Monthly Post

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2019

A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered religions, and I’ll be celebrating it, but it’s also important for mundane astrologers: those eccentric and studious souls who ignore the DO NOT ENTER signs our culture posts all over the most interesting parts of its intellectual heritage, and study the archaic science of the stars as a guide to political events here on the ground.

Ingress charts for equinoxes and solstices are important tools for the mundane astrologer.  For the last six months public affairs here in the United States have been under the influence of the Aries 2019 ingress chart, which you can find interpreted here.  Before we go on to see what the heavens have to say about the next six months, it’s only fair to take a few minutes to look back over the period just ended and see how I did. Here’s the summary from my post in March:

“To sum up, the people who keep on insisting that any day now we’ll see a final showdown between President Trump and his enemies are once again going to be disappointed. The next six months will see another round of angry social media wars between pro- and anti-Trump factions, more bluster from the Oval Office and more tirades from the Democrats, none of which will go anywhere or do anything, and all of which will begin to lose whatever interest they might have had for most of the American people. The Democratic Party establishment will be at loggerheads with its party’s radical wing, and will make no noticeable attempt to reach out to the working class voters it used to represent. Meanwhile the Mueller investigation will wind down inconclusively, leaving Trump unscathed.

“The economy will be a mixed bag, with a troubled manufacturing sector and major disruptions in the service and information sector partly balanced by good times in farm country. Foreign policy will get the bulk of the administration’s attention in the months ahead, with very equivocal results, and foreign trade and investment will take a serious hit for reasons that will likely be political in nature. Finally, we can expect some kind of international mass movement to seize the media spotlight for a while and give people something to do other than make the changes that matter, before it fades away in the usual fashion.”

Farm country has had a much more mixed time than I anticipated, due partly to difficult weather and partly to the burgeoning trade war with China, and the manufacturing economy did fairly well—it was the upper end of retail that took a beating, as wealth flowed away from the privileged classes and into the hands of working stiffs. Other than that, I think it’s fair to say that the heavens and I did a noticeably better job of predicting the last six months than the supposedly more rational methods used by the punditocracy on either side of our nation’s political war zone. With that in mind, let’s proceed to the 2019 Libra ingress chart for the United States.

Here it is. Those who don’t know their way around horoscopes will want to know that the circle in the middle is the notional earth, the circle around the outside the notional heavens, and the lines that radiate out from earth to sky mark the cusps or dividing lines between the twelve houses, which are divisions of the sky that relate to certain categories of events on earth. The most important of these for our present purposes are the ascendant or first house cusp, also known as the rising sign, the point on the ecliptic rising in the east at the moment for which the horoscope is cast—that’s the one marked 21° Leo 47’ over on the left—and the midheaven or tenth house cusp, the one with the arrowhead on it, which represents the point on the ecliptic furthest north of the celestial equator at the moment for which the horoscope is cast—that’s 14° Taurus 45’ in this chart. Got it? Okay, let’s proceed with the interpretation.

The first things you want to do in interpreting an ingress chart is to check which of the three classes of zodiacal sign—cardinal, fixed, or mutable—is on the ascendant. This determines how long the reading’s effects will last. Leo, the rising sign, is a fixed sign, and indicates an active period of up to a year. Since the astrological year begins with the Aries ingress in March and everything resets at that point, this means that the reading below will cover the six months left in the current astrological year.

The sign on the ascendant also determines the planet that typifies the period we’re considering: in the language of old-fashioned mundane astrology, the lord of the ingress. With Leo rising, the lord of the ingress is the Sun. The Sun in a mundane reading corresponds to the head of state, and when it’s the lord of the ingress, it tells you that the personality and activities of the head of state will dominate the collective mood of the year. The next six months will be all Trump, all the time, to an even greater degree than has been the case so far—and the Sun as the lord of the ingress is also traditionally a sign of success for the government. To a great extent, the Trump administration has been having to play defense for the last two and three-quarters years. The chart suggests that this may be about to change.

The next steps in interpreting an ingress chart are to check the Sun and the planet ruling the midheaven, which represent the government, and the Moon and the planet ruling the cusp of the ascendant, which represent the people. More specifically, the Sun as already noted is the head of state and the planet ruling the midheaven is the executive branch; the Moon is that portion of the population that makes its voice heard, and the planet ruling the ascendant stands for the mostly silent masses. The luminaries (Sun and Moon) and planets can be, as the old astrologers put it, dignified or debilitated by their positions in the zodiac, by their relation to certain houses, and by aspects from other planets. Their condition indicates how the things they represent will do over the period of the reading, and any aspects they make will show how they relate to one another.

Here again, I hope none of my readers are eagerly awaiting a prediction of Donald Trump’s imminent fall from power. Trump himself is indicated by the Sun; you don’t count zodiacal dignity for the Sun in an ingress chart—otherwise all Aries ingresses would be favorable for presidents and all Libra ingresses unfortunate—so what counts is that the Sun is not in a cadent house and is free of negative aspects, meaning a moderate degree of success can be expected. Since the rising sign Leo is ruled by the Sun, Trump will retain the loyalty and love of the deplorable masses through this period, however little the more vocal end of the population likes him.

Far more important in this context is the executive branch. Since Taurus is on the midheaven, Venus—the planet that rules Taurus—is the significator for the federal government, and she’s very strongly placed in Libra, her other rulership. Having Venus along with the Sun in the 2nd house of the chart shows prosperity and an increase in revenue to the government, although it also predicts very large government expenditures. More generally, with three important planets in the 2nd house, one of them the lord of the ingress, economic news will dominate the headlines for the next six months, and economic policy will be get the bulk of the Trump administration’s attention over that time as well.

Surprising as it seems, the vocal segment of the populace—indicated by the Moon—will not primarily be vocalizing about Trump over the months ahead. Other things will excite their wrath. The Moon is strongly placed in Cancer, the sign she rules, but she’s on one end of the aspect astrologers call a T-square: opposite at least one planet and square at least one other.  In this case, the opposition is with Saturn in the 5th house and the squares are with Venus late in the 2nd and Mercury just over the line in the 3rd. This is a complex and powerful interaction, and it’s worth taking a few moments to unpack it.

The 11th house in a mundane chart represents the legislature, and more particularly the lower house—in the US, the House of Representatives. The 5th house, opposite it, represents the upper house—in the US, the Senate. The 11th has Gemini on its cusp and so is ruled by Mercury; the 5th has Sagittarius on its cusp and so is ruled by Jupiter. Any planets in either house represent factions among the legislators of that house not necessarily aligned with the leadership. Got it? Now let’s trace the relationships in action.

Mercury, representing the leadership of the House, is sextile Jupiter, representing the leadership of the Senate, and conjunct Venus, representing the executive branch. Opposing all of these—by square in the case of Mercury and Venus, by inconjunct in the case of Jupiter—is the Moon, which clearly represents the radical Democrat faction in the House.  What this says to me is that the struggle for power in the Democratic party is going to blow wide open in the months ahead, as the radical faction in the House (the Moon) takes on the House leadership under Nancy Pelosi (Mercury) and both sides end up at odds with the Democratic minority in the Senate (Saturn).

That’s apparently going to drive Pelosi and the House leadership to mend fences with the GOP Senate leadership (Jupiter) and ultimately with the executive branch (Venus) in an attempt to head off a complete loss of control over the Democratic party. (Thus, for instance, we can expect Pelosi to double down on her resistance to attempts at impeaching Trump.)  GOP control of the Senate will continue to frustrate the House radicals (Moon inconjunct Jupiter; the inconjunct is the aspect of frustration) and their supporters among the population, and will make life easier for Pelosi and her faction. At the same time, there’s another player in this game, and it’s troubling.

The 8th house, over on the right hand side of the chart, is among other things the house of other countries’ money. It’s ruled by Neptune, and Neptune is in it, close to the cusp. Neptune also has aspects to most of the players in the T-square we’ve just been analyzing. It’s trine the Moon, sextile Saturn, square Jupiter, and inconjunct Mercury. What this means, unless I’m much mistaken, is that at least one foreign country will attempt to influence the political struggle here in the US by providing a great deal of covert funding by roundabout means (Neptune is among other things the planet of all things that can’t be seen clearly) to the radical Democrats in the House and Senate, while spending more money in an attempt to frustrate the leadership of both parties.

This project won’t be entirely successful by any means (Neptune, though strong by position, is retrograde). What’s more, word of the covert funding will begin to leak out (Mercury inconjunct Neptune) and it’s possible that the Senate may take action to frustrate it (Jupiter square Neptune). I don’t see any indication in this chart that the matter will become messily public in the six months ahead, but that makes sense anyway; if the Republicans have the political savvy the gods gave geese, they’ll save the big reveal for May or June of 2020, when it will have the maximum impact on the upcoming election. I’d encourage my readers, though, to look for signs that this or that Democratic politician is suddenly awash in money, and notice which wealthy countries overseas stand to benefit most from the policies proposed by said politician. That may just give you a heads up on next year’s sixty-point headlines.

A few other political notes are worth making here. The Moon-Mercury square traditionally predicts political dissension, legislation being held up, and a flurry of controversies and disputes; it also indicates trouble over treaties and diplomatic affairs. The Jupiter-Neptune square predicts class conflict, confusion in the political sphere, and wild accusations flung between the political parties. The Saturn-Neptune sextile, finally, gives strength to populism in the political sphere and results in legislation that favors the interests of the masses.

That basically sums up what the ingress chart has to say about politics. Mundane astrology also has a lot to say about the economic sphere, though. To begin with, as already noted, economic affairs are going to be all over the headlines in the six months to come. With Mars, Sun, and Venus all in the 2nd house, that’s a given. Virgo’s on the cusp of the 2nd house, so Mercury rules that house and the US economy in general. Mercury in Libra has no particular dignity, so the six months ahead will be neither unusually prosperous or the reverse.

On the other hand, it’s going to be a wild ride. Mars in the 2nd is a classic sign of turmoil in markets. Stock market crashes, bank failures, and other colorful events of the same sort tend to happen under that indication. Mars and Sun in the 2nd both indicate very large government expenditures, and Venus in the same house suggests that there will be booms as well as busts. Take the indications together and you’ve got drastic swings in the whole range of markets. Those of my readers who are risk-averse may want to take note.

Economic sectors to watch carefully include agriculture, mining and other resource extraction industries, the entertainment industry, the news media, and the tech industry. Agriculture and mining will by and large stumble along, not good, not bad, but there will be a big success story in one or the other of those sectors; that’s shown by Jupiter well dignified in the 4th house, which governs both sectors. Since Jupiter’s late in the house, expect news to break late in the six month period:  say, in February or early March 2020. The entertainment industry will by and large be prosperous, since Jupiter rules the cusp of the 5th house—the house that governs that industry—but there will be some seriously bad news in some part of the industry, as shown by Saturn in that house. It might just be another round of expensive movies that don’t make money, but I suspect it’s more than that—for example, the bankruptcy of a major Hollywood firm.

The news media, by contrast, is in trouble. The media generally is assigned to the third house, which is ruled by Venus and thus fairly strong, but news is indicated by Mercury in the third, and Mercury has no strength in Libra; he’s also hammered by two squares and an inconjunct, though he gets some help from the sextile with Jupiter. The ratings of major news networks such as CNN and MSNBC have been plunging over the last year or so as viewers become bored with the hamfisted partisan propaganda retailed there; expect the plunge to continue as people turn to other sources for their news (Moon square Mercury) and financial problems in some sectors of the entertainment industry spread to news (Mercury square Saturn). The next six months will be equally bad for internet firms, which are also governed by Mercury; only a great deal of speculative funding from venture capitalists (Mercury sextile Jupiter, ruler of the 5th house) will keep some very large firms from going under.

