Neptune (theatre) in Aquarius (robot):

Actor robots take Japanese stage

First there were dancing robots, then house-sitting robots and now a new breed of acting robots is making its big debut on the Japanese stage. The play, which had its premiere at Osaka University, is one of Japan's first robot-human theatre productions.

The machines were specially programmed to speak lines with human actors and move around the stage with them. Playwright Oriza Hirata says the work raises questions about the relationship between humanity and technology.

The play, called Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker), is set in the near future. It focuses on a young couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work. In the play, the robot complains that it has been forced into boring and demeaning jobs and enters into a discussion with the humans about its role in their lives. So far, the play is only 20 minutes long but it is hoped to become a full-length production by 2010.

Obama’s Sagittarian Solution for Capricornian Times

In his second annual message to Congress, in December 1862, Abraham Lincoln wrote: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Barack Obama has been fond of quoting Lincoln. But his proposals for the US economy have so far not been thought anew. OK, some of them are new: spending more on infrastructure, education, renewable energy technology etc. And he’s going to see what he can cut from the budget. But the main thrust of his proposals, in co-operation with George Bush, are old: the economy is heading into recession, so the government borrows a load of money and pumps it into the economy in the hope of stimulating it. The UK government is doing exactly the same. As George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor said, it is like trying to gamble your way out of debt.

As astrologers, we have a privileged insight into the zeitgeist and where it is heading. And the professional economists with their advanced theories have proved themselves to be spectacularly incompetent. So us astrologers who have a basic idea of balancing books have something to say.

Because that is what I think economics come down to: balancing the books. Margaret Thatcher understood this, at least in her early days as Prime Minister. If you have been living beyond your means, then you have to tighten your belt for a while, unless you can find some new means of income. Financial engineering can only delay this reckoning.

In a very Pluto in Sag fashion, the US and Britain have been living way beyond their means for years, fuelled by cheap money from the Middle East, China and India. With Pluto entering Capricorn, it is time to hang our heads for a while and pay our debts. Then we will eventually end up on solid ground again. With Uranus moving in to square Pluto, the game is soon to change radically. The old methods will not work, if they ever did.

But no, in their hubris the US and UK governments are trying to borrow their way out of the problem. Admittedly this can work when it is a matter of fine-tuning. Or if you can see the economy growing significantly as a result, and you can use the increased tax revenues to repay your borrowing.

But America is up against the wall. The competition from other countries, particularly China, is intense and growing. The US automobile industry is on its last legs, not because of cheap labour costs in China, but because the Japanese are better at it. And Obama wants to throw tens of billions of dollars of borrowed money at the car makers. And cut taxes to get people spending more.

Britain is even more up against the wall. We are in some ways a post-industrial nation, unlike say Germany, the world's biggest exporter of manufactured goods. A lot of our wealth has come from financial services in recent decades, and that entire sector is changing and, for now, shrinking. Yet Messrs Brown and Darling are chucking tens of billions of borrowed pounds - at what? At a past that isn't going to come back.

I don’t know what the answer is, but Pluto entering Capricorn tells me it is not this. In its prolonged affluence, America has become decadent: that is the only reason the car makers are in trouble, for there is no reason that America could not make cars as well and as cheaply as the Japanese. This decadence is also the reason the infrastructure has been neglected, and why there has been such excessive borrowing. But the Americans are spectacularly resourceful when called upon, and this gives me hope.

Long-term solutions are needed. The US economy is not about to roar ahead again, which is the only way you could justify the huge amounts the US government is starting to borrow. It will just make the deep-seated problems that much harder to overcome, for there will be even more debt to pay back.

The Bush-Obama solution has panic written into it. Obama’s self-assurance was wobbling at his recent press conference on the economy, and he was pushing his hand at the audience, as if to ward off criticism.

As a politician, there is the big ‘R’ word – recession – which you must avoid at all costs if you want to keep your job. But recessions are sometimes necessary, they are like reflective ‘down-time’ after the heady days of a booming economy. America needs a recession. The UK needs a recession.

Margaret Thatcher was probably the only politician ever who had the guts to deliberately put her country through a recession. Yes, she was hard, she was doctrinaire, she was patronising, she caused unnecessary - as well as necessary - suffering, and eventually she lost her political judgement. But Britain was no longer the ‘sick man of Europe’ by the time she had finished. Admittedly, a short and victorious war in the middle of the hard times (against Argentina) helped her through.

I think that Barack Obama to some extent understands the need for deep changes in the US economy, and his proposed spending on infrastructure and alternative technologies reflects this. But with Pluto entering Capricorn, the new economy will not be so consumer driven and credit driven – people have been burnt by this. It will be based more on personal financial security and on meeting actual, as opposed to invented, needs. It will be about inefficient businesses having to change or die due to foreign competition. It will be about recognising that resources are no longer unlimited, and that unlimited growth is no longer a sane model. Throwing borrowed money at the economy, ‘stimulating’ it, trying to get people to spend more and more, will soon become an old and discredited way of thinking. A recession is necessary to begin to make these changes.

