How in the Heck Did This Happen?

My wife wanted to reduce the mass of ammo to move, so we pulled it out and stacked it up.

And there are several thousand rounds of .223 below the table. If you are local and need .223,  308, 9mm, .380, .45; or  22LR, let me know. I need to pull some aside. If I can sell most of this at current prices, I can replace it in Tennessee. A few hundred rounds can move with us by car. But several thousand rounds takes up a lot of space and may make it harder to camouflage its nature in the car.

Another reason not to move it is that there is a small possibility that we might sell our house and need to move without a new house bought there so shipping it would be hard.

If You Grew Up Watching the Roadrunner Cartoons

You will look forward to this movie: Coyote v. Acme in which Wile E. Coyote hires an ambulance chaser to sue Acme for all the  injuries.

One Thing I Will Miss When I Move

5/12/26 CBS channel 2:

BOISE, Idaho (CBS2) — A 22-year-old Boise man convicted in two separate cases involving sexual abuse and strangulation was sentenced Tuesday morning to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

When we first moved here, I read Idaho Supreme Court decisions to get a feel for the place. I read a decision upholding life + 20 for two counts of child molestation. What? The statute at that time made sexual abuse of a child punishable by 1 year to life 

Greenland

5/12/26 BBC:

 The US has been holding regular negotiations with Denmark to expand its military presence in Greenland, according to multiple officials familiar with the discussions, with talks between both sides progressing in recent months.

US officials are seeking to open three new bases in the south of the territory, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, as they work to resolve a diplomatic crisis sparked by President Donald Trump when he threatened to seize Greenland by force.

Trump’s style of negotiation is brusque and ugly. It usually works. 

Teaching Historical Research and Writing in the Age of AI

I am flummoxed by the problem of teaching historical research and writing in the era of AI. It is not that AI cannot produce first year research papers. It can. They are often well organized and usually well written. The problems are:

1. They hallucinate. They make up sources. They cite work with no relevance to the subject. Example: a paper about colonial religion referenced a book about Spurgeon, a 19th century evangelist.

2. The usually do pretty shallow analysis of texts.

3. Fundamentals of Chicago Manual of Style such as page numbers, headers, double spaced first line indented seems to be beyond many of these programs.  In a sense, these minutiae do not teach either research methods or writing.  They do teach attention to detail.

One approach that some universities are tsking is scaffolding: breaking the process apart into individual parts.

1. Show me the question you are going to answer..

2. How did you find sources to answer that question. AI may be a perfectly fine method of finding sources. (Are your old enough to remember Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature?)

3. Your sources: explain their relevance to this question; what do they say about the topic?

4. What are the topic sentences for each paragraph? What is the sequence of topics you are going to cover?

4. Show me your bibliography.  Get it in Chicago Manual of Style. Again, using AI to do the housekeeping is quite mechanical. 

6. Write the paper filling in the paragraphs for each topic sentence.

7. Show that you can do the formatting for Chicago Manual of Style: header, page numbers, paragraph formatting.

8. Submit the paper.

The student must complete each step that can often be done by AI. You can ask the student to explain how he/she/indeterminate made those decisions and provide feedback for how it is supposed to be done. The full laziness of prompting AI and doing a copy pastae into Word is eliminated. Even if every step is AI-assisted, the student learns what each step looks like and can presumably do it in a post-EMP world using dead trees sources.

Thoughts?

I Blame Trump

5/10/26 Axios:

Violent crime fell sharply across the largest U.S. cities in early 2026, extending a nationwide decline that began after the pandemic-era crime spike.

 

Why it matters: Data from 67 major U.S. law enforcement agencies show violent crime fell across major categories during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2025.

Curiously, one of the cities that had a big drop was DC. Remember when the left was in an uproar because Trump used the National Guard to deal with their crime problem? 

A Change of Relocation Plans

My wife and I will chauffeur the dogs cross country in her car. This also simplifies getting all the guns and ammo there as well as the two telescope mirrors  

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Also, a nice road trip!

The Cadillac goes in a closed carrier for about $1300.