Hola Libertinus,

This week's dispatch comes straight from the Libertas war room..

West's connecting the dots.. a Ukrainian saboteur getting arrested, tariff costs landing on corporate balance sheets (for now), why renting is the contrarian housing play, and studies confirming that daily wake-and-bake sessions aren't great for your brain (who knew!?)

Zack's digging through the archives.. S&P 500 concentration that makes science YouTubers nervous, Cold War bunkers disguised as "telephone companies," post-apocalyptic $2 bill stashes, and Nova Scotia banning being outside (for your own good).

Let's get into it.

📡 S I G N A L S

Ukrainian man arrested in Italy over Nord Stream pipeline attacks (Reuters)

Remember back in 2022 when the Nord Stream undersea pipeline got blown up? Russia accused the US, the US accused Russia, and we collectively concluded this would be one of those international incidents that the public wouldn't get any answers on? Well last year I looked into the current status of investigations into the explosions, and there was increasing evidence that it was in fact Ukraine that blew the pipeline. This makes sense. Russia wouldn't have done it because it already controlled the flow of natural gas - it had no incentive. Germany and other Northern European nations had no incentive because it ensured they wouldn't receive the natural gas they were reliant upon. The US and Ukraine were the only obvious culprits, but saying this out loud got you branded as a anti-Western, misinformation spreading, conspiracy theorist. Now, a Ukrainian man has been arrested in relation to the incident. This isn't a true confirmation that the conspiracy theories are true, but if I were a betting man, I'd be willing to put a lot on the line. ~West

I'm Changing How I Manage My Money Because of AI

“Science YouTuber making a finance video is a recession indicator”

Gotta love a great comment section!

Now time for some good ol’ milquetoasty market analysis. (The boring stuff that actually matters.)

Hank Green makes a strong case about the S&P 500 right now: on paper you “own 500 companies,” but roughly four of every ten dollars ride on ten names. Nvidia grabs a chunky slice by itself, with Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Tesla elbowing for room. Thus, you’re not buying a tidy cross-section of America, but a handful of mega-entities riding the same trend: AI.

For scale: stack the market caps of those top ten and you’re staring at a astronomical number that steamrolls entire old-line sectors in one pass: think energy and a big chunk of industrials, all rolled up and still looking diminutive in comparison. That’s wild.

Note: this doesn’t mean the index is broken. You just need to know the bet you’re placing. Is AI frothy? Maybe. Could it rewrite the entire playbook? Also maybe. We’re future-agnostic. If concentration around one big narrative makes you itchy, shave off a little and add value, mids/smalls, and international.

Bubbles happen. Busts show up after. That’s the cycle. When failures are allowed to fail, capital moves on and competition enters the chat. But we’ve spent years throwing cushions under the fall with bail-outs, rescues, and increasing deficits, which, of course, funnels the long-run gains to people who already own assets. If you don’t own assets, you mostly get higher prices and a reminder to be resilient (just eat more lentils!)

Which brings me to my current concern: if automation knocks a bunch of folks out of the labor market and the “fix” is UBI on the national credit card, you’ve centralized more spending and piled on even more debt. Fresh money chases scarce assets. Owners win again. Everyone else loses (even when they begged for it).

Back to the fun comment section:

• “Instructions unclear, invested all my money into tulips.”

• “Meanwhile my current retirement plan is learning what kind of roadside weeds are edible.”

• “I’ve taken the bold step of investing most of my money in my landlord’s mortgage.”

This is the reality of today: if you don’t own productive assets, you’re financing someone else’s future. That’s the game. Read the label on your index. Decide if you like the bet you’re making. Own things that produce real value over time. And when the next pop comes ~ because it will ~ let it clear the field and “redistribute wealth” as the Invisible Hand intended. ~Zack

Russia expects India to keep buying its oil and seeks China-India-Russia talks (Reuters)

It was only a few short years ago that the US political left (along with many on the right) collectively decided that Russia was this generation's Nazi Germany and had to be stopped at all costs. Sanctions were put in place and hinting at the idea of negotiation led to accusations of Chamberlain-esque appeasement. While a lot of this extreme rhetoric has died down, I'm surprised the US political left seems entirely unconcerned in India's role in all of this. While Russia faces sanctions from the West, India has been happy to buy its oil at discounted prices. The profits from this trade are used to fund Russia's war in Ukraine. Even though the left doesn't seem to care much, interestingly Donald Trump does. He has now placed a 25% tariff on Indian goods as punishment for India's purchasing of Russian oil. Things may escalate further depending on how much of a policy priority this is for Trump, but it seems stopping Russia may have become a bit less of a priority for the left now that Trump is trying to seal the gaps in the US's Russian economic isolation strategy. ~West

Housing, cont.

