Jupiter-Uranus and the 2010 Scientific Breakthroughs

I’ve been noticing that both the macrocosmic and microcosmic scientific worlds are abuzz with the excitement of impending discoveries. This is an unusual situation, because discoveries don’t usually happen that way. For example, you don’t know in advance that you’re going to find new remains that reveal more about human ancestry, or a cure for cancer. But in both cases new, far more powerful instruments have just been put in place, so it’s like travelling to new worlds where you are bound to see new things, even though you don’t know in advance what they are.

On the macrocosmic level, a whole bunch of new telescopes, both ground-based and in space, have recently been coming into operation. One of these, the Kepler, is a planet spotter: we are at the point of being able to see earth-sized planets. From there it would only seem to be a matter of time, maybe the next few years, before we start detecting wavelengths of light from those planets that suggest the possibility of life as we understand it. This was pointed out recently by the astronomer Lord Rees, and it would be revolutionary, it would mark an epochal shift for humanity. It would suggest, for example, that life is a universal principle that turns up whenever conditions are right.

Microcosmically, there is of course the new CERN particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, on the Swiss-French border. It is being gradually fired up (after a sticky start that shut it down for a year) and has already set new records for the energy of its experiments. But that is only a start, it has orders of power left, and it is bound to reveal a whole new landscape.

Meanwhile a crucial breakthrough has been achieved by the Americans with controlled nuclear fusion, which is the Holy Grail of large-scale energy production. The American experimental method involves firing lasers at pellets of heavy hydrogen. For decades there has been concern that the resulting plasma would mess up any ongoing fusion, but this has now been shown not to be the case.

The astrological signature for all this is the upcoming Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, which is associated with periods of scientific breakthrough. Uranus is associated with the scientific mind and with brilliant insight, and Jupiter expands whatever it touches. The last exact conjunction (the most powerful of all the aspects) was in 1997, and shortly before that Dolly the Sheep, the first cloned mammal, was born.

This next conjunction begins in June in Aries, and then occurs twice more in Pisces over the following 7 months. The June conjunction is in an applying square to Pluto, empowering it.

So I expect this year’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (which occurs about every 13 years) to be unusually significant.

Mars Retrograde: French Muslims, US Healthcare and the UK Iraq War Inquiry

Mars only goes backwards every couple of years, so as one blogger pointed out, we don’t get used to it like we do with Mercury, which goes backwards 3 times a year. When a planet goes retrograde, it is time to review it, to put things on hold while we re-assess. The trouble with Mars is that it probably the least introverted, the least reflective planet in the zodiac, so it isn’t easy.

Mars knows what it wants and likes decisive action and winning. So when he’s going backwards we need patience. It is not a time for beginning new projects or even continuing with what we are already developing, but for reviewing what we want and the way we go about achieving that.

So it is not the time for a French parliamentary committee to be publishing a report proposing a ban on the wearing of full veils in public. Mars is retrograding in Leo through France’s 1st House, Mars’ natural House, which is not a place of self-reflection and awareness. France has 5 million Muslims, and the report will be felt as an attack (Mars) on Islam, and will produce the very radicalisation it is attempting to control. The report also gives the reason that the veil is a denial of the equality between men and women, which is true, but only 1900 women in France wear the full veil, so why the big issue?

Even publishing the report, let alone enacting it, seems to me a stupid thing to do, given the current worldwide sensitivity of Islam, and the inclination of some of its members to radicalise and to plant bombs, creating a backlash amongst the non-Muslim population and fuelling the sense of persecution felt by ordinary, non-radical Muslims.

On the other hand, Mars is retrograde for another 6 weeks, so maybe this is precisely the time and place for France to sort out how to approach its Muslim minority in a less confrontational way.

With Mars Retrograde, it is not surprising that the watered down US Healthcare legislation has stalled, perhaps terminally. Mars is in the sign opposite the US Moon, which has been crucial to this legislation. If it does get underway again, it won’t be until Mars goes Direct again in early March. It has also not been a good time for Obama to announce the sweeping changes to the banking system. Again, he needs to have waited until early March. The timing looks too much like an attempt to regain the initiative after losing control of the Senate, and the issue is too important for that.

