Peering Down the Rabbit Hole

Occasionally, great writers come about and must publish something controversial. We’ve been covering all kinds of things on this blog, and so, in that regard, we must be courageous. I post this at great risk to my own life, but I feel it is too important not to discuss. What I am about to share is so monumental, it will shake the very foundation of American life to its core.

Listen, and take notes.

Today was much like any other day. I was driving my fiancé to Starbucks, where she works as a barista. She needed to grab something from another store, so we had to stop there first. She explained she needed cleaning tablets to clean the espresso bar, and I asked her whether there was code she needed to use for the other people in the Starbucks to recognize her – a message or handshake that would prove she was part of the Starbucks staff. She assured me that she didn’t, since what she was taking wouldn’t be worth stealing. The tablets would be in their own container and clearly labeled, dissuading people from stealing them. Trying to make her laugh, I mused about there being a secret handshake or symbol, like the ratio for Pythagoras and his cult, or a cryptic message only other baristas knew from their trade. They could use such a code to identify one another when they would normally appear as ordinary citizens. Furthermore, I guessed the tablets would be delivered in something innocuous, like a normal Starbucks cup, so people wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss. Sam would just be another customer, even to a careful observer.

That made her laugh.

She entered the store, and I waited in the car. When she returned, she wore a guilty expression. She carefully placed a normal looking cup in the cup holder, which held the “cleaning tablets” for transport.

I was right.

But what else was I right about? How deep did the rabbit hole go? Was I falling down said hole toward the core of truth in Starbucks? It may sound crazy, but after a car drive’s worth of brainstorming and a few minutes of research, I may have very well unlocked the secret to Starbucks and its global success.

Read at your own risk…

Submitted for Your Approval

Starbucks begins as a company in Seattle back in the 1970s, rising to profitability during the 80s and spreading worldwide at the turn of the millennium. As a franchise, Starbucks now hosts over 23,000 locations around the world.

But for what purpose?

Many would say simply for the profit, but I submit there may be something more sinister afoot. I’ve examined the clues and followed the trail as far as I dare, and am now ready to present my findings on how Starbucks makes its millions, and the global network they control.

Sam’s incident earlier today proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that baristas employed by Starbucks are part of a global network of baristas – a clandestine society of coffee servers constantly in communication with one another, even when located on opposite sides of the globe.

What would be the necessity of a global communication network of baristas, you might ask? Fair question, but consider the humble barista. For those who frequent coffee establishments, especially Starbucks, they come in and out of your life unnoticed. If someone wanted to get coffee daily– let’s say at least 200 days a year – and spent approximately twenty minutes chatting with the staff while they waited for their drink to finish, that’s 4,000 minutes. Converted to hours, that’s over 60 hours of time. Casually talking with someone, you could glean a lot of information from a lot of people in that amount of time.

But say they are taking information from you – how would they get it out of you? What would they want? Answering that question requires delving into some of the more devious methods Starbucks employs to hoard your information before selling it around the world through a dark network of baristas. The chain of command climbs high above what you might think. Worst of all, they’re hiding in plain sight.

A “Latte” of Secrets

Asking strangers personal questions isn’t going to yield many secrets worth trading. Even very open people wouldn’t be willing to share bank accounts or state secrets, especially if it was their job. So how would any employee of anything manage to extract information without anyone noticing?

Their tactics are as devious as they are ingenious.

To start, consider the humble Starbucks location. With its relaxed lighting, comfortable seating, and almost endless supply of caffeinated beverages, it’s the perfect place to take friends and hang out for a nice chat. Historically, cafes and coffee shops have always been popular spots to gather – where people can freely express ideas and trade information. Starbucks exploits this fact in the same way McDonald’s have changed their own stores in the past decade, making them more comfortable and inviting to goad customers into lingering, possibly purchasing more things.

But is it just for profit? Starbucks would have you believe so. They wouldn’t want to admit it, but as an unspoken fact, people would assume that would be the ultimate reason for them to make the spaces so inviting. I submit, however, that there’s a more sinister reason for the design of their shops.