I think Obama will be a good leader in a time of recession. But he is clearly still caught up to a large extent in the old Sagittarian way of thinking. I think that circumstances will force him to change as the recession bites, and I think that he has the capacity to adapt and to think more radically. What he needs to avoid is to be seen as having caused the recession. Just like he will need to avoid being seen as the President who ‘lost’ the Iraq War (President Ford was seen, entirely unfairly, as the man who lost the Vietnam War.)

So it is a very tricky path he has to tread. I don’t think he yet understands how much the game is changing. The sticking-plaster solution that himself and Bush are proposing is just that, and Obama will find himself propelled into the need for very different solutions as Pluto in Capricorn bites, and particularly as Uranus also makes itself felt.

Obama himself has MC at 28.53 Scorpio. Neptune will be moving towards an exact square of this point over the next 2½ years. Even now Neptune is heading towards next May’s separation of just 2½ degrees. So this is going to be a constant theme of the first term of his Presidency. It is a challenging transit. It is about how the public sees him (MC), and will involve elements of both inspiration and illusion (Neptune); and it is also about his personal sense of vocation and career direction (MC) – again there are elements of both inspiration and illusion, and also a gradual unfoldment of the impulse which brought him to the Presidency in the first place.

Being a challenging transit, Obama is likely to have to struggle with the public’s perception of him. Some people may indeed start to see him as the man who made the recession much worse than it need have been, and who lost the Iraq War. A recession and a lost war are about the 2 worst things you can have as a leader in terms of popularity. Obama could easily go through a huge dip in popularity, particularly in 2010/11, as the honeymoon fades and the recession deepens. This is likely even if he is doing a brilliant job at guiding the economy through a difficult transition. The US has Sag Rising – it wants instant results – and Sun square Saturn – they are not patient or realistic with their leaders. But in early 2012, as the election approaches, Neptune will complete his final square to Obama’s MC and the journey will start to conclude.

The US Moon (the people) is at 27 Aquarius, which will have a conjoining transit from Neptune. So there is this whole Neptunian journey that America will be going through with Obama over the next 4 years. Part of it may be a realisation by some that he is not a Redeemer after all, but despite that an effective President.

Having Sun square Neptune natally, Obama has an instinctive understanding of this planet. He knows the effect he can have on people. Anyone who attracts the sort of belief and hope that he does is also likely to attract its opposite. People are likely to be intensely polarised in their attitude to him: but in America, that is politics as usual!

Copernicus' Skeleton

3 more days and Pluto will finally leave Sagittarius. So we can expect to see one or two Sagittarian events scooting in before it is too late. Like the remains (Pluto) of the astronomer (Sag) Copernicus being identified in a Polish cathedral where he lived. Copernicus was the supreme Sagittarian, re-visioning our whole sense of our place in the universe, through his theory that the Earth goes round the Sun, rather than the other way round.

‘Researchers in Poland say they have solved a centuries-old mystery and identified the remains of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

A comparison of DNA from a skeleton in Poland and strands of the astronomer's hair found in a book in Sweden almost certainly confirm it is his skeleton. Archaeologists found the skeleton in north-eastern Poland three years ago in a cathedral where Copernicus lived.

Jerzy Gassowski, the leader of the archaeologists' team, said forensic facial reconstruction of the skull found that it bore a striking resemblance to existing portraits of the father of modern astronomy.’

This theory of Copernicus’ makes the movements of the planets easier to understand. None of us have directly observed the solar system from the point of view of the Sun. But all the same, it has become an absolute truth. Though we have another name, ‘fact’, that conceals this.

As astrologers we are in the odd position of subscribing to this absolute truth, yet pretending it is not the case when we do our astrology, which places the earth at the centre of the solar system. Intellectually, we believe the earth-based system to be nonsense, yet we act as though it isn’t. And then we consider those who ridicule astrology to be closed-minded!

My conviction that astrology is, in a way, nonsense seems to grow on me, but that doesn’t hinder me at all as an astrologer. Because there are all these incompatible forms of astrology that work, I have to treat astrology as a form of divination, like tarot, that works, and which says nothing about our relationship to the real planets and stars. In a way. Because when I look at the Sun and Moon and stars, they have a powerful effect on me, and I know there is something going on. There is no intellectual solution to this conundrum.

Copernicus was born on Feb 19 1473. He was appropriately born with Jupiter in Sagittarius. When he developed his theories, the outer planets had moved into one of those rare configurations where they are all in the waxing phase of their cycles with each other. This only happens about once every 500 years, for about 60 years. It is a time when important new developments happen that define the following 450 years. Like Copernicus’ theory, which changed our relationship to the universe and gave a massive boost to man’s confidence in his own reasoning power - it seemed like a divine gift, and ultimately it ushered in the Scientific Revolution.

We are now, 500 years later, 15 years into another outer planet waxing phase. What is happening in our lifetimes will, on a deep level, define the next 450 years. What a time to be alive! But also, at the time, how hard it is to spot what those seed developments are. But I think the new global connectedness, particularly via the internet, has to be part of that: all we’ve had so far are the early beginnings of it.

The Lemming Theory of History

I think that conspiracy theory, in the sense of world events being secretly controlled by small groups of people, is similar in principle to the old-fashioned ‘great man’ view of history, which Tolstoy attempted to discredit in his novel War and Peace. According to this theory, history is largely shaped by great men like Napoleon: “highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or Machiavellianism, used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact.”

