Tag: James A. Bacon
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The Craziness Chronicles: Woke Kindergarten, Marijuana Candy and the Therapeutic State
Documenting Virginia’s steady descent into madness… Woke Kintergarten. Asra Nomani and her buddies at Parents Defending Education have caught the Fairfax County Public School system with its figurative pants down. A summer learning guide at Bailey’s Elementary school for the Arts and Sciences in Falls Church suggested readers follow Web links to “Woke Kindergarten,” “No…
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Make “Contextualization” Open, Vibrant, Dogma-Free
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia has taken down the statue of Indian fighter George Rogers Clark and is expunging other monuments and tributes to individuals who fall short of lofty, progressive 21st-century ideals. President Jim Ryan has promised that the statue to Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, will stay. But it will…
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Free Zywicki!
by James A. Bacon Virginia is now in full-blown panic mode over the Delta variant and the rebound in confirmed COVID-19 cases. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has designated a majority of Virginia localities as “high COVID transmission areas,” and media are reporting outbreaks everywhere from child care centers to summer camps. Cities, universities…
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UVa Does Foster Free Expression, VP Advancement Says
by James A. Bacon The upper echelons of the University of Virginia administration are keenly aware that many alumni are unhappy with the hostility toward viewpoints that don’t conform with the dominant leftist culture at the university. As Mark M. Luellen, vice president for advancement acknowledged in a recent dear-colleagues letter, “Many of us have…
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The Craziness Chronicles: Missing Students, Missing News Articles, and ABC Licenses for Teetotalers
Where are the students? Enrollments in many Virginia school districts declined in the 2020-21 school year as parents yanked their children out of schools beset by COVID shutdowns. Now that anyone who wants to can get vaccinated can get a shot and the epidemic has receded somewhat, will enrollment bounce back? The first whiff of…
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The Best Cities for Cat Lovers
by James A. Bacon Now it’s time for some clickbait — a ranking of the Best Cities for Cat Lovers based on a methodology of dubious merit from Lawnstarter. The compilers derived their ranking from eleven metrics ranging from the number of pet-friendly hotels, animal shelters, pet stores, and veterinarians per 100,000 residents to the…
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UVa and Tech Are Leaders in Building Massive Diversity Bureaucracies
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia and Virginia Tech have the second and fifth largest bureaucracies devoted to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion among 65 large public universities studied by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. UVa has 94 DEI personnel, while Tech has 83, according to Jay P. Greene and James D.…
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The Border Crisis Is Here, Virginia
by James A. Bacon Off the top of your head, which states would you expect to be the top destinations for illegal immigrants? California, of course. Texas. Florida. New York. Would you expect Virginia to be in the Top 10? By at least one metric — the number of pending immigration cases — Virginia is…
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COVID: Is It Time to Start Panicking Again?
by James A. Bacon COVID-19 is moving faster than we can keep up with. The headline news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on a study of an outbreak in Massachusetts, is that vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the highly contagious Delta variant of virus as unvaccinated people. The…
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Wake Up, People! This Is Me Telling You That the Old Answers Are Not Working!
by James A. Bacon How many children have to be killed, wounded and traumatized before people wake up? Headline from today’s Virginian-Pilot: “Nearly a dozen children have been shot this month in Norfolk. Communities are hurting…” And then it adds this kicker: “and activists want change.” The Virginian-Pilot spoke with elected officials, community organizers, the…
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What Fun! Spending $4.3 Billion in “Free” Money!
by James A. Bacon Before departing for the private sector, former Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne outlined his thinking for the disposition of $4.3 billion in federal COVID-helicopter money: The funds are a one-time windfall. Spend them on one-time projects. Do not use the money to fund programmatic expansions that will make an ongoing claim…
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Stoney Off the Hook for Statue-Removal Contract
by James A. Bacon A special prosecutor has closed his investigation into Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney’s awarding of a $1.8 million statue-removal contract to NAH, LLC, set up by a former campaign contributor. Timothy Martin, Augusta County’s Commonwealth Attorney who was assigned to the case when Richmond’s chief prosecutor recused herself because of a conflict…
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Nuking the Schools
by James A. Bacon The COVID-19-related shutdowns of K-12 schools across the country have been educational disaster of historic proportions, according to data published in a new McKinsey & Company report. McKinsey doesn’t use the phrase “disaster of historic proportions,” but how else can one describe a response to the pandemic that left students on…
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DHR Sets the Fiscal Benchmark for Statue Removal
by James A. Bacon Let us all praise Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources. The department may be part of the culture-cleansing machine taking down historical statues and moving them to locales where they don’t offend people, but at least it is looking out for the taxpayer. The Northam administration, acting through DHR, made national news…
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Why So Much Vaccine Hesitancy?
by James A. Bacon Only a month ago, it seemed as if we were putting COVID-19 behind us. With the emergence of the super-virulent Delta strain, all bets are off. Even vaccinated people and virus-resistant school children are being called upon to start wearing masks. I have no set opinions on the proper course of…