Ayn Rand on the businessman and bureaucrat

If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences.  If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences. 

~ Ayn Rand

 

Jay Bowen on long-term investing

Q: You describe your strategy as “endurance investing.”  How long do you typically look to hold a stock? 

A: We always feel like we are taking a 20-year investment approach.  With 20 years, you can measure the competency of an investor.  A lot of people can look good in bull markets or bear markets if positioned properly.  But over a 20-year time horizon, you’re likely to have bull and bear markets, a recession, wars, and bubbles.  Our investors have bought into this approach.

~ Harold "Jay" Bowen III, "How ‘Endurance Investing’ Produced 50 Years of Market-Beating Returns for This Tampa Pension Plan," Barron's, July 19, 2025

 

Jay Bowen: "AI is the fourth industrial revolution"

Artificial intelligence is the fourth industrial revolution.  It reminds me of the 1990s with the internet.  It’s not exactly the same, but this high-tech productivity boom that is anchored by AI is highlighted by a lot of innovation. 

In the mid-’90s, you had the Four Horsemen: Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Cisco [Systems].  If you didn’t own those stocks, you were done—and we didn’t.  But that bubble ended badly with the tech crash.  It’s not exactly the same now with the Magnificent Seven, though. 

Nvidia is the way we’ve chosen to play this.  We bought Nvidia back in 2019, and we continue to scale it back as it keeps going up.  We’ve taken profits and it’s still our biggest holding.

~ Harold "Jay" Bowen III, "How ‘Endurance Investing’ Produced 50 Years of Market-Beating Returns for This Tampa Pension Plan," Barron's, July 19, 2025

 

Edward Snowden on the right to privacy

Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

~ Edward Snowden 

Kevin Duffy on the predominant ideology in America

The ideology that the overwhelming majority of Americans share is the notion that the world is a dangerous, chaotic place, and that without a powerful government protecting them from the big, bad wolf, mayhem would ensue.  Generally speaking, the left sees the wolf as wealthy businessmen with regulators and tax collectors as the protectors, while the right sees foreigners (especially those who don't look like us) as a constant threat and rallies around the military, tariffs and ICE.  Mixed in is a bit of doublethink: the left is not quite as pro-war and the right is not quite as anti-market. 

Of course, those running the protection racket are totally drinking the Kool-Aid which means they are able to justify lying to the sheep.  To the masters, this is for their own own good: In most cases, the less they know the better.  Cue Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

~ Kevin Duffy

 

Jeremy Hammond on ideology and the post-9/11 WMD lie

When I first started on the path that led me to doing journalism, it was after 9/11, and I was speaking out against the coming Iraq war, warning people how the government was lying about WMD.  My own parents and older brother refused to listen to me and supported the war effort, even though I was providing them with all the information I had so they could see the truth that there was no evidence Iraq still had WMD.  My brother at one point at least conceded that I’d refuted all the claims and that no credible evidence was publicly available, but then his argument became: "well, I’m sure the government has classified intelligence that Iraq really is a threat and just can’t publicly release it." 

For a long time, I just couldn’t understand it.  I just assumed that facts and logic matter to people.  But the truth is that beliefs often matter more, so that reason is suspended if necessary to maintain a belief system.  The idea that the government would lie to start a war was just so incompatible with their view of the government as “the greatest on Earth”, and even though there are bad actors within it, the system itself is fundamentally benevolent, a beacon of light shining democracy and freedom on the world.  It’s a belief system, a matter of faith.  The state religion.

~ Jeremy Hammond

 

Philip Giraldi on America being drawn into Israel's 12-Day War with Iran

The fog of war may have lifted for now and the phony ceasefire between Israel and Iran has paused the immediate bloodshed, but don’t be fooled.  The respite is to allow an exhausted Israel to rearm with US provided weapons so the neoconservatives and the Israel Firsters aren’t done.  The war drums are still beating, and Trump’s America First movement is starting to fracture under the strain, with a growing divide inside MAGA over America’s pointless wars for Israel.  One group wants to stay out of foreign conflicts while the other is ready to back Israel completely, no matter the cost.  Trump is either consciously or inadvertently playing his usual role of spewing contradictions and sowing confusion and instability every time he speaks or acts.  Israel cannot retreat, it can only continue on its path of blood and slaughter, and Iran will not surrender.  This might create in the near and long run the potential for a major false flag operation by Israel to draw the US in and trigger a full-blown war against Iran. 

~ Philip Giraldi, "Trump Rolls Over for a New War," The Unz Review, June 30, 2025