… the rest of us damn well sit up and listen. As most of you know by now, Col. Douglas Macgregor is a highly respected and well-known political commentator and pundit on the subject of the Banderastan War, who has gained quite a lot of attention (and notoriety) for his against-the-grain comments on the course of the war. In line with people like Maj. Scott Ritter and others, who have long been pouring cold water on any notion that Banderastan has any hope whatsoever of winning the war, Col. Macgregor has tried very hard to inject some sense of realtalk into the discussion.
Mainstream whore-media refuses to touch him, especially since #BasedTucker got fired from FAUX Noose, because he simply refuses to toe the party line. Good for him. He has since been extremely busy appearing on various dissident YouTube and Rumble channels and podcasts, and never fails to deliver cogent, insightful analysis.
His recent appearance on Patrick Bet-David‘s Valuetainment podcast was, even by his standards, particularly excellent, and highly recommended:
He touches on a wide range of subjects here, some of which are quite verboten to discuss in polite society. But, I have to say, I agree with him on just about every single one.
He is particularly downbeat on the issue of the 2024 “elections”. As he points out, correctly, it is extremely unlikely the USSA will ever make it to 2024 without some sort of serious political rupture taking place. The way things are going, Amerikhastan will break apart LONG before Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Voxemort the Most Malevolent and Terrible ever predicted.
Back when OBADSDL(PBUH) predicted the USSA would collapse by 2033, he was ridiculed up and down the blogosphere for being an absurdist. Today, he looks like an optimist.
Col. Macgregor is, among other things, a strong proponent for decentralised monetary systems, like Bitcoin:
Now, this is one of the few areas where I disagree with DA KERNEL. I happen to know a thing or three about Bitcoin and digital currencies, from my own background and research. And I can tell you, definitively, that Bitcoin CANNOT replace or even complement the current monetary system.
Bitcoin is not money. It does not meet ANY of the standards for money. It is not a unit of measure, a store of value, or a medium of exchange. That last one is particularly important – Bitcoin in its current form is completely impractical for daily transactions. You cannot transact in it instantaneously, because of the way its Proof-of-Work algorithm solves for verification.
Bitcoin takes many minutes to settle a single small transaction, and the cost of doing so is very high relative to existing payment rails. By way of comparison, I know, because a senior executive at a very large payments company told me so, that VISA and MasterCard can settle transactions on their networks within 15 milliseconds, and they can run that network at a cost to them of about 5bps (0.05%) of the transaction’s value, with Five Nines (99.999%) or higher levels of reliability.
Bitcoin CANNOT do ANY of this right now.
Nor can any other cryptocurrency. Not ONE of them has the scale, speed, flexibility, stability, and portability required to fulfil the criteria of money.
You cannot really get around this problem. It is a well-known mathematical and cryptographic problem in the world of digital currencies, known as the “blockchain trilemma” – go look it up.
This lack of scalability and power is actually a feature, not a bug. It is a part of the verification process required to make cryptocurrencies of any kind workable as secure methods of public transaction. It does not matter whether you are talking about Bitcoin, which uses Proof-of-Work, or modern Ethereum 2.0, which uses Proof-of-Stake, and is MUCH faster – the FACT is that they are simply too slow and unwieldy to substitute for fiat money.
None of that changes the fact that something LIKE Bitcoin, probably in the form of tokenised gold on a public blockchain, is the way of the future. I agree with him entirely that the current American dollar-denominated debt-based system is simply completely unsustainable. Eventually, fiat-based currencies will collapse – and that day is likely to come sooner, rather than later.
The dominance of the USD depends entirely on the petrodollar – that is to say, the system whereby the US buys oil in dollars, which Middle Eastern and global oil suppliers then recycle into US Treasury bills, notes, and bonds, thereby financing the American addiction to debt. This subsidises the entire American economy, at the terrible cost of financialising the whole system – essentially, making the pursuit of profits above all else, the primary motivation of corporate leadership.
In the process, American corporations have stripped away their investments in long-term productive human and physical capital, focusing instead on short-term measures like return on equity (RoE), which you can easily manipulate through debt on the balance sheet. The result is an American economy geared toward financial services and “making money from money”, rather than investing in actual, real, productive, long-term activities that actually make things.
The petrodollar is too big and too powerful to be replaced easily. It survives based on American military power – both actual, and, increasingly, perceived. The moment either the petrodollar fails, or American military power collapses, the American economy itself shatters.
This is the reality to which Col. Macgregor and others (like me) are contemplating. It is a terrifying one, but it is also one full of hope and opportunity. Whether the currency that, to some extent, supplants the USD, is some sort of BRICS digital currency basket, similar to IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), or some kind of digital gold-backed token, the fact is the USD is a failing financial instrument that will eventually go the way of all fiat money.
Now, not everything the Colonel says is universally agreeable. Our own Excruciator Majoris of the Evil Legion of Evil – back when that was a thing – Genghis Tom hizzelf, thinks that Col. Macgregro’s book, Breaking the Phalanx, would lead to complete organisational chaos within the US military. Perhaps it would. Since I am not a military man, and since I have never read the book, I hold no opinion at all on the subject.
And, like Grandpa Grumpuss, I thoroughly disagree with Col. Macgregor’s assertion that it was American Lend-Lease that saved the USSR during the worst days of Operation: BARBAROSSA and the Nazi invasion. The fact is that we simply do not know enough, from either side, to come to a conclusive picture of who really won WWII – though the preponderance of evidence certainly sits with the Soviets. Nor do we really know for sure whether Hitler ever actually intended to invade the USSR in a war of conquest – as the standard conventional narrative tells us – or as a desperate preemptive measure designed to forestall and avoid a potential Soviet invasion of Europe – as the Suvorov Thesis, explicated in Icebreaker, tells us.
But I think it is worth noting that, overall, Col. Macgregor has gotten far more right about the Banderastan War, and the general course of events globally, than he has gotten wrong. Certainly, when it comes to China and Taiwan, and the global realities of geopolitics, he makes a hell of a lot more horse-sense than any of the GloboHomoPaedoPharisatanists running Clown World right now.
And the fact that the Chief Clowns all hate him, tells me he is doing something very right.
1 Comment
MacGregor…mmmm…no.
Oh, sure, he’s a good officer. He is still not what he tries to present himself as.
He tried to make his intellectual bones with Breaking the Phalanx. Sadly, it was a book about organization and he really didn’t understand organization for beans. All he understood was Armored Cavalry. This wouldn’t be so bad except that Armored Cavalry is of somewhat limited use.
You recall Trotsky’s observation about finding the truth in war by comparison of the lies? That’s how to take MacGregor; he is the fountain of the Russian lies we are not permitted by CNN, MSNBC, and the USG to see, the lies we can then compare with the Ukie lies with a fair chance of finding out the truth. Yes, of course the Russians are lying, too. No, I don’t think he’s consciously lying; I think he’s repeating lies he was told that he’d like to believe. Even so, and even despite his moral innocence, they remain lies.
A comparison of the lies, by the way, will still suggest that the Ukrainians are probably losing.