My predictions for 2011 were all fulfilled: over the past year there was indeed more debt, more taxes, higher taxes, more inflation, more immigration, more liberalism, more legislation, more surveillance, and more bureaucracies. Turbulent as it was, 2011 consisted of more of the same, and it was turbulent precisely for that reason. My predictions for 2012 are as follows:

More Debt

Efforts to solve the financial crisis—now entering its fifth year—will be made, but they will consist of finding ways to kick the can down the road, hold on to credit ratings, levitate the markets, resuscitate consumption, and prevent civil unrest, rather than on actually eliminating the problem. It seems that the only politically viable option is covertly to devalue the debt. The news services will keep the middle class on the edge of their seats dramatising the never-ending Euro crisis, which may provide some jolts.

More and Higher Taxes

Although debt reduction through currency devaluation will remain the preferred method of crisis containment this year, the political establishment is acutely aware of the need to pacify the populace. The White middle class has proven timid and, following the Tea Party experience in the United States, members of the establishment are satisfied that their most profitable constituency (the White middle class is the establishment’s open wallet) can be successfully neutralised by simply calling them racists. The establishment, however, worries about the lumpen proletariat. The Tottenham riots in London in August this year, albeit triggered by a police incident, offered a preview of the civil unrest that an economic shock could bring: the rioters did not demand equality or rights, they wanted iPhones and plasma television. So, more and higher taxes will be levied on the middle class (‘the rich’ in political parlance) in order to fund pacifying handouts for coloured immigrants and their descendants (‘the poor’). Some of the increases in the fiscal burden will be hidden, but some of them will be open, and will be justified in terms of the need for ‘the rich’ to do their bit for society. The system’s contrived pseudomorality will seek to bring tax avoidance further into convergence with tax evasion.

More Wasteful and Counter-Productive Government Measures

See above. In general: good spending will be cut, bad spending will increase. With the shutting down of the space shuttle programme and assorted NASA cutbacks, Americans in 2011 saw Obama end the space age in the United States.

More Money Printing

The money printing will continue, and efforts to conceal its true extent will also continue. Because banks have so far hoarded much of the money that has been printed since the crisis began, the true consequences of the money printing have yet to be felt. Consumer depression will also contain demand and therefore price increases, although the latter only partially. I suspect that parts of this containment will start to fail in 2012, even if consumption and consumer confidence is low. However, even if there is higher inflation, we are years away from the hyperinflationary apocalypse dreamt of by some. We will not see price tags printed on electric paper exponentially revising prices upwards in real time as we make your way to the till.

More Colonisation

Despite the millions of unemployed, ‘immigration’ policy will continue to focus on pacifying voters through deceptions. In the United Kingdom, wholly unsurprisingly, the same Conservative Party that promised drastically to cut ‘immigration’ has governed over a record increase over the past year. Instead of the tens of thousands annually that the promised, the Conservatives have governed over a quarter of a million settler colonists arriving in Britain. Of course, new measures were designed to work like sieves. The modern Conservatives will carry on being more Labour than Labour, the same way that Democrats and Republicans in the United States will carry on increasing their redshift values.

More Scams

A desperate consumer culture co-existing with an economic crisis means only one thing: glory for the Golden Age of the Scam. The ever-diminishing opportunities for legitimate wealth creation mean an ever growing necessity for illegitimate wealth redistribution. Corporations will focus more than ever on a model of planned obsolescence, slave labour, and government handouts. More small and medium entrepreneurs will drop out of the economy and get on the government teat. Cheap consumer products will break on the same day we buy them, forcing us to buy more expensive versions next, which will break after a week. True quality will still only be found in obsolete technology and goods, found in museums, eBay, attics, and antique shops.

More Obamanation

Obama is likely to win a second term, albeit by a narrow margin. The Anglo-American media will back him. All-White Republican candidates will pull their punches, any one of them afraid of being the one who ends the Afro-American dream. Should Obama lose, Afro-Americans will be enraged. If by a narrow margin, as I think likely in this scenario, accusations of racist electoral fraud may well surface. Obama’s post presidential career, whether it begins in 2013 or in 2017, will see him rise to the status of a secular saint. The Left’s historical revisionists will labour to recast him as an American Nelson Mandela, victim of racism, bad luck, and an insuperable legacy of mismanagement by his blue-eyed predecessors. Some way will be found to enumerate allegedly great or visionary achievements that were derided or underreported at the time.

