Tag: James A. Bacon
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Development and Sea-Level Rise in the Tarheel State
by James A. Bacon People love living on the water. They just can’t get enough of it. If they can’t afford to live on the waterfront, they will pay a premium just to live near it. Signs of the human proclivity for water views are evident all around Beaufort, N.C. (pronounced Bow-fort, not Bew-fort), a…
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Horse Play
A herd of horses live on Shackleford Banks, a barrier island near Beaufort, N.C., where the Bacon family is vacationing. The horses do not comprise a thundering herd of popular imagination, rather they are dispersed in small groups — “harems” — with a stallion, two or three breeding mares, and their colts. Five or six…
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Sunset: Beauford, N.C.
The Bacon family is on vacation this week in Beaufort, N.C. Blogging will be sparse.
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UVa, COVID, and Jim Ryan’s $200,000 Bonus
by James A. Bacon Like many other University of Virginia alumni, I was taken aback to hear that the Board of Visitors had granted President Jim Ryan a $200,000 bonus for the great job UVa had done in addressing the COVID-19 epidemic. Rector Whittington Clement put it this way: “When the situation this year became…
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COVID, Vaccinations and Risk
by James A. Bacon A new feature of the Virginia Department of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard compares the rate of infections, hospitalizations and deaths among vaccinated and unvaccinated people. We’ll get to that in just a moment. By way of preface, it’s worth noting that every Virginian who wants the vaccine has it. The graph above…
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Maybe the Redistricting Commission is Working Out After All
In two recent articles in Bacon’s Rebellion, Dick Hall-Sizemore has thoroughly documented the sausage-making that has gone into the Virginia Redistricting Commission. It’s ugly, and it’s discouraging, and makes you wonder if there is any hope for humanity. But the release of two draft maps shows what the new districts could look like. The maps…
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Is Anyone In Charge Over There?
The new rules for occupying a prestigious room on the University of Virginia’s Lawn allow students to post comments and materials on two message boards affixed to each door. An addendum to the “Terms and Conditions for Lawn and Range Residents, Housing and Residence Life” states: “Any materials placed on the message boards must fit…
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Left Behind…
Richmond resident and green card holder Javed Habibi has lived in Richmond since 2015 with his wife, and four daughters. The electrician and his family visited Afghanistan in June and was scheduled to return to the U.S. Aug. 31, but all hell broke loose when Kabul fell to the Taliban. The U.S. government promised him…
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Bacon Bits: Reality Sucks Edition
Bye, Bye, Brackney. The City of Charlottesville will not renew the employment contract of Police Chief RaShall Brackney, who took on the job in June 2018, the City announced on its website yesterday. No explanation was given. However, the announcement follows less than two weeks after publication of a survey of Charlottesville police officers showing…
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Nine Years Later, Bon Secours Still Hasn’t Made Good on Promises
by James A. Bacon In October 2012, the City of Richmond negotiated a $40 million deal with the Washington Redskins and the Bon Secours Virginia Health System to build a Redskins training camp in the city. The complex deal had many moving parts. To make it happen, the city gave Bon Secours a long-term lease…
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Last Year’s Enrollment Declines Sharpest in Kindergarten
by James A. Bacon National enrollment in public schools across the country fell by 2% nationally — by 1.1 million students — in the 2020-21 school year as school districts and parents grappled with how to respond to the COVID-19 epidemic, finds a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The…
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Hospitals Experiencing a COVID Crunch
The media is full of stories about how the rebound in COVID-19 cases fueled by the Delta variant is putting hospitals under the most stress since the peak of the epidemic in February. Hospitals are rapidly filling up. Some are reporting shortages of beds, others of staff. Making matters worse, hospitals from other states, also…
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Welcome to America
Thousands of Afghan refugees are arriving at Fort Lee in Virginia for medical treatment and immigration processing before settling permanently in the U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, who visited Fort Lee Monday, estimates that 70,000 to 80,000 Afghans live in the U.S., reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Odds are that most of the refugees from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan…
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Fairfax Schools to Spend $188 Million Undoing Shutdown Damage
by James A. Bacon Fairfax County Public Schools are getting $188 million in federal helicopter COVID-19 relief funds, and school officials propose spending about 88% of the sum undoing the damage caused by the system’s COVID-19 shutdowns. Eighty-six million will go toward addressing “unfinished learning,” and another $78 million to “academic, social, emotional and mental…
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Home Values and School Quality
by James A. Bacon It has become commonly accepted wisdom that a leading cause of poverty in Virginia is the phenomenon in which affluent citizens use their superior buying power to move to school districts with the highest quality schools. The poor, who have little buying power, are stuck in the worst school districts and…