FXBG Advance Saturday, June 27, 2026
OUR WEEKLY READER: AI Masters @ UMW by the Numbers. De-Trumpification. They're Really Called 'Points,' but You Can Still Say 'Arrowheads.' Here's How to Find Them. Breaking the News.
By the Numbers: UMW’s New Master’s of Science in Artificial Intelligence in Business
By Steve Watkins, Advance Editor
$400,000: Amount requested from the General Assembly to cover first-year start-up costs for new Master’s of Science in AI in Business at UMW (“new faculty to be hired and new faculty and existing faculty to develop the curriculum”).
$140,000: Salary for a new assistant professor of Business/AI to be hired for the 2027-28 academic year.
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De-Trumpification Commission: Sledgehammers, Golden Calves, and the Federal Debt
By Phil Huber, Advance Columnist
From Fredericksburg, Washington is just close enough to be dangerous. It’s about an hour away by car, roughly 52 miles, which makes the city ideal for day trips, congressional gawking, and, in some imagined, happier future, civic calisthenics on the National Mall. If the next administration is serious about national renewal, it should create a De‑Trumpification Commission and invite the public to help remove the monumental evidence of our recent bout of presidential self‑branding. This would not be vandalism. It would be debt reduction with historical interpretation and some exercise for the arms, chest, back, legs and core.
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How to Find an Arrowhead: A Life-Long habit of Looking Down Brings Its Own Rewards
By Ranjit Singh, Advance Environmental Columnist
I grew up on a family farm alongside Potomac Creek in Virginia. Our farm’s rich soil holds millennia of Native American history. As a boy, I regularly found “arrowheads” along the muddy creek banks and adjacent fields (more on those quotation marks later). Without the internet for entertainment, some days I even had a rule that I couldn’t go home until I’d found at least one. Over time my eyes got better at finding them. Now, I have hundreds sleeping in softly-cushioned boxes.
I still find arrowheads today. Birders win by looking up, but my life-long habit of looking down brings its own rewards. Arrowheads are a tangible and addictive way to learn history. They also connect us to those who called this land home long before us. When I joined Facebook years ago and began posting picture of my finds, the “How do you find them?” question started rolling in.
So, here’s my starter guide. It includes common sense rules that will not only save you from wasting many hours, but could keep you from legal trouble.
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Breaking the News: When Big Brother Isn’t Just Watching, He’s Paying Your Salary
By Steve Watkins, Advance Editor
Years ago, when I was editor of The Florida Flambeau, the independent student newspaper at Florida State University, we published a series of feature articles on gay life in Tallahassee. This was back in the late 1970s, several years after the Stonewall Riots, but “Gay Pride” was still years from being a thing—a reality that hit us hard when Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority flooded our major advertisers with letters of complaint and ripped copies of the “immoral” articles.
In less time than it took to say “Anita Bryant is a vile homophobe,” Publix and Albertson’s grocery stores canceled their weekly full-page ads—10 percent of our annual operating budget—which very nearly put us out of business. It also didn’t help that our business manager embezzled $200,000 not long after. She went to prison for a couple of years, but we never got the money back. I suppose we should have asked more probing questions when she showed up to work one day with a gag bottle of invisible ink.
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