A few other pointers about the months ahead can be drawn from the chart. The courts (ruled by the 9th house) won’t be as central to the national conversation as they’ve been for a while now; their ruler is Mars in the 2nd, in a loose conjunction with the Sun, showing that the GOP’s effort to appoint as many new justices as possible will pay off with fewer legal challenges for Trump and his administration. Uranus retrograde in the 9th suggests that the Supreme Court will reverse a longstanding precedent in the legal sphere, though that won’t have immediate effects on the nation or its politics—this is shown by the lack of aspects connecting Uranus to any of the other planets in the chart.

Moon opposite Saturn, alongside its other implications, is a traditional indicator that government officials will find themselves in serious trouble. Whether that trouble will come out of the various probes now ongoing into the attempts of Justice Department and CIA officials to pin claims of collusion with Russia on Trump is an interesting question, which events will have to answer for us.

Finally, I’m sorry to say that the ongoing problems with drug abuse and suicide in the US will only get worse in the months ahead. Neptune retrograde in the 8th is a very bad sign where this is concerned. Expect a steady stream of ugly headlines.

To sum up, then, we face another six months of political conflict in the US, but the focus of the conflict is shifting. For that period, Trump will be in the ascendant, and his administration will face less effective opposition from the Democrats than it’s had in the years just past. Instead, the Democrats will turn on one another in a bitter three-way struggle for control of a party in turmoil. The radical Democratic faction in the House, the more conservative Democratic bloc, and the party leadership will all be at loggerheads, and Pelosi and the House leadership can be expected to move closer to the GOP and the administration as a matter of sheer survival. Foreign money will also play a role in this struggle; keep a close eye on the possibility that this will blow up into a big political scandal sometime in 2020.

The economy is in for a rough ride, with markets jolting up and down, but the end result will be close to the breakeven point. Expect sudden good news from the agriculture or mining industries, sudden bad news from somewhere in the entertainment industry, and hard times for the news media and for internet companies. Federal expenditures will jump upward as the administration props up the economy with pork-barrel programs and promises of tax cuts. Overall, no drastic changes can be expected, just a continuation of gridlock in a bitterly divided society and a slow shift of the initiative, at least for now, into Trump’s camp.

That is to say, another round of business as usual. We’ll take a look back in March and see how well these predictions worked out.

208 Comments

  1. I hope you’re right about the market ending up about where it was when the upheavals start…. our in-house ‘money manager’ believes in riding out ‘storms’ : )

  2. Do you think the sudden good news you see in agriculture might be due to cannabis reform/legalization? That could create an agricultural boom in hemp, CBD and related products.

  3. Well, since the GOP seems to be spoiling to get Roe v. Wade overturned with recent laws against abortion the Republican legislatures of certain states have passed, I can’t help but wonder if that’s the big US Supreme Court reversal that’s coming up. If that happens, red states and blue states will become more polarized than ever.

  4. By the radical end of the Democratic party, I assume you are meaning Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the Green New deal and similar things?Why would a foreign country want to fund them, and which one would be most likely? I can imagine european countries and environmental groups wishing fervently they’d win the next election, but providing massive funding on the quiet? That seems less likely, as many have better places to put their money, or simply don’t have enough to move a US election, especially the environmental groups. Somewhere like Germany probably could if they really wanted to throw a lot of their resources at it, but would have trouble hiding vast sums of money vanishing from alert citizens. Or are you thinking of somewhere like Russia or China just wanting to cause trouble in the USA, and/or get rid of Trump and those pesky sanctions/tariffs? They’d have an easier time moving money in without having to explain gaping holes in their own budgets to citizens with the power to vote them out of office.

    A bit more off-topic, what do you make of the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil refining, and the increasing tensions between Iran and the USA?

  5. In re: “The courts won’t be as central to the national conversation….”

    One exception to this I see is that apparently Ginsburg is critically ill, and according to some sources at least, is not expected to survive the next six months.

    If Trump is able to make another appointment to the Supreme Court, that will set the Court’s direction for possibly some decades into the future. I think, therefore, that the Democrats and never-Trumpers will do all in their power to prevent this. I would expect another Kavanaugh type of circus except for one thing: Trump nominates a woman for the position, thus obviating all the sexual hysteria that was virtually the entirety of the opposition to Kavanaugh.

    It will indeed be interesting to see how this all plays out.

    Antoinetta III

  6. Nancy, my guess is that your money manager is right. These days there’s a bipartisan consensus in the US government that the stock market must be propped up no matter what; the mission of the so-called Plunge Protection Team has morphed, as such things always do, from intervening in the occasional crisis to managing the market as a whole. There are major downsides to that over the long run, but those mostly come out of what happens when you sabotage the mechanism of price discovery; for the time being, things may get wild but you’ll most likely come through the vagaries in decent shape. (That said, you might want to have a plan B in place in case that doesn’t happen…)

    Lloyd, that’s certainly one possibility. I know that the industrial-hemp industry is gearing up in a big way, with acreage planted in hemp soaring and new factories being built — a recent news story I saw mentioned a new plant in Kentucky that’s making a wood substitute out of hemp stalks, denser and more durable than oak — you can bet that they’re going to find plenty of buyers. I also understand that hemp’s been made eligible for Federal crop insurance, which ought to throw things into overdrive. Still, we’ll see!

    Mister N, it might be that, but there are several other big cases on their way to the Supreme Court right now, involving hot-button issues ranging from immigration policy through gun ownership to the ability of Federal judges in district courts to impose injunctions that affect the entire country. The last in particular would be a major shift — and the Supremes have shown a potential willingness to impose limits on that power. But we’ll have to see how it plays out.

  7. anything in the chart indicating whether the endless wars will expand or contract in the next six months?

  8. With the US’ worldwide involvements increasing (economic, military, ecological, …), it’d be interesting to see a global reading for the next six months. Alternatively, readings at a regional level: North/South/Central America, Asia, Middle East, etc.

  9. Well, I guess predicting that the news media is in for some trouble is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel after the New York Times’ nakedly partisan blunder of the last couple of days. I’d say it would be hard for it to debase itself any more, but perhaps I lack enough imagination.

    If, on the one hand, the financial markets will be unsettled but the outlook for the Trump administration will be reasonably good, it would seem that the public won’t hang responsibility for economic instability on Trump. The Progressives who are secretly hoping-but-not-saying-they’re-hoping for a recession to take the wind out of GOP sails are not going to be happy with this.

    And finally, for some happy agricultural news: after a couple of years of high losses due to mites, our bees are doing spectacularly well. Just checked the hives this week and everything is far better than I dared even hope. It’s been several years since I’ve seen late summer/early fall hives looking this abundantly healthy. I was so thrilled that I almost didn’t mind getting stung. Many heartfelt thanks too to the person, whoever s/he may be, who discovered that simple oxalic acid, vaporized, is so very lethal to varroa mites while gentle on the bees and leaves no residue in the hives. It’s a win all around.

  10. “Mars in the 2nd is a classic sign of turmoil in markets. Stock market crashes, bank failures, and other colorful events of the same sort tend to happen under that indication.”

    Oddly enough just before reading your post I was reading that the quarterly tax payments just made sucked so many bank reserves out of the system that it caused the Fed’s routine overnight repurchase operations (the repo markets) to become quite exciting. This is supposed to be as boring as you can imagine accountants squaring up the books at the end of a day should be. And then it wasn’t.

  11. What birth date to use for some countries: Russia (should one use the day the USSR broke), Brazil (over 100 years after independence, the capital was changed) and really old countries where the origins are lost in the mists of time?

    I hope this is not too far off topic. Please ignore this post if that is the case.

  12. Thanks for that JMG, very interesting. How about an ingress chart for the UK? I know many of your readers are from this side of the pond and the dog’s Brexit is troubling us all.

  13. It may be useful to compare this chart with the corresponding one for the UK – I expect the foreign financial influence would be either London and/or Brussels currying favor with Washington in the aftermath of Brexit. Any thoughts?

  14. Pygmycory, the radical wing of the Democrats — yes, that would be Ocasio-Cortez and her allies, among others — have pushed for a policy of open borders and the elimination of Trump’s tariffs and trade barriers. That would be a huge gain for China and a range of other countries that profited from the free trade system at our expense. A range of Middle Eastern countries would also have reasons to support the radical Democrats’ hostility toward Israel. Those are just the two most obvious possibilities that come to mind. As for the business in Saudi Arabia, I know I’m not the only one who has noticed that every time Trump seems to be backing away from a policy of confrontation toward Iran, something happens in or around the Persian Gulf that the Saudis insist must have been Iran’s fault. The Saudis and the Iranians are bitter rivals, and the Saudis have every reason to want the US to go to war with Iran. Trump, on the other hand, pretty clearly realizes that such a war would not be in the US interest, and so he’s efficiently backed away from every provocation; it wouldn’t surprise me if his allies in the Pentagon’s intelligence services have identified the provocations in question as Saudi false-flag operations, but of course that’s just a guess.

    Antoinetta, based on the chart (and the three-ring contrarotating clusterfrack that’s sure to break out once RBG dies), I’m going to predict that she clings to life and her Supreme Court seat until after the spring equinox. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any sign of the kind of all-out political warfare that her death would cause — and she’s a tough old bird, so could last longer than many people expect.

    Nate, that’s a worthwhile question. There’s no sign of any new wars on the horizon — you get a serious risk of war when Mars or Saturn, or the lord of the seventh house are angular, and one of them is strongly placed and afflicts the Sun, the Moon, or the lord of the 10th. (For example, the vernal ingress chart for Paris in 1939 had Saturn in fall in the 10th, in mutual reception with Mars, the lord of the 10th house — thus Mars has the power of an angular planet; Mars was also exalted and square the Sun and Moon. The fashionable astrologers who insisted that there was no risk of war that year were stunningly clueless.) Uranus as lord of the 7th tells us something about US foreign policy, and it’s retrograde and relatively weak in the 9th; thus I’d expect to see the US quietly back down from some of its overseas commitments, but I don’t see anyh sign of really drastic changes.

    Dwig, mundane astrology doesn’t provide the tools for global or continental readings. You have to do a reading for the capital city of each nation. If you’re interested, Raphael’s and Green’s books on mundane astrology are easy to come by — pick ’em up and consider giving it a try!

  15. I also wonder why a foreign country would want to fund that faction of the US population that has lost their minds, and also find it strange as I assume the epicenter of the madness is from the US puppetmasters. To foment chaos, I suppose.

  16. I could really see the split in the Democratic Party between the “Bernie” and “Hillary” factions all but splitting the party in two in the next six months, possibly exacerbated by Russian social media professional trolls. That’s a conflict that has been not-so-quietly simmering away ever since Summer 2016.

  17. “[Florida] lawmakers this year approved a measure (SB1020) that created a program to regulate the cultivation of hemp, addressing such issues as the licensing of growers…” The News Service of Florida, in the 9/18/19 issue of the Gainesville Sun.

  18. It would be beyond delicious if the democrats were found to be colluding with a foreign power in the next election.

  19. Interesting take on things as always JMG. It’s obvious Trump is a 2 term President.

    Also I checked your Brexit chart and it’s good through to next year’s ingress thankfully. There is talk of a legal loophole that will allow No Deal Brexit to go through despite MPs creating a law to stop it. Given your earlier forecast, do you think it will be a No Deal? I think at this stage Leavers want No Deal as it’s obvious the EU is trying to sabotage Brexit. And the Moon (the people) is dominant in that chart…

  20. @ JMG – Right now, it looks like the smoldering cold war between the Saudis and Iran is turning hot. Might the unexpected good news for the extractive industries be a bump up in oil prices that give the shale gas/oil industries here in the US a second wind?

  21. @JMG,

    After bringing up the Trump/Saudi Arabia/Iran events, I’m curious as to what you think of this twitterfest involving the President and Tulsi Gabbard:

    @realDonaldTrump – Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!

    @TulsiGabbard – Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not “America First.”

