X MARKS THE SPOT

To give credit due to the right person (I did not write this). This comes from a newsletter I receive and thought that many of you might enjoy this and some interesting information and a few chuckles.  If only I could write as entertaining as the publisher of Coffee and Covid.  

Onto the article:

This morning I gave in to the eclipse hype — everyone else is talking about it. I put it all under a skeptical microscope, but at least one conspiracy theory remained not easily explained. Let’s begin with Forbes’ spooky story yesterday, headlined “Here’s Why The Total Solar Eclipse Has Prompted States Of Emergency In Parts Of U.S.” What on Earth is an eclipse emergency? And why now? After all, we just had a similar eclipse only seven years ago without any declarations of emergency? Do they know something?

As you are probably well aware by now, on Monday the Moon will blot out the Sun, dramatically dragging its shadow across the entire United States. The undocumented eclipse will jump Texas’s border around 1pm Eastern time. Around 3:30pm, like a supersized Chinese spy balloon, it will float out of Maine’s east coast.

2024’s Great American Eclipse is pretty much the same as 2017’s great eclipse, except it’s going the other way this time. Criss, cross.

By all accounts, experiencing the day-to-night phenomena during a total eclipse makes for unforgettable memories. In 2017, Michelle and the kids drove up to North Carolina for the event, and she often describes it with a sense of wonder and amazement. (I was stuck home litigating a jury trial that week).

Eclipses are not particularly rare. Around a half dozen times every year, somewhere or other, fully or partially, the Moon eclipses the Sun.

That said, it is unusual to have two total eclipses within a few years of each other crossing the United States in an “X” pattern. The last time it happened — possibly the only other time — it was two eclipses five years apart, the first flying over in June 1806, and the second passing overhead in September 1811. They intersected near Cleveland.

Then, three months after the second eclipse closed the “X” in December 1811, came another unique historical event: a five-month series of two thousand of the most devastating earthquakes in U.S. history. It really shook things up.

According to the City of New Madrid, Missouri website, in recorded history of the entire world, no other earthquakes have lasted so long or produced so much evidence of damage as did the New Madrid earthquakes. They occurred along something called the New Madrid seismic faultline — hence the city’s interest — which happens to be located right around where the 2017/2024 eclipses will intersect this coming Monday. That’s the first coincidence connecting the two pairs of “X” eclipses.

Even more eerily, the 1811 earthquakes and the 1811 eclipse were preceded by the appearance of a great comet visible around the world. And what do you know? The 2024 eclipse is also preceded by the appearance of a great comet visible around the world — a great comet the media first creepily called the Devil’s Comet but now ominously calls the Mother of Dragons Comet. It’s green. So that’s another connection between the 1811 and 2024 eclipses.

So as you can easily imagine, people are a wee bit jittery over all the intersecting eclipses, great comets, and geographic coincidences. Still, one may easily chalk the 1811 earthquakes, comets, and eclipses up to natural coincidence, without invoking anything supernatural. (Note there is some unsettled scholarship potentially linking eclipses and earthquakes, presumably somehow related to tidal forces.)

But since we live in a post-pandemic, social-media world, where influencers constantly require ever more controversial, eyeball-grabbing content, a wild frenzy of speculation about the eclipse’s effect has flooded the electronic airwaves with thousands of hours of chilling new content. I would be shocked if you haven’t seen at least some of them.

Virtually any eclipse-related apocalyptic scenario you could imagine has been predicted and described online at great length.

Getting back to the Forbes article, it reported that a slew of cities and counties have officially declared states of emergency in the face of Monday’s eclipse. The answer given to the question posed by Forbes’ headline — why? — was unsatisfying. The explanation had nothing to do with post-earthquake disaster recovery, devil comets influencing people to bite each other like rabid zombies, or the even cleaning up the mess created by the Rapture.

Nope. The emergency-declaring areas cited increased traffic caused by out-of-town eclipse watchers. It might cause inconvenience and snarl some highways, and even clog a few cell tower communications for a couple hours. In other words, it’s a nothing-burger.

Still, it’s not completely unprecedented. Prior to the 2017 eclipse, FEMA issued a guidance with similar logic — traffic gridlock and so forth — and reported sending liaison officers to emergency operations centers in several states:

But that 2017 FEMA guidance, and whatever prudent steps FEMA took in case of some crowd-based incident, did not result any cities or counties declaring states of emergency, not as far as I can tell. So … do they know something we don’t know about the devil comet? Are these scattered cities and counties expecting a new, New Madrid earthquake?  UFOs?

I doubt it. I think the complete answer is the pandemic addicted them to emergency powers.

For just one example, most emergency ordinances let cities and counties award no-bid, no-oversight contracts. That means mayors and county chairmen can ‘buy’ goods and services from whoever they want, since it’s an emergency, without needing any pre-approval or signoff from pesky, skeptical councils, commissions, or purchasing departments. It’s perfectly legal to hire your cousin at emergency rates for “traffic management consulting” or some similar undefined and unquantifiable service.

Basically, states of emergency smoothly bypass all the difficult, bureaucratic rules with all their due process and their safeguards and their checks and balances, which just gum up all the great stuff local officials really want to do. Need to do something unpopular? Declare an emergency. Need to do something fast? Declare an emergency. Have a deadlocked council? Declare an  emergency.

It’s super simple! The best part is, when you think about it, anything can be an emergency. Just check the day’s headlines. Let’s see what we have to work with today … anything will work … and here’s one! How about a bug emergency? From the New York Times:

That sounds perfect! Who’ll argue about a state of emergency over a trillion locusts; it even sounds like something monstrous and bizarre buzzing out of the later chapters in the Book of Revelations.

