D.C.’s Twin Rivers of Filth

There is a grim poetry in the fact that Washington, D.C. — a city synonymous with political sewage — has been grappling with millions of gallons of actual sewage pouring into the Potomac River. The capital’s aging infrastructure has failed to contain what flows beneath the surface, and the metaphor practically writes itself: neither the city’s pipes nor its institutions can hold back the rot anymore.

And then, as if the cosmos itself decided to punctuate the point, an annular solar eclipse (a “ring of fire”) arrived at 7:01 AM EST this very morning, February 17, 2026. The Moon slid between the Earth and the Sun, blocking the center but leaving a blazing halo of light around the edges.

For those versed in the symbolic language of astrology, this eclipse landed, with exquisite precision, on one of the most sensitive points in the national horoscope.

The Sibley chart — the most widely used natal chart for the United States, erected for July 4, 1776, at 5:10 PM in Philadelphia — places America’s natal Moon at 27 degrees Aquarius, nestled in the third house of communication, media, and the public voice. This morning’s eclipse struck at 28 degrees and 50 minutes of Aquarius, falling within a single degree of the nation’s Moon.

In mundane astrology, the Moon in a national chart represents the common people, the collective mood, and popular sentiment. An eclipse conjunct this point does not whisper. It announces, with the force of a cosmic alarm, that what the public sees, feels, and knows is about to undergo a forced reset. Hidden truths surface. What has been obscured is illuminated, even as the Sun itself goes dark.

The timing is almost too perfect. As raw waste bleeds into the river bordering monuments to democratic ideals, a parallel flood of revelations has been spilling into public view, exposing a political class that has long operated above the laws it writes for the rest of us.

Consider the Epstein files. For years, the powerful moved heaven and earth to keep those documents sealed. When they finally began to surface, the names that emerged crossed every partisan boundary — financiers, politicians, and public figures tied to both parties. The reluctance of any administration to pursue full transparency suggests that the rot is systemic, structural, and deeply protected. The sewage flows in both directions.

Then there is immigration. The Biden administration’s aggressive shielding of illegal aliens from deportation, often in open defiance of existing federal law and court orders, represented more than a policy disagreement. It was a calculated decision to place political interest above the rule of law, poisoning public trust as surely as untreated waste poisons a watershed.

Congressional insider trading remains one of Washington’s most brazen open secrets. Members of both parties have been exposed through suspiciously timed stock trades aligned with committee knowledge and legislative action, participants in a system of legalized corruption that the toothless STOCK Act of 2012 did nothing to arrest.

Nor are the ruling families exempt. The Biden family’s labyrinthine business dealings and Hunter Biden’s foreign entanglements paint a portrait of influence-peddling that would be career-ending in any profession but politics. The Trump family, meanwhile, has converted political power into a commercial enterprise with a boldness that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush… from foreign licensing deals to cryptocurrency ventures launched on the back of presidential influence.

Astrologers who track the Sibley chart note that eclipses at this degree of Aquarius have marked pivotal moments in American public consciousness before. A similar solar eclipse struck nearly the same degree on February 15, 2018 (also during a Trump presidency) amid the chaos of the Mueller investigation, mounting national division, and the Parkland school shooting that catalyzed a mass movement.

Go back further: February 16, 1999, during the Clinton impeachment saga. February 16, 1980, as the Iran hostage crisis consumed Carter’s presidency and the country’s faith in its own competence. Each time the eclipse cycle returns to America’s natal Moon, the public mood cracks open, sometimes violently, always irreversibly.

This morning’s eclipse arrives alongside an even rarer alignment: Saturn conjunct Neptune at zero degrees Aries on February 20, a combination that has not occurred in this sign since the founding era itself. Saturn-Neptune dissolves the old structures of illusion. It strips away what we have pretended not to see. Paired with an eclipse on the nation’s Moon, the astrological signature is unmistakable: the American people are being shown, whether they wish to look or not, the true state of the plumbing, both literal and political.

What connects all of these scandals is not party affiliation but a shared contempt for accountability. Washington’s sewage crisis will eventually be addressed with engineering and funding. The political contamination is far harder to remediate, because the people responsible for fixing the system are the same ones who benefit from its failure.

The Potomac will recover. The eclipse will pass. But the ring of fire leaves an afterimage, and this one falls squarely on the soul of the American public. Whether the republic can look clearly at what has been revealed — and act on it — is the open question the cosmos has, with its usual indifference to our comfort, placed before us today.

The smell from both rivers grows stronger by the day.