Tolstoy’s most effective presentation of his case was in describing the nature of battles, of which he had first hand experience. What we might learn in a history book is Napoleon’s brilliant victory at such-and-such a battle, brought about by the orders he gave. What Tolstoy points out in detail is the huge disparity between the orders that were given, and the course of events on the ground. The outcome of the battle, in other words, had nothing to do with the orders given by the ‘great man’. The victorious Russian general Kutuzov in War and Peace goes to sleep in his tent during a battle, having the wisdom to know that any orders he gives won’t make any difference.

It’s not that ‘great men’, or small powerful groups of people, do not make a difference. They can, if they seize the moment. But it is soon gone in the wider current of forces that shape society. In the last analysis, I think it is this wider current, the collective will of society, that has the most power.

Barack Obama may make a difference to America. But he is in the position he is in because there is a collective longing for certain types of change that he has been able to respond to and articulate. There have always been leaders and influential groups of people. Sometimes they are able to rise above the collective and shape it, for better or for worse, at least for a while. But they are like temporary islands in an ocean.

The ongoing world financial crisis, and plunge into recession, is a good example of the unconscious collective having the upper hand. A huge force has swept through the world, and gone are our usual illusions that anyone is in control. The notion that somehow a few people engineered this is risible. It has been a wonderful and instructive example of the ultimate power of blind collective forces. These forces haven’t come out of nowhere. They have been building for years through the reckless, herd-like actions of the banking system, the politicians who are supposed to regulate it, and the millions of people who have borrowed far more than they should have. It’s very hard to point a finger at particular groups of people and blame them. It’s human nature at a collective level that has brought it about.

Hence my title ‘The Lemming Theory of History’, which remarkably doesn’t produce any results on Google. The lemmings go over the cliff because all the other lemmings are, and they are being pushed on from behind. Even if you have been financially prudent over the last decade, you are still having to go over the cliff, you are still being affected by the recession.

So individuals, or even, if you want, secret conspiring groups can make a difference for a period, even for decades, while the currents are with them. But the bigger trends are fundamentally collectively determined.

This view ties in with society seen as a chart in mundane astrology. Yes, the inner planets are there: there is the Sun as the leader, the Moon as the people, Mars is the army and the violent gangsters, Venus is the women, Jupiter the gamblers and empire builders and so on. But then you have the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. We know from our own individual lives that we cannot control these planets when they are active, we can only do our best to co-operate and to remain conscious. These planets carry the deeper themes of our lives, as well as ushering in the new phases, the big transformations. Living with outer planets can be hard enough for us as individuals, with our capacity to make choices. So how much harder it is for a collective, where choice-making and consciousness are much more problematic, to live consciously with these planets.

It is therefore entirely in keeping with the astrological view of the outer planets to see society as fundamentally, and largely unconsciously, in the grip of collective forces, with the odd moment of inner planet consciousness here and there. The Lemming Theory of History! Yes there are great men and women, and yes there are conspiracies/cabals, but they are small fry in the bigger sweep of things.

With Uranus moving in to square Pluto over the next few years, we are at the beginning of one of those great collective transformations that we see from time to time. The last was Uranus conjunct Neptune in the early 90s. Despite his best efforts, the leader of the USSR at the time, Gorbachev, was completely powerless in the face of the collective forces that tore apart the Russian Empire, with a speed and ferocity that surprised everyone. These moments when outer planets join up and completely take over do not come from nowhere: they are like underground rivers meeting and bursting through to the surface, sweeping through towns and villages. They were there all the time, quietly growing in strength and carrying the collective with them, which in its hubris thinks it controls events.

By the way, what keeps me on these sort of themes is living in Glastonbury, UK. For many people here, it is a common sense fact that any major world event has been deliberately and secretly engineered. They are not clear about who or what or how. But that’s not the point. The point, I think, is to avoid engagement with reality, while retaining a sense of superiority to it.

The Age of Ideology; Scientific Bits & Pieces

Having Mercury in Aquarius opposite Uranus within half a degree, I bristle when I see a closed orthodoxy. The liberal, progressive end of things is just as capable of producing these orthodoxies as the conservative, reactionary end. Man-made global warming long ago became one of those orthodoxies, to which any ‘responsible, right-thinking’ person subscribes. Now it may well be that we have caused global warming. But that’s not the point. The point is that anyone who disagrees tends not to be taken seriously by these responsible, right-thinking people who have woken up to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (capital T). To disagree, or even question, certainly won’t do your career prospects any good if you are a scientist or a politician.

Pluto in Sagittarius has been good at producing rigid ideologies, as one might expect, and global warming is just one of a series. The free-market ideology that brought down the world financial system is another. It was the rigidity that did it, rather than the ideas themselves, because it means it’s hard to adapt and respond until it’s too late.

Signs always need to learn from their opposites, and in this case we did not do a very good job collectively of learning from Gemini while Pluto was in Sagittarius. Gemini realises that ideas are… just ideas! Gemini flows like quicksilver from one idea to another, and sees how any idea flows into its opposite. This too can be an extreme, and Gemini needs to learn that while ideas are just ideas, they also matter, they can reflect deeper truths.