    The ironic thing is that if you look at just Trump’s actions and not his bluster, you get somewhat different picture, i.e. he hasn’t started any wars. Still, his closeness with Saudi Arabia and willingness to turn a blind eye to things like the Khashoggi murder have me worried. But on the other hand, Gabbard is somewhat of an outsider on the Democrat side, and her ideas aren’t exactly what we can expect if, say, Biden were to somehow become president.

  22. Hi Texas Nate,

    Not speaking astrologically, but from the viewpoint of experience with contracting—endless war, fought somewhere else by Deplorables, fuels a huge portion of what remains of the U.S. economy. It’s not just the defense contracting itself. All that middle-class welfare results in lots of purchases, from houses and cars down to gallons of milk. So I’d expect it to continue, as it’s not a new problem—General Smedley Butler warned about it in the early 20th century, President Eisenhower in the mid-20th. The problem is even worse now that most other industry has been shipped overseas, and now that the people who plan the wars no longer even pretend to care about the lives of the Deplorables sent to fight them.

  23. JMG, recently Eddie Money, Ric Ocasek, And Cokey Roberts all died within ten days of each other. Is there an esoteric reason why celebrities tend to die in threes? I’ve noticed the pattern before. Granted Cokey Roberts was a minor celebrity—she was a talking head on Sunday-morning political TV shows.

    I’ve always suspected those talking-head fests were financed by organized religion, to make getting up early on Sunday, dressing up, and sitting on a hard wooden pew seem like the more attractive alternative. 😉

  24. Hi JMG and all, I read an opinion by a political commentator recently who said that it would be better if RBG would wait til next spring or summer to expire, so that the circus surrounding the new supreme court nominee would be fresh in the voters minds leading up to the next election. The commentator also put out a name of a likely nominee, I can’t remember who, but the person was indeed a woman, a married, practicing Christian woman, a nominee sure to enrage the leftists. The left leaning and progressive Democrats will really make themselves look bad if the confirmation hearings turn into the hatefest that was the Kavanaugh affair.

  25. Hi John Michael,

    Congratulations on a very accurate reading for the Aries ingress…very impressive! Everything you’ve forecast for the next six months seems eminently plausible and likely and I’m really enjoying the mundane astrological learning that has taken place for me since you began this series of post. Thanks.

    I note that you’ve dropped Pluto entirely from your charts and am still wondering if it’s somewhat premature. I think you’re on to something regarding its waning influence but keep wondering if the Saturn/Pluto conjunction in January 2020 (opposed to the Sibley chart Mercury in the eight house) represents something quite potent, followed in early 2022 by Pluto’s return to its US birth chart position, the culmination of a nearly 250 year cycle. Pluto is a reasonably prominent planet in the US chart, ruled by an exalted Saturn in the tenth, Can you tell I’m a little attached to Pluto?

    @ Mr. Nobody
    I really doubt that this will be the Roe v. Wade moment. Trump will almost certainly get to appoint RBG;s successor, and then Breyer (81) may be next. Once that happens, it’s probably game over for the federal mandate..it’ll all go back to the states. All of the hysterical Left’s worst fears with respect to the SC will probably come to pass. I suspect the twenties are going to roar again and it’s going to be a wild ride indeed!

    Equinox blessings to everyone,

    Jim

  26. @JMG, well, this week’s post had an unexpected — but not unwelcome — dose of mind-blowing TSW woven into it. Some of the key themes agree with what I saw in July ( https://gbejm.dreamwidth.org/615.html ).

    The compassionate side of me was a bit disappointed that the media’s troubles aren’t behind it yet as I thought perhaps the last couple months had already ticked the box for that prediction. @Beekeeper’s comment about the NY Times expresses it better than I probably could: “I’d say it would be hard for it to debase itself any more, but perhaps I lack enough imagination.”

    I didn’t see the multi-sided political thumb war turning out anywhere near as sanguine for the Democrats, but that could also be a function of the timing (through the spring equinox versus through July 4th). A big reveal in late spring would be consistent with that. Either way, Trump may have an opportunity coming to deal out quite the thumping/shellacking…

    @Dwig, if you’re already familiar with other forms of divination such as tarot or ogham (wasn’t sure if you were or not), have you tried doing spreads for various regions of interest?

  27. Beekeeper, I think what’s indicated by the chart is considerably bigger than the humiliation of being caught pushing fake news — the corporate media has been doing that for a good long time. My guess, given the Saturn and Moon squares afflicting Mercury, is that a steady drop in audience is going to start costing them money in lost advertising revenues, leading to a serious cash crunch. Thank you for the update on the bees — that’s really good news!

    Pvguy, I’m watching the repo markets with a raised eyebrow right now. I find it hard to believe that quarterly tax payments had that big of an impact. I suspect something’s up…

    Adrian, dates for foundation charts are always tricky, unless we’re talking about a nation founded recently enough that the date and time are known exactly! The best approach I know of is to find the best data you can, cast foundation charts for the various dates and times, and see which of them fits the nation’s character and history best.

    Mrbluesky and Steve, hmm. Interpreting a mundane chart takes a certain amount of time and study, and there’s a limit to how many I can do on my own nickel and still earn a living. I’ve noticed that there’s some serious interest in traditional mundane charts and not a lot of people using them. Let me ask this: would you potentially be interested enough in regular quarterly mundane charts for Britain, the EU, and other major nations that you’d be willing to support that work via a small regular fee on Patreon or some similar service?

    Let me throw that out to the commentariat generally. How many people would be interested enough in quarterly US and international astrological forecasts to pay a small recurring fee to get access to it via Patreon or the like?

    Tomriverwriter, delighted to hear it. Of course the Changes are appropriate for that — they’ve been being used for political forecasts since the Duke of Chou’s time!

    Pvguy, thanks for this.

    Onething, people in most other countries assume as a matter of course that people in the US are out of their minds anyway, so what’s new?

    Mister N, that’s certainly part of it. The thing that fascinates me about this ingress chart is that it seems to be a three-way rather than a two-way split. We’ll see!

    Patricia, a lot of states are doing that, and for good reason: industrial hemp has the makings of a huge new agricultural sector and the basis for literally dozens of domestic industries. The states that jump on its first are going to rake in a huge amount via direct and indirect tax revenue. Glad to hear that Florida’s on the ball.

    Onething, I doubt they’ll see it that way. 😉

    Bridge, my guess is that a no-deal Brexit is still the most likely outcome, despite the efforts of the Remainers. They’re really in an unenviable situation; the majority of British voters want Brexit even if that requires no deal, and the longer the Remainers drag things out, the more brutal their punishment will be at the next election. (It’s quite possible, for example, that Labour could come in fourth place, behind the Tories, the LibDems, and the Brexit Party; whether Labour would survive that scale of debacle is an interesting question.) It’s definitely going to be an entertaining spectacle.

    Ben, good question. The Saudis don’t have what it takes to take on Iran. Everyone I’ve met who’s dealt with the Saudi armed forces says they’re a joke — that’s why they have to hire East African mercenaries to do their fighting for them in Yemen, and that’s also why they’re running one gimmick after another to try to get the US to do their dirty work for them. Whether the Saudis are clueless enough to try to take on the Iranians anyway, hoping that the US will bail them out, is another matter…

    Wesley, Gabbard is building her credentials as the peace candidate; it’s a smart move, since bringing the troops home is becoming an increasingly popular idea across the political spectrum. I’m pretty sure she’s already factored in a Trump victory in 2020 and is trying to position herself as the logical Democratic candidate in 2024, the alternative to a failed party elite. For his part, Trump likes to bluster but he knows that getting into another war would cost him votes he can’t afford to lose. So the two of them are actually helping each other out — Trump gets to look muscular and bold, and Gabbard gets to present herself as the peacemaker by contrast.

    Your Kittenship, hmm! I don’t know of anything in the traditional lore that would explain that.

    Dana, that makes sense. I know Amy Coney Barrett’s name has been bruited about as a very likely pick — and given the way that the Dem’s handling of Kavanaugh fiasco blew up in their faces and gave Trump’s popularity a major boost, if they try the same sort of thing against Barrett (or any other nominee), that could cost the Dems in blood come election day.

  28. Jim, the difficulty with Pluto is that traditional mundane technique has never really been applied to it. The books I use all date from before 1930 and don’t reference it, and despite some very striking data — for example, the 1939 Aries ingress in Paris has Pluto dead on the ascendant — I find that ingress charts cast without it seem to work better than charts that take it into consideration. It would be an interesting project to work with a whole series of ingress charts and see what if anything Pluto’s positions and aspects seem to indicate, but there are only so many hours in the day.

    G Bejm, fascinating. Yes, I suspect it’s a difference in dates — the three and a half months between March 21 and July 4, 2020, are likely to see the Trump campaign go on the offensive on all fronts, with an eye toward making as many gains as possible before the summer doldrums and then go all out after Labor Day.

  29. JMG – “Let me throw that out to the commentariat generally. How many people would be interested enough in quarterly US and international astrological forecasts to pay a small recurring fee to get access to it via Patreon or the like?” I would most definitely subscribe to this!

  30. Finally, I’m sorry to say that the ongoing problems with drug abuse and suicide in the US will only get worse in the months ahead.

    This touches on a question I’ve had for a while now. Back in 2017, there was a burst of headlines about deaths due to opioid overdose in 2016. Since then, I haven’t been able to find any information on this trend, for 2017 or 2018.

    Has anyone else noticed this? Or am I just looking in the wrong places? I can’t help but think that the pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in keeping this stuff quiet.

  31. I noticed you have dropped the openning bit about rationalists and astrology. Probably not a bad thing to do, probably invited more debate than needed.

    I`ve said it here before, I used to be deep into the skeptics movement and astrology is one of these thing that fascinates me. Logically from “rationality” it does not make sense, but the proof is in the pudding. The agriculture part was a very slight miss but the rest was spot on. I am just patiently watching and learning and I must thank you putting the time in to do these.

    Anyway onto this reading, I think you will be spot on with the big internet companies. I have said that the 2010s will remembered as the period of cheap money/credit and as a result of this, big companies that should have failed early and now going to fail late. Im thinking the likes of Twitter, Uber even Tesla. They are rapidly running out of avenues to go to the next round of VC funding and it is only a matter of time until one of the big ones finally becomes the first of many that sinks.

    Eventually folks may wake up and realise that a lot of these companies don’t really do much to help the world and we be done away with. Could call them appendix companies, they are there but potentially useless.

  32. Beekeeper,
    Always delighted to hear that the honeybees are happy and healthy. Must’ve been a sunny honey sort of week, as I was visited in morning ritual for the first time by images of a shining Sun and his astrological symbol instead of the usual crosses or Adam Cadmon with outstretched arms. Same morning my divination with the Druid Animal Oracle produced the Bee. So what’s a man to do when he’s visited by the Sun and the Bee?

    Tend to the mead of course! And let me tell you, it is the most deliciously fragrant and ambrosial mead I’ve ever stewarded into existence. Hopefully we’ll be able to share a glass of it one of these days.

    Cheers.

  33. Hi JMG, thank for the post

    A bit off-topic (or may be not) but I would like to share my opinion about the attack on the Abqaiq plant in KSA.

