le ships. And I guess what they do is they bring in a bunch of helicopters. And the helicopters keep everybody busy. Then the special elite team, they rappel down presumably. I don't think the helicopter lands. I think they probably rappel down. And then they use their superior weaponry to make it to the bridge and then basically take over. And then there's some speculation that they're looking for a captain who would know how to run the boat after they take it over because it's not that common to know how to operate that kind of a ship. So it might be hard to find somebody who's willing to be the new captain.

Would they be SEALs? I don't know. Maybe they would be a subset of SEALs, but the SEALs were not mentioned in this story.

Anyway, as part of that story, I keep hearing it said that if the Venezuelan oil shipments are shut down or even seriously degraded, that it will collapse the economy of Cuba because Cuba is already a basket case and it depends on cheap Venezuelan oil. So if the cheap Venezuelan oil gets cut off or seriously degraded, some people say, "Oh, the Cuban economy will collapse." To which I say, "There's never been a time in my life when the Cuban economy was not on the border of collapse. Do you believe that they're going to collapse?" Every time we hear this, things don't collapse. At least not completely. So it seems like there's always a workaround for everything.

But the thing I still don't know is if the Trump administration thinks they're getting a twofer and that they're going to find a way to do regime change in Cuba the hard way just indirectly by putting pressure on their sponsor. Don't know.

All right. According to Politico, the US Immigration Customs Enforcement people that we know as ICE are buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of surveillance tools so that they can find the non-legal residents. So that would include social media monitoring tools, facial recognition software, license plate readers, and services to find people where people live and work.

So let me take you back to something I've been predicting for 10 years. If you think you can protect your privacy, you can't. Your privacy was always going to disappear and it wouldn't matter who's in charge. And the reason I say that is that the utility of taking your privacy away is just too high. So the government, whoever the government is, is going to say, well, you know, we really need to do this for the illegals. Then the next thing you know, you're gonna say, "Well, we have all these tools, why don't we also use it for the police force?" And I don't think it will ever matter if the Democrats or the Republicans are in charge. I think in every scenario, just the usefulness of taking away your privacy for law and order will be so high that you don't have a chance. It will just disappear. And I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm just saying it's inevitable.

So if you're worried about it happening, maybe what you should worry about is not doing anything that can be discovered that you would not want to be discovered because a full lack of privacy is just guaranteed in the future. I mean, that's before you have a robot in your house. How much privacy could you have with a robot in your house?

All right, let me ask you this. Let's say you've got an Optimus robot and the police say if we could get that robot to spy on you that we could find out if you're doing anything bad, would Elon Musk say, "Nope. Even though you have a warrant, I will not turn on the ability to monitor people through the robot, which would be presumably not that hard." But even Elon Musk can't defy the Department of Justice. So if the Department of Justice says, "Oh yeah, this is a totally legitimate use of a warrant. You've got a robot. We can listen through the robot. We are ordering you to make that robot a spy." Would he do it? I don't know that he would have a choice. I think he would go to jail if he didn't do it. So yeah, as soon as there's a robot in every house, you'd better not break any laws.

All right. Surprisingly, there's a report that Zelenskyy is going to meet at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to try to reach an agreement. Now, that surprises me because the most recent comment from the Russian envoys was that they didn't make any progress recently and they're not close to a deal. But there are some hints that they might be close to a deal. One of the hints is that Trump probably wouldn't take the meeting unless he thought it's close enough that he could push it over the edge. Now, he's an optimist. So just because he thinks they might be close, that doesn't mean they're close, but it's worth a try.

So remember, he's got Kushner and Witkoff working on this, and they're very good at what they do. So maybe we're in for a surprise. But according to Axios, here are some of the things that are the biggest sticking points and why we might be closer to a deal than we think. One is that Ukraine needed security guarantees. And apparently the US is willing to push some legislation through Congress that would give them security guarantees without NATO. Now, what would that look like? What exactly would a US security guarantee be unless it meant we would put boots on the ground if Russia got adventurous? Well, I don't know. But one of the things it could be is an open-ended, you know, we will respond. But what we would plan to do is give the Ukrainians the good weapons that we've never given them before.

So suppose we said, here's the deal, Russia. We have held back our best weapons because then it would look like we're part of the war if we give them the good stuff. But if we give them a security guarantee and you move on them militarily, we will instantly take the controls off and they can have everything except our nuclear weapons. So suddenly you will not be facing Ukrainian weapons, you'll be facing the most optimized American weapons. And if you look at what companies like Anduril are doing to make our weapons smart