Mars retrograde, on the other hand, is a very good time to be having the Iraq War inquiry in the UK. We are re-considering why we went to war, which is an ideal use of Mars Retrograde. Mars has been passing over the Jupiter (at 8 Leo) of the Iraq War, a planet that can be reckless and that rules both the Pisces Asc and Sag MC of the Iraq War chart. This suggests the central themes of the inquiry: was proper consideration given beforehand, and was it legal (Jupiter again)?


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I don’t expect an outcome to the inquiry that is strongly critical of the government of the time, because it has been set up by Labour, and these types of inquiries almost seem designed to absolve governments. Nevertheless, some interesting stuff is coming out along the way, like the senior legal adviser who today said that his recommendation at the time had been was that the war would be illegal under international law. So whatever the outcome of the inquiry, at least some voices that were muffled at the time are now being heard.

An Italian Vegetable Garden

An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey . He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard.

His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison.. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:

Dear Vincent,
I am feeling pretty sad, because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot.

I know if you were here my troubles would be over... I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days.
Love, Papa

A few days later he received a letter from his son...


Dear Pop,
Don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried.
Love,
Vinnie


At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left.


That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Pop,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances.

Love you,

Vinnie

From http://jokevault.blogspot.com/2009/08/italian-vegetable-garden.html

Brown, Cameron, his cronies, and the General Election

This year Pluto will conjoin Gordon Brown’s MC at 4.43 Capricorn, and next year Neptune will conjoin his Sun at 0.54 Pisces. Transitional periods don’t come much bigger than this, and with a General Election coming up in May or sooner, it is hard to see him continuing in the same life for much longer, let alone the same job. That says to me quite definitively that Labour will not win the next election. It may be a hung Parliament, in which case the astrology tells me that Brown will nevertheless not continue for very long as leader of his party. Gordon Brown's progressed Sun will change sign in September this year, adding to the evidence that he will be entering a new phase of his life.


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John Prescott once described Gordon Brown as having the worst smile in politics. With Sun in the 12th House and in Pisces, Brown is personally very retiring, and almost entirely lacking in the element of showmanship that is so necessary in modern politics.

This placement doesn’t have to mean this: Tony Blair and George W Bush both have 12th House Suns, and both are very strong performers. The way I’d explain it is that the 12th House placement means they are able to put aside who they really are, and perform. This concealment is not just from others but also from themselves, which gives them conviction. It is to Gordon Brown’s credit that he is not able to conceal who he is, a retiring 12th House type. It also means that he is not a good leader, and should never have been in the job.

The trouble is he has Moon in Leo conjunct Pluto, so he has a strong need for power and leadership, emphasised by an Aries Ascendant. Because the sign of his Moon is ruled by the Sun, the Neptune-Sun transit he is having will tend to dissolve his hold on power, at least in the way he is used to having it. Gordon Brown’s life to date has been a single trajectory of a rise to power within the Labour Party followed by 10 years as Chancellor and 3 years as Prime Minister. All that is about to change, and I think it will give space for perspective and personal transformation.

That said, I will still vote for him at the next election, because I don’t view him as particularly incompetent, and his heart is in the right place when it comes to social issues. I do not think the same about the Tory Party. There is only one word for George Osborne, the thirty-something Shadow Chancellor, and that is callow. I have no doubt of his political skills, which are probably superior to those of his leader David Cameron.


Promising to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million when he did was a masterstroke. He may well be very competent, but I see no sign of his reason for being in politics other than knowing he’d be good at it, rather like Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who said as much about himself: there’s a ladder to climb, so you climb it.


Boris Johnson is a Gemini

I don’t get any sense that Osborne or Johnson particularly care about the well-being of the people in the country. I think that underneath the likeable buffoonery Boris Johnson is quite a nasty right-winger. There is also the Cameron-appointed Treasurer of the Party, Michael Spencer, billionaire founder of ICAP. This is the man who, when Cantor Fitzgerald lost 600 people in the 9/11 attacks, and were desperately struggling to survive, took advantage of their troubles to poach some of their employees. As he proudly said at the time, he’d always wanted “to put one up Cantor Fitzgerald’s bottom.”


