My reflections on the historic year that was 2016.

First, I want to thank all the supporters of NIRP Umbrella; it has truly taken on a life of its own with the amount of attention it has received in the past nine months.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where clusters of ‘Intellectuals yet Idiots’ create powerful headwinds for anyone who decides to challenge the intellectual status quo by questioning the very nature of centralized decision-making.

The elites have evolved for the worse, and the ethos of NIRP Umbrella is to expose any intellectual who is using elite status to push a hidden agenda.

It’s been a fun year calling out Kenneth Rogoff :)

Before I go any further, I would like to make one thing clear: I am not cynical; however, ‘common sense’ has been somewhat eroded by mainstream media, government officials, “too big to fail” banks, and ‘The Committee to Destroy the World’ aka Central Banks. We are witnessing the rise of exponential political polarization, distrust in media, people flocking to alternative currencies and (finally) arriving at the conclusion that most Ph.D. economists are full of shit.

This very rise of individuality is supported by observing the current state of the centrally-rooted elite’s effects on the masses.

Let’s start with mainstream media: For the most part, these so-called pundits are prohibited from expressing personal beliefs and opinions, and there were several examples of this during the recent election period. I won’t delve into it in this post, but in short, the select few who challenged the mainstream consensus were deemed a ‘hazard’ and their voices were suppressed.

Mainstream media seems to want to stick with clickbait, which lacks substance and doesn’t encourage people to THINK, because thinking is considered ‘dangerous’ in today’s world.

Knowledge is POWER! Once you get addicted to knowing more about things that directly impact your life, including but not limited to:

◦ Socialism & fascism

◦ Financial repression

◦ Trickle-down theory

◦ Purchasing power decay & wealth inequality

◦ A broken workforce

◦ Students drowning in debt

◦ Banking solvency

◦ Geopolitical matters

◦ Prodigality

◦ Authoritarian control

It will become difficult to summon enough curiosity to monitor your favourite celebrity’s every move.

I understand there are different topics of interest, but my argument is that these mainstream media outlets need to start striving to empower people with knowledge and objective facts instead of subjective emphasis.

For example, financial pundits like to refer to gold as a ‘barbarous relic’, a phrase that has been misused and thus materialized into an ideological echo chamber, which demonstrates the lack of rigour among those pundits who take the “follow the leader” approach. The underlying phrase is derived from John Maynard Keynes, who used it to describe the FLAWED gold exchange standard that prevailed from 1922 to 1939 — not gold itself.

If mainstream media doesn’t pivot quickly, it could go the way of Kodak (valued at $28 billion in 1996) — a situation in which exponential forces put a linear company out of business. The exponential forces for media are arising from SOCIAL MEDIA, where the power of one uncensored thought can reach millions of people. NIRP Umbrella is a testament to this theory. I started it out of mere frustration nine months ago, but now reach an average of about 6 million people per month. Why? You tell me… but I think it’s because I stick with truths that many people don’t want to talk about.

Before I discuss the next pillar that needs to be repaired to bring back ‘common sense’ from rooted corrosion, I would like to say one more thing about the mainstream media: This war on ‘fake news’ has zero justification for the type of consumer CONFIDENCE headwinds they now face. It’s because the top-down model of distributing information is BROKEN. If these outlets want to restore confidence and survive, they need to restore the interpersonal relationship between writer & reader [-] the middlemen, and inject a broad range of diversity of thought instead of relying on some groupthink corporate mentality.

Next, let’s move on to the government: I would just like to state up front that I am incredibly grateful for democratic society and for the most part, the freedom of speech that we have in the West; however, governments around the world have made fierce movements towards gaining access to and having control over citizens like never before seen in history. These bureaucrats have decided to take a much more intrusive approach to governing our daily lives, and for what reason?

The rise of the regulatory state via FBI, IRS, SEC, FINRA, NLRB, OSHA that now governs our lives is coupled with a monstrous increase in debt, which is smothering economic progress and putting us on the road to secular stagnation.

Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of pages have been added to federal regulations throughout the global economy due to anti-growth policies promoted by idiotic fiscal policymakers.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s easy to connect the dots with bureaucrats rushing to regulate and oversee everything. They understand we are facing unprecedented wealth inequality, stagnant incomes, currencies that fail to retain value, students indebting themselves for a lifetime, rising concerns about race relations, and “too big to fail” banks — some of the things that have slowly urged people to question the very people who govern them.

So where am I going with all of this? Scroll back up to the Political Polarization chart…

Over the course of 2016, we saw Brexit, which led to Cameron resigning; Italy’s failed referendum, which led to Renzi resigning; and the Trump election, all of which directly indicate the emergence of an anti-establishment sentiment among the masses. The problem is that the establishment itself will not go down without a fight if the movement metastasizes to the very roots of governance: Money.

