Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

Q&A: “CURT, WHAT IS A GOOD SOURCE OF NEWS???”

—“Can you recommend a good source of news? I mostly read the Economist; neoliberal assumptions aside it’s weighty and thorough.”— Trent Fowler

Interesting question that I can answer on multiple levels.

1) Every source of news is ‘good’ if you know what they’re lying about (their bias).

When I hear news, I don’t take it on face value as a statement of honest moral intent, but I take every single news item i read as a lie of some sort, if for no other reason than it’s stated with sufficient confidence to get your opinion: ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseodorationalism, pseudoscience and deceit.

So all news is good news if you realize its all lies and you’re looking for possible half-truth candidates by combining enough stories across enough outlets that you can figure out the rational intentions of the people who are being reported upon.

2) I tend to read this web site every single day: www.rtable.net/index/rt/economics/recent/ Understanding that professors in the academy are always biased toward globalism and think the academy is a good thing instead of the problem.

I read stratfor, understanding that it’s got a neocon bias.

I tend to read the Forbes blogs.

I read the WSJ

I read pretty much any new paper that’s mentioned on SSRN.

I let other people SELECT news for me (I follow people on twitter)

3) But here is the trick. You get to the point where you have enough information, that really, you are rarely learning anything new. Because man isn’t new. Man’s thousands of years old. And all that happens over time is that we make things cheaper, and our speech gets more complex. But otherwise we’re the same as we were when we built the first villages and cities.

I think news cannot be understood unless history is understood. So I would read my suggested reading list before I would worry about the news. News is just gossip.

History and science will be the NEWS to you, until you run out of news when reading history and science.

And you will run out of news once you see it’s just a long history of repetitions of cycles.

And that’s the most profound thing I can tell you.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.