Spencer and Cameron

People like Spencer attract admiration and awards, and I expect him to be Lord Spencer within a couple of years, for lending his name to the Tory Party.


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David Cameron puts on a good show as a nice, caring guy, and I think some of it is genuine, but he is surrounded by sharks. He is just emerging from a hard Pluto transit to all of his Angles over the last few years, and Saturn continues to transit them. He has been learning the lessons (Saturn) of power (Pluto) during his time as leader of the opposition. With Sun and Venus in Libra, and ASC on the Virgo/Libra cusp, he comes across as a nice guy. But underneath it is a Moon-Jupiter conjunction in Leo in the 10th/11th: the sense of entitlement (as an old Etonian) is huge, but it will take a while to become visible. Particularly as it squares Mercury in Scorpio, giving him the capacity to conceal from others this side of himself. That, at any rate, is Cameron at his worst. At his best, he will radiate confidence and bonhomie. It could make for good leadership.

Cameron is unapologetic about what he terms his ‘privileged’ education. Credit to him for that, in a way, though calling it privileged in the first place implies a sense of superiority that is exactly what people are getting at in the first place. Personally, having been through the same system, I don’t think it is privileged. It is like getting hold of kids and putting them in a saucepan and adding ketchup and pepper and gravy and cooking it all up. It’s easy to pressurise kids who are reasonably bright into getting top grades and making them feel like they must ‘succeed’ in life. The lucky ones fall apart by the time they are 40, the unlucky ones spend their whole lives on stilts as though nothing is the matter.

Cameron is now moving into a Pluto square Venus transit, and Venus in a politician is popularity. This square isn’t necessarily bad, because Obama was elected under a Pluto opposite Venus transit. So the transit is likely to dynamically empower Cameron’s popularity. I think it means the Tories will probably win outright, rather than there being a hung Parliament. Assuming he becomes PM, by the time of the next election in 2014/5, Pluto will be squaring his natal Sun.

He has been, and will continue to be, a Pluto transit leader of the Tory Party and of the country. Margaret Thatcher was also a Pluto transit leader (confrontation, destruction and transformation), while Blair was a Neptune transit man (‘spin’ and ‘lies’.)


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Cameron’s Progressed Chart looks favourable. Venus is in Sag, starting to trine Jupiter. And Mercury will be trining Moon in Pisces by the time of the election.

America's Return to Conservatism

Hard aspects between Saturn and Pluto generally correspond to a swing to the right in US politics – the empowerment (Pluto) of conservatism (Saturn). With Saturn and Pluto also currently hard-aspecting the US MC at 1 Libra, the effect is likely to be particularly pronounced and significant.

Saturn at the moment is backing into an exact square with Pluto (the 2nd of 3 squares), and bang on cue Obama lost his crucial majority in the Senate to the Republicans. You’d expect this tendency anyway under a Democratic President, and indeed a few governorships have been lost to the Republicans over the last year. But this was a big upset. It was seen as a very safe seat, having been occupied by Edward Kennedy for decades. It reflects the strength of the Saturn-Pluto square to the US MC, and with one more crossing to go (in August), it is possible that the US could see a decisive swing to the right in this autumn’s mid-term congressional elections, that will leave it very difficult for Obama to get much legislation through.

It is ironic that the death of Edward Kennedy, a major figure who backed Obama over Hillary Clinton, should have led to this upset and the possible derailment of the healthcare legislation which, however watered down, is at least a start. This legislation has been debated and voted on under incredibly favourable astrology: the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron in Aquarius, conjoining the US Moon. It is hard to imagine such favourable conditions, astrologically speaking, ever occurring again, so it does seem to be now or never, despite the new-found Republican ability to filibuster their way out of passing any legislation.

I’m not American, and sometimes a commenter will tell me to keep my nose out if I say something they don’t agree with. And I don’t know the finer points of what’s going on over the pond. But for me this legislation is a strong indicator of how much the American people care about their less well-off fellow Americans. The way it treats its minorities is a mark of how civilised a country is. The government response to the New Orleans flooding was an indicator that Republican America did not care about its minorities. It is disappointing to see the US reverting to its old, hard self so quickly.