Appealing coffee shops not only mean you’re more likely to stay and buy things – you’re also more likely to stay and talk with the people working there. A friendly space well make you want to return to the shop consistently, where they can work on you, peeling away at your guarded exterior with sweet compliments and tasty drinks.

But even the friendliest person would take a long time to get to know. Despite how much money Starbucks has, it doesn’t want to make a significant time investment to gain your secrets. The true secret is there right in the drink, in what Sam was taking back to her Starbucks.

Truth serum.

Sodium thiopental is difficult to hide from a palette, but a still coffee master with a small enough dose just might be able to hide some in strong coffee without the customer noticing. Side effects of anesthetics can be depression of breathing and heartrate, but caffeine counteracts those effects. Consuming the barbiturate would make the effected more receptive to persuasion – gaining information would be as simple as asking them politely. Furthermore, the most important side effect is the one you don’t even notice. Amnesia.

What makes the truth serum so diabolical is, most of the time, you don’t remember the administration. The drug is quick to metabolize and the side effects are little in small doses. Thus, when you’ve left the store hours later, you don’t even remember what the nice barista asked you. Did they say something about your day? Your clothes? What did they even look like? Was it a girl or a boy? You can’t really remember for sure, and quickly assign what you do remember to the back of your mind to delete later with some funny meme or an important text message. They slip quickly in and out of your life, squeezing between your attention, and slipping into obscurity with your secrets comfortably in hand.

Sinister, right?

Further testing is required to determine if they are using sodium thiopental or some other truth serum, but I didn’t feel comfortable taking one of the tablets for study, in case they counted them later. I assume you would like some proof rather than more conjecture, and I promise, we will get there.

But let’s just say that they are using truth serum to extract secrets from people without them noticing. We can even say they’ve gotten so good at it, that almost all the locations around the world engage in the practice. What do they do with the things they learn? Write about it in their diary so they can laugh at you later? Snicker and tell their coworkers before moving on to the next victim?

Hilarious, but no. Information is power. What better way for Starbucks to buffer their profits than by selling secrets from any of the thousands of locations around the world? But how to communicate them without drawing attention? There’s the dark web, but that’s a solitary tool – not something a whole company could utilize. Other connections aren’t safe from government security, which would investigate and close the company if they found out. What’s an info broker to do?

Enter, the coffee masters.

Masters of the Dark Roast

For the uninitiated, Coffee Masters are Starbucks elite customer service representatives. You can tell them apart by their black aprons, rather than the signature green. What Starbucks will tell you is that they’re trained in the nuances of the coffees offered by the company. They taste all the blends and train their palettes so they can suggest food and other beverages to serve with them.

That’s what they tell you.

We’ve been speculating on Starbucks need for secrecy, and that begs the question, how do they transport messages between stores? How do they safely get the information into the hands of the higher ups? Normal communications aren’t secure enough for the volume of info, so what other means do they have?

The answer is right under your nose. Or tongue, rather. What does Starbucks deal in?

Coffee.

Indeed, suggesting other store items isn’t the only reason they train. They’re equipping their palettes in the clandestine art of “reading” the coffee. Say your blend is dark with citrus undertones. A Coffee Master samples the new blend before giving it to the store. To the untrained employee, or normal customer, it’s just some dark coffee. But for the Master, it’s a hidden message about other stores – a cypher that only they can decode. I don’t have the specifics of what each of the flavors and blends mean, but Sam has told me that the various flavors have “spoken to her” on some level. This tells me blends have the capacity to transmit the message through your palette, even if you’re not trained to understand what’s communicated. Starbucks ships and trades its coffees all around the world. All the locations can make changes to the blends before their shipped to send their messages globally, ready to sell to underground organizations or stockpiled somewhere and used later as leverage.

So, you know how they get the information from you, and you know what they do with your secrets after they obtain them. But surely this is all speculation – none of this is feasible. What evidence could there be to prove the existence of this secret society of baristas?