    I have been working in process industries for two decades, not petrochemical but anyhow I have some knowledge about the emergency procedures and behaviors in big accidents and incidents, and IMO there was an attack, but has been “false flagged” by the saudis and a part of the USA intelligence agencies, and IMHO what really happens in this attack was:

    a) The weapons and technology are iranian in origin (as the F15 and F16 using by KSA to bomb Yemen are from USA). No secret, no problem for nobody with that.

    b) The drones did not come from Iran, also they did not come from Yemen, they came from inside KSA (big shia population around Ghawar and feed up with the “regime” of MBS), and they were 10 or less drones of small size (no cruise missiles at all, this is a crude saudi lie); the drones cannot fire multiple ammo, they are “normal” suicide drones with an small amount of explosives. Probably only few of them made any damage at all. The attack was launched from the North but near the factories (from few kilometers), nearly impossible to detect or shut-down before to reach the factory, and manually controlled by radio (low tech) probably at visual range.

    c) The Houthi spokesmen are trying to protect the people inside KSA that made the attack talking about all those incredible capabilities of their miraculous drones that never miss any target and with multiple warheads each of them with a pinpoint precision after flying thousands kilometers. Of course they protect also Iran, but everybody knows the drones were not sent from iranian soil (iranians are not so stupid to appear as aggressors and corner the USA to a war), and they would have been detected by the US army and navy scattered in bases, ships and planes all around Iran

    d) The damages were much smaller than what have been said by KSA and a lot of photos of the attack have been photoshoped to make the consequences of the attack bigger and attract the USA to justify an attack on Iran (the holes in the onion shape tanks are fake). A big part of the fires in the night of the attack and the next day were emergency flares using to emptying tanks and installations as prevention measures. There were not a big deployment of emergency firefighters, police, army, ambulance, etc…to contain the fire, and in the next day all was cleared: no hoses, no foam, no puddles of water, no firefighter’s trucks around, etc… as could be seen in the satellite photos, this is incredible for anyone with experience in big accidents/incidents

    e) The Abqaiq factory will be in fully operation in few days, they probably are doing now normal preventive maintenance to mask that they could produce almost the same quantity of oil than before the attack immediately, just to give more relevance to the attack.

    f) The dream of the KSA is to have USA involved in the Yemen war, carpet bombing the huthies guerrilla with B52 and a, if it is possible, to have some rangers or marines battalions “crushing” the huthies warriors; because the saudi people are not interested in the war and they need foreign mercenaries to fight for them, but it is better to have well trained american troops that think they are fighting against “terror”, to “protect their country”, for “freedom” and “human rights”. Imperial Stormtroopers are always better… and if it is against Iran their sacrifice will not be in vain but for the sake of the sacred petrodollar.

    Trump is not so stupid and he wants to be reelected, so no war with Yemen nor with Iran; he perfectly knows this is a trap

    Cheers
    David

  34. Lady Cutekitten – at least in the hard pews and in your best clothes, you’re getting the real original Gospel in the readings, at least if they follow the usual liturgy. Not saying anything about the sermons, mind you. And if the organist and choir director are any good, some halfway decent music.

  35. JMG, does your chart address the problem that if we end up with a Biden-Trump race, both of them MAY be in early senility? They both have speech patterns similar to my mom’s when she was in the early stages of vascular dementia. This is when the carotid arteries are so clogged that the brain does not get enough blood. (They couldn’t roto-root her arteries because they were too calcified.)

    I stress MAY, but listening to each man sure sounds like listening to Mom…

  36. In re: Pluto

    Astrologically, how does Pluto’s de-designation as a planet by NASA have any impact at all? It was merely re-classified by humans on Earth, but nothing about Pluto itself changed; it’s still the same ball of rock and ice it always was.

    In re: Court Appointment

    I would bet a fifth of tequila that Trump’s next nomination to the Supreme Court will be a woman. Noting that literally ALL of the dirt thrown at Kavanaugh was “sexual”, by nominating a woman, all this just goes away; I don’t see even the most deranged victims of TDS attempting to accuse Barrett or any other woman of “sexual harassment.”

    Antoinetta III

  37. Dana, a little clarification here, please. Is your statement about the possible Supreme Court nominee intended to be three separate assertions, or two assertions and a conclusion? Because there is nothing about being married and a practicing Christian to drive most of us lefties screaming up the wall, except for the hard-core atheists. Her particular theology, whatever that may be, would give some of us pause.

    Now, of course, many of us would reflexively vote against anyone the other party put up; the entire New Mexico Congressional delegation, like so many robots, does so all the time.
    But I’m afraid the statement you made is somewhat poorly defined. .

  38. P.S. Just heard from my rabid-Hillary-fan friend in Oregon, who said about Barrett “I’d have to read up on her cases to judge…..” Very sensible.

  39. KayeOh, duly noted! Anybody else?

    Cliff, I’ve seen news stories about it in various odd places, but yes, the pharmaceutical industry isn’t too happy about such stories, and so the corporate media — as usual — does what it’s told.

    MichaelV, I figured any rationalists who read this blog are probably already used to my attitude. With regard to astrology, though, it seems to me that a lot of so-called rationalists are caught in a massive logical fallacy regarding it. It goes something like this:

    Major premise: for astrology to work, there must be some connecting link whereby planetary movements in the solar system can be used to anticipate certain trends on earth.

    Minor premise: scientists have spent the last four centuries doing their level best to avoid looking for any such connecting link.

    Conclusion: therefore astrology can’t work.

    That’s the extreme form of what I’ve called the Debunker’s Fallacy: “If the cause isn’t known, the effect can’t happen.” Au contraire:

    Major premise: astrological forecasts have a remarkably high rate of accuracy.

    Minor premise: the accuracy of such forecasts indicates that there’s some kind of connecting link (not necessarily causal in nature) between planetary movements in the solar system and certain trends on earth.

    Conclusion: if astrologers had access to any kind of adequate research budget, and the entire global scientific community didn’t have kittens on the spot at the mere thought thereof, we might well be able to figure out what the connecting link is…

    DFC, thanks for this! I appreciate the input — and yes, that sounds very plausible.

    Your Kittenship, we’ve had plenty of senile presidents before — Reagan in his second term comes to mind. It’s not at all impossible that we’ll end up with another.

    Antoinetta, nah, you’ve got the causal arrow pointing the wrong way. The decision by the International Astronomical Union to downgradePluto’s status didn’t affect Pluto; the waning of Plutonian influence caused the IAU to vote the way it did. It’s exactly the same as what happens when a planet gets discovered; that doesn’t happen by accident either, and is marked by a sudden upsurge in that planet’s influence in worldly affairs. The same thing happened with Ceres, which was discovered in 1800 and downgraded in the 1850s — track the influence of romanticism on the world and you’ll find that it peaked between those years. In the same way, the Plutonian influence was at its peak from 1930 to 2006; it started coming on 30 years (one Saturn cycle) before the discovery and will fade out to minor status by 2036.

    As for your bottle of tequila, I won’t take the bet — I’m pretty sure you’re right.

  40. John, et al.

    Late to the party a bit this week. Just got back from a national energy industry conference for public power, so I haven’t had a chance to go through the comments or give John’s essay more than the first read.

    I had a previous experience that I was saving for the open post, but it is actually relevant, I think, to one point of John’s discussion, so I’ll go ahead and toss it out here.

    The context of the conversation was a post regarding the muddled movement of impeachment efforts in the House. I had commented that I did not see how pursuit of impeachment was a good strategy for the Democrats at this time and laid out several reasons why, above and beyond the fact that the Senate won’t convict him: 1) too close to the election and a distraction from the Democratic candidates’ message, 2) gives Trump a significant stage to be the center of attention and reinforce his identification with those similarly-despised segments of the population who helped elect him in the first place, and 3) the Trump x-factor where the old rules just don’t apply and he somehow jujitsus impeachment right back at the Dems out on the campaign trail. Coherent and logical, my key mistake.

    “But he *must* be impeached!”

    But you’re just handing him a big stick and asking him to whack you with it, I explained.

    “He’s not fit to be POTUS! We have to impeach him!”

    But he *is* POTUS, I said again. And he’s going to be POTUS at least until Jan 20th, 2021. If your goal is to keep him from another term, you don’t want to pursue impeachment. It only helps him.

    “We have a Constitution. He’s not fit!”

    You realize that you’re going to be aiding his re-election, I repeated.

    And now the facepalm moment:

    “Then he’ll just be illegitimate for two terms. And this country is *done*.”

    I was left rather speechless.

    Evidence, to my mind, of how some folks are so locked up in their rage that they harm their own cause and cannot see it. It is an incredible thing to witness.

  41. Just the other day I saw a headline about 10+ od’s in 24 hours in Columbus, Ohio, so the news isn’t being completely suppressed.

  42. @Cliff, the driest and most matter-of-fact data you can find is the 2017 US mortality data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, a govenment agency. The 2018 data will only be released next December. Opioid overdoses are included in “non-intentional injury” or “suicide”, both on the rise.

  43. Maybe I’m just dense, but if nothing about Pluto itself changed, why would its level of influence change?

    Same thing with a newly discovered planet; the planet was always there, so it’s influence on Earthly concerns was also always there. Being unaware of a planet shouldn’t seem to effect it’s influence; it would seem to mean we are unaware of the influence, or it’s source.

    Antoinetta III

  44. Hello JMG

    Another vote here for a recurring fee for access to quarterly astrological forecasts. I’d be particularly interested in forecasts for the UK, US, China and Russia but obviously you may well not have the time for that much forecasting.

    SMJ

  45. I went ahead and looked at the (very similar) Libra ingresses for Riyadh and Tehran (which are valid; both had Capricorn rising for the Aries and Cancer ingresses).

    The thing that pops out at me is Mars in the 10th, near the midheaven (and much closer to Tehran’s midheaven). Both have Sag rising and Jupiter in the 1st, squaring those Marses and Midheavens. So I’m thinking there might be some sort of conflict or further belligerent activity between them, or some tough talk from their leaders.

  46. JMG,
    I would be happy to subscribe for a fee to your astrological forecasts. And are you on patreon? Because I would subscribe there too. Thanks for all you do and btw, can’t wait for the next Weird of Hali.
    Jean

  47. Ever-interesting Archdruid, at the end of your Aries Ingress prediction discussion, you said: “Finally, we can expect some kind of international mass movement to seize the media spotlight for a while and give people something to do other than make the changes that matter, before it fades away in the usual fashion.”

    I’d be interested in your thoughts on which movement fits the bill. Right now I would nominate the gaggle of “Unite Behind the Science” groups like Extinction Rebellion, Fridays For Future, Sunrise, and so on. I’ve been bewildered at how little those groups seem to be actually doing and how very little they are “walking the talk.” Wrinkling foreheads at senior politicians and castigating them for not doing… something… seems to captivate the media but promises to deliver nothing tangible. Having a few spotlighted children eschewing flying, cheeseburgers, and school classes on Fridays hardly seems like a movement of consequence. Gluing yourself with others across the entrance to a London Tube station, really?

    The recent media-circus photos of the Greta Thunberg Phenomenon, with bright clean youngsters in brand-new clothes brandishing $1000 smartphones, just make me want to weep. See one here: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65266999/GettyImages_1167860284.0.jpg

    I remember being in high school and wearing a black armband on a designated day as a protest against the Vietnam War; those of us doing so caused substantial consternation, and friendships were sundered. My riding back and forth to Junior College (yay, COS!) day after day wearing my “Bicycles Don’t Pollute!” tee-shirt seemed like a tangible commitment to the environment, though I’m sure it had substantial impacts on my social standing. Everything I see of XR and FFF and Sunrise et al pales in comparison. Kids, smash your climate-damaging smartphones! Renounce all car use! Kill your TV!

    As always, JMG, felicitations!

  48. JMG — definitely interested in quarterly US and international astrological forecasts, and willing to pay a small recurring fee to get access to it via Patreon or whatever platform you choose.

  49. Regarding your reply to Pygmycory, I think you are right about that being a false flag in Saudi Arabia. I initially leaned toward Yemen, but after reading a couple of analyses at Moon of Alabama I became aware of all sorts of puzzling discrepancies and anomalies, like huge tanks with holes in them that did not explode and burn, and Saudi Arabia’s stated ability to get back to business as normal later this month. Add the fact that Yemen would only suffer more than it already has from retaliatory attacks, plus the egg on America’s face for the attacks occurring right under its nose, with its base nearby in Bahrain. Someone among the commenters pointed out that the drones would have had to have been released from nearby to accomplish what they managed to. There was speculation about spies within Saudi Arabia in the deserts, and also about dissatisfaction with the regime, especially among the so-called “guest workers.” You are the first one I’ve seen, though, to point out this probable false flag. Good call, I think.