Pluto transits are deep, so time and perspective are needed. It may be some years before we understand the Age of Ideology that we are just leaving.

Anyway, having Mercury in Aquarius opposite Uranus (within 1/2 a degree), I am always pleased when I see an idea that niggles at one of our orthodoxies. Here’s one from New Scientist:

‘The planet’s climate was on the brink of entering a permanent ice age before humans intervened. The ice caps at Earth’s poles formed only in the past 30 million years, as levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell. Then around 2.5 million years ago, as the overall cooling trend continued, something strange happened: the climate began see-sawing ever more wildly between conditions like today and ice ages every 20,000 to 50,000 years. According to a simple climate model developed by Thomas Crowley at Edinburgh University, these oscillations were a sign that the climate was set to flip to a new stable state: a permanent ice age lasting tens of millions of years or more. This flip could have occurred in about 10,000 years from now, or possibly earlier. “It’s not proven, but it’s more than just an interesting idea,” he says.

However, by pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere we have delayed this transition indefinitely. “We are probably very comfortably away from it happening now,” says Crowley.”

This piece doesn’t question the man-made nature of global warming. But it does introduce the idea of there being something fundamentally good about the warming we have created.

While I’m about it, a few other QI ideas from the recent New Scientist.

In July this year in Las Vegas, a computer programme called Polaris became the first to beat a team of world-class poker players, each of whom had previously won over $1 million. This may prove to be a pivotal moment in the development of artificial intelligence.

It is some time since computers were able to beat the best chess and draughts players. These games favour players with the mathematical ability, or processing power, to calculate the consequences of choices many moves down the line.

But Poker is different. It is a game of cunning, bluff and deception – not attributes we traditionally associate with computers. Polaris excels at a simple version of Poker, ‘ heads-up limit Texas hold’em’. Its developers believe it is only a matter of time before computers get the upper hand at more complex forms of the game.

The next version of Polaris has been trained to ‘learn’ optimal game strategies by examining a database derived from simulations of 800 million two-player hands. These strategies are embodied in series of software bots with names such as Mr Blonde, Mr Pink and Agent Orange, each one tailored to counter particular styles of play.

AI is an Aquarius issue. With Neptune in Aquarius, the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence are starting to blur. But it is still early days. In 15 years time Pluto will enter Aquarius, and that’s when it could start to get really interesting.

Before Copernicus, the earth was considered to be at the centre of the universe. Since then, it has been an accepted truth that the earth’s place in the universe is in no way ‘special’: we are one planet among many in one solar system among many. However, this has not been proved! This means that we might live in part of the universe that is not typical. And that means our perception of the universe as expanding at an accelerating rate might be a relatively local phenomenon. This would mean we can do away with the notion of ‘dark energy’ or ‘dark matter’, which no one has seen, but which is needed to explain the expansion of the universe. I like this idea. I’ve always thought of ‘dark energy’ as like the ether which was postulated before Einstein came along, but which no-one could detect. They couldn’t detect it because it wasn’t there, and I suspect the same is true for dark energy.

Finally, it may be that the Holy Grail of physics, the Unified Field Theory, which reduces the four basic physical forces to one force, may not be testable. These forces are gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The theory itself hasn’t been properly worked out yet, with gravity being the tricky one to incorporate, though String Theory seems to be getting somewhere.

The problem is this: that were you to conduct an experiment at the energy levels required to see full convergence of the electromagnetic and weak and strong nuclear forces (at around 10 to the power 16 gigaelectronvolts), you would at this level run into problems with the ‘Planck scale’, at which quantum fluctuations in space-time become strong. This can create enough uncertainty to make it impossible to tell if unification does occur at higher energies.

Experiments in the 1970s were powerful enough to hint that the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces were beginning to converge at the energies then created during particle collisions. It may be that the quantum fluctuation effect is not strong enough to invalidate a test for full convergence. But if it is, it may mean that we never have our theory of everything! I think I can live with that.

Barack Obama is the first major western leader from the Pluto in Virgo generation, and as a number of people pointed out, his election acceptance speech was very Virgoan. A meaning of Virgo that didn’t come out there is technology, but this is something that Obama has emphasised: that we can invent our way out of many of our problems.

Pluto is where we look to for survival. For the Cancer generation, many of whom either lived through or fought in World War II, survival lay in protecting the homeland. For the Pluto in Leo generation, individuality was the key to survival. The protests and rebellions of the 60s were not just about bored youth with nothing better to do: these were Pluto in Leos for whom conforming to their parents values felt like psychological death. Because they were Leo, we saw their influence while they were young. The Pluto in Virgo generation will be looking to technology as a means of survival. Not just because they are Virgos, but because the world increasingly demands it if we are to survive in our present numbers.

The Ultimate Truth

Caveat: if you get worried about my sanity, skip to the end!

It’s obvious to anyone with eyes to see that the global financial crisis we’re in has been deliberately engineered. Not by the puppets we call our leaders, but by the cabals behind them who have the real power. Democracy has been a godsend to our real rulers, because it gives the people the illusion that they are the ones calling the shots. But democracy is nothing other than crowd consciousness, which is the easiest thing in the world to manipulate. You just get a few good-sounding ideas that address the current popular complaints, the right use of imagery and the media, a bit of charisma, and you have another puppet.

