“A Florida grand jury has found that the administration of the governor, Ron DeSantis, ‘misappropriated’ $10m in taxpayer money from a Medicaid settlement into the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity with ties to DeSantis’s wife, before the money was reportedly ‘funneled’ into ‘two political action committees’. In the grand jury report, which remains sealed but was obtained and published by CBS News Miami on Wednesday, the grand jurors wrote that ‘we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities’ but said that they found ‘insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally’. … The grand jurors wrote that no witness admitted or identified who directed the money to go to Hope Florida and noted that testimony also revealed that [attorney general James] Uthmeier’s political action committee, Keep Florida Clean, was the ‘prime recipient of the majority’ of the $10m.” (08/27/26)
“The Gilded Age was convicted by its name before its history was ever written. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined that appellation in their political satire by the same name. Their point was clear—the American era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the opposite of a golden age. Instead, it was a time when a thin layer of glitter concealed corruption, useless speculation, and harmful self-interest. The name stuck, permitting Twain’s summary judgment to masquerade as neutral historical judgment. … It is a relief then to have Julian Fellowes’s series, The Gilded Age …. [it] shows that the era produced many public benefits and that the rich were substantially responsible for the dynamism that led not only to economic prosperity but also to broader social inclusion, even if they were hardly always innocent or admirable.” (08/27/26)
“On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed in March in a California district court, accused the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against Anthropic for setting ‘red lines,’ or unacceptable military use cases of its AI technology. ‘The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,’ Judge Rita F. Lin, a district judge in the northern district of California, wrote in the ruling.” (08/27/26)
“After US-Canada trade talks collapsed Friday, the United States imposed a 50% tariff on a long list of Canadian goods via the never-used Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer went on TV first thing Monday in an attempt to calm financial markets with some basic tariff math. He said the new action hits a small percentage of Canadian imports into the US and an even smaller share of consumption, so there’s ‘no possible way it can really affect US well-being.’Greer is basically right on the issue of the tariffs’ direct effects. The problem for both America’s chief trade negotiator and the US economy is that the new levies raise other issues that are much more important – and troubling. … First, the spat injects significant new uncertainty into both the trillion-dollar bilateral relationship and the broader global economy.” (08/27/26)
“Rich and Riley discuss the newly christened Lake America, slipping better pork into Big Beautiful Bills, and how long until the new thing is just the normal thing.” (08/27/26)
“Amazon announced it will shutter its 21-year-old crowdsourced labor market platform, Mechanical Turk, by the end of September. Some say the rising usage of artificial intelligence delivered the fatal blow. The company launched Mechanical Turk, which users commonly call MTurk, in 2005 to pay gig workers to complete simple digital tasks that were easy for humans but challenging for computers. People looking for side jobs could transcribe audio, categorize data or label images for a few cents per task. Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos described the platform as ‘artificial artificial intelligence.’ But AI has become more capable of such mundane tasks in recent years. A 2023 study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne found that between 33% and 46% of workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk used large language models like ChatGPT to complete some of those tasks.” (08/27/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“In his 6,000-word essay, Gates proposes three direct state interventions. First, he proposes a payroll-style tax on artificial intelligence and robots to penalize companies that automate labor. Second, he proposes legal mandates that reserve specific job categories for humans only. Third, he advocates for global government coordination to slow down artificial intelligence development. As we see so often, government interventions cause more problems than they propose to solve, often having the opposite effect of their stated goals — so government intervention is a terrible idea to solve problems that have not yet happened. After all, adding a tax on automation will negate the increased profits the automation will bring. His ‘solutions’ will bring higher consumer prices; they would protect inefficient monopolies while reducing productivity. Negating the whole point of AI.” (08/27/26)
“The US Army, Fox Business reports, plans to build nuclear ‘microreactors’ at five of its bases — Fort Bragg, Fort Campbell, Fort Hood, Fort Benning, and Fort Drum — over the next two years, with at least 15 more to follow later. Why? To, the report says, ‘strengthen the military’s energy security and reduce its reliance on potentially vulnerable power grids.’ The idea certainly makes sense for a military base, but it makes sense for everyone, everywhere else, too. The biggest security and reliability worry with electricity isn’t that an enemy missile or bomb will take out a power plant. It’s that an attack or accident somewhere along the 650,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 6.3 million miles of distribution lines criss-crossing the US will stop that power from getting delivered.” (08/27/26)
