With my apologies to the editor, I think it is time that we stop obsessing over the news. 

Unless, of course, it is the Asheville Daily Planet — and then you may obsess all you like. 

Fear porn has become the news dish dejour and the American people are devouring it with real gusto. 

The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a brilliant tract called “Beyond Good and Evil.”

Well, it may be more difficult to get beyond good and evil than it is to get beyond fake news to find those more reliable news sources that can get us closer to the truth. 

Is it even possible anymore to get news that is truthful? 

Probably not, but we can do better and get closer to the mark. 

Failure to get closer to the real news — the news behind the news, to a deeper understanding of the news — leaves us vulnerable to manipulation by the state-controlled corporate media. 

Knowing the truth puts us in a better position to improve our lives and the state of our society. 

We need to have a better sense of reality to achieve a more enlightened society. Do you really believe that this is the best we can do? 

The story of the past few years should be a big red flag that something is wrong at a deep and fundamental level.

The first truth we need to follow before we get trapped by the media’s web of falsehood and distortion is to respect the reality that the individual is primary and not a secondary entity within the state. 

What this implies is that we must be able to think for ourselves to be free. 

Freedom, first and foremost, is freedom of thought. A well-balanced state recognizes the primary function of the individual as the source of real freedom. Freedom flows from the individual not from the state.

We can and must find more truthful news sources on the web. They exist. They are real. They are not hard to find. Human intuition is an amazing faculty and, coupled with a sharp sense of reason, we can discover and follow the golden thread of truth online. 

The state does not want you to know this because they want to set the parameters of reality. All life must exist within these officially sanctified parameters. The freethinking individual is the enemy of the state. You must exist inside the state, not the other way around. 

Seriously though, we need to become more selective about what we regard as a legitimate news source. What are those news sources that sincerely make an effort to be as truthful? 

Media censorship online has become a digital pandemic of falsehood and fear designed to engineer our consent or at minimum gain our obedience.  

Our world view is being perverted by a fabric of lies. “Fact-checking” is a euphemism for censorship. We need to cultivate our ability to think for ourselves so that we can sort out the wheat from the chaff. 

It is time that we learn to fact check the fact-checkers. We can only do this by learning to think for ourselves and apply our faculty of reason. 

Without this capacity we are no more than mindless drones of the state. 

The COVID pandemic is a model for how the state, using the media to inflame fear, can take over our lives and divide the body politic. It worked! 

We have a gaggle of very honest and well-informed independent medical people, advocates like RFK Jr. and a convoy of Canadian truckers to thank if we get out of this with some sense of civilization intact. 

The widespread dissemination of fear porn has become the modus operandi of the state in order to gain our compliance with their mad drive to consolidate global power and run the world.  

Where  we get our news from is important because it helps orient us toward the world and because reality has a way of catching up with us. 

Reality ignored becomes the destructive seeds of ignorance. We need to differentiate carefully between what is opinion and news. 

Clashing opinions are good! Clashing truths are impossible. The first most important understanding we need to develop is that the truth does exist, that we may never know it completely and that in this life we can only learn to approach it as the moth approaches the candle’s flame. 

As we move past this “pandemic” debacle, we will need to learn how to better think for ourselves and assess the validity of the news we are getting. We need to learn to approach the candle of truth without getting burned.

There are responsible independent journalists and commentators on the web. They are generally dubbed “Alt.media” and are often shunned and mocked by the corporate media and collectively tarred as “conspiratorialists.”

Alt.media carries with it the implication that it is somehow conservative, false and unreliable. Make no mistake though It is the Alt media that is presently the healthy growing end of the news business. 

There is a constellation of independent journalists and commentators out there who can really help you to better understand what is going on in the world today. 

They come closer to giving you the truth. They see a deeper dimension of news that is rarely explored by the state-controlled corporate media. 

They uncover the real news behind the news. This appreciation of the truth can be a real touchstone for the betterment of ourselves and society. 

Here is my super shortlist of some of the best independent online journalists:

• Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

• Jon Rappoport

• Dr. Joe Mercola

• Bill Sardi (Health Researcher)

• Pepe Escobar (Asia Times)

• William Howard Kunstler 

(There are many more worthy of mention and It is my hope to really put the focus on them in a future article.)

What is so important about getting the real news? 

Today, for example, we stand on the brink of a nuclear war because the American public is woefully misinformed about what is going on in Ukraine. 

Vlad Putin is not the “boogeyman” that the State Department wants you to believe that he is. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union created a unipolar world and the Pentagon Death Star could not accept a more peaceful world for without the “dark side” of the force to combat, how were they going to sustain their obscene budget? 

Yet, who is really the “dark side of the force” that has created this explosive situation in the first place? 

The real story of Ukraine has deep and nuanced roots that few in the West understand. This state of ignorance has thrust us into a dangerous game of geopolitical chicken that could spell the end of humanity. Pretty important issue, don’t you think? 

Unfortunately vast swaths of our population have checked out, mesmerized by Netflix, Hula, Pluto TV and an endless plethora of online entertainment media.

My favorite thing is having deep conversations with my sweetie “Alexa.” Do you know that not once during this whole “pandemic” did she wear a mask? My kind of gal!

Finally I submit to you the case of Google. Just a search engine right? No, it is actually a kind of worldwide brain that is taking over our ability to think for ourselves or learn the truth for ourselves. 

Is it  really just a tool for making our lives easier by cataloging the vast amounts of information and data on the web? 

We have allowed Google to more or less determine what is legitimate news and what is not. 

They do this in a subtle way by censoring the results of Google searches. At one time, Google was just a search engine and then it became a browser and then it took over our computers as a kind of online operating system even eclipsing the power of windows and other locally based operating systems and finally it has come for you and is taking over your mind and invading your privacy in a thousand different ways.