Deep-State Doppelgängers

As an outsider -- I'm an American expat living in Japan -- I've had to seek out my own unique set of "insiders", individuals who have special access to the inner workings of the U.S.  My most fruitful source of insider information has turned out to be an Latvian taxi driver based in Youngstown, Ohio who has a network of informers deep within the bowels of our opaque government machinery.  His expert psychic talent plus the natural ability to see through both lead paint and building insulation, combine with his disarming knack for making light of any situation -- he has a sideline business as a stand-up comic at local area funerals -- to penetrate the most secure firewalls of secrecy put in place by the plutocrats and power brokers nestled in the Washington DC bubble.  I've never met him in person but we talk regularly on Citizens Band radio (channel 7).

What he told me yesterday was shocking and left me nearly speechless.  But speaking I am right now to share with you what I learned.

It doesn't matter who we vote for in the coming election for president!

This is not because as is commonly thought the electoral system is completely rigged.  Rather, it's because whoever is elected will immediately be disappeared by the Deep State security agencies and replaced with a robot which you and I will not be able to detect is a fake.  Then this deep-state controlled doppelgänger will do and say what it is programmed to say and do.  You and I will never be the wiser.

The NSA in conjunction with DARPA have been perfecting the science of anthro-robotics for this very purpose.  The results are astonishing.

The Donald Trump prototype is already being street tested.



On the other hand, the Hillary Clinton robo-doppelgänger has had some snags.  The finest researchers at the facility are having trouble capturing some of the tics, outlandish facial expressions and seizures which have recently become her trademarks.  After all, they've spent millions of dollars trying to emulate normal behavior, not that of a crazy person.  Look at this video and you'll see what they're up against.

They've still managed to come up with an "early version" of what they are confident will be a very convincing President Clinton II simulation.



No one gives Jill Stein a chance in hell of winning the election.  But the ever-cautious deep state robotics experts are taking no chances.  This early mock-up appears to need a little fine tuning but I'm confident they'll get it right by inauguration day.



DARPA and the NSA have decided they can replace Gary Johnson with a washing machine jacked up with some artificial intelligence and nobody will know the difference.  They are, however, having a little trouble keeping the feisty anthro-bot on message.



There you have it.  Voting is a complete waste of time!  Don't bother.

The good news is that the 23rd season of Dancing With The Stars will be showcasing such amazing talents as Amber Rose, Ryan Lochte, and Laurie Hernandez.  It would appear that November 8th will be a good day to just stay home and watch TV.



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



Deep-State Doppelgängers

Russian Roulette

 

Since everyone seems so easily distracted these days, I'm going to make this short and sweet, extremely straightforward.

People question my choice for president in the coming election.  Here's my reply.

There's a revolver on the table and six bullets.  You are going to play Russian roulette.  You have no choice in the matter.  You will play!

Voting for Hillary Clinton means they will load six bullets, filling the cylinder.

Voting for Donald Trump means they will insert five bullets, leaving one chamber open.

Voting for Jill Stein means there will be no bullets in the gun.

Why Russian roulette? 

Because Hillary is surrounding herself with warmongering neocon lunatics -- she is a warmongering neocon lunatic herself.  She'll start a major war with Russia.  Lacking any diplomatic sense or understanding of history, she has equated President Vladimir Putin with Adolph Hitler.  Since Obama already has pushed America and Russia to the brink of war, and Hillary just keeps escalating her facile anti-Russian rhetoric, we have no reason to expect otherwise.  World War III, here we come.

Trump talks of rapprochement and working with Russia.  But he's crazy and changes his mind daily.  Who knows?  He's almost as scary as Hillary.

Jill Stein wants peace and cooperation in the world.

If the U.S. ends up in a major war with Russia, it will go nuclear and that will be that.
All other issues -- immigration, Muslims, wealth inequality, jobs, equal rights, a living wage, etc. -- will be off the table because there will be no table, no room, and no building.  The city, the nation, and everyone in it will be turned into radioactive corpses and rubble.