    I’ve been spending the past three months looking for good news in the agricultural sector, recalling that one point in your prediction in June, and I’m aware that the news focuses on tragedy rather than success. The start of an industrial hemp industry does sound like good news, especially over the long term. I look on with envy, because Japan will not follow suit for at least another 15 years, and despite hemp being the most sacred plant in Shinto, with the fiber used in all ceremonies (sakaki of the camellia family also sacred, but can be substituted), you cannot even mention hemp without bringing hostile scrutiny on yourself. There are a handful of farmers with permission to grow traditional hemp under highly controlled circumstances, but sterilized seeds used in a popular spice “shichimi togarashi” have to be imported.

    At the very small scale of our field, it has been an interesting year. Seven smart meters were installed facing our field on adjacent houses, and we lost at least 90% of our pollinators there. Every flying creature was impacted. All the birds left, with the sole exception of barn swallows, which seem somehow to be attracted. Arthur Firstenberg will probably post part of my account of what happened. With the media blackout on EMF effects, if I hadn’t been aware of this possibility to begin with (the smart meters are inconspicuous–I didn’t even notice they’d been installed even after feeling sporadically sick in the greenhouse, until my husband pointed out the loss of bees) I would have been blaming covert pesticide spraying or climate change like everyone else. Of course, very poor yield of anything relying on pollinators, especially melons, squashes and blueberries. Underground pests and creatures dwelling in close contact with the ground flourished, probably due to the loss of predators. After a while a couple of snakes came in and helped themselves to the voles.

    On the other hand, the corn did okay, and the beans and solanacea don’t seem to need bees, and reduced insect pests seem to be helping the latter. TEPCO really ought to patent its smart meters as a pesticide that can be turned off when not needed, leaving no residue. But of course, they can’t. Japan’s economy is heavily reliant on the myth that these things are safe.

  50. “wealth flowed away from the privileged classes”

    Could you explain why you see it this way? I may have missed something, but I don’t think I have seen this claim from any of the other sources that I follow. Are you claiming that wealth inequality is not actually getting worse, and not at record levels? I would think that Trumps tax cut for corporations would have had wealth flowing towards the privileged classes, not away.

  51. Cliff:
    There’s news pretty regularly on the Vermont and New Hampshire outlets about the problems with drug overdoses in this neck of the woods, maybe it’s an oversight of your local news sources? Maybe you’re lucky and there are fewer deaths in your area?

    Jim:
    An untreated hive is a dead hive; winter will see to that. The problem is that mite treatments have drawbacks: mites have developed resistance to the hard chemicals, some treatments require a very specific and limited temperature range, most can’t be used on a hive that has honey supers in place, others can have an unacceptably high bee death rate even when used as directed. Over the last year or two bee inspectors have really been advocating oxalic acid because it’s a highly effective miticide and used with a vaporizer causes few bee deaths. It still can’t be used with honey supers in place and won’t kill mites under wax cappings, but spacing the doses overcomes that. In our experience, it’s the best treatment we’ve ever used.

    Tripp:
    Not a drinker, but I’d happily share a bit of mead with you!

  52. David BTL, yeah, that’s pretty classic. I was forwarded an intriguing blog post the other day that pointed out that a great many people on the left have abandoned politics for a faith-based pseudopolitical eschatology, in which they know the Flying Spaghetti Monster or somebody will grant them victory in the end because they’re the Good Guys and Orange Man Bad. It does seem to explain things…

    Antoinetta, and yet the discovery of a planet correlates very precisely with the emergence of new trends in human society. (Look at the way that the discovery of Uranus correlates to the emergence of representative democracy as a major political force, for example.)That suggests that there’s more going on than a simple cause-and-effect model.

    SMJ, duly noted! Thank you.

    Barrigan, good. That definitely shows a risk of war between them.

    Jean, not yet, but that may change sometime soon. Thank you.

    Bryan, I’m pretty sure that the ineffectual mass movement I predicted there was the latest version of the climate change activist movement, with Thunberg as its (literal) poster child.

    Lloyd, so noted. Thank you.

    Patricia O, thanks for the update. I’m sorry to hear about the meters — not surprised, but sorry. As for hemp, well, that’s really too bad; I’m delighted to see that taking off here, and it’s unfortunate not to see the same thing happening in another country that could benefit from it.

    Copeland, remember that the privileged classes in this country include the top 20% or so, not just the .01% — the upper middle class has thrived over the last fifty years, as they’ve benefited from the policies that have destroyed the working classes and the bottom end of the middle class. Trump’s tariff policies have sparked a manufacturing boom that has driven down minority unemployment rates and raised 1.2 million households into the bottom end of the middle class by income, after decades of brutal economic decline for the majority of American families. The flip side of that can be traced in the collapse of high-end retail and the beginning of declines in upper-end real estate; that’s why I see this as a transfer of wealth from the privileged 20% to everyone else.

  53. Hi David by the Lake,

    Maybe you were talking to whoever writes those anti-Trump spells JMG uses as bad examples for us. 😄

  54. JMG said:
    “Surprising as it seems, the vocal segment of the populace—indicated by the Moon—will not primarily be vocalizing about Trump over the months ahead. Other things will excite their wrath.”

    My reply:
    I’ve already read three “Vote Blue No Matter Who” in my DeFaceBook feed. Each time there’s been feedback against it. I gave my shot, but know that the battle on the left (as predicted in the Stars) has begun.

  55. I won’t comment on your methods, but I always enjoy your political forecasting. I didn’t vote for Trump but I give him mixed marks as a President. I hate what he’s done for environmental regulations. His Supreme Court picks have yet to reveal their true colors, but Brett seems like a grade-A D-bag. We did need to do something about immigration, but I wouldn’t have taken the course he did. As for the trade war, we’ll see. As for alienating all of our allies, high marks! Most importantly though, we haven’t started any NEW wars, although we are pumping more T-bills into the MI complex. C’est la vie.

    As a swing voter living in deep blue California, my vote doesn’t count for much at the Federal level. I’d like to see an alt dem like Tulsi Gabbard get a shot, but I don’t think 2020 is the year. It’ll be Biden gaffes all the way down.

  56. To Beekeeper in Vermont:

    I’m going to be moving up to your neck of the woods from North Carolina and settling in the Burlington area in the next several weeks and I’d love to pick your brain regarding sustainable agriculture/apiculture and green wizardry in Vermont. If you could email me at way dot of dot tele at gmail dot com I’d really appreciate it. I have lots of questions…

    – Bob Heyn

  57. JMG,

    Thanks again for the ongoing immersion course in mundane astrology! I’d throw you a buck or two per month, but I hope you’ll still post these interludes.

    re: war on the horizon, Neptune conjunctions are considered afflicting, right? Unless I overlooked something, Aries 2020’s chart for Washington, D.C. appears to have those very indicators, in the “person” of Mercury who is lord of MC and AC, retrograde, and debilitated, applying to Neptune on the 7th cusp, all in Pisces. Does that sound like getting neoconned into a brief war to you? Can you drop a little spoiler as to whether you see any Twilight’s Last Gleaming in that Aries ingress? Or do I just have to stay tuned? What part of the chart rules “think” tanks, anyway?

    re: Kavanaugh, the Bourbon Democrat establishment had no genuine objection to his priors. They just phoned in their kabuki opposition as red meat for their woke, attention-bulimic management-professional class faction (which sounds a lot like Saturn/Sag/Cap in that Libra 2019 chart). If they really wanted to sink him, Democrat leadership would have been more decisively on the attack and not have sat on evidence. They could have spent more time showing his contempt for common people and the Constitutional process, for the people interviewing him for his JOB for Bob’s sake. I really wish the Democrats would just merge with the GOP and leave room for a proper Labor party so we can get some proper synthesis in here.

    re: opioids, there’s some really gross stuff going on with the Gatsby-Sackler family. Naturally, they’ve moved most of their fortune overseas and are attempting to torture bankruptcy law into leaving the mess they made for other people.

  58. Thanks for the thoughtful responded JMG, I completely agree with you. Hopefully in time we figure out the connections. Regardless of the causes, the results are what matter in the end.

  59. JMG, not sure when you did the chart, but just 2 nights ago for the first time in 10 years the FED had to inject $75 billion into the financial system due to a liquidity squeeze. Apparently overnight rates shot up to 10%. One wonders what else is lurking out there and which financial institutions are having trouble funding their operations. It’s certainly an indicator that turmoil in the markets may be ahead as indicated by the chart. Thank you for the interesting insights, I look forward to seeing how the chart turns out.

  60. Off topic. UFO “disclosure” coming closer. This is Fox News!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZeAYsz7rvw

    My provocative conclusion: your book “The UFO Phenomenon” will be proven right, but your book “Twilight´s last gleaming” will be proven wrong, since apparently “our boys” have some state of the art new drone technology at their disposal.

    Unless, of course, those UFOs are, ahem, Iranian or Chinese…

    😉

  61. Interesting analysis. I´ve been non-astrologically pondering more or less the same things. If confrontation with China heats up, how will the Dems respond? Even their supposed dark controller George Soros has made anti-Chinese statements! Also, what about Biden´s senility (even an anti-Trump Swedish newspaper admits he might be) and the problems if and when he is replaced as nominee? That China might start financing both US politicians and protest movements seems like a foregone conclusion at this point. I also wondered if a new Cold War with China will put the Dems on the spot and force them to unite (somehow) with Trump (or one of their factions) rather than being left out in the cold as “unpatriotic”. If this coincides with a Biden scandal, Trump will be reelected in a landslide of major proportions!

    It´s too early to tell whether the Saudi attack was a false flag, but it certainly seems too big for the Houthi rebels who were initially blamed. Funny how it happens just 48 hours or so after Bolton was fired by Trump…

    The climate kids are too good to drop right now, I think they will be allowed to stay in the limelight until after the 2020 elections, and then dumped as the liberal establishment “goes Green” in its own peculiar way (electric cars, nuclear power etc). I think they want to use Greta Thunberg against Trump. Probably won´t work.

    And yes, I also predict a Mike Pence-Tulsi Gabbard showdow in 2024…

  62. Hi John Michael

    + me for the potential forecast subscription. Particularly if australia was added to the list!

    Jez

  63. Did Gauquelin’s work prove anything in your opinion JMG? It seems that scientists will always find ways to invalidate astrology data as they have a religious devotion to it being deemed to be fraudulent.

    I would be prepared to sub your mundane astrology work.

  64. I know nothing about astrology, but it seems to me that your predictions are logical enough:

    US shale oil production has stopped rising for several months now. If that phenomenon becomes permanent — in other words, if US shale oil has peaked — it means that, this very summer, global oil production has plateaued. if it doesn’t recover quickly, it means that the Long Emergency has begun, since conventional oil peaked in 2006 and has been decreasing ever since, but that decrease has been offset by shale oil.

    Abqaiq is a distraction, a dent in the unstoppable decline of conventional oil. What is important is whether shale oil production will rise again. Probably not, I’d say, but let’s not forget that millions of smart people all over the world are working like lunatics to delay the Long Emergency for as long as possible. So far, their efforts have delayed the unavoidable for 13 years, not only by improving technology, but also by printing dollars like crazy to finance fracking, while knowing that shale oil can never be profitable. Can they give us some more years? Not sure.

    For us mere mortals, the global peak oil means the beginning of the global collapse, since our civilization rests on cheap energy, primarily petroleum. Population and energy are joined at the hip; a 90% decrease in energy production around 2100 means a 90% decrease in world population, mostly by famine and wars.

    The first years of the collapse won’t feel like collapse at all, more like a particularly severe recession, unless the financial system collapses. If so, we can expect the worse in 2020 and beyond. Even if the international financial system keeps functioning, the economy will suffer, whereas the price of gas won’t necessarily rise a lot, because demand will fall, as it always does during recessions. Instinctively, Americans with rally behind Trump, for humans always rally behind their leaders during harsh times, it has been in our DNA since homo sapiens exists.