Allow me to provide insurmountable proof of what I’ve discussed. Hang on to your underwear, let’s put the fork in the garbage disposal and make some noise. Try your best and follow along.

Confirmed

Like so many secretive organizations, identification is essential for alerting members of an order where they can safely congregate. Thus, there are many clues, left in plain sight, to guide members toward certain locations. By examining Starbucks emblem, the Starbucks siren, we can extrapolate who’s really behind this conspiracy and connect some other disparate pieces of our puzzle.

The siren has gone through some iterations, and although they seem different through each era, all of them have clues that indicate the masterminds behind the barista network. Let’s start with the previous version, the one just before the most recent, since I think it’s the subtlest.

First, note the encompassing circle around the siren itself. Historically, circles represented brotherhoods and organizations. They’re also essential in understanding occult practices, since circles represent connectivity and house arcane equations. With the Siren in the center, it indicates that the order surrounds the main idea of the company, or the Siren. As a mythical creature, the Siren was responsible for luring people to their death with comfort and song, and represented female power. That sounds just like how we described the stores before, comfortable and welcoming. But the connections don’t stop there.

If we take the stars around the circle, and connect them, we form a triangle or pyramid. Some may know where I’m going with this, but for those who are still unsure, let’s look at the most recent change, back in 2011.

This logo is still a circle, although it’s no longer closed, most likely to draw less attention to itself. Still, the logo isn’t without it’s clues as to the company’s masters. For one, the star atop the crown is more pronounced. A five-pointed star, or pentagram, is symbolism present in many masonic and occult spaces and rituals. It represents balance and understanding of the universe beyond a Christian god. Don’t believe me? From the pinnacle or the star, or the very top, draw a line, following the edge to the end of the circle, then across, then back.

Another triangle. What’s more, outline the round face of the Siren within the pyramid.

Illuminati confirmed. Still not convinced? We can go back as far as the first iteration of the logo, all the way back from the 70s.

Here we see a more detailed drawing of the siren. Here, we can still draw a five-pointed star at the important edges of the logo. But beyond that, taking the picture and turning it upside down adds the final piece of evidence from the symbolism of Starbucks.

The upside-down star. The pentagram represents the Sabbatic Goat, otherwise known as Baphomet or the deity of the Knights Templar, that would later become free masons. The idol is something they have carried since their inception, and represents their thoughts on the nature of the universe and the role of wealth and reason. Connections with free masonry would explain their global and holistic connectivity around the world, as well as what they would want the information for. The more data they collect, the more leverage they have national officials, allowing their Shadow Government to dictate global events more effectively.

But this connection with the Masons left me wondering about the nature of their business. Sure, it made sense that Starbucks would operate out of Seattle. Washington was an integral member of the masons, so they would have a headquarters in the state of his namesake. But that even seemed too obvious – everyone knows where the headquarters would be. What would stop governments that were under the control of the masons from simply attacking there and cutting the head from the serpent? Then it hit me.

Seattle wasn’t really their headquarters, and I have more evidence to prove it.

The True Lion’s Den

The answer, as I later learned, was directly under my nose. As I will prove to you now, the Starbucks headquarters is not Seattle, as they would have you believe. No, I posit that the main base of operations is in Colorado, in the mountain town of Golden. Seems impossible, right? Not so.

Golden is a small tourist town right at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Quaint and unassuming, it feels far removed from the hustle of Denver just a sparse half hour away. If the headquarters was going to be in Colorado, one would assume it would be in the capital city, right in the center of the action. Once again, that would be too easy. Instead, they would set up just a few miles away, close enough to observe and influence, but not so close as to draw attention to themselves. Starbucks is all about subtle maneuvers, but I believe I have them cornered.

There are three Starbucks located in the town, all down one main road. Innocuous enough, Starbucks has been known to saturate areas with its presence. But looking at their placement, and things become more conspicuous. Ever looked at the Golden locations at night, watching the mountains. That’s right, you’re not hallucinating. The Starbucks line up perfectly with constellation Orion’s belt. Masons have always sought a more profound connection with the Heavens, believing it would bring them closer to understanding true Reason. Constellations provide the blueprint for many Masonic sites.