Pick up the gun.  Choose your game.

I made my choice.



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]


Russian Roulette

Thought Experiment

 

Let's say that you spend $20 on two fifths of whiskey, get so drunk that you have a horrible automobile accident, hitting a school bus, killing over fifty elementary students, causing serious injury to several others.  Three of the children who survived are now quadriplegics, two others have permanent brain damage, a number are disfigured because the bus caught on fire, and they couldn't get out in time.  Moreover, enraged by your clearly irresponsible behavior, several of the parents, solid members of the NRA -- thus well-equipped with assault weapons and handguns -- have vowed to avenge the death and crippling of their children.  You find yourself being hunted down and must be on the alert at all times for a potentially lethal attack.

Now let's imagine that through the magic of quantum theory and Einsteinian relativity, we could take you back to before this entire incident.  You have that same $20 in your hands.  You're given a choice.  You have full knowledge of what will happen if you buy the whiskey but you have an option:  You can walk up to a complete stranger and hand him the $20.

To make it interesting, let's say the stranger is a bum.  Let's say that from all appearances the guy is not employable, lives hand-to-mouth on what he can panhandle.  It is also easy to imagine he will spend the $20 on cigarettes and beer.

Knowing what will happen if you keep the $20 for yourself -- the whiskey, plowing into a school bus, mangling a bunch of innocent kids, creating enemies who now want to kill you -- would you hand the $20 to the bum?

Since all of the good people who visit my website are the most intelligent, rational, decent and sensible humans on the planet, I will assume to a person that all of you would opt to hand the $20 over to the bum.  Not only would you be sparing yourself a monumental amount of grief, and a stain on your conscience from which you might never recover, I have no doubt that the warm bubbles of Good Samaritanism would fill you with giddy abandon, a tactile bonanza for your good sense and generosity.  What a splendid feeling!  Why, it would be better than a kick-ass dose of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors!

So what if the guy is a bum.  A lot of people never find their groove.  That $20 will make him feel like he won the lottery.  He can spend it on whatever he likes.  It's really none of your business, right?  And it's not like you haven't made some bad choices at one time or another.  What about that time-share you bought in the Bahamas that turned out to be a shed for garden tools?  Let him buy some cigarettes, a Hustler magazine, and Wild Horse.

Alright.  Now through the magic of Blog World -- where anything can happen because the person writing the blog can make up whatever he wants and being somewhat disconnected from reality or just plain nuts is no barrier as long as he can afford the $27.95 a year for an internet domain -- let's say YOU are suddenly in charge of the entire federal budget.

Now you don't have just $20 to spend or giveaway.

You have $1.16 trillion dollars!  That's the total discretionary federal budget for 2016.

Here's the choice.  Do you continue to spend the majority of the money on defense, buying unnecessary junk, building and maintaining military bases -- the U.S. already has close to 1000 in 143 countries -- starting wars, bombing nations into complying with our agenda, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, spreading even more terrorism across the planet?  Do you inflict carnage and suffering on undeserving citizens in distant countries, blowing up not just school buses, but whole schools, hospitals, villages, whole cities?

Or do you give some aid and comfort to those who for one reason or another have fallen on hard times here in the U.S.?

Despite the putative recovery from the 2008 crash, despite America still being by far the wealthiest country in the world, despite having the largest economy in the world with a whopping GDP of $18.56 trillion, there are some 45 million Americans living below the poverty line.
There are over 500,000 homeless people in America!

Does that compute?  Over a half million human beings, many of them children, without a place to live in the richest nation in the history of the world?

Just considering the enormous amount of waste the direct result of Department of Defense incompetence and skewed priorities, it seems obvious something could be done about this.

The $1.5 trillion which is being spent on the biggest boondoggle in military history, the F-35 fighter jet, could push every single one of the 45 million poor above the poverty line for at least the next five years.