In the news this morning was the suggestion that China is now overtaking Japan as the world’s second largest economy. China is known for overstating its economic growth for political reasons, but all the same it can’t be long before this does happen, and after that they will be chasing America.

This must be deeply unsettling for Americans, having been indisputably the largest economy for over a century. I therefore expect to see America become much more conservative over the next 20 years. Obama could easily be just a one-term President for this reason. For America, the transit of Pluto through Capricorn could easily mean this: the empowerment (Pluto) of conservatism (Capricorn), whereas for China it could have another Capricornian meaning: the empowerment of ambition/status.

The US is in the run-up to a Pluto Return in 12 years time. Pluto raises survival issues, particularly for the US which, having declared independence in 1776, then had to fight for it. With natal Pluto in the 2nd House, the US looks to its own resources and its wealth for its survival, and this wealth is precisely what the rise of China is starting to threaten. So I think we could see a return to the old, paranoid cold-war type America, after the brief Obama dawn. This will be an aspect of a New World Order, dominated by the US and China (and Europe if it chooses to go there), that the Uranus-Pluto square will be ushering in over the next few years.

Some time ago I read a fictionalised account of the Kennedy assassination, Flying into Love, in which Kennedy bemoans his lack of power in comparison to Krushchev. And that is how it seems to me, living in the UK. America has this wonderful system of checks and balances in its political system, designed to avoid the abuse of power you got in Europe at the time, but it seems to make the place almost ungovernable. And you still get the abuse of power!

In the UK the government is generally able to get on with its legislative programme, and though I may not always agree with it, at least they are able to govern. And I think I prefer that.

PS Just after this post was published, news came of the US Supreme Court decision to allow big contributions by business to political parties. This, of course, favours the Republicans, and is a further instance of the Saturn-Pluto swing to the Right.

Occam's Razor and Scorpio; Sex and the 5th House

It is worth remembering that for hundreds of years most of Europe believed literally in Adam and Eve and the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. If people will believe that, they’ll believe anything, and people DO believe anything, and it doesn’t make them psychotic, it just seems to be human nature.

I’m more of an Occam’s razor type, in that I tend to keep my beliefs to a necessary minimum. This is because ALL beliefs are at best approximations to reality, besides which they clutter up your mind.

So when the other night someone was telling me about an old lady who took comfort in the belief that when the going got really rough, a spaceship would land in her garden and take her away, I said well she’s obviously starting to lose it a bit, and they said no, she’s perfectly with-it and she’s always believed that.

And then I remembered about the Virgin Birth, which put it all in context again. Besides which, I live in Glastonbury.

I was watching a couple of films last night, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and in it one of the characters, who is a Scorpio, said he believed there is a mystical core to the Universe. I thought that was perfect for a Scorpio. I’m not a Scorpio, but I have Jupiter, which governs beliefs, in that sign. For me, Occam’s razor is not about being a dry, rational sceptic, it’s more about paring your beliefs down to the minimum in order that the heart of things may be exposed, that mystical core at the centre of the universe. Jupiter in Scorpio. It’s a modern scientific superstition to say that reality is rational. Reason is a useful ordering faculty that humans have, but reasons only ever describes, it is not the thing itself.

Anyway, those 2 films I watched are impossibly romantic. 2 young people meet on a train, one from France and one from the US, and they start talking, they realise they have a connection, and they don’t stop talking for a whole day until he goes to catch his plane back to the US. Because it seems impossible that they have a future, they don’t swap phone numbers etc, but at the last minute they decide to meet 6 months later in the same place. I said it’s impossibly romantic, but I think at the same time it can actually be like that maybe once or twice in your life: you feel a connection and you don’t stop talking and you’re a fool if you don’t go with it but what if you have a life already? So I think these 2 films have something very real going on at the core of them. Scorpio again!

It can be interesting relating the astrology of actors to the parts they play. For example, Harry Potter is a Leo, and so is Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Potter. In Before Sunrise/Sunset, Ethan Hawke is a Scorpio in real life as well as in the film. Julie Delply, whose love life is disempowered by not following through this connection, has Venus in Sagittarius (attraction to a foreigner) square to Pluto. She is French, and has a German partner, so she seems in real life to have got it right!