In a perfectly economically rational world, we'd expect to see the long term costs of owning and renting to be around the same. After all, housing either rent or bought accomplishes the same goal of having shelter. But we don't live in a perfectly economically rational world. The American Dream compels us all to buy houses with white picket fences and have 2.5 children. The result of this cultural bias towards purchasing a home has led to the total cost of home ownership dramatically outpacing the cost to rent. The contrarian play? Just rent. If you have strong and compelling reasons for buying, make sure those compelling reasons aren't based on the perception of others, and certainly not society at large. ~West

“Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself – While the Rest of Us Die”

True story:

Turn off the highway and a two-lane meanders through the trees, past a row of 1950s dollhouses.. identical, cheerful, lawns trimmed like a movie set. No cars. No kids. No lights. A mile of Truman Show without any extras.

At the end of Big Hole Rd: a gatehouse under floodlights, cameras, men with sidearms.

You ask, because you're young and nosy.. "So.. what is this place?"

The guard responds.. "The telephone company."

You laugh. He doesn't.

Years later I stumbled upon Garrett M. Graff's Raven Rock, which explicitly mentions the rural NC facility. Turns out the "telephone company" line wasn't so much a dodge, but more of a wink. Big Hole was a Continuity-of-Government communications node designed to keep Washington talking, no matter what happened to the rest of us.

The specs are delicious: $7 million in 1962 money to carve 100,000 square feet into solid rock. Buildings mounted on gravel and springs so the whole thing could shift six inches to "roll with an atomic punch." It also boasted its own power plant. 100,000-gallon water tank. 300,000-gallon fuel tank. Decon showers. Racks of clean clothes so if you showed up after the flash, you could change shirts and keep working.

They even positioned it on hard andesite/basalt that takes a hit and stays put.

Meanwhile, the government's plan for you in case of nuclear war? The Post Office would register who's dead. The Park Service would run refugee camps. The USDA would handle rations. They even shrink-wrapped billions in $2 bills for post-blast currency.. because even in the post-apocalypse, you still can’t end the Fed.

Government. Government never changes.

Today, Big Hole is still fenced, still watched, still very much "the telephone company." Because when push comes to atomic shove, their first instinct isn't to protect you.. it's to make sure they can keep giving you orders from their underground bunkers while you fight over canned peaches in the wasteland above. Sweet dreams, vault dweller. ~Zack

The Cost of Tariffs

When our current President was still on the campaign trail and touting the benefits of tariffs, I was tariff-ied. Tariffs are just another tax that ultimately gets passed down to consumers in the form of increase prices for goods. But that hasn't really happened yet. Inflation has remained manageably low. So what's happening? It seems that so far the real victims of tariffs have actually been corporations who are taking hits to their profitability by eating the costs of this extra tax. But that can only last so long. Goldman Sachs predicts that by October the costs of tariffs will mostly be eaten by the consumer. We'll see how things play out, but in any case, the math will still math regardless of your political beliefs. Someone has to foot the bill when extra taxes are imposed. ~West

Nova Scotia Bans Everyone From Hiking in the Woods Until October (Reason)

Nova Scotia just banned hiking until October with $25,000 fines. "It's not that you might cause a fire," the New Brunswick Premier admitted when pressed. "It's that if you're out there walking in the woods and you break your leg, we're not going to come and get you." Under current guidelines… you can operate chainsaws generating metal sparks with permits, run heavy machinery with 700°C exhaust systems at night, and have actual campfires in designated areas.. but taking a peaceful walk in the woods? That’s too dangerous for the average human! The government literally doesn't trust you to put one foot in front of the other. One veteran got fined $28,872 for hiking and is taking it to court. Peak nanny state: ban healthy recreation because people are too incompetent to exist unsupervised, then admit it's really because government can’t do its job. ~Zack

You'd have to be high to believe that

I think people should be legally allowed to put whatever substance they would like into their own body. That doesn't always mean it is a good idea. Now that marijuana use has been decriminalized in many US states, use of the drug has soared to new highs. This has given researchers much more robust data sets to work with and there is a growing body of evidence that marijuana use isn't good for you. I always assumed that waking up each morning and getting high probably wasn't a particularly healthy practice, but in today's "WHERE'S YOUR SOURCE FOR THAT CLAIM!?!?!" culture it seems like there's a high demand for studies telling us things we should probably already know without a study. ~West

That’s it for this week.

The official story is rarely the real story. And when they tell you it's for your safety, that's usually when you should start asking what they're really protecting.

Stay sharp. Stay critical. And remember: follow the smoke, not the fire.

Sic semper debitoribus
~ West & Zack

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