Category: Blogs and Blog Administration
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RVA 5×5: State of The City – What The People Think
by Jon Baliles There is a little-known part of Richmond’s City Code that requires the City Auditor to produce a “Services, Efforts, and Accomplishments” (SEA) Report by conducting a thorough poll/survey of Richmond residents to see what they think about the level of service and performance and deliverability of City government. In other words, it’s…
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RVA 5×5: Annual Crime Briefing Numbers
by Jon Baliles The Richmond Police Department held its annual crime review briefing this week and the numbers were positive on the surface, a little mixed in total, and almost miraculous considering the force has more than 150 vacancies. Mark Bowes writes in the Times-Dispatch that “The good news for the city of Richmond from…
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The Box and the Snowball
by Joe Fitzgerald There’s a box, and there’s a snowball. The box is the support of the Bluestone Town Center. It is a well-constructed but beautifully decorated box, built on strong buzzwords. Affordable Housing, and Climate Change, and Dense Development are the shiny wrapping on this gift. The snowball of opposition rolling toward City Hall…
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Note to Subscribers
For reasons too tedious to explain, I accidentally published some notes I had written to myself regarding comments on a previous post. I have to assume that the notes were broadcast to our subscribers. I did not mean to make them public. My apologies.
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Dealing with Trolls
by Carol J. Bova In March 2022, The Atlantic published an article, “Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us,” by Arthur Brooks, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the host of The Atlantic podcast “How to Build a Happy Life.” Brooks wrote: If you use the internet, the odds are about even that you’ll be mistreated there. A…
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New Sheriff in Town
by James A. Bacon The comments section of Bacon’s Rebellion is a patch of the Wild West on the Internet. Laws and rules are frequently ignored. There are too many ad hominem attacks, too much skirting around profanity restrictions, too many excursions into rhetorical no-man’s land, and too many flaming wars. There’s gold in them…
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RVA 5×5 – Holiday Briefing
by Jon Baliles It’s Friday! Which means this newsletter would normally be filled with stories and analysis about what is happening in the RVA region (not all of it good), with an honest and insightful take (so far as that is possible). For instance, this week we could have stories about: A non-profit that presented…
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RVA 5X5: A Five-Part Series of Stories
by Jon Baliles STORY #1 — The Pot Overfloweth There have been a lot of stories this week about the $21 million surplus announced by Mayor Levar Stoney and what he is asking City Council to endorse and how to disburse it in a budget amendment vote scheduled for a Monday evening vote. “The growth…
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RVA 5X5: Enrichmond and the City’s Radio Silence
by Jon Baliles I won’t do a “Top Stories of 2022” list for this newsletter, but if I did, one of them would surely be the collapse of the Enrichmond Foundation and the radio silence on all fronts concerning its finances, the groups that depended on it, their assets, and the two historic Black cemeteries…
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Passing the Baton
The Big Bacon is pleased to announce that Bob Rayner and Robin Beres will make taking over primary editing duties at Bacon’s Rebellion. They will take on tasks that I will no longer be able to fulfill as executive director of The Jefferson Council. Bob and Robin have been working as a team for years.…
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What’s Next for Bacon’s Rebellion
As noted in the press release I just posted, I have been appointed executive director of the Jefferson Council, the alumni organization fighting to preserve the Jeffersonian tradition, free speech and intellectual diversity at the University of Virginia. Although I’ll continue to publish Bacon’s Rebellion, I won’t be able to devote as much time to…
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Insanity Gives Way, Briefly, to Street Art
So much to blog about and so little time. Jon Baliles, some of whose columns we republish on Bacon’s Rebellion, has been distracted by his duties as a board member of the Richmond Street Art Festival, so he has been unable to report on the latest inanity and insanity in River City. But the art…
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Note to Readers
Baconites and Rebels, I have disabled one of the two services that had been feeding ads to Bacon’s Rebellion. I have been receiving frequent complaints about glitches in the blog, and from my own observation, the ads were highly intrusive. The ads were bringing in a not-insignificant revenue stream, but not enough to justify the…
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Utah Bound!
I’m leaving Wednesday on a much-needed vacation, in which my wife, traveling companions and I expect to do a lot of hiking with spectacular views such as this one. I’ll be gone about 10 days — without a laptop, unable to blog! (Is there a blogging-withdrawal antidote comparable to Oxycodone? Oh, maybe it’s spending time…
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The Trumpification of Bacon’s Rebellion
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Rather than engage an opponent in reasoned debate, Donald Trump has a habit of conjuring up a derogatory nickname for that person and attacking in that way. One aspect that attracted me to Bacon’s Rebellion a little more three years ago was the civility of the discourse and the willingness to engage…