Once you understand it all, you wonder how you never saw it in the first place. We are not in control of our destiny. That is controlled from elsewhere, by a small group of people – or beings – skilled in giving us the illusion that we have choice.

These rulers are ancient, even timeless. You can see their hand through human history. It is the reason that all civilisations eventually fall: humans become too powerful, they start to understand too much. History has been one long experiment in which our true rulers allow us to build civilisations, which gives them power, but sooner or later we begin to break free.

This time it is different. Humans have amassed an unparalleled technological understanding, but our metaphysical understanding is now nugatory. Consequently we think it is ourselves who are in control. The true rulers – the Omega Brotherhood – finally have us where they want us. Astrologically, this has been the final outcome of Pluto in Sagittarius – the power (Pluto) of the alien (Sag) controllers.

It is ironic that we have been so enchanted by the recent intensification of the globalisation process, itself a reflection of not just Pluto in Sag, but the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1990s, followed by the mutual reception of these 2 planets. At last, it seems to us, humanity is becoming one. What it really means is one big crowd that can be controlled.

The origins of the Omega Brotherhood lie elsewhere in the galaxy. They are a splinter group from a much larger, essentially peaceful civilisation, the Pax Lactum Via. That wider civilisation is well aware of the activities of the Brotherhood, and much of what we think of as UFO activity has been coded attempts by the Pax to help humanity awake from its entrapment. This is why the military has been so quick to get involved with UFO sightings, particularly where hard physical evidence is involved. Military leaders, just as much as celebrities and political and business leaders, are in thrall to the OB. The global financial crisis, like 9/11 before it, is a crude attempt by the OB to distract humanity from the real state of affairs. As the OB knows very well, 2012 is a possible wake-up point for humanity. Uranus in Aries square to Pluto in Capricorn: a fresh awakening to who the real world government is. And this just as we are moving from the Age of Pisces (Submission) to the Age of Aquarius (Humanity with its own Vision of the Future).

It is through America more than any other country, for obvious reasons, that the OB has been directing its efforts over the last century. George Bush was the ideal puppet, for Americans with their ‘advanced democracy’ had become sufficiently malleable that they would elect such a President. But Bush was just too good – or too bad! Too many people began to see through him to the real mechanism by which he attained the trappings of power. History has been a process of learning for the OB itself, and with Bush they over-reached themselves, they had become over-confident. Too much was unaspected in Bush's chart: his Saturn, his Mars and his Mercury-Pluto. It was a risk. A fragmented character like this can be very easy to control, but also very hard to control if one of the sub-personalities, in this case Mercury-Pluto, gets the bit between its teeth.


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The OB inevitably has its own hierarchy and power-struggles, and Barack Obama was the product of a backlash within the OB: he was put forward as an emergency remedy. In allowing Obama to be elected, the OB has made a number of temporary concessions towards humanity’s desire to be self-determining. But metaphysically, Barack Obama is still caught up in the Christian Nexus. The Nexi are what the OB term the various religions and philosophies they have put forward over the millennia to keep humanity docile. Having 9th House Neptune in Scorpio, Obama is open (Neptune) to the power (Scorpio) of extra-terrestrial influence (9th House). With Obama it will be a waiting game, but what is 8 years in the context of centuries? And if, like Bush, he turns out to have been an error of judgement, termination always remains an option, as it has done with a number of Presidents.

By the way, I don’t believe a word of the above, apart from some of the stuff about Democracy and Christianity. I just decided to take the side of the conspiracists for once. They may not thank me for it. It wasn't very hard to invent when you're not constrained by the need for evidence or deductive reasoning, and you've read a couple of paragraphs of David Icke.

I think that a lot of conspiracy theories are properly classified as 'religion', due to the fervour, certainty and sense of superior inside knowledge that tend to accompany them. It's no different to believing in the literal truth of the Bible. There always have been, and always will be, people who take fairy stories literally.

New Scientist magazine recently ran a poll of readers' favourite sci-fi books. One person advocated the Bible: "A superman creates a lot of rubbish out of dust and sets up a version of a 'simulation of a city' game... there's a twist at the end but I won't spoilt it for you."

For those of us who don’t like Sarah Palin

In her posting Can Love Endure? Nancy writes:

“I have always maintained that to win a presidential election, especially a first term, Venus, the planet of love, is key. If involved in a very potent progressed aspect, it indicates that supporters are smitten and that the candidate will inspire enormous enthusiasm. Interestingly, the only two candidates, besides Obama, to have a strong Venus progression this year were Hillary Clinton (progressed Venus square the Sun) and Sarah Palin (progressed Venus conjunct Sun), both of whom elicited tremendous devotion from their followers. In the case of Obama, there were several Venusian indicators of the enormous popularity that eventually catapulted him to the White House. Unlike both Clinton and Palin, Obama was able to navigate largely unhindered by the incoherence, confusion, and/or scandal of the sabotaging Neptune.”

Sarah Palin was born 11 Feb 1964 in Idaho. This year she has had Pluto square natal Venus, Neptune square Progressed Venus, and Prog Venus in an applying square to her natal Sun. So there was plenty going on for her around Venus. I don’t think we need worry about hard or soft aspects being ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Obama continues to have Pluto opposing his natal Venus, for example, and it has challenged him (over Rev Wright, for example), and has resulted in increased popularity.

