robots.

Have you been following the story of the Pentagon press policy? I guess they have a new policy that says if you want to be in the Pentagon and talk to people and get information, you got to sign this 10-page agreement that says that you won't be soliciting people for tips or insider stuff. I guess if you get your information not from asking the people in the Pentagon, you can still publish it, but they don't want you pestering them and then reporting on it. Now, to their credit, it appears that both the left-leaning and right-leaning, including Fox News, have said no way, First Amendment, we do not sign on to this. So there's almost complete unanimity on the left and the right that this is an overreach. I guess OAN agreed, but they're a small entity. And so this is an example of why I'm not worried about an authoritarian takeover by the right because the right has what I call a sort of an internal idea of where the line is but the left can't see it and the internal line is the Constitution. If you violate the Constitution conservatives are not going to put up with any extra authoritarian stuff that violates the Constitution and this is that.

So as soon as you see that the administration has in fact gone too far and I feel like again Jonathan Turley is on the side of this goes too far and I think all the reasonable people are on that same side. You can depend on the conservative press and also the conservative public saying that's too far. So what? Imagine if you were a Democrat and you don't have the same reverence for the Constitution and you also don't know how any conservative thinks. If you did not know the inner thoughts of conservatives, you wouldn't know that there's an automatic very reliable guardrail to make sure that a Republican or conservative president doesn't go too far. We like him to push the door a little bit. We like him to test things. We don't mind if he's testing the edge, but as soon as he steps over the edge, I think everybody recognizes it at the same time. And this would be an example.

So if the combined left and right media succeeds in getting this dropped, or possibly maybe it doesn't matter. It might be one of those things that you think matters, but doesn't really matter. But I think they'll deal with it. And you can see how a Democrat would be possibly panicked about authoritarianism because they don't know that the people who will stop that authoritarianism are really dead set on stopping it if it has to be stopped. That they will stop it. But you know, you don't trust the other team to do what you want. So I can see how that'd be scary if you didn't know that conservatives aren't going to put up with losing free speech. Not for the long run.

CNN's reporting, you've heard this before, the Supreme Court I guess now is getting ready to vote on that Voting Rights Act, which included some special set aside districts for minorities just to make sure they weren't completely closed down from representation. That was part of the Voting Rights Act from way back. But I guess that will be reassessed. And if it's struck down as being racist, which it is, by design is racist, it was the kind of racist that was supposed to be the good kind, but you know, time goes by, so maybe we don't think it's the good kind anymore. It would give up to 19 extra seats to Republicans.

So here's my quibble. Do I like it that Republicans will get 19 extra seats, which might be enough to keep the midterms from flipping? Okay, I like that. That feels like that would be good for the country. But here's what I don't like. How many elections are we going to have determined by rule changes? By rule changes. It wasn't the 2020 election mostly because of rule changes around COVID and mail-in voting and stuff like that. Now we're looking at getting rid of maybe voting machines. That would be a rule change. Maybe requiring driver's licenses or IDs. That would be a rule change. Now I might be in favor of every one of these changes except for the vote by mail one. I might be in favor of them, but do you want to live in a world where the president is determined by the most recent rule change? Like what kind of system is that? We've developed a system that's completely immune to voting. It's only sensitive to rule changes. And this would be another one. So even though I'm in favor of dropping those racial set asides, I'm not comfortable with our democratic republic turning into basically a lawyer contest. I'm not comfortable with that.

Anyway, Argentinian President Javier Milei visited and was smart enough to bring with him a letter nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. I feel like all of his buddies are going to do that now. I wonder how many nominations he'll get. It could be a lot. You know, if people see that he likes it, they'll just keep doing it. But Trump very publicly decided to interfere with Argentina's elections and somehow people are just sort of ignoring that. He said that if Milei didn't get reelected that he wouldn't be nearly as kind to Argentina. Now, isn't that directly interfering with their election? And then he's with Scott Bessent, which I think is probably a good idea just because Bessent is involved and he understands this world. If he were not involved, I don't know if I would be so supportive of it, but they're going to do some kind of currency support that Argentina needs. It's been pointed out that Argentina often needs some currency problem because they have all kinds of emergencies. So I wouldn't assume that this one intervention solves their currency problem. It might get them past a bad phase, but I don't know if it's the end of their problems.

However, I am not, I don't have a problem with Trump interfering with their elections either through the currency support or through just threatening that he won't be so friendly if somebody else wins. And the reason is that I think this falls under the Monroe Doctrine, doesn't it? You know, the Monroe Doctrine says, "Don't mess around with our hemisphere. We're the big dog." Trump is basically just Monroe Doctrine all over this thing. So yes, he's interfering in their elections. But I think he, I would go even further. If they elected some pro-Chinese communist leader, I think he would go further than talking, you know, that they might get kinetic. The CIA might be setting up a government overthrow function there. So I feel like it's all, I think that the Monroe Doctrine works. It's good for the US. It's definitely America first. So I'm okay with it, but it definitely is interfering with their elections.

Dan Driscoll, he's a US Army secretary. He described Ukraine as quote the Silicon Valley of warfare. Meaning that at this point the Ukraine military might be one of the strongest military in Europe because of all the practice and all the weaponry, but also their innovative system appears to be just way better than Russia because you know Russia is you get a paycheck no matter what you do. The Ukrainians have all these incentive systems and various ways probably to get rich as well for building better drones. So what you should see, as I've warned you, is that you're going to see the Ukrainian innovation start to make a big difference. The Russians still have the human power, the missiles. They've got a range of advantages, but those advantages should be disappearing entirely because the innovation thing just keeps going. Russia isn't making lots of new soldiers, but Ukraine might be making lots of new innovations. So one of them is going to improve faster than the other one could improve.

And I guess they bombed each other last night. Their energy facilities are both going after them. Breitbart London says Russia hammered Ukraine with glide bombs and they struck a hospital and energy facilities and meanwhile Ukraine struck I guess St. Petersburg according to Grok. St. Petersburg is already having blackouts. So Ukraine's being successful there. And Russia's low on diesel and aviation fuel. Trains are late. Planes, some planes are grounded because they don't have aviation fuel. And I guess Siberia is going to have a special problem because they would be the most vulnerable. So I don't know if we really know what's going on over there at all.

But there's a poll according to Breitbart's John Hayward that 75% of Ukrainians want Zelensky to leave office after the war. So do you think the war is going to end if the guy in charge of the war knows that 75% of the people want him to leave office after the war? Is he going to end the war? Probably not. So that's a problem. I was going to ask you what percentage of people think you should stay, but I think you already figured out 25%.

Hong Kong's going to install 60,000 AI enabled cameras in public. So did you think there was any chance we wouldn't get to a future where there were cameras everywhere in public that could do facial recognition and connect it to your entire life? Well, it's definitely happening. It's happening in Hong Kong. And I'm pretty sure it's just going to happen everywhere. Now, sometimes people say, "Scott, why are you in favor of losing all the privacy?" I'm not in favor of losing all the privacy. It's just going to happen. There's no world in which we don't lose all of our privacy. I hate to say it. I mean, it might take longer, it might take shorter, but you're going to lose all your privacy. Or somebody is, maybe your children. There's literally nothing you can do about it. The technology will just make it too easy.

And then this is kind of cool. DirecTV has worked out some deal with another company. Ars Technica is talking about this. Another company called Glance. But what it'll do is make the screen saver on your TV or whatever it is you're watching for DirecTV. It will put you in the ad. So I think you have to give it approval, but you can take a picture of your face and then from that point on some of the ads will have you in the commercial with AI. Now,