The $1.0 trillion which is being allocated to upgrade our already excessive nuclear arsenal, which currently has over 7,000 nuclear bombs -- enough to destroy the entire planet forty times over -- could put every homeless person in a $1,000,000 mansion and give them $50,000 to live on every year for the next twenty years.

Is this so outrageous?  The idea of "helicopter money" to the homeless?  Helping those folks who struggle every day to make ends meet pull even with the rest of us?

Finland is right now testing out the idea of a guaranteed minimum income for citizens who are now unemployed, a no-strings-attached, tax-free stipend of $630 per month.

Yeah, some of those homeless and poor people might not be employable.  And a few might buy beer and a Hustler magazine. 

But the truth is most of them will feed their kids and replace the bald tires on their car.

I'm not suggesting we give million-dollar mansions to every homeless person.

The point of this article is to put things in perspective.  We hear these figures bandied about all of the time.  $3 trillion for the Afghanistan war.  Another $4 trillion for the Iraq war.  Figures so mind-boggling, it's almost impossible to wrap our heads around them.

Can anyone out there say with a straight face we can't find some money in the vast wealth of the U.S. of A. so that everyone can have at bare minimum a decent life?  So that we can be proud of our country and the way it treats its citizens, especially its most vulnerable?

We can do whatever we decide to do.  That's what a democracy is, if we still have such a thing in America anymore.  It's a matter of getting over the brainwashing we have been subjected to all of our lives.  It's a matter of reconnecting with the values which allegedly are the foundations for our Christian nation.  Granted, Jesus wasn't a U.S. citizen but it seems a lot of people here claim to align with his teaching.  Does this sound familiar?

“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” - Matthew 25:34-36

So, returning to our "thought experiment" . . .

Does the comparison of America's leadership to an inebriated driver plowing into a school bus full of children hold up? 

Is there any doubt?

Our foreign policy has the U.S. military careening across the planet spreading death and destruction, chaos and fear, violence and terrorism.  The whole bunch -- Obama, Biden, Carter, Clinton, Power, Rice, Nuland, Kerry, Clapper -- are drunk on power.  Yes, they are drunk on their sense of entitlement and destiny.  They are drunk on psychopathic fantasies of conquest and empire.  They are drunk on delusions of becoming deities.

And a school bus of innocent maimed and dead school kids, however horrifying and tragic, is small potatoes compared to the tens of thousands murdered, mutilated, crippled, driven from their homes, subjected to the worst possible conditions, by U.S. military aggression over the past 15 years, with the fraudulent War on Terror, pursuit of regime change, and wholesale destruction of nations which posed no threat to the U.S. or its citizens.

Yes, these lunatics are DUI alright.  They are driving America and the world to the brink of destruction, under the influence of greed and profit-seeking by the defense industries and a fanatic loyalty to the bogus pseudo-ideology of neoconservatism, a brain-eating, morally debilitating virus spread by sociopaths like Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz.

So there's the choice.  Help some people who need help.  Or continue to let the crazies get behind the wheel of the mightiest military machine in history so they can perpetuate the destructive rampage that makes the U.S. the greatest threat to peace in the world today.

I titled this piece Thought Experiment.  But in reality, this is no cerebral exercise at all.
Because when you step into the voting booth on November 8th, you will have this choice or some version of it staring you in the face.  Every decision you make is another iteration of this choice.  Who you choose as your congressman, who you select as your senator, who you vote for to become president.  Their priorities become your priorities.

No one who has read even a handful of my articles will have any doubt about where I stand on the election.  I believe everyone who has regularly breathed the toxic brew of cronyism, self-serving lies, and monomaniacal propaganda, which currently permeates our nation's capital, must go.  We cannot make progress without complete and total regime change in Washington DC.  A clean sweep!  But I'm extreme that way.  I keep thinking we can have a government which truly represents the people, looks out for their best interest, one which puts the enormous wealth and resources of the U.S. to proper use, promoting the general welfare of its citizens.  Realistically, for starters that would require kicking our addiction to war and then becoming the world's greatest purveyor of peace.  Without that, we can never escape the moral and financial bankruptcy which will inevitably destroy our nation, if not the entire world.

