Hola Libertinus,

Everyone’s talking about tariffs right now. Tariffs this, tariffs that—suddenly everyone's a trade war expert.

And sure, we’ve got opinions (we like free markets and free trade). And there’s also a bigger picture here—geopolitical posturing, all that jazz.

But this week? We’re taking a break from being armchair economists.

West dives into the world of Paul Le Roux—a criminal mastermind with the frugality of a CPA and the ambition of a Bond villain. Zack, meanwhile, explores why the boomers at his local co-op always give his kids the stink eye.

So grab a drink, settle in, and let’s talk narco-techlords and sterilization-happy utopians.

🗞️ DISPATCHES

Criminal Spending

Paul Calder Le Roux is probably the most prolific criminal you've never heard of.

At the height of his career he ran an international crime organization that branched into some of the most far flung and opaque markets in the world, and his net worth was likely in the hundreds of millions of USD.

But Le Roux started as a programmer, not a criminal.

He spent his childhood in Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, which gave him a first hand look into the failures of government.

His interests in technology and sovereignty converged in 1999, when he released a disk encryption program, E4M, making him a figurehead in the nascent free software and encryption movement.

By 2003, Le Roux's interests had shifted towards making money - lots of it.

He launched a mail-order grey market prescription drug company named RX Limited, and raked in millions by selling drugs to consumers in the US.

All via your local USPS and FedEx shipment services.

But Le Roux had even grander ambitions.

In 2007, Le Roux began diversifying his business interests to include illicit drug production, gold smuggling, arms trafficking, and money laundering; and his business partners included everyone from corrupt government officials to the North Koreans and Iranians.

He operated these businesses in notoriously difficult markets throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Le Roux seemed to thrive anywhere where there was corruption, power vacuums, or out right anarchy.

But intrinsic to these markets and the line of work he was in was violence.

To protect his business interests and enforce his power he began hiring mercenaries, at one point even training a ~300 man militia in Somalia.

And you didn't want to get on Le Roux's bad side.

Several murders have been attributed to Le Roux's mercenaries after Le Roux perceived people were stealing money from him.

Usually, his instructions were simple to these mercenaries - "take care of the problem".

But things came tumbling down for Le Roux in September 2012 when he was set up by the DEA in Liberia, arrested by Liberian police, and quickly turned over to US officials.

Le Roux wasn't done yet though.

Because of his dealings with enemies of the US, like North Korea and Iran, Le Roux was able to strike a deal with the Feds.

He became a national security asset, and at the behest of the US government, began working to dismantle his criminal organization from the confines of a jail cell while informing on the North Koreans and Iranians.

The exact details of the bargain he struck with the US government are opaque, but it seems likely that Le Roux will walk free again some day before he dies.

Due to Le Roux's technical knowledge and the scope and scale of his operations, he has been compared to Silicon Valley billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

Some even believe that Le Roux is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

But what interests me the most about Le Roux is how cheap he was in his personal lifestyle.

We have some insight into Le Roux's character via the multiple legal and journalistic investigations into him.

For example, Le Roux was notorious for wearing plain clothing, often pictured in nothing more than flip flops, cargo shorts, and a t-shirt.

Surveillance on Le Roux once recorded him complaining to a colleague about the high price of getting his clothes laundered in Liberia, at $2 a shirt.

Similarly, he imposed a strict $80 limit on hotel expenses for even his high-level underlings.

All the while Le Roux was likely worth somewhere in the hundreds of millions of US dollars.

This is a far cry from the likes of other notorious criminals like Al Capone, and teaches us a lesson about finance.

Le Roux knew that the money he was generating in his business was for the purpose of generating additional business, not for flaunting via personal consumption.

He was also known for his tireless work ethic, with employees commenting that they didn't think he ever slept.

In this sense, Le Roux embodied the protestant work ethic and leveraged it to maximum effect.

What's the lesson?

Work hard, be frugal, and your fruits shall prosper.

Oh, also, try to stay on the right side of the Feds. ~West

Why Liberals Hate Babies (Especially Brown Ones)—Part I

The year was 1978.

The cities were full. The borders were buckling. The land had nothing left to give.

Soon, a full-blown invasion was inevitable.

In the “demographic disaster areas”—Asia, Africa, Latin America—there were too many babies, too many empty bowls, and not enough birth control...

Billions of people—starving and multiplying.

Governments were collapsing under the weight of mouths they couldn’t feed. Aid convoys were looted. The fisheries were dead zones. The fields were dust.

And yet, they kept on breeding...

Babies born starving, ribs showing through thin skin, limbs brittle, eyes hollow, bellies bloated, riddled with parasites, buzzing with flies.

It was tragic. But it was also their fault.

The grown ups had to make some tough decisions.

Borders were sealed, aid was cut off, and nature was left to take its course.

What other choice was there?

The First-Worlders tried to help them, sending grain and medicine and seeds. But still, the babies kept coming. Like cancer.

The official policy had a name—"Total Nonintervention."

This was environmental triage, not genocide.

Genocide requires intent.

In contrast, this was simply crisis management.

After all, there was no saving them. This was a necessary culling. When carrying capacity is exceeded, you've got to make tough choices.

That's how nature works.

There's only so much nitrogen and phosphate, only so many calories per hectare... and the last thing the world needs is another swarm of Somali or Bangladeshi infants consuming ever more fresh water, rice, and diesel—resources they don’t produce, only consume.