On a Positive Note, However . . .

There will be positive developments on the fringes. Marxists will of course benefit from the continuing crisis because it is easy for them to point to banksters and Big Business as exploiters of the labour force. Yet, in this they share common ground with dissenters on the alternative Right, who are also likely benefit from the disturbances of 2012. Opportunities will continue to grow outside of the mainstream, and traditionalist dissenters will continue shifting away from quantitative gloom-and-doom analyses in favour of a more positive, subjective approach; away from simple forensics in favour of aggressive deconstruction and the active pursuit of new and original solutions, new ways of thinking, speaking, and operating.

In Sum

…more of the same, with some jolts, shocks, and possibly even a few changes along the way in the economic sphere that, although apparently dramatic, will not be fundamental, together with exciting opportunities on the fringes and beyond. The place to be will be on the outside.

From time to time I encounter the slogan ‘worse is better’ within dissidents on the Right. To me this has always sounded as a rationalisation, a mantra intended by the user to help him cope with loss, defeat, inaction, and helplessness. The reason is that, for worse to really be better, there would need to be a credible alternative to the existing system already in place, needing only the critical mass that would be made available by a collapsing system. And as at present a genuine alternative exists mostly in theory, and only very incipiently in practice, with credibility outside its cultural ghetto yet to be earned, for as long as that is the case, worse for us can only mean worse.

An iteration of the ‘worse is better’ mantra was recently enunciated in connection with the United States presidential elections of 2012, which the incumbent, Barack Obama, intends to fight against an as yet unspecified Republican candidate. It was argued that, in the light of Obama’s record to date and of precedent established by previous presidential second terms, an Obama win would be immensely beneficial. The assumption is that Obama will further discredit himself with a large-enough majority of voters, and that his discredit will infect the mainstream political establishment, causing voters to seek alternatives outside of this establishment. It was further argued that a Republican win would create the illusion of progress among the ill-informed, while only delaying, and ultimately opening the way, for further evil from the hard Left.

While the latter argument is correct, the former one relies on fallacies.

Although there is still more than a year left to go until the United States goes to the polls in 2012, the campaign is already in full swing. Both parties are gearing up for the coming congressional, gubernatorial, and presidential primaries, and national and international media are engaging in polling, punditry, and speculation. The election, like those before it, poses a problem for the non-aligned Right in the United States and abroad, whose members almost always look upon both of the United States' major parties with equal disdain. Should we support the Republicans as the lesser of two evils? Should we put our weight, such as it is, behind a quixotic candidate of the Ron Paul or Constitution Party variety? Or should we simply throw up our hands in disgust and opt out of the whole affair, not supporting any candidate at all? Needless to say, none of these options seem very appealing. However, they also appear to be the only options available to us. This appearance is, I think, mistaken. The lessons of history hint at a more attractive possibility.

More specifically, it is my firm conviction that the European and American far Right should do everything in its power to ensure that Barack Obama wins a second term in 2012.

In the past decades, second terms have rarely been good for American Presidents. George W. Bush is the most recent and obvious example, but not the only one. In 2004, Bush, by then already fairly unpopular, narrowly won a second term in office, largely thanks to the Democrats' political ineptitude and John Kerry's lack of charisma. Five years and a midterm defeat later, he left office as one of the most unpopular Presidents in recent memory, handing over to his successor an economy in free-fall, a record deficit, and two catastrophic foreign military entanglements. Other Presidents have also been plagued by scandals and crises in their second terms. Bill Clinton had the Lewinsky affair and his subsequent impeachment, and also had to contend with a hostile Republican Congress. Ronald Reagan's popularity suffered as a a result of high unemployment, an economic crisis, and questions over his age and mental acuity. Nixon, of course, had Watergate.

