. 8%. That's pretty impressive. So I'm going to say all bets are off. We don't know how big that could get. I still don't see a path to get all the way to no income tax and tariffs do everything, but I'm not going to rule it out now. So I'm moving from, well, there's no way that's going to work to I don't know. Maybe. Maybe.

Let's talk about Mark Kelly, Senator Kelly, who as you know is part of what we're calling the seditious six. One of the six Democrats who did the video saying that the military should not obey illegal orders. So he goes on Meet the Press yesterday and he was asked by the Meet the Press host if he would refuse an order if he had been in the military and he had been asked to attack the Venezuelan drug boats, would he consider that an illegal order? That is a good question. So if you're thinking that NBC is going to give him softballs, well that wasn't a softball. That question was exactly the question I wanted to be asked. Would you interpret this as an illegal order if you had been asked to blow up one of these Venezuelan narco boats?

Well, here's what Kelly said. Rather than answer the question, he avoided the question. He had just said that it's sort of common sense and any reasonable person can certainly tell the difference between an illegal order in the military and a legal one. And then when he's asked to give a specific example, is this legal or illegal, he changed the subject and he reinterpreted it by saying, "Well, the news story recently about Hegseth alleges that there was a secondary attack on one boat, the first one I think, that killed the survivors." So he said, "Well, you know, we're really talking about that second order." But he didn't really answer the question at all.

Now, how can he have it both ways? How can it be that a reasonable person can definitely look at a real world situation and they would definitely know what is legal and what isn't? So there'd be no real ambiguity in the real world. But he couldn't answer the very first question. He had to avoid the question because he couldn't answer it. And you know what? I don't know the answer to the question either. So even if you take the story about Hegseth to be true, and by the way I don't think that is at all confirmed, that's an allegation, a whistleblower thing. I don't know that that will ever be confirmed that there was a standing order of some kind that you had to kill all the people in the boat. I don't know. I'm not assuming that the allegations will be proven. But let's say they were just to take this question to its logical conclusion.

What if you were in the military, you took out the boat and you said, "Okay, that part's legal because they're terrorists and I've got the legal authority to do it." But then there are these two alleged survivors and then suppose you had the question of do you take them out too or do you try to rescue them? To which I say how does that work with terrorists in general? If you were in an airplane over land and you spotted some terrorists, be they al-Qaeda or someone else, and you knew that's who it was, so you knew that it was al-Qaeda and they weren't in the act of doing a terrorist thing, but they were definitely preparing for it. So let's say they were loading bombs onto a truck, and you knew that they had bad intentions for those bombs. Could you kill those terrorists from the air if all you knew is that it's al-Qaeda and they were preparing some bombs? To which I say, I don't know, but I think it would be legal.

So I asked ChatGPT, is it illegal for the military to kill a terrorist who is preparing a terror act? What do you think the AI said? I asked ChatGPT in this case, not Grok. Grok had some issues this morning, so I was using ChatGPT. What do you think in the comments? You tell me. Do you think that AI said, "Oh, it's totally legal to kill a terrorist if they're in the act of preparing a terror act." Well, here's what it said. It said, "In general, under international law and the laws of armed conflict, it is not necessarily illegal for a military to target and kill a terrorist who is actively preparing an imminent terror attack." And then it goes on and explains it.

Now we are soundly into gray area here, right? If we have already declared the narco boats are terrorists because they're delivering a weapon of mass destruction to our shores, that makes them terrorists who are in the act, right in the middle of the act of doing the terror thing which is delivering these drugs to our shores. So even though two of them survived the first attack, if they were al-Qaeda and they were on land and they were loading bombs onto a truck, you don't think we'd kill any survivors if we had to if it took a second shot? I think we would. And it doesn't feel like that would be illegal to me.

Now, I'm not in the military, so I'll never have to make that decision. But are you telling me that the average person in the military or I'll say it a different way, are you telling me that every person in the military or almost every person would have the same opinion about what I just described? Would they? To me, it seems obvious that people would have different opinions. So if it's obvious that people could have different opinions about are these terrorists in the act of a terror attack or are they not, I think Mark Kelly's argument just falls apart because if I can't answer the question, are you telling me that just being in the military would have helped me? I doubt it. Do you think that they had a training class that covered that exact situation? I doubt it. I doubt they had any training that was specific to that. And I don't think that the generic understanding of what's legal and the generic understanding of what a terrorist is gets you there. I think that's a genuine gray area.

So to Kelly's argument that anybody in the military would know the difference between a legal and an illegal act, that doesn't even feel like it's close to being true. I feel like most of the things in the real world are messy and that there would be just all kinds of gray area. This is just an obvious one. And we didn't even have to look for a weird example, right? I'm literally taking the example that's the headline in the news right now. If the headline that's in the news right now, even that one, we can't decide if that's a clear case of illegality or not, what's the next one going to be?

Anyway, terrible argument, but it's getting more interesting because apparently there is some existing law that I believe has not been used maybe for decades or hundreds of years, but there's some law that says that it is a felony with up to 10 years in prison for anyone quote with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the US military or naval forces. It is literally a felony for what the six Democrats even made that video because don't you think that they would have known that that would have an impact on interfering or impairing or influencing the loyalty, morale, or discipline? I feel like you can make the case. I don't know that any jury would necessarily convict people for free speech. Probably free speech would win, I'm guessing. But this is a real risk if you were one of the people telling the military that maybe they're going to be getting illegal orders more than they've ever gotten before. I don't know. That looks pretty sketchy.

Also another Elon Musk ism coming from his recent podcast. I would love to give credit to who was interviewing him because I got a lot of good stuff, but I did not see it in what I was looking at. So I apologize. If one of you knows who this podcast was with, put it in the comments so at least the other people can see it. I want to give him a shout out because he did a really good job getting some good stuff.

So Elon Musk was talking about what DOGE and the DOGE experience taught him. He said it was like a very interesting side quest, which is a funny way to put it. He said fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They're not going to say, "Give us money for fraud." He went on. It's going to be like, "Save the baby pandas NGO," which is like, "Who doesn't want to save the baby pandas? They're adorable." But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing. It's just corruption essentially. And then you're like, "Well, can you send us a picture of the panda?" And they're like, "No." And he goes, "Okay, well, how do we know it's going to be pandas then?" And that does pretty well capture my understanding of what our government and the NGOs and where all our own money is going.

I did not know that before DOGE. My entire understanding of the country, the debt, the government, all of that changed radically when I learned what Elon Musk is describing is actually the normal way we're operating. If this had been a one-off, like well, there was that one time the bad people pulled one over on us. No, it's not one time. It's the only way it works. It's a universal effect. It's not the exception. It's the way everything works. I didn't know that. I mean, that would be beyond my most cynical, skeptical view of how anything works. I had no idea.

I did know, to my small credit, I did know that at the city level 100% of things are corrupt. I've been saying that for a while. The city, the people who are allocating money, your tax money for city services, of course they're corrupt. Maybe not day one, maybe not the first person who ever gets the job