The town itself has its own significance. Golden might just sound like a name, and the residents of the town will say it relates back to the Gold Rush and pioneers panning for gold in the mountains. But I think it has to do with something much more significant – calves. Specifically the Golden Calf.

When Moses went up to receive the ten commandments, the Jews left at the bottom of the Mountain got bored, as religious refugees can sometimes. They took all of the gold they had brought with them and melted it down into a Golden Calf idol that they could worship. This symbolism would then be taken by Eliphas Levi, who would first draw the modern interpretation of Baphomet.

But there is even more compelling evidence. The location at 13th and Washington sits in the center of the belt. Here’s where things get interesting. We were willing to accept that Starbucks operated out of Washington, but that would be too easy. But neither can let go of the symbol of a founding father, so placing the headquarters on a street named after the first president would be a comfortable compromise. Perhaps more significant is the cross street – 13th. The number thirteen is an important integer in Numerology and the occult, but it has special meaning to the Masons and their predecessors, the Templar Knights. For one, Masons always enjoy their American symbolism. Thirteenth street, just like there were thirteen colonies that began America as we know it. What’s more, there were thirteen major figures in the Jesus cult – all twelve apostles plus Jesus Christ himself.

But for medieval history aficionados, thirteen is the most important date among the brotherhood. Friday the 13th, October 1307, King Phillip IV ordered the arrest and interrogation of the entire order in France. This would signal the decline of the knights and their adjustment into a more clandestine organization, with its symbolism and traditions becoming more exclusive and secret. Eventually, their ideas about reason and religion would find their way to Masons in the Middle East, and they would live on throughout Europe until they reached the New World, where they would be Freemasons. But despite their secrecy, the Masons are nothing if not dramatic, and can’t help themselves leaving clues and other markers that would guide members of the order toward them. And consequently, the rest of the world, right outside Starbucks’s glass doors.

But don’t take my word for it. For all you know, I could be one of them. Questions everything – trust no one. Do your research and practice caution. The walls have ears and the walls speak. Apparently, so does the coffee.

The Point

I’m serious, do your own research. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, I’m sure that was a weird ride. No more façade, it’s time to be real.

Let me make something abundantly clear.

Are the Starbucks really a legion of baristas bent on taking your info? No.

Is Starbucks really under the control of the Illuminati and assisting a shadow government? Of course not.

Is Sam studying to be a coffee master to become a trained coffee assassin? So far as she’s told me, no, but the science is still out on that.

Do you see how easy that was? How easy it is to generate a false claim and make it into news? With some tangential connections and very little research, I wrote almost 3,000 words on something fictitious trying to sell it to you as fact. Most of the time, however, it’s not nearly as silly. People take this kind of thing seriously, and not just Dan Brown shit like the Freemasons or Templars – things our modern culture is really interested in. I already wrote a little something on Pizzagate, and it followed much of the same threads as what I just did – a lot of falsehoods presented as facts and consequential connections blown up to be something they’re not.

I don’t write this to generate views, although I hope people read this. I wrote this whole thing about Starbucks to make a point, one I think deserves more analysis than what I wrote in An Apathetic Nation. The point, boiled all the way down to the bare ingredients is:

Do. Your. Research.

Don’t take things at face value, especially on the internet. I’m no master wordsmith, but I know my way around a keyboard. And with just a few keystrokes, I engineered something that, if I sold it well enough, I could get someone to believe. So, when you see that link on Facebook about how Bill Clinton was complicit in a child sex ring, please look for some other confirmation from a source that isn’t so politically swayed. When you read an article about how vaccinations cause autism and that global warming is a myth, do a little Google search and don’t be afraid to read something that might make you uncomfortable. Sometimes, that uncomfortable feeling is the truth, trying to make itself heard.