Astrologers traditionally put sex in the 8th House. I think it belongs as much in the 5th House of fun and pleasure. Some people get terribly serious about bonking, and they can experience a lot of pressure to 'perform'. But you need to be able to have a laugh in the middle of it. Venus in Aquarius opposite Uranus (me) speaking to my Venus in Scorpio readers.


In the West, Tantra has come to mean Tantric Sex, and you get these courses in it. I think a lot of that is for people, teachers included, who don't know how to relax and enjoy sex, so it gets turned into a higher, esoteric teaching.

A writer worth looking at is Sherman Alexie. He's from an Indian Reservation, and writes humorously and insightfully about life there. I've read 'The Absolutely True Diary of a part-time Indian' and 'The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist-Fight in Heaven', on which the film Smoke Signals is based. He's unsparing yet sympathetic, and has no time for Native American pretensions to super-spirituality. At one point a character refers, slightly tongue in cheek, to sex as Body Medicine, and I thought yes, that's a good way of putting it.

Having natal Mercury in Aquarius closely opposite Uranus, I always enjoy findings that upset conventional thinking. And with Uranus currently opposite Saturn, we can expect this to be a general theme. This applies as much to the opposition to conventional thinking, which has its own way of becoming an accepted truth.

So we have the finding that people who drink large amounts of alcohol are less likely to suffer heart attacks. This finding came through a study of the Spanish people, many of whom drink more than a bottle of wine a day. The medical establishment strongly resisted the publication of this study.

Then we find that people who give up smoking quickly are more likely to get diabetes. This is because of the weight gain.

I think there is another factor: much of what kills you through smoking and drinking is the guilt, because you are told they are bad for you, and besides which they are pleasurable, and that is also bad. I think smoking and drinking can prolong your life if you enjoy them, because there is nothing like enjoying life to keep you going. I would say that, because I like nothing more than a film, a bottle of red wine and a couple of cigars to finish off the day.

And now we have the finding that mice that are programmed to get Alzheimer’s are protected from it through exposure to mobile phone radiation. (I heard an Alzheimer’s joke the other day: with Irish Alzheimer’s, you forget everything except your grudges.)

In the UK, we are currently experiencing what is, for us, a big freeze, and predictably you have the tabloid newspapers questioning the veracity of global warming. Which I don’t object to, as the issue has become so politicised and black and white, and to that extent falsified.

On another tack, I tend to be very sceptical of conspiracy theories due to their lack of impartiality and verifiable evidence. But I’m fascinated when one (rarely) turns out to be true. The other night I watched One Day in September, a gruesome documentary about the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The German police were spectacularly incompetent in dealing with the situation, and the Olympic Committee wanted nothing apart from getting the kidnappers and hostages off site (with 2 of them already dead) so that the Games could continue as though nothing had happened. To its credit, the documentary gave the story from both the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

At the end of the shoot-out, 3 kidnappers were left alive and were arrested by the Germans. A few weeks later, a German airliner was hijacked, and the hijackers demanded that the 3 Olympic kidnappers be released. Very quickly the German government gave in to the demands, and the kidnappers were sent to an Arab country and were never tried. (Subsequently, Mossad hunted down and killed 2 of them.)

There were mysteriously only 12 passengers aboard the hijacked airliner, and the release of the prisoners rid the Germans of a problematic situation. Interviewing more than one ex-government minister decades later, they as good as admitted that yes, the hijacking had been a set-up by the German government. It seems to me a high-risk strategy, because so much can go wrong with these situations. But they got away with it. One factor which I think helped was that you didn’t need too many people in on it. At the other end of the scale, if the Moon-landings had been faked, you would have needed practically the whole of Nasa in on it, and no whistleblowers, which seems to me to be wildly unlikely. Given the tendency of large organisations, including governments, to be incompetent, I think you can only safely pull off a conspiracy with a small number of highly trained and loyal people, and an operation that is not too complex. Like a jet with a dozen hand-picked ‘passengers’ and a few ‘hijackers’. That was nearly 40 years ago, and I’m not sure you could get away with that now.