Editor's note: The following is a translation from the Russian of an article that originally appeared in the online magazine Regnum. I probably speak for most AltRight readers when I write that I find American foreign policy to be "chaotic" (in the common sense of the word.) Lacking a conservative ruling order, the American state has been a mere tool to be used, in contradictory and self-defeating ways, by various political factions, all of which are semi-united by a post-Trotskyist embrace of "democracy." The American political system itself seems ill suited to any kind of coherent strategy, with the short attention spans of the public and media and the constant turnover of elected officials. Articles such as this one, however, challenge us to find a method in the madness, that is, a deeper Grand Strategy lying behind what appears at first glance to be incompetent and unwise policy-making.  ~RBS

Coups in Tunisia and Egypt, mass rallies in nearly all Arab countries, armed rebellion and foreign aggression in Libya, all of these events led to lively discussions about the relationship between the internal and external factors of the crisis [in the Greater Middle East]. Undoubtedly, the root cause of revolutions and rebellions lies within the state.

{snip}

The cover-up operation had failed

From the beginning of turbulence in the Greater Middle East, the world MSM and Russia's liberal and semi-official media right behind them persistently hammered the thesis about the complete lack of involvement on the part of the United States into the consciousness of their readers, viewers, and listeners. Moreover, the United States were portrayed as the victim and the main loser. If the MSM were to be believed, we must not sympathize with the Libyans, perishing under NATO bombs, but rather the unfortunate Americans and their idealistic president, who was unexpectedly drawn into the fatal whirlwind of events.

{snip}

Let's start with the fact that Obama's entire Nobel-Prize acceptance speech was dedicated to the rationalization of the "just war" principle and the justification of the right to use military force, including "humanitarian interventions." Therefore, the U.S. president was amazed by the demands to take away his prize when the bombing of Libya began. "Americans see no contradiction" between the status of a peacemaker and the order to bomb, said Obama.

As with the Nobel Prize, the transition of command of the operation from American generals to NATO also does not prove the lack of involvement in the crisis on the part of the United States. Americans initiated these problems, but the end result will be cleaned up by the allies. This is perfectly normal and natural politics. Or does anyone think of NATO as a separate entity, independent of the U.S.?

Furthermore, it became clear rather quickly that the “Twitter technology” of accumulating protest energy was developed by the NGOs directly related to the State Department, and the democratic activists in Tunisia and Egypt (by strange coincidence) were interns or members of these institutions. Well publicized was the fact that in August of last year, a secret analysis of the possibility of revolutions in the Arab world was conducted on behalf of Obama; the policy to support this process was adopted at the same time. A purely rhetorical question is who was behind the adoption of the two UN Security Council resolutions on Libya.

{snip}

America was first to become aware of the power of information and to master the art of information warfare. No other country is currently able to conduct a massive and pervasive information operations at the global level (although, so far only in the short-term). The maximum possibility for other countries is at the state-, not even the regional level. The U.S. dominance in this area is absolute, which gives them a huge advantage, but it also greatly exposes them. Deficiencies are often a continuation of the merits.

Today the BBC reports, entirely without irony, that

President Barack Obama has said publishing photos of the dead Osama Bin Laden threatens US national security.

I intercalate my comments:

"I think that, given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk," Mr Obama said.

How convenient. Yet it was alright to show us the hanging of Saddam Hussein, with the camera going right into his face moments after his execution. And how is a graphic image going to create a national security risk anyway? My guess is that the Islamists have known that Osama has been dead for years

The al-Qaeda leader was killed by US special forces in northern Pakistan on Monday. His body was buried at sea.

Again, how convenient. Will he stay dead this time? Because if I remember correctly, Osama has died already several times over the years, usually when there was a U.S. election looming on the horizon.

On Thursday, Mr Obama is to visit the site of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York, one of many Bin Laden claimed to have masterminded.

Mr Obama said: "It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence, as a propaganda tool. That's not who we are."

Well, the images of Saddam, hung and filmed after death, and Ceausescu, shot and filmed after death in extreme facial close up, were floated around the world and were pumped right into people’s living rooms via their television screens. 