Just remember.  There's a reason why America is one of the most feared, and increasingly hated, reviled, and targeted nations in the world.  There's a reason why the world is in the screwed-up state it's in.  And if you return the same people to office who caused this mess, then you become part of the reason too.

It doesn't have to be this way.  We don't have to have perpetual war.  We don't have to live under the thumb of the rich and powerful.  We don't have to be the victims of grotesque wealth inequality.  We don't have to sit back and watch as our country is looted and our democracy becomes a standing joke.  We don't have to march to the constant beat of war drums and drink the Kool-Aid of ultra-nationalism and exceptionalism.

Which America will you choose?

November 8th.  Voting is not a thought experiment.  It's the real deal.

By the way, as noted in the fine print on the image at the head of this article, that is an unretouched photo of contiguous rich and not-so-rich neighborhoods in Santa Fe, NM.  Bernie Sanders made wealth inequality central to his recent presidential campaign.  People responded to his message for good reason.

It's not just embarrassing.  It's unacceptable.  It's immoral.  It's unconscionable.

It's un-American!

Maybe we can't all live in mansions.  But the poor and homeless certainly deserve better.

Let's spread the wealth around a bit, eh?  We begin that with peace in the world and peace right here at home.  Peace with one another.  Peace with our own souls.

Does this make me a socialist?  A hippie?  A peace-and-love Pollyanna?




[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



Thought Experiment

There were over 28,000 Prince deaths last year.

 

I never use the phrase 'conspiracy theory' anymore. It carries too much of a pejorative connotation and strongly implies that what is being discussed should obviously be dismissed.

I prefer a clumsy phrase which will never be used again:  'Observations and commentary on suspicions of coordinated action'.

To be candid, I will not be presenting anything like a conspiracy theory here, or making any attempt at a cohesive and conclusive argument.  What I will do is offer some facts and throw out some questions, then let you draw your own conclusions and make whatever connections might seem appropriate.

We were all saddened, perhaps shocked when Prince recently died from prescription opiate abuse.

At the same time, over 28,000 people died in the U.S. last year from prescribed opiates.  We might ask:  Is there is no human price too high to pay when it comes to maximizing corporate profits?

"Nationally 125 people die every day from drug overdoses," according to a recent article in the New York Times.  Death by drug overdose has recently been dramatically accelerating.


 
Death by heroin overdose quadrupled in eleven years and is now reaching alarming levels.

Here are some questions that immediately come to mind:

Why is it that so little funding is being made available for rehabilitation programs to treat drug addiction?

Why is it that the FDA is so lax when it comes to dealing with Big Pharma, apparently not willing or able to perform its mandated duty to protect the American public?

Why is it wherever the U.S. mounts special ops campaigns or as in the case of Afghanistan a full-on military assault, production of heroin and trafficking of drugs seems to explode?

Why is it that the CIA is often implicated in drugs-for-arms deals and drug trafficking?

Why is it America seems incapable of winning the War on Drugs?

Okay, here comes the curve ball . . .

Are you familiar with the Boxer Rebellion?

I was taught in high school world history class that this was an uprising against the West in China, specifically Beijing, which illegally seized power from the legitimate authorities, and was subsequently put down by Western powers with the help of Japan, to restore the proper order.  It was a turn-of-the-20th Century example of the enlightened West fighting the evil of terrorism in a nation we held dear to us because of our mutually-beneficial trade relations.

The truth is that China had been the victim of a vast opium trade, promoted by the West over several decades, which resulted in massive addiction and effectively a subjugation of China to economic manipulation and control by the West.  The Boxer Rebellion was an attempt to reclaim the country from foreign control and eliminate the scourge of opium addiction and the resulting disintegration of Chinese society. 