What is worrying is the possibility of Sarah the Ghastly running for President in 2012, and winning.


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The good news is that in 2012 she has much less going on around Venus. A separating square from Prog Venus to natal Saturn – this suggests that she will be old news, past her peak. And a conjunction from Prog Mars to natal Venus. This is dynamic, and suggests she will put her name forward and have some initial success. But the aspect will be separating after early April 2012.

Of course, we do not know Palin’s birth time, and therefore where her Moon and Angles are. This could make a big difference. But an initial assessment for 2012 based on her noon chart does not look promising for her.

St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, Russia

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Chapel of St. Gildas, Brittany, France

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Las Lajas Cathedral in Colombia

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Last Gasp of Pluto in Sagittarius: First Picture of an Exoplanet

The first pictures of planets outside our Solar System have been taken, two groups report in the journal Science.

Visible and infrared images have been snapped of a planet orbiting a star 25 light-years away.

The planet is believed to be the coolest, lowest-mass object ever seen outside our own solar neighbourhood.

In a separate study, an exoplanetary system, comprising three planets, has been directly imaged, circling a star in the constellation Pegasus.

While several claims have been made to such direct detection before, they have later been proven wrong or await confirmation.

"It's a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen."

Paul Kalas, University of California

Read more here

For the hell of it, here is a post called STRANGE NEW WORLDS from Oct 2007 in which I described some of the new exoplanets currently being discovered. They do Sci-fi proud:

We’ve known for a long time of the existence of other Suns like our own, but other planets, other worlds were not definitively detected until early 1992, as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction began. They tend to be detected indirectly through their effect on their local Sun, and naturally enough the ones detected so far are mostly pretty big, because they are easier to spot. These new worlds are known as extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, and there are currently 253 of them.

Some of them are turning out to be weird and wonderful places. Here is a list from New Scientist magazine:

HD189733b (they have such sexy names) is 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula, with a mass of 1.15 Jupiters. It orbits its star every 2.2 days. One side is in perpetual daytime, the other side is in perpetual night-time. The day side has a temperature of 940 degrees, the dark side is 700 degrees. The dark side is so hot because winds of more than 10,000 kilometres per hour – Mach 8 – whip round the globe, spreading the heat. In July, it became the first exoplanet to have a compelling case made for water in its atmosphere.


TrES-4 is 1400 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It is the most bloated world on record, less massive then Jupiter but with a volume 5 times bigger. It has an average density less than a wine cork, and would float on water. It orbits its Sun every 3½ days and has a surface temperature of 1300 degrees. It is not known why it is so puffed up, but its days are numbered. Its Sun has run out of hydrogen and in less than a billion years TrES-4 (Doesn’t that name just grow on you? Don’t you want to just take it home, like Gordon Brown, and tuck it up in bed?) will be engulfed by its swelling star.

HD80606b is 190 light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is 4 times the mass of Jupiter. Its orbit, which takes 4 months, is wildly elongated, varying from between about 90 million miles and 3 million miles from its Sun. If you floated in its atmosphere, you would see the Sun go from the size of ours to one 900 times as big in just a few days. In the same way, the temperature would soar from about 100 degrees to 1700 degrees. This exoplanet has the most elongated orbit known for any planet, and the reason lies in the gravitational influence of a distant companion star. The orbits of most exoplanets so far have turned out to be much more elongated than those of our local planets, which are nearly circular. This has come as a big surprise.


HD149026b is 256 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It is slightly smaller than Saturn, but has an unusually dense core – packed with about 70 earth masses of heavy elements. Its atmosphere at 2000 C is unbelievably hot – hotter than the surface of some stars, and the hottest planet known. It is so hot because it is close to its star and the planet’s surface is probably very dull-coloured, so it absorbs plenty of light.

Gliese 581 is a dim red dwarf star in the constellation Libra, 20.5 light years away. Earlier this year it was reported that an earth like planet had been discovered circling this star, rocky and with temperatures of around 20 C, so liquid water could possibly be present. It has a mass of 15 earths. Then 2 more planets were found orbiting Gliese 581. The smaller one, which is 5 earth masses and a surface temperature of 0 to 40 C, has been dubbed the Goldilocks planet – not too hot for life, not too cold, but just right. Then they reckoned that the greenhouse effect would make the planet far too hot for life. And then they further reckoned that the 3rd planet, of 8 earth masses, which is much further away from the star, might be just the right temperature for life because of the greenhouse effect. These planets will be visible to the European Space Agency’s 3 Darwin spacecraft, due for launch in 2015. THEY WILL PROBE THESE WORLDS FOR SIGNS OF LIFE.


