This article is for everyone who was surprised by the events in 2016, hopefully helps shed some light on some of the biggest events over the past year. It should be especially informative for those people who get their news exclusively from outlets like CNN, NYTimes, The Economist ..ect. This post is also to save me from having the same conversation over and over online and off. I have used a lot more pictures than I usually do, as I think most people got a lot of their news through various social media platforms which are usually heavy with click-bait pictures, and I also know most of my friends and family can’t be bothered reading a lot 😉 Hopefully you enjoy the pictures, many of them are really well done!

I don’t think this is what CNBC/NYTimes ‘journalist’ John Harwood had in mind when he tweeted out this.

Demonizing Russia and especially Putin was a popular theme throughout 2016!

The ‘Russian hacking’ story never ended; the only supposed evidence continues to be ‘too classified’ to release, which sounds a lot like: if you can’t see the clothes you are a fool, or not worthy of your current position, reminiscent of a children’s story regarding an emperor and his clothes; in our current lexicon in 2016-2017, the more apt term is ‘unpatriotic’ for those who don’t blame Russia for everything or just side with Wiki-Leaks over other sources.

If the US had no one to demonize, they wouldn’t be able to justify spending over half a trillion dollars a year on the military budget, which is 3-4 times bigger than what China spends and almost 10 times as much as Russia spends on their military every year.

Is it that Putin/Russia threaten world peace, or rather threaten America’s hegemony/petrodollar system? If we didn’t turn Putin into a caricature of Hitler, it starts to get difficult to incessantly demonize Russia. Trying to end the war in Syria, selling weapons to its allies (China & Iran) or buffing up its borders from hostile countries (NATO) that are conducting war-games on its borders definitely sounds EVIL to me! Sounds like Hitler’s 1939 aggression exactly!

I’m sure the US would sit back patiently and try and understand China’s and Russia’s foreign policy if they were deploying troops and conducting war-games in Mexico and Canada.

We were on the brink of WW3 when the Cuban Missile Crisis took place, one must also remember that Cuba has something called an ocean in the middle. Russia isn’t as fortunate to have an ocean in between it and NATO expansion on its borders.

By the looks of the map, it is obviously Russia who is aggressively expanding the ‘Warsaw Pact’ (which ceased to exist post 1991) on the West’s borders, NATO (blue) has nothing to do with it.

So many people around the world wondered how, in a country with 320 million people, the best candidates that American’s came up with were Trump and Clinton?

How can you elect a better candidate if you don’t know what is happening in the world, or even in your own country? During the 2012 GOP presidential debates my favorite politician Ron Paul,(pictured below) would get huge applause from the ‘well informed’ audience when he talked about bringing home the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but then, the exact same people would boo him, when he would say America should stop being the world’s policeman… hmmmm confusing I know!

2016 was a wake up call to more than just the elites; anyone who has been living in a ‘reality distortion field’ had a few reasons to be surprised.

2016 should also be a wake-up call to all the people, mainly the ones who call themselves ‘liberals’ who were so surprised by Brexit and Donald Trump getting elected; wake up and try to understand a bit more of the world that you are living in, not just your small enclave.

Here are a few other things that may surprise people, but ‘surprisingly’ hold up to facts and not just my opinions.



Aleppo was ‘liberated’ in 2016, and didn’t ‘fall’ to the bad side.

Check how the citizens of Aleppo really feel today, talk to them, travel there, check foreign language news sites. The consensus is that the vast majority of Syrians would rather live under Bashar Al Assad’s regime than the ‘moderate rebels’ aka IS, al-Nusra ect.

Who should we believe: the Syrian people or ‘The Economist’?

President Obama, in his recent farewell speech would like to have us all believe that everything is fine and well (CA & NY are doing better than most states and voted Democratic – unsurprisingly),and his two terms in office were a huge success, but here are a few things that stand out to the contrary. Obama was so successful with the economy that people elected a ‘casino owner’ to see if he can do any better with jobs and the income inequality gap. Obama frequently takes credit for the ‘healthy’ economy.



The stock market is at all time highs, true, with the caveat, that since Obama has been in office the US debt has doubled from 10 to 20 trillion dollars.

The number 1 culprit for income/wealth inequality are the central banks around the world, they are addicted to easy monetary policies which will eventually result in inflation.

Even with the ‘Fed’s bluff cycle‘ which I wrote about here, we have had almost a full decade of zero percent ‘real’ interest rates. Such a vibrant economy indeed! That the cost of money has been artificially held down for 10 years in a row speaks for itself.

I wouldn’t bet against central banks ability to devalue currencies, they have a pretty good track record. The central banks have openly stated that rising prices, aka inflation is one of their mandates. The richest 1% own the vast majority of assets, while the rest of us are just stuck with higher living costs when inflation does appear, sounds fair to me! Ron Paul has it right when he calls for auditing and ending the FED; it’s anyone’s guess whether Trump will stay interested in this, or if it was just campaign rhetoric when he opined on ‘auditing the FED’.

‘Obamacare’ as Obama likes to call the ‘Affordable Care Act’ is affordable depending on who you ask. Even ardent Obama supporters are starting to accept that health care costs are rising – YES, more people may be covered, but at what cost? The Affordable Care Act by definition isn’t working well! It’s unsustainable for a squeezed middle class and a government already running perpetual deficits to continue with this healthcare experiment. If a country like Norway which is small, and rich can make universal health care work, that doesn’t mean all countries should attempt this. Half of Americans have come to terms with this reality, probably only a few weeks left of this failed policy.

As much as you may love Obama’s rhetorical gifts and his pleasant demeanor, he hasn’t had a very fruitful tenure if his job is to help all Americans fulfill their dreams. And he failed on an even grander scale, if you happened to live in a host of countries America has destabilized over his 8 years in office.

I will leave his Nobel Peace Prize out of this article, but will just state that: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Ukraine and now Syria will never be the same as a result of Obama’s ‘peaceful’ foreign policy. (Did I miss any countries? Probably!)

I digress, back to why I started this missive:

I think it’s great to be passionate about issues and have an opinion, but also we must be weary not to grab the first ‘fact’ or opinion we read on Facebook or Twitter, or maybe even worse – the mainstream news. Research. Read. Think first!

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I’m all about healthy discourse, but please use facts rather than emotions, or what you want to be real.

Can’t forget #BREXIT



Polls, and the financial markets reacted when it was all but certain that Brexit and Trump would carry the vote. It looks like a few people were caught asleep at the wheel. It might have been a good idea for some British folks to have picked up a few gold/silver investments before the Pound dropped off a cliff, still sliding……

If everyone was well informed – “I think most sane people are actually libertarians, but they just don’t know it”. – Gary Johnson – One of his better moments in the recent political campaign. I think overall in the 2016 campaign he was an embarrassment to the Libertarian Party and even more to Ron Paul, who has spent his lifetime building up libertarian awareness.

In 2017 information is virtually free. If you are reading this, then you have access to the internet which has all the information you need, so do some exploring and seek out answers or even scarier facts! Or turn back on NETFLIX and finish another season of ……..

This is the world we are living in – Hope you enjoyed my 2016 summary.

Some of the pictures format looked way different when I was putting this post together, but when I published, the format changed, hmmm Hopefully this post was still easy to digest!

Gratitude for all the pictures in this post which are from people I follow on Twitter or just simple Google images that came up; they are all just borrowed and will not be used commercially. If you are the owner or ‘tweeter’ of an image and would like me to take a picture off my website, please e-mail me at nolanjamesfyfe@gmail.com and I will be happy to oblige. Cheers!