Palmistry, Pluto and Preposterous Propaganda

Pluto is entering the sign of Aquarius later today. What could this mean?

New Horizons spacecraft image of Pluto. Courtesy of NASA

In the fall of 2019 I felt that it was time for a big change in my life. I couldn’t let go of the fact that we were living in a massive illusion, the extent of which I still could not determine. For two years I had been imploring my friends (and strangers on FaceBook) to reexamine what the public was told about the events of 9/11 to no avail.

You don’t have to agree with me about 9/11 to understand why a person who held this belief so strongly couldn’t sleep at night. I didn’t see the point of going to the hospital every morning to do what I was trained to do. There were a lot of other anesthesiologists out there. There weren’t a whole lot of people who saw what I saw, had some applicable training and knew how to tell a good story. It was excruciatingly difficult to be awakened in the wee hours of the morning to place an epidural in a young mother in labor who was going to raise her child under the illusion that those in charge of our country and the way we lived our lives were trustworthy. Who knows what they would try to pull off next? Why wasn’t anyone saying anything?

It was at that time that I met Vernon Mahabal, a world expert in palmistry— the practice of reading and interpreting the marks on our palms. Palmistry and astrology are regarded with seriousness in India. But I was born and raised in America and had formally trained in the sciences. I found such notions amusing.

Mahabal gave a “seminar” on palm reading near my home which I attended in October, 2019. He made some bold claims, including that astrology is useful but superfluous if you know how to read the hand. Everything is written on our palms. There is no second guessing. What is written is not open to interpretation.

The following day he was offering individual sessions to those who were interested. $300 for an hour of his attention to your hands. Obviously he was ripping us off. On the other hand, if he could back up his claims, he was selling something priceless for a few Benjamins…

Mahabal did not know anything about me or my obsession with getting “the truth” out. He sat at a small table with a notebook and a bright swing-arm lamp. He gestured that I sit across from him.

“Okay. Let me see your hands”, he said.

For the next five minutes he shined his bright light on my hands, illuminating and interpreting the creases that apparently told the story of my soul. He took notes as went, scribbling in unrecognizable glyphs. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t say a word.

“Okay. You can put your hands down.”

For the rest of the hour he told me about my life in both general and very specific terms. The biggest influences in my life as a child and adolescent. The challenges I faced as a young adult. He accurately named my age when I was first married and how long the marriage lasted. I was startled by how self-assured he was. He was saying it like it was.

When he arrived at the present day he looked up at me and asked, “Have you quit your job yet?”

I shook my head.

“What are you waiting for? You’re not supposed to be doing whatever it is you're doing.”

I tried my best to ask him as flatly as possible what exactly I was supposed to be doing. He answered specifically. He made other predictions that have yet to be realized.

At the time I thought his prognostications were seductive but not anywhere close to being practical. I was the primary bread-winner for my family. Without going into the specifics, he was sure that I would be successful at stuff that I had no experience with. I could not take him seriously. There was no way I would be able to leave my job and the paycheck that came with it.

Nevertheless, two months later I found myself consulting a dear friend of mine who is an astrologer about when would be the most auspicious time to submit a letter of resignation. I had never consulted astrologers for anything before, but then again two months earlier some guy looking at my hands told me that my departure from the OR was inevitable. The idea that I would leave my job was more fantastical than trusting an astrologer about the future. And yet here I was…

I had to give a three month notice. She spent a couple of days with my “chart” and called me back.

“There is no bad time really. However if you give your three month notice on or around December 19th, you are definitely going to leave with a ‘bang’!”

I took her advice and announced that my last day of work as a clinical anesthesiologist would be March 20, 2020. The following Monday, March 23, 2020 turned out to be the last day of elective surgeries around the country. Operating rooms everywhere essentially shut down and accommodated only the most dire surgical emergencies for the next year due to a dangerous virus that emerged from a wet market in China.

How could she know this? Astrology remains a complete mystery to me. Using accurate astronomical projections astrologers are able to superimpose significances relating to our health, our relationships, our finances and even how we collectively regard powerful institutions like our government and media. I don’t know how astrologers are able to attribute psychological and cognitive influences of objects in the sky that sit trillions of miles away from us. However in my journey of unlearning I have become more comfortable accepting my ignorance rather than dismissing ideas that I do not or cannot understand.

Pluto is entering Aquarius!! (so what?)

Later today (the former planet) Pluto is entering the constellation Aquarius. What does this mean? I can only answer this from an astronomical perspective. For non-star gazers:

In simple terms, our solar system sits in the Milky Way galaxy which consists of a hundred billion stars, the vast majority of which we cannot see with the naked eye. The constellations of the zodiac comprise the stars in our extremely local neighborhood. These constellations provide a frame of reference that can be used to define where in our orbit the planets are.

The figure above approximates how our planet and Sun align with the constellations. On the morning of the vernal equinox the sun rises with the backdrop of the constellation Aquarius. This is what is meant when we say we are in the age of Aquarius. 