Governments have started to counteract the movement towards independence by embracing a fascist system that ensures things are centralized as turmoil starts to spill over into money, which is only backed by CONFIDENCE. Hell, this system has been in place for a while now and citizens have been asleep at the wheel. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been difficult to ignore this phenomenon. Unlike socialism and nationalism, which are easily identifiable, fascism circumvents the public eye by allowing private companies/property to exist; however, if there is a direct threat to STATE POWER, they reinforce it will not be accepted. i.e.:

◦ Hospitals and health insurers (private enterprise) = Prices, products and policies controlled by Obamacare

◦ Private internet companies = Internet access and fees regulated by the FCC

◦ Banks = Regulated under Dodd-Frank

This regulatory oligopoly is not by accident; it’s by design.

All of this is governed by the intellectual fallacies of central planners — a group of people who for the most part have never held a real job (at least one that contributes to society), managed money, or otherwise had ‘skin in the game’. They are a group of Ph.D. economists who think they can mathematically model the system around them. They will be too busy with value at risk methods or standard regression models to ever admit to saying they don’t have a clue as to what’s happening. They fail to respect COMPLEXITY, which always ends up biting these centralized groupthink groups in the ass.

Are you noticing a trend? These idiots believe that forced supervision and reassurance keeps psychology balanced by always being one step ahead — and centralized supervision is just warming up… (the emergence of cashless societies, biometrics, etc.)

We’ll be covering these topics in depth when NIRP Umbrella’s website is LIVE at the end of February, so stay tuned on that front; however, before I sign off, you may be wondering why I included ‘Euphemisms’ in the title of this piece. I did so because I’m sick and tired of seeing esoteric jargon concealing truths from laymen, as words of this kind are downright dangerous.

That said, I thought I’d compile a list of misleading bullshit euphemisms. The purpose here is to demonstrate how academics use words to fool for their own gains, to advance their personal agendas, or simply because they don’t want you knowing what the hell they’re up to.

George Carlin’s Euphemisms: 1–17

1. ‘Shell shock’ became ‘battle fatigue’, then ‘operational exhaustion’, and is now usually referred to as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD).

2. ‘Toilet paper’ became ‘bathroom tissue’

3. ‘Sneakers’ became ‘running shoes’

4. ‘False teeth’ became ‘dental appliances’

5. ‘Medicine’ become ‘medication’

6. ‘Information’ become ‘directory assistance’

7. ‘The dump’ become ‘the landfill’

8. ‘Car crashes’ became ‘automotive accidents’

9. ‘Partly cloudy’ became ‘partly sunny’

10. ‘Motels’ became ‘motor lodges’

11. ‘House trailers’ became ‘mobile homes’

12. ‘Used’ cars became ‘previously owned’ transportation

13. ‘Room service’ became ‘in-room dining’

14. ‘Constipation’ became ‘occasional irregularity’

15. ‘Poor people who live in slums’ became ‘economically disadvantaged occupying substandard housing in inner cities’

16. ‘Broke’ became ‘negative cash flow position’

17. ‘Fired’ became ‘management wanting to curtail redundancies in the human resources area’

NIRP Umbrella’s Euphemisms: 18–40

18. Reduction in government spending became ‘austerity’

19. People saving the bank became ‘bail in’

20. Taxpayers saving the banks became a ‘bailout’

21. ‘Company that went broke’ became ‘bankrupt’

22. ‘Greedy banker’ became ‘bankster’

23. ‘One hundredth of a percentage point’ became a ‘basis point’

24. Thinking the price of something will go down became ‘bear’

25. Lowering the value of a currency to make exports cheaper and implement protective barriers became ‘beggar thy neighbor’

26. Thinking the price of something will go up became ‘bull’

27. ‘Confiscation’ became ‘CPI’ and ‘taxes’

28. Multiple countries devaluing their currency to bolster exports became ‘Currency Wars’

29. Missing deadlines to repay debt became ‘defaulting’

30. Reducing leverage became ‘deleveraging’

31. Economic stimulus (lowering interest rates) became ‘dove’

32. Fear of inflation (raising interest rates) became ‘hawk’

33. U.S. dollars invested in banks outside the USA became ‘Eurodollars’

34. Country/people putting everyone at risk (positively or negatively) became ‘externalities’

35. Fiat money (John Law) became ‘Monopoly money’, then reverted to ‘Fiat Money’

36. Money became gold

37. Central bankers bullshitting everyone became ‘forward guidance’

38. The total unduplicated value of all goods and services produced by a country or region within a specific period became ‘GDP’

39. A person obsessed with gold became a ‘Gold Bug’

40. A company or government not giving bondholders all their money back became a ‘haircut’

I could go on all day, but my point is: Be on the lookout for complex jargon, as it’s typically used by elites when they don’t want you to question the meaning of what they’re saying.