PSR B1257+12 (Now that really is sexy) is a neutron star, 1.35 times the mass of the Sun, 15km wide (yes, just 15km), 980 light years away in the constellation Virgo. It is the remains of a massive star that exploded in a supernova, leaving a superdense core. This neutron star rotates once every 6 milliseconds, emitting radio beams – in other words, it is a pulsar. It was round this pulsar that the first exoplanets were detected, 0.02, 4.3 and 3.9 times the mass of the earth, while the sizes of their orbits are similar in proportion to those of Mercury, Venus and the Earth. So, remarkably, these first exoplanets are like a carbon copy of our inner solar system, scaled down by a factor of 2. The discoverer reckons the 3.9 earth planet may have an iron core and a strong magnetic field. So that though the pulsar wouldn’t produce much daylight, the planet may well still have magnificent auroras, produced by the dense streams of energetic particles coming off the pulsar, and bright enough to read a book by. The particles would also gradually erode the planet’s surface, generating a low-level haze.

How do avatars have sex?

Mars in Scorpio (caught you at it) square Neptune (cheating on me) in Aquarius (online world). Venus conjunct Pluto, Uranus stations (I’m divorcing you!)

From BBC News

How do avatars have sex?

A couple have divorced after the wife saw the husband having online sex in the virtual world of Second Life. Amy Taylor and David Pollard met in an online chatroom in 2003, got married and shared their interest in Second Life, a virtual world in which users create avatars to interact with each other.

But the marriage ended after Ms Taylor's online character saw her husband's avatar having sex on a sofa with a female prostitute.

So how do computerised characters have sex?

"First you need to buy genitals," says technology journalist Adrian Mars, explaining the process in Second Life. "You start off with no genitals and then you buy some. These objects can do all sorts of things. You can have ones that ejaculate at the right moment."

"But there's not much in the way of exciting mechanics. What you see on the screen is what you get and the best you can hope for is a bit of sexual humour, although some people do have intense relationships. Obviously the sex is not the same as in real life, but you're still expressing yourself in a way that would, maybe reasonably, upset a partner."

"People customize their avatars with animations and enormous e-phalluses which you can buy. It's a player-generated economy and people exchange things they have created - someone builds it, someone buys it and someone puts it into action."

For people participating in this, he adds, the sexual chat is more important than the avatar having sex, which acts more like a prop to get their imagination going.

One blogger writing about his experience in Second Life describes the range of male genitalia on offer to buy, including skin colour control, sound, animations, ejaculation, urine and some that are touchable by other players to lead to arousal.

He visited virtual sex shops and sex clubs where he saw people having sex in a number of different ways. It is only to be expected in a world where players pick every detail of how their avatars will look, says Mr Mars.

Some Second Lifers have been known to misbehave - a US journalist was attacked by flying penises when conducting an interview in his virtual office.


And infidelity is not the only thorny ethical issue thrown up by virtual sex - some players have had sex with animals.

The Pluto in Libra Generation; Pluto square Pluto

I just received this interesting comment from a post on the generational Pluto that I wrote last year:

"I've been searching for some thoughts about the generational influence of Pluto (mostly because I and many I know are on the verge of the fearsome Pluto transiting square our natal Pluto in Libra), and came across your generational comparisons here, which I enjoyed. I do feel, though, that Pluto/Librans don't get the fairest shake when generational personality traits are assigned, and would like to suggest at least one alternative viewpoint to the "lazy", "unmotivated" and "apathetic" characterizations that we've all come to know and love.

I would argue that the Pluto/Libra generation is not a particularly competitive group of people, being far more interested in pursuits involving cooperation. This kind of attitude toward career (especially here in the U.S.) is nearly incomprehensible, as the socio-economic system is built to encourage intense competition, with very few opportunities for meaningful cooperation. Add to this the fact that Pluto/Librans have come of age in a cultural environment dominated by the ultra-competitive, ultra-individualistic Pluto/Leos, and it's no wonder why we have the reputation we do.

Interestingly, the Pluto/Libran affinity for cooperation seems to have caught fire over the past few years, particularly with respect to social networking and the political process, as well as within the booming not-for-profit sector (a field into which many of us have been drawn). Of course, we do have our fair share of "slackers", but, frankly, so does every other generation. The point is to see each generation for what it is rather than what it's not. Even the most unusual of us has something to contribute."

My only comment is that I don't think Pluto square Pluto is best seen as fearsome. Like the other outer planet cycles - particularly Uranus opposition Uranus and Neptune square Neptune - they are best seen as reflecting the movement from one phase of life to the next that a whole group of people will pass through at the same time. In that sense they are not personal, so you may hardly even notice them. Or, depending on who you are, and depending on the natal aspects to the inner planets or Angles, they may be very transformational. And that doesn't have to mean difficult (though it often does): you may just go from strength to strength.

The meaning of Pluto square Pluto can be seen under 2 aspects: personal and generational. By Sign it is generational, because everyone born during that period (in this case 12 years) has Pluto in Libra. But the House it is in depends on what time of day you were born, so it is more personal.

Pluto square Pluto by sign will empower the positive and negative traits of that sign on a collective level in society. This transit happens in our late 30s/early 40s, just as that generation begins to attain to positions of power and influence within society. For example, Barack Obama, a figure with a strong connection to the collective, had his Pluto square Pluto transit for a year or two either side of 1998. In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate, and his political career got underway. It often won't be till years later, when these people are more prominent, that these generations can be observed as a collective. As a number of people pointed out, Obama's recent acceptance speech was very Virgoan, the sign of his Pluto.

