On July 18, 2016, an intergalactic dust storm - Mendacium Collocatio – plowed into earth, broadsiding North America. It modified the brainwaves of half the people it hit, and created synaptic disruptions in them, for which we are just beginning to understand the ramifications. It also appeared that those who were affected also acted as transmitters of turmoil, impairing about 20% of the people they came into contact with. It was during a hotly contested political campaign, and this was not noticed for what it was. It was thought at first that the activities of people were aroused due to their emotional connection to one or the other candidate. We are only learning now that was not the case. The earth had been hit with the equivalent of 15,000 kilotons of this cosmic micro dust, 10,000 times more powerful than the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. And while the dust storm didn’t spread toxic and lethal radiation like a nuclear blast, it nonetheless caused widespread disruption. And it has been theorized that it made the human population on earth more susceptible to dormant viruses lying in wait, creating a confluence and causing a Perfect Wave scenario. The last time this planet experienced such a Perfect Wave was 66 million years ago.
What does this have to do with Italy and wine, you might ask? Nothing and everything. Intentional wine comes out of a civilized society. And a country like Italy, being civilized for a few thousand years, has not witnessed this kind of dissonance since the Inquisition. But that was a man-made occurrence. This just came out of the blue.
Dr. Gia Notti, an Italian scientist and wine lover, works at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. And on her Fyzzics blog, she has offered up some interesting ideas about this dust storm, and how it might be changing the face of not just Italian wine, but wine all over the world, and how the wine trade is being reformed because of this conflux. I was able to reach her, via Skype, and ask a few questions about this situation. She had only a few minutes, but was willing to share her speculations. The following has been edited for brevity:
Q. Hello, Dr. Notti. Thank you for your time. I’ll launch right into this subject and ask you: What do you think happened?
A. Hello, America. What we originally were able to determine was that this so called “cloud” has altered the neural pathways of those whom it has affected. I’m neither a neurologist nor a psychologist by training, but my colleagues in that field back in Italy have surmised, and I agree, that the main alteration had been in a suspension of belief in the truth. Or rather, those affected are unable to tell the difference between the truth and a falsehood. Those more deeply affected, as well, have shifted to a reality that exists only inside their mind. Inotherwords, they are bereft of the sense of reality that most of us share, which allows for civilizations to grow and flourish. This is problematic in modern man, and woman, in that the basic building blocks of civility could cease to exist, causing a regression of some of the humanity on earth, mainly the poor souls in North America. Not limited to North America, even though your country took the brunt of the hit. But in time, the cloud has managed to work its way through Europe and parts of Asia, and some of the larger countries in the southern hemisphere closer to the equator. That’s the basic theory.
Q. If this affects one’s sense of reality, how does that intersect with wine and the appreciation of wine?
A. Ah, an interesting side bar in this time of crisis. Well, on the basis of something that requires sensory appreciation, if one is unable to live in the reality that most of us agree upon, then a sour wine, or a corked wine might seem agreeable to the affected person. It is capable of causing great disruption in your wine trade (and the world-at-large) in the foreseeable future, as we do not know if these symptoms are temporary or permanent. Or how long they will remain, past the duration of the time which we passed through the cloud. We are not sure if we have even passed through the cloud. So, there are still a lot of questions. But, one thing is for sure: everything you know about Italy, about wine and about the wine trade (my father had a vineyard in Liguria), it’s as if someone took a blackboard filled with information and wiped it clean.
Q. I’ve noticed a shift here in America, more towards the younger professionals, but also more toward women and black and indigenous people of color. Is this by any chance a byproduct of this gas we’ve passed through?
A. I’m not sure, and not being a sociologist, you’d have to ask someone with more expertise. I don’t think this “sudden” shift toward a more egalitarian system, which would include women and, how do you say, BIPOC, needed a cosmic dust storm. But it might have provoked an opportunity for them to take a more ascendant role. We have run some numbers, and an unusual large percentage of people affected by the dust storm are men, and older men, and older Caucasian men. I cannot offer any conclusions from this, but it is something we are studying and following in our spare time. After all, we have another mission here and that keeps us pretty busy.
A. Ha! That’s a good one. And this is probably a question that goes beyond 50 billion miles and four years inside an intergalactic dust storm. For sure, the majority of these people have experienced profound neurological changes, but, and this is a big but, it could be they were the best hosts for whatever this dust storm was promoting. What we know now is this: the main result of those affected is the loss of reality and the inability to distinguish between the truth and a lie. I think that has been a problem on earth for a lot longer than four years. It may have just exacerbated an already endemic situation in these poor souls. Whatever it is, we’re going to have to figure out how to live with them, and they with us, for the duration of this storm, If we ever pull out in our lifetime, or our children’s children’s children lifetime.
In the meantime, I’m drinking a bottle of Pigato from my father’s vineyard tonight, with the hope that we’ll make a turn in the universe and find
ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in. I think we all could use a
drink to get through this.