    Additionally, Trump will reap the benefits of having being demonized by the mainstream media, against whom people’s anger will turn. Hence, the loss in advertising revenue which you predict.

    But since Trump is no magician, he has no miracle solution to reverse the depletion of natural resources, and what will the economy look like, one year after the Peak, if, as I fear, we have passed the Peak this summer?

  65. “…at least one foreign country will attempt to influence the political struggle here in the US by providing a great deal of covert funding by roundabout means…this project won’t be entirely successful by any means. What’s more, word of the covert funding will begin to leak out…if the Republicans have the political savvy the gods gave geese, they’ll save the big reveal for May or June of 2020.

    I’d place bets on China. For most of Trump’s term, addressing the problems with China enjoyed an unprecedented level of bipartisanship.

    Then came Biden’s impossibly idiotic comments in May earlier this year, even by Biden standards:

    “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man…they can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”

    I’m having trouble understanding how someone who was a US Vice President for eight years and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — privy to all China’s human
    rights abuses, IP theft, aggressive protectionism, military buildup, island-making, and all the other classified stuff we don’t even know about — could come to that conclusion. A few theories:

    1) Biden is simply adopting a pose to undermine the tariffs, because, well..they’re Trump’s tariffs
    2) He’s getting pressure from lobbying groups who represent “American business interests in China,” who are in turn getting pressured or lobbied by the Party
    3) Just a little friendly tip o’ the hat to the Chinese government, which so graciously invested $1 billion into his son Hunter’s business
    4) The Biden who spoke those words in May actually stepped out of time machine from 1999

    Even time-machine Biden should know better. Considering what he must know, his comments demonstrate extremely bad faith toward American interests. If he wins the nomination, I’m sure the GOP will have a field day.

    And now other Democratic primary candidates are poo-pooing the tariffs, probably for the same combination of reasons, most-likely just wanting to appear anti-Trump. They talk a good game about “values” and “multi-lateral partnerships” in dealing with China. The US has been complaining about human rights in China for over 20 years. And the consequences? Unfettered access to American markets while US businesses begged for access in China and never got anything close to a level playing field. There was a lot of talk in the debate about “Trump not doing it right. Tariffs aren’t the way…etc.” It’s exactly the opposite: the cliché “money talks” really applies.

    And by the way US farmers should be doing a bit better very soon. China now needs to import more pork and soybeans because of rocketing consumer prices. Swine flu caused Chinese pork prices to rise by over 40% last month. This all started of course because they imported infected pigs from Russia after banning US pork imports to retaliate for the tariffs. Quite the cascade of consequences! Although there are those that speculate the real reason for the swine flu outbreak would be the karmic consequences of throwing Muslims in concentration camps and forcing them to eat pork.

  66. Beekeeper,

    I’m not much of a drinker these days either but mead is not for getting drunk! Hopefully we’ll get the chance.

  67. JMG wrote: “How many people would be interested enough in quarterly US and international astrological forecasts to pay a small recurring fee to get access to it via Patreon or the like?”

    I would certainly be interested! How about a distance learning course on astrology for beginners too or a list of introductory books?

  68. To reply to Patricia Mathews, I am not opposed to practicing, married Christian women. As to my rather troll like comment, I suppose I have been on Pinterest too much lately, and my “feed” for some reason, seems to be heavy with postings from hard core leftist atheist types who HATE anything to do with Christianity, and Christians. You would think that, according to the lefties, that Christians are the new N@z!s. That there are many flavors of Christianity, or any religion, doesn’t even enter their minds.

  69. Hi JMG & all,

    Yes, I’d be interested in subscribing to a mundane astrological forecast–

    Also, if you don’t consider it to pose any moral hazard, you may want to contact the people that run James Puplava’s Financial Sense News Hour (https://www.financialsense.com/blog ). They run a series of podcasts that is more or less about economics and investing, but this includes things like a highly accurate long-term weather and volcano forecaster (Evelyn Browning Garriss http://browningclimate.com/).
    Puplava and company are interested in a wide variety of information sources, and they don’t seem to care if the source is unorthodox as long as you have a good track record–which, of course, you do. It is likely that they would pay you to do a podcast interview every equinox, during which you can advertise your astrological forecast services, as well as being linked to their news feed. Their number is 888-486-3939, or fswebmaster@financialsense.com to make your pitch. If you offer links to your many previous accurate mundane forecasts, tell them that ‘no one knows how it works, but it does seem to work,’ and assure them that you are not looking for believers, just to provide a glimpse of the future, I think they might be intrigued.

    Switching gears, it will be interesting to see how the ‘radicals accepting foreign money’ thread of your mundane forcast plays out! It reminds me of a similar plot thread in your book, “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.” A year from now, if it turns out that some old Chinese bureaucrat came up with the idea of funding those folks, I may be asking you if it’s a case of life imitating art, or just a long-term forecast of your own 😉

  70. I would be willing to pay for a quarterly astrological forecast from you via Patreon or other like site should you choose to do that.

    Kay

  71. JMG, I’m – far – more curious how the political dynamics (strengths) look in the six months leading up to the Nov 2020 election than I am in how they look in the next six months. While I understand context helps you form guesses about what specifics might support astrological dynamics, and I appreciate your guesses (and especially your long term record for predicting specifics accurately), is there any reason you can’t generate and share the election-time chart now — and at least comment on whether it looks auspicious for the Repubs — and the economy, since I think that is a huge factor in any election — or not? Am I correct you can generate such a chart, and generally read it, for any time period whatsoever? Thx!

  72. Greetings Ecosophians from the Mill Creek Valley in Cincinnati, Ohio. My second article in the “Down Home Punk” series, Squatters Rites, is now available on the Green Wizards website here: http://greenwizards.com/node/906

    Here is a brief intro “Migration and homelessness caused by climate change and economic collapse in the coming Long Descent will be a huge social challenge. We must think now how we will deal with it when it comes. To do that we should first look at the history of squatting over the last two centuries for some context of squatting in an urban environment.”

    From Berlin to Detroit, to a city near you, squatting is a reality and I think we’ll be seeing more and more and more of it as the cycle sketched out in this astor-analysis of the next months also suggests: a cycle of up-and-down disruptions that gradually moves us further down the staircase of the Long Descent.

    Thanks to any and all who check it out.

  73. I really enjoy these interludes. When you started them a few years ago I remember some talk in the comment section about a global grand realignment approaching in 2020. Do I remember correctly, and do you have any idea how that might show up in the coming Aries ingress?

  74. Dear JMG, you can add me to the list of folks willing to pay a subscription fee for quarterly astrological forecasts!

  75. @ JMG – One would hope the Saudis are not foolish enough to take on Iran directly. I assume that they are trying to drag us into it, to do their heavy lifting. A few weeks ago, with John Bolton as national security advisor, it may have been a good bet that we would have gone to bat for them. Now that he’s gone, hopefully the cooler heads in Washington will prevail. Notice that Iran has not been stupid enough to attack US forces directly… (I’m taking it at face value the oil export facility attack was carried out by Iran, until proven otherwise. Not that US intelligence agencies have ever been wrong about goings on in the Middle East…)

  76. First of all, to everyone who expressed an interest in regular mundane astrology reports, thank you! I’ve got an inquiry in the queue at Patreon to see if they’re going to balk at helping to support an astrologer; once that gets sorted out and I choose a platform, I’ll be setting things up over the next month or two, in time to have a detailed (as in, much more detailed than this post or its predecessors) mundane forecast up for the Capricorn ingress this December. Depending on how much interest there is (and thus how much of my time I can afford to put into this project), I’ll have forecasts for other countries as well — and yes, I’ll set things up so that if a certain dollar value of monthly patronage comes in requesting regular forecasts for a specific country, that country will get quarterly forecasts. I’m really looking forward to this — it promises to be entertaining, and also gives me the opportunity to put more time and study into astrology. So again, many thanks!

    Godozo, thanks for the data point. I’m not at all surprised, but it’s all grist for the mill.

    Brian, fair enough! I certainly find plenty of Trump’s actions irritating, though I’m far from displeased by his trade and immigration policy — not least because all the data I’ve seen suggests that the US working classes are finally getting the break they desperately need, in the form of more jobs at better pay. As for the 2020 election, a few months ago I was pretty sure the Dems would field a Biden/Harris ticket; that’s certainly still a possibility, but Biden’s not doing well and a significant faction among the Dem leadership seems to be swinging to Harris. Gabbard would be my choice, too, but it’s going to take the total implosion of the current party leadership to give her a shot at it; since that seems likely at this point, I think she’s got a very good chance at the 2024 nomination.

    Jonathan, I’m not sure what chart you’re looking at, but it’s not the ingress chart I’m looking at According to my ephemeris, Mercury stations direct on March 10, 2020, and so is direct and picking up speed at the time of the ingress just before midnight EDT on the 19th; he’s badly debilitated anyway, being in both detriment and fall in Pisces, but is very weak due to being in a cadent house. He’s also not lord of the ascendant, which is in Scorpio — and Mars as lord of the year is exalted in Capricorn in the 2nd and conjunct Jupiter. So the executive branch is going to be in a world-class muddle but the nation as a whole will be doing very well; Trump’s significator, the Sun, is also angular and strengthened by sextile aspect to Saturn. The seventh house cusp is in Taurus, so Venus (also in Taurus in the 6th) rules foreign policy; neither Mars nor Saturn is angular, both are well dignified, and the lord of the 7th is well dignified but cadent. All in all, no sign of war.

    MichaelV, bingo. I figure the best thing astrologers can do at this point is keep casting and delineating charts, and demonstrating that TS really does W. The angry rationalist movement has pretty much shot its bolt at this point, and with any luck we can get back to a little more sanity soon.

    Ryan, I cast the chart originally in early August, did a rough draft of the delineation over the week or so following, then set it aside and wrote the post on the 12th and 13th of this month. So it’s interesting to see the prediction already starting to work out!

    Tidlosa, funny. The irony is that I’ve just submitted a revised and expanded version of The UFO Phenomenon to its new publisher, Aeon Books. Clearly my timing was good! As for the business with China, it’ll be fascinating to see how that plays out. The pre-Trump bipartisan consensus was to conciliate the Chinese no matter what the long-term consequences, while trying to reduce Russia to vassal status or, when that failed, keep up the pressure; Trump clearly wants to reverse that, though he’s having to buck the momentum of the whole US policymaking elite to do so.

    Bridge, I thought Gauquelin’s work was interesting, and the attempts to debunk it were riddled with bad logic and bad faith. Ultimately, though, I don’t worry too much about that. Debunkers gonna debunk, so to speak; as you point out, the refusal of scientists to think clearly about astrology is grounded in dogma, not reason, and trying to get them to listen to proofs is right up there on the futility scale with trying to convince a dyed-in-the-wool creationist that Darwin’s theory of natural selection doesn’t say what the creationists think it says.

    Horzabky, I really do need to do that post updating the peak oil situation, don’t I? You seem to think that the decline in liquid fuel availability will be sudden, drastic, and traumatic; I don’t see any reason to agree with that. Rather, as shale oil production peaks in the US and begins to sag, I’d expect to see shale production ramped up in some of the other countries that have been holding off until prices rise. I’m pretty sure we’ve been post-peak in terrms of net energy for more than a decade now, and so what we can expect in the years ahead is a gradual acceleration of what we’ve seen since 2005 or so — a slow, ragged contraction in the real economy papered over by frantic financial gimmickry, the gradual abandonment of certain extreme energy-wasting habits, more political and economic instability, and shifts in population dynamics away from expansion and toward the inevitable demographic contraction ahead. That is to say, the Long Descent. More on this as we proceed!

