One can never know the true story of anything based on what you read, but one can perhaps find some truths from the meta.<p>Before Snowden, there was about 10 years of news regarding the NSA desiring to spy on everyone (coming from such organizations as the EFF, which -- while clearly biased, are usually not pie in the sky fanciful.)<p>I&#x27;m not too familiar with Zero Hedge, personally. My &quot;first impression&quot; (just looking at Zero Hedge) is that it&#x27;s not your ultra-conspiracy-theory Alex Jones type site. Definitely no Jade Helm 15s or Illuminati here.<p>However, I <i>do</i> think that the tone of the site is excessively negative and excessively Chicken Little. It also hawks gold in a bad way. Very much a red flag. In the real world, gold tends to be a more emotion driven trade than a logical one -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;finance-and-economics&#x2F;21692942-investors-are-cautiously-returning-fickle-market-hedge-against-ignorance" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;finance-and-economics&#x2F;21692942...</a> .<p>The best time to buy gold is actually during times of good prosperity, when the fearmongers stop pushing up the value. :)<p>I think many of the subjects Zero Hedge reports on look like real issues, to be honest. ZH doesn&#x27;t seem to have any solutions other than &quot;OMG world going to end buy gold!&quot;. Which is... not helpful (see above). There&#x27;s too much of the &quot;Evil Elite Wall Street &#x2F; Politician&quot; angle as well; while we should be concerned about inequality, concentration of capital in markets, etc., casting them in emotional terms isn&#x27;t helpful either.<p>Having said that, there was an anti-vax article. Zero Hedge better be careful, that <i>definitely</i> is Alex Jones territory. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zerohedge.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016-04-28&#x2F;why-our-children-should-hate-us-read-lance-simmens-article-banned-huffington-post" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zerohedge.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016-04-28&#x2F;why-our-children-sh...</a><p>That&#x27;s my first impression. Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, I&#x27;d love to hear a counterpoint. From a perspective of where I get my &quot;truths&quot; from, personally I get most of my business news from The Economist and Kiplinger. Even then, this is not really for investment purposes. The best investment advice is relatively simple:  invest periodically in a variety of baskets, and hold long.