The US administration has been monitoring world reaction - amid conspiracy theories about the al-Qaeda leader following conflicting accounts given by US officials.

"There are going to be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you won't see Bin Laden walking on this Earth again," Mr Obama said.

Er… could this be because he has been dead for many years?

On Thursday, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir again dismissed allegations his country's secret services had links to al-Qaeda, and said the investigation into the presence of Bin Laden in Abbottabad would reveal what failures there were.

In other words, they need time to contrive some cover-up, and find some hapless scapegoat to save face. The U.S. has been had and Pakistan has been laughing all the way to the bank.

I am going back to doing something productive with my time. Life’s too short to pay these losers any further attention.

As we’ve all been told, when someone talks about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, he’s really talking about race. Apparently, even when a life-long Manhattanite billionaire who gets invited to Davos talks about the birth certificate, he’s really talking about race. (At the very least, he’s trying to rile up the racist boobs.)

I don’t completely disagree with this interpretation of the so-called “Birther” movement—a name, by the way, that was coined by the pro-Obama media to associate the issue with the John Birch Society (“Birchers”) of yesteryear, whose leader speculated that Eisenhower was a Communist.

Obama stands as visual reminder to White, Christian Americans of their creeping suspicion that they’ve lost control of their country. In reality, the Majority hasn’t had a country for a long time, though with Obama, it’s obvious. When Southern WASPs were in the White House, it wasn’t.

Disallowed by the media and their political and religious leaders to articulate the terms of their own dispossession, the Majority begins to imagine that Obama is . . .  a Muslim . . .  a foreigner . . .  a usurper or Manchurian candidate of some sort. (And is it really outrageous to ask whether someone named Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim?)

This is not to say that Birtherism is all false consciousness. “They” have something on everyone and perhaps this is what they’ve got on Obama. And it’s also not to say that Jerome Corsi hasn’t uncovered compelling evidence that there’s more to Obama’s early years then he’s letting on, or that Donald Trump isn’t genuinely concerned with the matter and not just trying to rile up the boobs.

But race is what Birtherism is about. The issue itself wouldn’t exist without the factor of Obama’s Kenyan father and his ungovernable mother who went on a variable Third-World Muslim love tour in birthing and rearing the future president.

Even the secondary “Birther” issue that Donald Trump has raised recently regarding Obama’s academic record is, at the end of the day, about race. As Trump relates,

I heard he was a terrible student. Not like OK, I heard he was a bad student.

How does a bad student then go to Columbia and then go to Harvard? How does this happen?

How Obama got to Harvard—and how his wife got to Princeton—is affirmative action. I doubt there’s any smoking gun in Obama’s academic records, but the whole matter is indicative of the fact that Obama has been promoted since birth (wherever that may have been) well beyond his talent by powerful White liberals. The president hasn’t “overcome” his lowly, African/half-breed identity; he has used it to advance himself. Indeed, he would be nothing without it.

American political psychology goes something like this: "Liberals" love telling themselves that they’re losing—that they’re idealistic underdogs doing battle with the reactionary forces of wealth and corruption. “Conservatives,” on the other hand, always imagine that they’re winning—that their views express the Will of the People and that everyone would like them if only given the chance get to know them better.

Each side lies to itself, in its own way: the Left is the Establishment as has won every major cultural battle over the past half century; demographically speaking, “conservatism” has no future.

Whatever the case, Red and Blue played their parts today as Obama announced an extension of Bush’s income tax cuts and the lowering of the payroll tax (which funds the hopelessly bankrupt social security program.)

Conservatives called it a “victory,” another sign that they “took the country back” this past November. The liberals think Obama “caved.”

Again, both are wrong.

Yesterday the BBC reported that the U.K. Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander has launched a 'ruthless' tax evasion clampdown. He talks about the desire to avoid taxes being "morally indefensible."

What is morally indefensible is government officials squandering taxpayers' money and running up huge deficits on spurious wars, demagogic entitlement programmes, and bankster bailouts.