Shouldn’t finite resources rightfully belong to the more responsible stewards of Mother Earth? Those smart enough to reproduce responsibly?

That was the mainstream dilemma.

Now, you might have noticed this didn't actually happen in 1978.

Or at the dawn of the millennium.

Or even today, all these years later.

But get this...

What you just read was considered to be an optimistic scenario.

The year was 1968 (a decade before the impending apocalypse) and the author was Paul Ehrlich.

Not some fringe racist crank, but a celebrated leftie.

A professor at Stanford, no less. A man with a PhD in entomology, a recipient of both the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club and the MacArthur "Genius" Prize... and an axe to grind with reproduction (especially in the developing world).

His book, The Population Bomb, would sell over 2 million copies, land him over 25 guest spots on The Tonight Show during the '70s, and crown him America’s most popular environmentalist.

And his ecological warnings and recommendations were dire...

• That poor people, especially in the Global South, were a cancer—his word—a metastasizing threat to planetary stability.

• That the Earth’s carrying capacity had already been breached, and population growth must be brought “into balance” by lowering birth rates—or raising death rates (or both).

• That food aid should be conditional on sterilization programs.

• That some countries should be written off entirely. Starvation, he reasoned, was regrettable—but inevitable. Triage, he said, was simply good policy.

And Ehrlich didn’t just predict hunger. Like I said above, he predicted a mob at the gates...

“Can we guess what effect this growing disparity will have on our ‘shipmates’ in the underdeveloped counties? Will they starve gracefully, without rocking the boat? Or will they attempt to overwhelm us in order to get what they consider to be their fair share?”

Now I'm not here to pass judgement or moralize.

But I want you to pause for a moment and zoom out...

Ehrlich wasn't considered radical and he wasn’t mocked or shunned.

No one called him a racist or a fascist or a colonizer.

In fact, he was quite popular. He was invited to speak at the UN and regularly appeared on television. A respected public intellectual.

And maybe you think I'm being sensational and there's no way the left could embrace this man and his views.

Maybe you think the progressives would find someone describing their visceral disgust during a trip to India like this...

“The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people… The dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel?”

...would be abhorrent and immediately needing cancellation. 

But you'd be wrong.

Of course, I don't want to give him too much credit.

He was just a mouthpiece for the neoliberal world order.

He was just a PR man for the spooks that saw 3rd world overpopulation as a fertile breeding ground for Marxism.

Obviously some Ivy League bug connoisseur with a gift for writing sci-fi isn’t the real boogeyman here.

It was the the unelected foreign policy apparatus—at home and abroad—rebranding their agenda as global citizenship and planetary stewarding.

And during the Cold War era, they wanted to crush the class struggle narrative... while it was still in nappies.

They didn't even need to pull the trigger. They could simply threaten to cut off supplies.

That was the USAID playbook!

In 1974, National Security Study Memorandum 200—drafted under Henry Kissinger—explicitly named over a dozen countries where rapid population growth was seen as a threat to U.S. strategic interests.

The solution was to tie food and aid to sterilization programs.

Classic Realpolitik.

The UN and the World Bank understood the assignment and the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID helped ‘midwife’ the modern population control movement—funding it, institutionalizing it, and globalizing it.

• The Rockefeller Foundation helped create the Population Council, funded early sterilization research, and linked agricultural aid to fertility suppression.

• USAID made ‘family planning’ a cornerstone of its foreign assistance programs—tying food shipments and health infrastructure to contraception quotas and sterilization campaigns.

• UN agencies followed suit, and governments from India to Indonesia bent under the weight of this ideological consensus.

These programs were real and they weren't for the weak of stomach.

And they were global:

• In Peru, between 1996 and 2000, over 270,000 women—most of them Indigenous, poor, and rural—were sterilized under a government program under the guise of family planning. Many were coerced. Some were lied to. Others were operated on without anesthesia.

• In Bangladesh, USAID helped fund massive population campaigns throughout the '70s and '80s. Sterilization quotas were imposed. Incentives were offered to poor women. (And international agencies praised the results.)

• In India, propaganda films were screened in village huts while surgical vans rumbled across the countryside. Under Indira Gandhi, millions were sterilized—some forcibly, others in exchange for food rations, school access, or debt forgiveness.

This was all in their best interest, of course.

The West needed to save the brown folks from themselves... with a World Bank loan in one hand… and a sterilization quota in the other.

Neo-Malthusianism was all the rage. And perhaps surprisingly, in the post war era, that was something everyone could agree on.

The CIA got geopolitical stability. The environmentalists got fewer carbon footprints. The demographers got linear charts. And middle class liberals were happy to do their part and shame anyone unenlightened enough to not limit their reproduction.

And the poor? They got what was best for them.

And that's how a liberal professor who was a hit on late night convinced the left to hate babies. ~Zack

That’s it for this week.

Next time, Zack’s back with Part II—where we zoom in on the demographic death spiral of the Western world, the uncomfortable math around immigration, and what happens when the same boomer liberals who feared brown babies now depend on them to keep the lights on.

Meanwhile, West will be reporting in from Bangkok and Kathmandu with some on-the-ground intel (and possibly gastrointestinal distress).

No probability models this week. Just the bigger picture—and the long, slow unraveling of the modern world.

Sic semper debitoribus,
~ West & Zack

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