 

Xi Jinping, the current president of the People's Republic of China, as many other embittered Chinese scholars likewise do, refers to this era of addiction and enslavement as the Century of Humiliation.  He has vowed to never allow China to be subjected to such disrespect again.  It's what drives his foreign policy and what our historically-ignorant politicos view as his "confrontational" policies and recalcitrance with the U.S.  You see, Xi Jinping is acutely aware of America's use of drug trade and drug addiction to control and enslave whole nations.

Are you?


[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



There were over 28,000 Prince deaths last year.

Just Making A Buck

 

It seems that every time I look at a news media site, there's yet another announcement of a giant arms deal between the U.S. and some foreign country.

Maybe I should feel all aflutter that at least some things are still being manufactured in the U.S., instead of China or Bangladesh.

America is the main supplier of arms to the world.  I don't mean prosthetic arms.
Guns, bombs, bombers, fighter jets, ammunition, artillery, tanks, attack helicopters, attack and reconnaissance drones, rockets -- you name it -- just about every killing device and deadly combat technology, except nuclear weapons, is in the catalog.  Last year our foreign sales of military equipment reached a record high of $46.6 billion!

Recognizing that making money and bolstering the economy are main drivers for most of our foreign policy decisions, I still can't help but wonder why two obvious questions never get asked:

1. As an allegedly Judeo-Christian nation, is this really the best way to honor those values we claim are the core of our beliefs?  "Do unto others ..." and "Thou shalt not kill ..." are a couple phrases that immediately come to mind.
2. Is flooding the world with weapons which may, given the apparent volatility of political loyalties, be ultimately pointed right back at us, really a very smart thing to do?

 

I realize that these are secondary and tertiary considerations -- if they ever come up at all -- in the boardrooms of military companies and their mirrored think tanks, and the decision making forums of our government, where profit and raw power are more important than people's lives, reducing and eliminating human suffering, or even embracing basic human decency.

But how can we claim to be advocates for a peaceful world if any Tom, Dick, or Abdul can arm their countries to the teeth by simply buying the ingenuity and efficacy of American killing machines, instruments of war, technological marvels that erase human life?  Or do we even bother worrying about such inconsistencies anymore?  Frankly, it doesn't seem that in the raucous din of saber-rattling and incessant beating of war drums we now must endure 24/7/365, peace ever gets even passing mention by our congressional leaders or White House spokespersons.

It's quite obvious to anyone not under the ideological spell of neocon lunacy . . .

The aggressive promotion of our war industries and pursuit of profit through arms deals is mind-bogglingly self-sabotaging, whatever the pecuniary rewards.  It's like pulling up with a truck full of assault weapons in downtown Cambden, NJ and selling them to anyone who forks over the bucks, hoping that all these folks will use good judgment and not cause any undue harm.  It is an understatement to say this approach is patently stupid and suicidal!

President Obama himself, a man who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize based purely on the rhetoric of his presidential campaign and speeches made in the first few months of his presidency, most notably his A New Beginning address to Muslim nations June 4, 2009 in Cairo, has outpaced George W. Bush with accelerated approvals of lethal weapons sales to foreign buyers, and has significantly relaxed or done away with altogether the regulatory framework intended to safeguard against those weapons getting into the wrong hands.

 

To put this in perspective, President Obama has sold more armaments than any president since World War II, and thus we are daily treated to scenes in the media of all sides of a conflict blasting away at one another with high-end U.S. manufactured equipment.  Much of it initially goes to legitimate, approved buyers but then gets stolen, captured, even intentionally passed along, so that terrorists groups who represent our worst nightmares, who are anti-American to the core and willing to do anything to destroy the "Great Satan" and supreme infidels we are judged by them to be, then are in a position to mount astonishingly successful military campaigns, conquer and control huge swaths of territory, forcing millions of refugees to flee to Europe and other areas of the globe, creating the worst such crisis in seven decades.

