Tag: James A. Bacon
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Dominion Dips Toe into Battery Storage
by James A. Bacon Last week Dominion Energy announced a slew of new solar and energy-storage projects, which it describes as a “significant step” toward achieving the net-zero carbon goals for Virginia’s electric grid under the Virginia Clean Energy Act. The proposed investments include 11 utility-scale projects, two small-scale distributed solar projects, one combined solar…
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The Reconstruction Story Rarely Told
by James A. Bacon America’s culture wars are national in scope, but they hit especially close to home in Virginia, which was, before the current cultural cleansing, home to many monuments to Confederate soldiers and generals. Central to the struggle over history is a desire by many to replace narratives that whitewashed the evils of…
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A Small Victory for Pluralism at UVa
by James A. Bacon I’m beginning to have a smidgeon of sympathy for University of Virginia President Jim Ryan. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Ryan attended an event sponsored by the Virginia branch of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) to commemorate the lives lost in the terrorist attacks. YAF is an avowedly conservative…
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“White Supremacy with a Hug”
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1437560071714709506?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1437560071714709506%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fjohn-s-2%2F2021%2F09%2F14%2Fvirginia-teacher-asking-students-to-listen-to-the-teacher-is-white-supremacy-n415922 by James A. Bacon Josh Thompson, an English teacher at Blacksburg High School in Montgomery County, explains in the TikTok video above how Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (BPIS), the disciplinary approach used by Virginia public schools, amounts to “white supremacy with a hug.” BPIS was touted originally as a reform of the traditional…
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Questions McAuliffe Will Never Be Asked… But Should Be
by James A. Bacon Aspiring Governor Terry McAuliffe has referred to concerns about Critical Race Theory in public schools as a “right-wing conspiracy.” Likewise, the media has downplayed the CRT controversy roiling many school systems by dismissing CRT as an obscure academic legal theory that is “not taught in schools.” That response, of course, is…
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Your Tax Dollars at Work: The Virginia Breeze
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT) subsidizes three bus routes connecting communities in Southside and Southwest Virginia to population centers to the north. One of those, the Valley Flyer, links Blacksburg and Virginia Tech, ferrying college students to Northern Virginia and back. It carried more than 2,800 passengers…
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2021 SAT Scores: Virginia Still Shines… With Caveats
by James A. Bacon CollegeBoard has released SAT data for the 2021 testing season, and the good news for the Old Dominion is that Virginia high school graduates outperformed their peers in the other 49 states (and Washington, D.C.). Virginia’s average overall score of 1151 for English and Math was 91 points higher than the…
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Rules Are for the Little People: Terry McAuliffe Edition
Terry McAuliffe violated federal mask-wearing regulations while traveling on an Amtrak train this summer, as seen in photos obtained by Fox News. The Democratic Party candidate for governor, who has urged others to wear masks, spoke maskless on a cell phone while walking through Union Station and boarding a train, according to the passenger who…
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Quote of the Day: Mary Trigiani
Mary Trigiani is a management consultant in Southwest Virginia. One of her interests is rethinking “economic development” in the region. I was struck by this morning’s lead-in to her daily newsletter. Economic development is, for some, the game of redistributing taxpayer money and sustaining agencies for that purpose – without reporting ROI back to taxpayers…
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God, COVID and the Rage Against the Unvaccinated
by James A. Bacon “There is a growing rage among the people who are vaccinated about the people who have refused a free and effective vaccine,” Stephen Farnsworth, an oft-quoted political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, said recently. “We’re all going back toward lockdowns because of the selfishness of a few.” As…
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The Enrollment Gap Colleges Don’t Like to Talk About
by James A. Bacon While college administrators across Virginia and the United States fixate on the racial/ethnic makeup of their institutions, there’s a large and growing gender gap. Young women dominate enrollment at most higher-ed institutions these days. Fewer young men are applying, and even when they do, they’re dropping out more frequently. Administrators don’t…
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Bacon Bits: Wind, Rain and Sun Edition
What happens when the wind doesn’t blow? The North Sea, locale of the world’s largest cluster of wind farms, normally delivers strong, consistent wind flows that keeps the turbines spinning. But every once in a while, weather happens and the winds diminish. That’s what’s occurring now. Blame it on global warming, if you will —…
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9/11 Flags Vandalized
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, Young America’s Foundation, a conservative student group, planted 2,977 flags in the University of Virginia’s Amphitheater. Vandals knocked down the flags and flipped a table with a banner. Expressing solidarity with the perpetrators, Twitter users equated the memorial service to the white supremacist torch march…
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A Closer Look at Those “Driving While Black” Statistics
by James A. Bacon When the Commonwealth published its Virginia Community Policing Act traffic-stop database last week, the Richmond Times-Dispatch spun the data this way: Black drivers are disproportionately stopped and arrested, and they have their cars searched at higher rates than any other race statewide. Here’s what the RTD could have written: Black drivers stopped for…
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I’m Baaaack!
Many thanks to Dick Hall-Sizemore, Jim Sherlock and DJ Rippert for filling Bacon’s Rebellion with lively, informative content during my vacation absence. — JAB