A local declaration of emergency is literally a one-pager and only needs one signature. It’s so easy. So tempting. So lucrative.

So that’s what I think. I think all the eclipse states of emergency are really about graft and political opportunism. The good news is many states — like Florida — have already started reining in local emergency authorities. But much work remains. Local, local, local.

 But wait! I teased this story mentioning a conspiracy theory I couldn’t so easily dismiss… and here it is. I have no idea what to make of it. But during my eclipse research, I ran across something I could not so easily chalk up to mere coincidence. This one is really bizarre. Take another look at the map again, at the central intersection, where New Madrid and its earthquake fault line are located. Something else lives there, and it’s much weirder:

To set the table, there is a third eclipse we haven’t mentioned yet. On December 14, 2020 — remember that date — a total solar eclipse passed across South America. Here it is:

Nothing particularly interesting to us lay in that eclipse’s path. Yawn. But then … in a mildly interesting coincidence, the date of the 2020 South American Eclipse happened to lie exactly at the midpoint of the two Great American Eclipses. Behold:

August 21, 2017 ←→ 1211 days ←→ December 14, 2020 ←→ 1211 days — April 8, 2024.

Huh. So that’s a little curious, right? But it gets much curiouser. On the same date as the middle eclipse — December 14, 2020 — two insanely significant things happened here in the United States. First, Joe Biden was certified as Resident by the Electoral College. So, there’s that bit of insanity. But that’s not even the big one.

Second, on December 14, 2020, exactly halfway between the two Great American Eclipses, and on the same day as the South American eclipse, nurse Sandra Lindsay became the first American outside of clinical trials to be vaccinated for covid-19. Sandra got Pfizer. But forget about Sandra. The point is, December 14, 2020 was also the vaccine’s release date.

So … the deadliest medical intervention and biggest manmade disaster in history started on the day of a total eclipse, and was perfectly bracketed on both sides of the calendar by total eclipses, eclipses that happen to make an “X” over the same country that produced that same disastrous intervention.

I’ll grant you, all of that is weird and wildly coincidental. But I don’t put much stock in numerology, or astrological coincidences, and I’m not supernatural about eclipses. Thus, given only the facts I’ve reported so far, I still probably would not have taken up the time this morning to write about the Pfizer triple-eclipse connection.

But then, one more domino dropped and that was it. It got even weirder.

Turn out, the first batches of Pfizer, including Nurse Sandra’s shot, were almost certainly produced in a Pfizer manufacturing facility located in Chesterfield, Missouri, which was one of Pfizer’s very first facilities that made the vaccine.

Check this out: the Chesterfield, Missouri Pfizer plant was in or near 2017’s total eclipse path, and is also in or near 2024’s total eclipse path.

In other words: the Pfizer shots, which were first deployed precisely halfway between the two Great American Eclipses on the calendar, were also made inside the paths of both of those Great American Eclipses. Meaning, right where they intersect at the “X”:

X marks the spot. Or, the shot.

To be clear: I am not suggesting any supernatural relevance. I’m not even sure what it would be. But there were just too many coincidences for me to fail to mention the outsized role of Pfizer, both in the eclipse timeline as well as in the actual physical paths of the eclipses.

Regardless whether you are a booster of boosters or a skeptic of jabs, the Pfizer event is inarguably vastly significant in human history. In all of time, there’s never before been a coordinated global rollout of a single medication to billions of humans all around the world. If you believe the vaccines were lifesavers, and covid was a 1918-level threat, then it was the first time humans have ever stopped a deadly global pandemic in its tracks and saved that many lives. Or if, you believe (like me) the medication was defective and fatally flawed, then there’s never ever been a bigger manmade disaster causing more death, sickness, and misery.

What do you think Pfizer’s triple-eclipse connection means?

The world can be a strange place. Coincidences happen, all the time. But you must admit, this one is one crazy, wild coincidence.

 The New York Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse’ than COVID, scientists warn.” The news was a single Texas dairy worker caught bird flu … so here we go again!

In a long series of ridiculous neo-pandemic stories, this may be the most ridiculous neo-pandemic story yet. The “100 times worse” quote from the story’s headline was attributed to John Fulton, who is — get this — a pharmaceutical industry consultant for vaccines and the founder of Canada-based BioNiagara. So.

And according to the story, the U.S. already has two “candidates” for bird flu vaccines ‘in the pipeline.’ That makes two more bird flu vaccines in the pipeline than I will ever take.

At the top of its article, the Post reported the terrifying fact that bird flu — H5N1 — is around 52% fatal in humans. So, pray for the Texas dairy worker who … oh, wait. He’s not really that sick. Later down the article we discover his symptoms, I mean his symptom:

Not eye redness! Say it isn’t so. Man the lifeboats! Head for the hills! Where is Chicken Little right when you need him the most? (Maybe he’s down with bird flu.)

“They” — the singular dairy worker — is recovering at home. (Sorry about the awful grammar but the pronoun brownshirts made me do it.)

Eye redness. Not even pimples. His eyes are red. Somebody give him some Visine or something. It does make me wonder though; how did the geniuses who recommended outdoor masking manage to connect the dots between the dairy worker’s only symptom and the super-rare, chicken-to-human, red-eyed bird flu?

I mean, what Gregory House-level genius put two-and-two together?

Or, were they just looking hard trying to find a case among the dairy workers? All of them, by which I mean him, or maybe this time I do mean them … oh nevermind.

So far, this latest bird flu hysteria is nothing to worry about, except maybe how many poor animals will be destroyed, and how much more expensive chicken, beef, milk and eggs will will be next month.