  77. Bob Heyn:
    I’ve sent you a message directly. If you don’t get it or I’ve messed up your email address, let me know and I’ll try again.

    Number one thing to know about Vermont in the winter is that you need to buy long johns. Seriously. And you might as well invest in the good ones. At our house we wear them from November through April, indoors and out, because we don’t like to crank up the heat too much unless company from more southerly climes is visiting. They’ll fit nicely under your faahm overalls, too, which as you will learn, is the correct pronunciation for that word spelled f-a-r-m ’round these parts (or ‘pahts’ if you will). 😉

    There’s somebody else here on Ecosophia who lives in Vermont, Burlington if I remember correctly. I met him at the picnic but I’ve forgotten his name. (Sorry!) I don’t know if he is involved in agriculture, but he might be able to fill you in on things in that part of the state. Chittenden County, in which Burlington is located, is the most leftward part of an already left-leaning state. If that doesn’t suit you, the Northeast Kingdom is the most conservative and the most rural.

    JMG:
    I, too, would be interested in subscribing to a quarterly astrological chart. Would you consider a non-credit card option, postal money orders, for example? Or does that complicate things too much?

    Patricia Matthews and Dana:
    The opposition I’ve heard from the Left to Amy Coney Barrett reflects discomfort with her being a devout Catholic, which includes having seven or so kids. We’ve seen that before in recent years, senators going after nominees’ membership in the Knights of Columbus (Are you now or have you ever been a member . . ?) reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings. The Left is more or less O.K. with folks who say they are Christian, as long as that doesn’t include taking Christian teachings seriously.

  78. Thanks for your comments about Pluto with respect to mundane astrology…makes perfect sense that it would not have been ‘discovered’ when the foundational texts were written. It’s very encouraging to see such a strong response for the mundane astrology subscription…you can certainly count me in. (If your forecasts continue with such accuracy demand for your services will soar. Please don’t forget your base JMG! I had a fleeting dark fantasy of the newest feature segment on Good Morning America or Oprah: Today’s Mundane Astrology Forecast with John Michael Greer!)

    I had to chuckle when you mentioned that we’ve had senile presidents previously — The Great Communicator was so obviously declining in his second term…as a young man it used to drive me nuts. Reagan was well protected from too much exposure by his handlers but Trump doesn’t really tolerate handlers. Dementia is a progressive condition for most people so it could get interesting. Watching Biden or Bernie progress wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining.

  79. Versling,

    Since 1/20/17, Pelosi’s stated desire to impeach from day to day is inversely proportional to Trump’s degree of compliance with the unwritten rules of empire and proportional to how poorly the Democrat establishment is doing in polls. If they were ever serious about impeachment on principle, they would have done something about it by now instead of helping MI6 and other spooks run psyops in the whole Western mainstream media and suppressing economic populists. In fact, the Democrat establishment mostly likes Trump’s policies and they’ll be glad to throw the election to him (again) before letting Sanders ruin the endless supply of Likud campaign funds, underage women and nose candy lifestyles to which “both” Parties have become accustomed.

    David, BTL,

    I would be very amused to know how your “MUST… IMPEACH… TRUMP” friend feels about Versling’s link.

  80. I’d certainly be interested in mundane forecasts, although UK is my personal focus. Once Brexit is resolved things are going to be very uncertain. Any source of guidance would be welcome.

  81. Hi John

    I would definitely be keen to pay a subscription to access your astrological forecasts. My interest would the UK, EU and America primarily.

    Regarding the wealth pump, something similar is happening in the UK. We are seeing house prices rise outside London (excepting the north-east) whilst high end houses in London have fallen.

    https://www.theweek.co.uk/house-prices/61987/house-prices-in-london-and-UK/page/0/56

    We are also seeing real wage growth occurring which is in part caused by a fall of EU inward migration into the UK.

    This is the hidden reason why so many wealthy UK remainers are so aghast by Brexit. One of my good friends, a classic top 20% earner from inner London, spoke last year about how house prices in Islington (a posh enclave in north London) have fallen 6% since Brexit.

    It was clear that he blamed Brexit for the fall in prices of where the bulk of his wealth was placed in. In fact, Brexit is only partly to blame for the drop in prices of high-end London flats/properties – stamp duty brought in by the Tory government was also a key reason.

    Anyway, the bottom line is that outside the wealthy enclaves of “Remainia”, the average Brit isn’t doing so badly after all which probably helps explain the slow but ready rise in support of those prepared to leave without a deal.

    Of course, you rarely get this data in our mainstream media which is dominated by Remain voting upper-middle class journalists based in London.

    I have also updated my blog on our civilisational future which you might find interesting to read. Nothing new for you but I have referenced some of your writing in it.

    https://forecastingintelligence.org/2019/09/15/deep-future/

    A second data point is a new book by the British writer Robert Harris. Its a very Greerist themed book on faith in progress, the collapse of industrial civilisation and a return to a Dark Age UK. I reference it in my blog post and I think it is a realistic take on how the UK might look after our civilisation has collapsed.

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/09/the-second-sleep-robert-harris-review

    Regarding the Saudi attack, this is a fascinating article on the geopolitics of it all.

    http://thesaker.is/how-the-houthis-overturned-the-chessboard/

    “The situation has now reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl – that’s why they rely on mercenaries.”

    I don’t think this is a particularly realistic scenario, short term, but medium term it could definitely happen. I recall you did say a while ago that you were predicting the collapse of the Saudi Kingdom at some point in the coming years. Would be curious to see what your thoughts were on this Arab intel chatter..

    Finally, on Brexit, I agree with you that a hard Brexit remains the most likely outcome but precisely how long it takes to get there remains to be seen.

    This macro consultancy, BlondeMoney, think that no deal is now 90% probability of happening by the end of October.

    https://blondemoney.co.uk/2019/09/revoke-v-no-deal/

    We will see!

    You will also find interesting that Corbyn’s personal ratings are collapsing – https://britainthinks.com/news/what-makes-a-great-leader-britainthinks-leadership-study-2019 – Labour are struggling in the polls. He seems to have lost his opportunity in 2017 after a successful election campaign but UK politics is volatile at the moment!

    Finally, I would be interested in learning your thoughts on a recent report on how the supply of phosphate will be in serious trouble in 20 years or so.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/06/phosphate-fertiliser-crisis-threatens-world-food-supply

    Thanks
    FI

  82. Beekeeper: Are we back to the Menace of Rome already? The Know-Nothing Party and all that? As for how many children the candidate has, isn’t there a plank in our platform about the inalienable right of a woman to decide how many children she wants or doesn’t want? More policing of womens’ bodies, I see. Grrrr…

    Patricia Mathews

  83. JWWM, Biden’s comments on China were really pretty remarkable, all things considered. If the rest of the Democratic party starts mouthing the same things, that may just tell us where the money is coming from.

    Karim, I’ll certainly consider that! I’ve been thinking for a while now that a good book on political astrology might be a project worth tackling, for starters.

    Emmanuel, thanks for this — I’ll certainly consider it. As for foreign money in US politics, what inspired me to put that in Twilight’s Last Gleaming is simply the way that US money (via a series of supposedly “nongovernmental organizations”) has been used so often and so blatantly to interfere in the politics of other nations. The phrase “turnabout is fair play” is doubtless on many minds overseas just now.

    Gnat, yes, it’s quite possible to generate a chart in advance, so long as you know where the national capital city is going to be located. I don’t tend to do charts in advance, precisely because good astrological forecasts always take context into account. Predicting election results via astrology is extremely difficult, and the results are not much better than chance. With regard to the economy, though a few points are clear. The 2020 election will take place when the Aries 2020 ingress is in force, because that has a fixed house rising; in that chart Jupiter rules the 2nd house cusp, and Jupiter is in his fall in Capricorn in the 2nd, normally a sign of economic hard times. Jupiter is however very closely conjunct (only 11 minutes of arc) with Mars, who is the ruler of the ascendant, the lord of the ingress, and exalted in Capricorn; Jupiter and Mars are also both strengthened by an applying trine from Venus, ruler of the 7th. Thus we can expect underlying economic weakness and continuing contraction in high-end economic sectors (Jupiter) but a sharp turn for the better in the lower 80% or so of the consumer economy (Mars), driven partly by issues involving foreign trade (Venus as ruler of the 7th), partly by issues involving health care (Venus in the 6th), and partly by changes in popular sentiment (Mars again). If that’s the way things turn out — and I’ll have to see in six months how this looks — the Dems have an uphill struggle ahead of them.

    Versling, there’s that! Back in the days before satellite communications, when radio signals had to be bounced off the ionosphere, engineers noted that certain angular relationships between the planets as seen from Earth were associated with distinct peaks and dips in ionospheric conditions. Since those same angular relationships are called “aspects” by astrologers, the whole subject was dropped like a hot rock once satellites made the whole point moot…

    Justin, thanks for this!

    Dylan, that’s the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction on December 21, 2020 at the beginning of Aquarius, completing the shift of the Great Conjunctions from Earth to Air signs. I plan on discussing that in quite a bit of detail as we get closer, as it marks important shifts. It doesn’t show up on ingress charts, though — those deal with the grubby realities of politics and economics, while the dance of the Chronocrators deals with deeper and higher things. More on this in due time.

    Ben, one of the basic rules of politics is that governments routinely do really stupid things. I don’t expect the Saudis to try to take on Iran themselves, but Napoleon III did exactly that in 1870 against the Prussians, and the result was exactly what could have been expected: France had its rump handed to it on a platter, and Prussia used the opportunity to unite the fractious kingdoms of German-speaking Europe into the German Empire, with consequences we’re still dealing with today. So we’ll have to wait and see…

    Versling, oh, it’s going to get much worse than that. This is just the opening volley.

    Beekeeper, I’ll have to see what the platform I choose ends up providing in the way of options — but I’ll certainly look into it.

    Jim, I don’t think there’s any danger of me appearing on Oprah or any similar program, and if by some misbegotten chance it happened once, I’m quite sure it would never happen again (and I’d lay odds the episode would never be broadcast). Since I won’t be providing tips on how overpaid and overprivileged upper middle class office fauna can cling like grim death to their delusions of cosmic importance and moral superiority, I just don’t think I’d be of interest. 😉

    Andy, I’ll keep that in mind! I’m already planning on adding other countries depending on how many subscribers I get from where, and I know I have a lot of British readers, so quarterly forecasts based on London ingresses would be a logical first step.

  84. Forecasting, thanks for this! I’d encountered a few hints that things were looking up for working class Britons now that immigrant labor is leaving the lsiand, and a proper no-deal Brexit with trade barriers protecting British industries from European competition would double down on that, very likely launching a boom in the Midlands and the North while sending all Middlesex into hysterical weeping fits. Certainly we’re seeing the equivalent here now that Chinese goods are subject to reasonable tariffs. With regard to the Saker’s thesis, it doesn’t strike me as likely, but it’s by no means beyond the bounds of possibility — and if the Saudis end up launching a war with Iran, trusting on their money and mercenaries, it would be a very sound strategy on the Iranian side to pin the Saudi forces down along the Gulf with missile strikes, naval incursions, and Quds Force guerrilla actions, and then land a major force in Yemen to join with the Houthis and march on Mecca.

    Corbyn’s in a really difficult predicament, stuck between the pro-Remain Blairite wing of the party with the bulk of the money and influence Labour has, and the working class voters of the Midlands who voted for Brexit and may just jump ship to the Brexit Party if Labour goes full Remainer. No matter what he does, he loses — and as it is, the LibDems rather than Labour may be the Opposition after the next general election, facing a Tory-Brexit coalition. As for phosphate, that comes up every few years, and of course the answer — already under way in a lot of areas — is to accelerate the transition to organic methods that don’t require phosphate supplementation.

  85. Dear Mr Greer,

    You wrote:
    “You seem to think that the decline in liquid fuel availability will be sudden, drastic, and traumatic; I don’t see any reason to agree with that.”