It hasn’t always been like that. In fact the stars that form the backdrop of the rising sun on the first day of spring shifts slightly from year to year. This is not because the stars have moved significantly, it is because we define a year to be slightly shorter than the time it takes the Earth to complete a single orbit.

We do this because the Earth’s axis of rotation is wobbling very slowly. If we did not make this adjustment, our seasons would arrive at different times of the year based on our calendar. This slight adjustment, about twenty minutes per year, means that a different constellation appears behind the rising sun on the first day of spring every 2,100 years or so. Until very recently we have been in the age of Pisces. 

When a planet enters a new sign it means that viewed from the Earth, the planet appears in front of a new constellation. Of the large objects that orbit around our sun, Pluto is the most distant and has the lowest orbital velocity. On average, Pluto is trudging around the Sun at about 1/7th as fast as we are. This means that viewed from the Earth, Pluto will be in front of Aquarius for the next two decades.

To astronomers this is nothing to write home about. Planets (and lowly objects like Pluto) are constantly moving in and out of zodiac signs as they and the Earth orbit our Sun.

To astrologers, this represents an enormous shift in our collective psyche. They tell us that we are in for a ride.

To my limited understanding of astrology Pluto represents destruction, transformation and renewal. According to this astrologer, Aquarius rules independence, community, innovation, scientific reasoning and the rational.

It goes without saying that astrologers predict that we are entering a 20 year period when we earthlings will change our attitude with regard to our understanding of what is.

It’s obviously all hogwash. How could a frozen object like Pluto several billion miles away from us possibly influence our thoughts and feelings? Then again it was only a few centuries ago that we thought the objects in the sky were illuminated by a heavenly light that penetrated a cloak of darkness which spun around the Earth every day. We then discovered these points of light had mass and they influenced every other object through an invisible force called gravity. Could they be influencing us and our society in other invisible ways?

Consider the fact that the last time Pluto was in Aquarius was in a different two-decade long period, 1778-1798, which saw both the American and French Revolutions, i.e. the collapse of authoritarian rule and the emergence of an independent spirit. Interestingly, the first vaccine (against smallpox) was conceived during that time as well. The idea that humanity would never have a defense against invisible organisms that were responsible for terrible diseases was challenged and upended.

Vaccines are amazing! Science and scientists are our saviors! A government by and for the people can be trusted for ever more!

Pluto has a knack for being in the right place at the right time…

The Tucker Carlson Encounter

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Bret Weinstein’s interview with “rogue” journalist, Tucker Carlson on the X platform. Readers here had fair criticism of the evolutionary biologist. He hasn’t always been right. One can also say that he squandered his appearance in front of an audience that numbered in the millions by being incomplete. Nevertheless, I thought he changed some minds by not going too far.

When asked about the possible death toll from the mRNA technology, Weinstein shrugged his shoulders but felt that a figure of 17 million fatalities was a reasonable estimate, based on research that he finds credible. The research he was citing was a presentation given by researcher, Denis Rancourt, in Romania in November 2023 based on excess deaths across many countries that occurred only after the vaccine was introduced:

https://twitter.com/denisrancourt/status/1743735976420093986

One week later Carlson hosted independent journalist and mRNA vax critic, Alex Berenson:

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1745581351498060019

Berenson directly contradicted Weinstein and assured the host that he found no death signal from the jabs. Tucker Carlson was visibly incredulous. Carlson volunteered the fact that he knew of someone who died immediately after getting jabbed and the doctors admitted it was due to the vaccine. He also is close friends with two people who suffered heart attacks immediately after getting injected with this technology. How could there be no signal??

Berenson offered this up as proof of NO signal. He tweeted this, going so far as to say that “if anything, the opposite.”

What is Alex talking about?

• Why put up incidence of hospitalizations to prove something about fatalities?

• Why would he use a cross-section of healthy young people to rule out deaths that most likely occurred in the older and sick?

• There are other, obvious reasons that hospitalizations would have dropped in the military, like frequency of deployment into dangerous areas where injuries become more likely.

• There was clearly widespread reluctance to seek medical care from 2020 onward because of the pandemic.

My friend, Mathew Crawford, spent hundreds of hours analyzing the D.O.D. medical database DMED and found quite the opposite. Crawford is possibly the most competent statistician out there. He refutes (in his characteristically cheeky manner) Berenson’s absurd argument here:

Alex Berenson and James Suriowiecki Fail the Clown Veracity Test

I support Berenson’s substack, “Unreported Truths” primarily because of his fight against censorship. However his statements on the Tucker Carlson Encounter leaves me scratching my head. What exactly is going on here? What are we supposed to make of Berenson’s absurd “evidence” that there is no mortality signal from the shots? I can think of three reasons:

1. He actually believes what he is saying

2. He is being influenced, or more interestingly,

3. He is letting us know that he is being controlled by making statements that are obscenely preposterous

There’s another possibility: Pluto has gotten the best of Alex Berenson. What do you think? Please leave your comments.