By House, Pluto indicates where we need to dig deep and claim our power; where we will be undone if we do not claim that power, if we do not have the courage to be authentic and stand up to those people or unexamined ideas that have power over us. Positively, the house placement of Pluto indicates where we can find the seed of something deeply real within ourselves. Pluto square Pluto can bring us to a point of reckoning with that deeper self, particularly if natal Pluto strongly aspects the inner planets or Angles.

I have Pluto in the 12th House opposite the Sun. The years leading up to Pluto square Pluto were a time of enforced inactivity, in the sense that nothing felt right to do, and if I tried, it went wrong. Very 12th House! Pluto was forcing me to honour the realm of quiet contemplation and apparent 'uselessness', which is actively dishonoured in our modern society, it has become part of our collective shadow. As Pluto made the exact square in 1996, I had a dream telling me what to do. Again very 12th House! I began to be active again, but what I did was more authentically me, and less driven and derivative, than previously. This then led to an even deeper 'me' a couple of years later, as Pluto crossed my IC.

Obama's Economic Plan

I can’t say I understand how economies work. I certainly don’t know what all the terms mean, and how one thing affects another. I don’t know if that’s an advantage or a disadvantage, because one thing we all know from recent events is that the ‘professionals’ can get it spectacularly wrong, in ways that someone with their eye on a bit of basic bookkeeping would not get wrong. It’s a classic case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. I always like it when it becomes apparent that the layperson’s opinion is just as valid, if not more valid, than that of the ‘professionals’.

This is where it helps to be Aquarian, because you’re less likely than most to buy into the professionals’ desire to be seen as the experts. It’s likely to get worse for a while under Pluto in Capricorn: the power (Pluto) of the professional (Capricorn). People often have much more innate sense and wisdom than they realise.

Anyway, all this gives me and you the right to comment on the state of the world economy and what we think the cure might be. What I’ve got in mind are the latest proposals of President-elect Barack Obama, from yesterday’s Financial Times:

‘Obama set to push 'big bang' reform package

US President-elect Barack Obama intends to push a comprehensive programme of social and economic reform beyond an immediate emergency stimulus package, Rahm Emanuel, the next White House chief of staff, indicated yesterday.

Mr Emanuel brushed aside concerns that an Obama administration would risk taking on too much when it takes office in January. He said Mr Obama saw the financial meltdown as an historic opportunity to deliver the large-scale investments that Democrats had promised for years.

"We can't afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, healthcare, education and tax relief for middle-class families," said Mr Obama. "We also need a rescue plan for the middle class that invests in immediate efforts to create jobs and provides relief to families watching their paychecks shrink and their life savings disappear."

Economists have estimated the US budget deficit could more than double next year to almost $1,000bn, raising concerns about whether Mr Obama could deliver on expensive campaign promises including $150bn in investments in alternative energy over the next decade and a $60bn-$110bn plan to provide universal health insurance for Americans.

In contrast to 1992, when Mr Clinton postponed longer-term investments in favour of urgent budget deficit reduction, advisers to Mr Obama, including Mr Summers, who is tipped by some as his first Treasury secretary, are tilting towards investments. They emphasise that Mr Obama will stick to a medium-term goal of restoring fiscal discipline.

So what do you reckon? Obama is certainly being bold, though you can see the sense in Clinton’s approach of balancing the books before you start spending. On the other hand, government spending, even when it’s borrowed, can stimulate the economy. Britain was effectively bankrupt after World War II, but that didn’t stop a Labour government setting up the National Health Service. In his first term as Prime Minister, Tony Blair was cautious about the reforms he wanted to introduce, particularly in increasing spending on health and education. He eventually got round to it, but by then his political capital was not what it had been, and he was not able to reform to the extent he would have liked.

So it makes political sense for Obama to begin reforms immediately. He will have a huge amount of power to start with, and he needs to take full advantage of that. As I wrote in my last blog, he has a strong Saturn, so I think he can be trusted not to overspend.

Boldness is a Mars quality, and Obama’s is in practical, analytical Virgo, and trine to his prudent Saturn. The Saturn-Uranus opposition will be lining up along his Mars for the next year, so we can expect to see a series of initiatives that are bold and ground-breaking, and yet considered and prudent.

The US Venus is at 3 Cancer. Venus governs wealth, and Pluto - which also governs wealth - will be opposing this Venus next year. The last hard aspect from Pluto to the US Venus was in 1972/73, when there was a stock market crash followed by the oil crisis and then a recession, as the world adjusted to the higher price of oil. So we can expect to see a big change in the nature of the US economy over the next 2 years as it adapts to changed conditions.

It will be interesting to see what steps Obama takes over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for these are Mars issues for both himself and the US. The US Mars at 21 Gemini is being similarly impacted by Saturn-Uranus in 2009, as well as being square to Obama’s natal Mars. So we can expect new and unexpected strategies and developments that challenge the US’s traditional military understanding and view of itself.

General David Petraeus, who has recently assumed command of the entire Middle East theatre, has Mars at 19 Capricorn (a classic Mars sign for a general) in a t-square with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Though his Mars is not currently under a major transit, it is trine to Obama’s Mars, and he also has a natural and dynamic understanding of the Saturn and Uranus principles as applied to Mars. So he should be able to work well on a military level with Obama and any new ideas he might have.