered racist because the phenomenon of White people moving into a neighborhood increased local property values, which increased taxes on long-time African-American residents and pressured them…
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Yes, You Can Fight City Hall
by James A. Bacon Sometimes it takes grumpy old men to get things done. Ken Davis, retired from a career in the Attorney General’s Office, lived with his wife in the Willow Lawn area of Richmond for more than 40 years. They paid their property tax bills on time and without complaint. But in July…
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Oppression of the Drinking Class
It’s time to proclaim a new class of the “oppressed” in the pantheon of society’s victims — bourbon drinkers and other imbibers of liquors. Virginia’s tax system engages in systemic bias in favor of the teetotalers. It’s not just that drinkers in Virginia must purchase their spirits at government-owned ABC stores or that they must…
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A Curmudgeon Counts His Blessings on Memorial Day
by James A. Bacon It’s Memorial Day, and I should be choosing an uplifting and patriotic image like an American flag to accompany this post. But I’m feeling more than ordinarily cranky this morning, so I’m using this image of an old man shouting at birds and the rain. That’s me, alright. Set aside my…
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Civil Disobedience Without Consequences
by James A. Bacon The anarchists who organized the UVA Encampment for Gaza are clamoring for the University of Virginia to reverse its No Trespass Order (NTO) against nursing student Mustafa Abdelhamid. The circumstances behind the sanction are absent from the brief Instagram post by the anarchist collective, but the restriction was imposed for actions…
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Data Centers Are Good for Virginia. Predictably, Opposition Is Mounting.
by James A. Bacon Data centers have become such big business in Virginia that the industry has formed its own trade association, the Data Center Coalition, Unsurprisingly, that group is headquartered in Leesburg, smack dab in the middle of the largest cluster of data centers in the United States if not the world. You know…
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Apologies (Once Again)
You may have seen some garbage posts on the blog and, if you are a subscriber, in your in-boxes. My apologies. I’ve been experimenting with ways to apply Artificial Intelligence to summarize the content of Virginia news and opinion on blogs and websites free from paywalls. Let’s just say that I could use some AI…
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Open the Books Digs Up 100 More DEI Employees at UVA
by James A. Bacon Back in March, Adam Andrzejewski and his team at Open the Books, a non-profit dedicated to transparency in government spending, concluded that the University of Virginia is spending $20 million in payroll for 235 employees (including student interns) on work relating to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Describing Andrzejewski’s numbers as “wildly…
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Money Alone Won’t Solve Teacher Shortage
by James A. Bacon Virginia, like other states, is facing a teacher shortage. The debate over how to reverse the thinning of the ranks has been mind-bogglingly superficial. As a consequence, there is little prospect of solving it. The root of the problem is that the Virginia Education Association (VEA) and its ideological allies in…
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UVA Groups Are Hamas Proxies, Lawsuit Contends
by James A. Bacon Matan Goldstein, a first-year Israeli-American student at the University of Virginia, has filed a lawsuit against President Jim Ryan and Rector Robert Hardie, alleging that they stood by and did nothing while pro-Hamas groups subjected him to harassment, intimidation and abuse for his religious and ethnic identity. Goldstein drew attention as…