What is morally indefensible is government officials robbing people of their wealth by printing money every time they promise more than they can deliver.

What is morally indefensible is government officials helping themselves to the public purse to fund their lifestyles, as was so egregiously found last year in what became known as the Parliamentary Expenses Scandal.

Is it any surprise, then, against such a backdrop, that hard-working citizens would rather conceal their assets than hand it over to an incompetent, wasteful, irresponsible gang of government officials? Is it any surprise that businesses would rather pay professional tax advisors than allow themselves to be suffocated and swallowed whole by the money-gobbling government anaconda?

Okay -- perhaps the Liberal Democrats opposed the war in Iraq; but they support the war in Afghanistan, if critically; they support redistributive taxes and entitlements; and they support regulation and red tape. If they have supported the Conservative-led cuts in spending, it has been only because the fiscal situation inherited from Labour was so dire that absent immediate action there would have been hell to pay. We should not have had to wait until the economy had fallen off a cliff.

Even more disturbing is Danny Alexander's wording:

Just as it is right to ensure that every benefit is fully justified, so we must ensure that every tax bill is paid in full. There are some people who believe that not paying their fair share of tax is a lifestyle choice that is socially acceptable. Just like the benefit cheats, they take the resources from those who need them most. Tax avoidance and evasion are unacceptable in the best of times but in today's times it is morally indefensible.

Never mind that "those who need them most" tends to be governmentspeak for "those who deserve them the least but whose vote we seek to purchase through government handouts"; Alexander conflates avoidance, which is legal, with evasion, which is illegal.

Tax avoidance being the use of legal means to minimise tax liabilities; evasion being to 'cheat' the system in order not to pay tax.

In my novel, Mister, I have a confrontation on this same issue between the money- and status-obsessed Mister and the corrupt police inspector, 'Obama'. Of course, Obama claims the two are one and the same, and that the money collected through taxes is 'owed' to the government, because it is money that "belongs to the government."

The government, in fact, does not own anything -- at least, in theory. In theory it uses money given to it by the citizens for the purposes of running and maintaining public services for and on the citizens' behalf. In theory, the government needs the consent and approval of the citizens before they can take and spend any money of theirs. In practice the government extorts, willy-nilly, any amount of money it sees fit by means of intimidation and violence in order to perpetuate itself and extend its power -- if the citizen occasionally benefits, it is purely incidental. When is the last time your objections to how your tax money is being spent were noted?

Phrases like "paying their fair share", therefore, sound intolerably specious -- particularly from a politician known to practice tax avoidance himself and who only three years ago was investigated for non-payment of capital gains tax.

Warren Buffett recommendations notwithstanding, it says something about the state of our economy when someone decides it is time to resurrect a 35-year-old account of the Weimar-era hyperinflation.

Written during the stagflationary 1970s, Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation contains much to titillate our morbid curiosity, besides an instructive illustration of what we can expect should the Austrian economists’ gloomiest prophecies ever come true.  (The book, long out of print, was fetching close to $700 on eBay this summer, and has now been made available in electronic format.)

Defined in the present text as occurring when the rate of inflation exceeds 50 percent per month, hyperinflation is caused by an uncontrolled increase in the money supply and a loss of confidence in the currency. Because of the absence of a tendency towards equilibrium, fear of the rapid and continuous loss of value makes people unwilling to hold on to the money for any longer than is necessary to convert it into tangible goods or services. Hyperinflation is therefore characterized by very rapid depreciation and a dramatic increase in the velocity of the circulation of money.

Feds Spent $800,000 of Economic Stimulus on African Genital-Washing Program

September 13, 2010

CNS News.

By Matt Cover

(CNSNews.com) – The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex.

The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011.

“NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications,” the grant abstract states. “We propose to evaluate the feasibility of a post-coital genital hygiene study among men unwilling to be circumcised in Orange Farm, South Africa.”

Because AIDS researchers have been unsuccessful in convincing most adult African men to undergo circumcision, the UCLA study proposes to determine whether researchers can develop an after-sex genitalia-washing regimen that they can then convince uncircumcised African men to follow.