Many political analysts on the left -- ones I happen to agree with -- say this is all actually entirely preplanned and deliberate, that the U.S. has mutated into the Empire of Chaos, one maintaining its supremacy as the world's only remaining superpower by seeding and feeding disarray and destruction.  This is entirely consistent with the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a landmark policy embedded in Defense Planning Guidance recommendations issued in 1992.  This paradigm-shifting proposal in short order established the tone and substance for America's application of power over the subsequent two-and-a-half decades:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.  This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

So America is to reign supreme and anyone who appears to threaten that arrangement will have to be dealt with accordingly.  Even the slightest challenge can trigger overwhelming opposition by the U.S.  The list of countries bombed into submission, functionally erased as nations, or whose leadership has been replaced by regime change if formidable and still growing. 

Except for its confrontation with the Soviet Union during the five decades of the Cold War, the U.S. has typically limited itself to smaller, more easily bullied countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Libya.  Despite its abysmal record of both military and diplomatic failure in almost all of its interventions, America's recklessness and hubris continues to escalate, as this cycle's presidential candidates, divorced from the realities on the ground, competed in bluster and bombast, promising bigger and badder explosions and wars.  No country, large or small, is to be given a pass. For example, Russia and China just recently were identified as major national security threats.  They are now prime targets for either military action or chaos and crippling by whatever means the U.S. chooses to enlist.  Of course, neither has attacked nor shown any intention of attacking America.  BUT they are both growing more powerful and have proven unwilling to play a submissive vassal state role, determined to meet their own needs and national priorities.  And even more horrifying in the view of the hegemonic America-first neocons, Russia and China are now cooperating on many fronts and appear to be entering into a full-on military and economic alliance, inviting countries from the rest of the world who are fed up with Washington's imperialism and truculence.   

Not only Russia and China are in the cross hairs.  It seems on a more perspicuous analysis that the Wolfowitz Doctrine applies not just to hostile powers, but any power, as the U.S. manipulates and bullies even its allies to exclusively serve American interests.  Recently, we've seen aggressive interference by the U.S. to prevent any pursuit of independence by EU/NATO countries.  Japan, of course, has been under America's thumb for seventy years, and despite some grumbling from Japanese citizenry, has remained a good lapdog for the Empire.  With Obama's "pivot to Asia", which is built on intensified deployment of military assets in the region, while stirring up longstanding rivalries among the Asian countries, divide-and-conquer is alive and well.  Though the Chinese have a longstanding history of non-aggression and have made it clear they would rather work out any disputes at a conference table rather than on the battlefield, it is now the primary boogeyman.


For our "friends" often much of this meddling and manipulation comes down to money.  It's such a win-win situation -- unless, of course, you happen to be an American citizen.  The U.S. guarantees the security of other nations against both real and imagined threats, and foots the bill for much of the military equipment and deployment of U.S. troops.  The countries are effectively subsidized for being an American protectorate, quite generously so.  Pax Americana gets to be king of the mountain.  You and I foot the bill.  The defense industries pocket the profits.

All I can say is this:  What a colossal waste!

What a waste of our tax money.  What a waste of our leadership role in the world.  What a waste of our generosity.  What a waste of our resources.  What a waste of the energy that once went into building a great nation and maintaining a functioning society.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben, activist Naomi Klein, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, and countless others have proposed that America immediately take the lead in creating a green energy world.  We can still make a buck — billions and billions of them, far more than we make on weapons of war — manufacturing and selling the necessary equipment and technology, and providing training and infrastructure for a global green energy revolution. 

Is it so far-fetched to imagine a world covered with wind turbines and solar panels, instead of missile launchers and tanks?  Is it so extreme or quixotic to want to transform the surface of the planet into a vast sustainable community instead of a killing field?

Where would you have America invest its vast economic resources and wealth?  Creating a harmonious future and habitable planet, or promoting chaos, death, destruction, and the inevitable collapse of civilization?





[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]

Just Making A Buck