e disagreeing with with some specificity.

So Rand Paul thinks that he says about the narco boats if they're armed show us who they're armed. Show us that they're armed. Well I guess you know prove to us that they're armed. If they're not armed explain to us why we kill people who are not armed. Now, that's a reasonably good push back. So it sounds like he's saying if they're not an immediate threat, why are you killing them? Because it would need to be an immediate threat. Now, where I disagree is that I think allowing them to live and even allowing other people to think the risk is low if they do the same kind of boat thing. I think those are immediate risks. And I think that the weapon is the drug. So when he says, "Show me that they're armed." That's the big tanks of drugs. And you can see in the pictures that they have these big blue tanks. They're quite obviously full of drugs because those big blue tanks are exactly what they ship drugs in. So if you believe, as I do, that the drugs are the weapon and you believe that they're definitely going to cause overdoses if they make it to the mainland, that's good enough for me. But I absolutely respect and appreciate that Rand Paul is doing a good job of steelmanning the side of being better people. I guess, you know, maybe in his view. So good job, Rand Paul. I just respectfully disagree.

Apparently Maduro, head of Venezuela, is asking OPEC to help him survive essentially. And it looks like OPEC's not going to give him a good answer, but I would say that this is pretty good evidence that Maduro is running out of options. If he thought that appealing to OPEC was going to help him. That was sort of a Hail Mary, right? If your best play is to try to get OPEC involved, I mean really, you would have to get Saudi Arabia involved or else nothing's going to happen. And Saudi is good friends with the Trump administration and Trump in particular. And there's just no way the Saudis don't get involved in this sort of thing smartly. They wisely don't get involved. So I would say there's no real chance that OPEC is going to sort of weigh in and try to influence Trump on this. I think they'll just stay out of it. But the fact that Maduro thinks this is one of his options means he's out of options. So it would suggest that something might be happening soon because he's got no plays. No cards. No cards.

I saw Mike Cernovich talking about Trump's pardons that he's issuing, and some of those pardons look a little a little bit of a head scratcher to even his supporters. And so Mike Cernovich says, "I voted for Trump." He said this on X. "I voted for Trump, drove support for him, and I'm glad each day I did. The pardons will be his downfall if this isn't handled immediately." And he in a separate post had made an appeal for someone who was in the administration to see if they can maybe dial back some of these sketchy pardons that are coming out now. I again Mike Cernovich is one of these valuable voices. Even if you don't agree with him, you want to hear what he has to say because that'll be a valuable stake in the ground and you might not agree with all of it, but you should be better off by knowing what that point of view is.

So I agree that I am uncomfortable with some of the recent pardons because there doesn't seem to be a pattern to them. And without seeing the pattern, you have to wonder what's going on. So it doesn't look like it's just for humanitarian reasons. It doesn't look like just because they were unfairly treated, although Trump tends to say that about his pardons, they were unfairly treated. That doesn't mean that's why he did it. But there's also no obvious reason for some of the pardons. So I'm left to speculate.

My speculation goes like this. There's something that Trump or the administration or the country is getting in return. I'm guessing information because I don't think Trump would do pardons for money because I mean, how much money could anybody pay for a pardon? If you're Joe Biden and you can get a million dollars for a pardon, you probably do it because a million dollars would be real money for the Biden family. But would a million dollars be anything for Trump? Not really. A million dollars. And how much do you think anybody would pay? Is somebody going to pay a billion dollars for a pardon? Probably not. So I don't think it's about money. It doesn't really light up any bells for me. It doesn't light up any lights. I just don't feel like it could be about money. Although if it were someone else I might say maybe, you know, somebody who didn't have as much money.

So if it's not about money and we can't see any other pattern to it, what is it about? Here's my best guess. There must be something. And when I say must, I should change that to might. There might be something that these particular people know or have access to or can control that Trump needs to know or control. So it's probably about someone else. And it could be something along the lines of if I pardon you, do you think you would tell us who did this? If I pardon you, do you think you would show us or tell u