    Well, yes and no. I wrote: The first years of the decline won’t feel like collapse at all, more like a particularly severe recession, unless the financial system collapses.

    I expect the decline in liquid fuel availability to be between 1% and 5% a year. After a decade or two, the pain will be real. Even if other nations start producing shale oil, I see no reason why their production would last more than it did in the US. Besides, no nation other than the US has the financial ability to print billions out of thin air to invest into shale oil extraction.

    In my opinion, if the international financial system collapses, it will be an indirect effect of the decline in cheap energy availability, and that collapse will be sudden, drastic and traumatic, as you say. But if the smart people who manage the financial system succeed in maintaining it in a somewhat functional state, the decline will be relatively slow, at least in the first decade.

    Then it will accelerate, like when the USSR collapsed.

    One early sign of decline is the rise in mortality, which is currently affecting the poorest white Americans. Opioids are blamed, like vodka was blamed in the USSR. About 20 years after its mortality rate began to rise, the USSR collapsed.

    I am French and I live in France. Recently, I spoke about opioids and the US opioid crisis with my doctor. He told me that doctors like him were encouraged to prescribe painkillers (he didn’t tell me by whom) because it was inhumane to let patients suffer. He implied that, prior to that, if you had a disease, you expected to suffer because of it. Then the news about the dreadful side-effects of opioids crossed the Atlantic, and the French doctors became more prudent in their prescriptions. My doctor told me he doesn’t prescribe painkillers for more than a week or two.

  86. JMG, Thanks much for taking the time to look and comment on that. Unlike in 2016, where I was frozen like a deer in the headlights going into November, I intend to have some options in place if it looks like the rules are going to get worse, dramatically, again. Honest business concerns (defined, by me, as businesses which attempt to add real value to the economy, producing consumer goods and services in accord with free market forces/ consumer preferences) tend to grow where rule of law is favorable; transfer payments (theft) is minimal; and – probably most important – the situation is reasonably stable (so a capital investment or hiring decision made today is still likely to be correct next year). There are plenty of things I don’t like about Trump, but he laid out his promises clearly at the beginning and has kept his promises more than any politician I can recall in my lifetime. As a result, I’ve been hiring and making capital investments again. I can also corroborate that, as part of the outcome, my personal pay is actually down (I’m putting money back in to the business and dealing with deferred maintenance, so I’m actually okay with that) while my employees on average are making substantially more money (it’s actually harder to find qualified people to hire).

    From my perspective, you’re correct that the working class has, on the whole, gotten a substantial, relative economic boost from Trump’s presidency to date.

  87. I’m curious…

    Seeing as we’ve already seen Pluto rise and fall in Astrology and we have a record of Ceres doing the same, could you see Uranus and Neptune lose their status as planets as we lose technology in the long emergency? Once Telescopes become impossible to make, would those planets disappear from the human imagination?

  88. “Off topic. UFO “disclosure” coming closer. This is Fox News!”

    I’ve not made up y mind about UFOs, but I am so cynical now that if it is on the news, it means they are planning a false flag or something. I noticed that the interviewee, when asked to speculate on why the pentagon tells us so little, came up with that maybe it is just too horrible.
    Imagine how they can manipulate us if we are terrified of an alien presence.

    I’m trying to get across to people how little of our news is true.

  89. Beekeeper in Vermont and Patricia Matthews–IMO the problem with another Roman Catholic on the Supreme Court is that that demographic is already over represented. There are currently five Catholics, two Jews and one protestant (raised Catholic) on the court. With so many cases pending that involve religious issues you cannot blame the non-Catholics in the nation for worrying. It isn’t just abortion–rights of LGBT people to a non-discriminatory environment, rights of non Christians and of women who want health care not vetted by the Council of American Bishops are all at stake.

  90. I would pay for the mundane astrology workups of other nations is there were a way to do so that I can use or comprehend. No idea what Patreon is or what getting on it would entail, frex. So add me to the list.

  91. JMG,

    I was trying out new and unfamiliar software, ended up on Aries 2019. Awkward! My apologies for not checking my work more closely. Now I see that 2020 is gonna be a pretty good year for the US, the decoupling from the “rules-based international order” proceeding apace, the vacant south half screaming “Tend to your own garden.”

    Returning to the Libra 2019 chart, and re: Mars in the 2nd generally, central banks have been concerned lately about debt shuffling and monetary policy nearly exhausting its ability to stabilize the economic system (example, Fed Chairman Powell’s July speech). They are exhorting policymakers to do their part fiscally and help put money in the hands of the commoners who (they hope) will spend it. Whether he said as much under duress of one too many protest signs reading “Bring Back the Guillotine” or genuinely seeks to fix it is an open question for another thread. Here’s hoping they stay afraid of us, that the innovation/false prophecy of neoclassical economics burns at the stake, and that classical political economy rules the day once again.

    Thanks again for all you do.

  92. “…trying to convince a dyed-in-the-wool creationist that Darwin’s theory of natural selection doesn’t say what the creationists think it says.”

    And what mistake is that?

  93. @ JMG

    I second KayeOh and would also subscribe to a quarterly chart!

    @pvguy

    Thank you for the link to the repo article. I wish I had read your comments before commenting myself. The $125 billion injection represents almost 10% of all reserves currently parked at the FED according to the article. I think the FED should have seen this coming if the cause really was, to any significant degree, September corporate tax payments (which fluctuate but should be known within a broad range) and the amount of Treasuries auctioned last week (since the auction results were known last week). The need for such a massive injection when overnight rates hit 10% suggests to me there is more to this that isn’t public.

  94. JMG, I really want to subscribe to your forecasting, but I am leery of releasing my card details to any Internet company. Japan has no sympathy for fraud victims. I wonder if there would be any way around that.

  95. Hey jmg

    I noticed that you mentioned something about planetary alignments affecting the ionosphere in your reply to versling, do you have any sources you could show me?

  96. JMG, your defense of astrology sounds a bit like Rupert Sheldrake defending his ideas. That’s a compliment.

    As Brian points out Trump has not started any new wars, and that’s more than we can say for his predecessor. When I point this out to Trump haters/Obama lovers I always get a deer in the headlights response. (No, I’m not a Trump voter)

    On the political front I’d note that Harris isn’t doing all that well in the polls. In fact she’s falling. It will take some work to get her up alongside Biden, Bernie and Warren. I don’t know if the D party can do it – though I think they’ll try. Her problem, it seems to me, is that she has no message and doesn’t really stand for anything. She’s black and has two X chromosomes – I’m not sure that’s enough. I’m not “with her”.

  97. Horzabky, people in the peak oil scene started predicting that kind of scenario beginning in the late 1990s. You may have noticed that they’ve been wrong so far, and there are good reasons for that. I’ll discuss those in detail in my future post on peak oil, but the very short form is that while there are hydrocarbons to be extracted — and there are, of course — gimmicks will be found to arrange for them to be extracted. (The US approach of spinning the presses is just one option.) As for the global economy collapsing, here again, I don’t recommend holding your breath — that’s another one that’s been predicted over and over again since I was a child. More on this as we proceed.

    Gnat, many thanks for the data points! Those are among the reasons I expect to see Trump reelected in 2020 — too many people are noticing that the policies he’s put through really are improving things economically for working class people and small businesses.

    Godozo, obviously nobody knows for sure, but I’d be surprised if that were to happen. Telescopes aren’t that hard to make by hand — there are still people who do it — and the military advantages of being able to see things at a distance are such that I expect the basic technology to remain in existence.

    Onething, a sensible skepticism! I’m quite sure that what the Pentagon isn’t talking about is that, as usual, they’re testing some new aerospace project. It came out some years ago that half the “unknown” sightings recorded by Project Blue Book were U-2 spyplane flights. What were the others? Well, the U-2 was hardly the only secret technology we were testing just then. No doubt the Navy’s got something secret in the testing phase, and is using the old wheeze about UFOs to try to distract attention from it.

    Patricia, so noted! I’ll see what I can work out.

    Jonathan, that would do it! I’ve had that happen with unfamiliar software too, so I sympathize. I just checked my post on the Aries 2019 ingress and there Neptune is, right on the descendant; clearly it didn’t bring war, but it explains why so much of US foreign policy has been based on wishful thinking over the past six months. As for the economy, I think a Grand Moff Tarkin approach to it — “fear will keep the economists in line” — has something to be said for it!

    Onething, well, what do you think Darwin’s theory of natural selection says?

    Patricia O, duly noted. I’ll see what options I can come up with.

    J.L.Mc12, not off hand. It’s something I read about while studying for my ham radio license back in my teen years.

    Christopher, thank you for the compliment. Sheldrake’s done a fine job of pointing out that he has double-blind controlled studies backing up his theory of morphic resonance, and his opponents’ response amounts to “I refuse to believe that!”

  98. Can Mundane forecasting be used for corporations? I think there’s a lot of people who would pay money for that.

  99. “No doubt the Navy’s got something secret in the testing phase, and is using the old wheeze about UFOs to try to distract attention from it.”

    Just a guess–some kind of radar baffling technology that makes objects appear to defy the laws of physics.

  100. The predictions according to the ingress chart sound quite interesting. As I read the part about the Democrats, the term “circular firing squad” came to my mind. Anyway, I’ve hacked through the Aries ingress chart for Berlin, 2021. One of the things that seems to be interesting about that chart is Uranus in the 11th house, in quadrature to Saturn, predicting serious conflicts between government and opposition in parliament; likewise the Aries ingress chart for 2020 for Berlin predicts political agitation. I don’t have the details handy, but on the whole, there will be noticeable political agitation in connection with the opposition before the elections in fall 2021, but the outlook for the German government is rather good, if I’m not mistaken.

  101. Rita Rippetoe:
    I understand the concern that the makeup of the Supreme Court is now predominantly Roman Catholic and Jewish, but there was a time not all that long ago when it was entirely Protestant and Jews and Catholics had no representation. That doesn’t mean, however, that the rulings from the Court were necessarily biased against them. In the specific case of Amy Coney Barrett, is the problem that her rulings up to now have been explicitly Catholic, or that those who oppose her fear that she will rule in clearly Catholic ways in the future? The first is fair game; the second, not so much.

    I don’t follow the Supreme Court rulings with any particular attention except for the ones that grab headlines, but I haven’t noticed that the Catholic and Jewish justices are ruling in identifiably Catholic or Jewish ways. Remember that the same concern about control from Rome surrounded John Kennedy when he ran for president, so much so that he was forced to address the issue publicly. Looking at his presidency in hindsight that worry turned out to be unfounded. It is entirely possible for a devout Catholic (or Jew, or Druid) to sit on the Court and issue good, solid, constitutional rulings without bowing to the specific teachings his or her personal religion. I’m of the opinion that a person with a devout religious backbone – whatever that may be – is generally preferable to someone whose ideas of justice change with the latest fashion. Also: excluding someone from a court appointment on the basis of his or her religion is in direct violation of the Constitution’s ‘No Religious Test’ rule too.

  102. To Chris L Hope, I comment on several other sites, and I have been doing my darndest to elevate the language used in the discussions. In reference to Kamala Harris, I have been using the old fashioned word “courtesan”. I think that word pretty much covers her political persona.

  103. Not pertaining directly to US politics, but I saw this and thought you’d be interested, as it pertains to China’s natural gas markets (from my weekly EIA newsfeed):

    In the News:

    China introduces new incentives for domestic production of tight and shale gas and coalbed methane

    In June 2019, the Chinese government introduced a new subsidy program that, for the first time, offers incentives for domestic production of natural gas from tight formations. The program also extended subsidies for natural gas production from shale formations and from coalbed methane (CBM). The new subsidy program aims to stimulate further growth in domestic natural gas production and to reduce China’s increasing reliance on imports, which have grown from 15% of the total supply in 2010 to 45% in 2018.

    In recent years, rapid growth in China’s natural gas consumption has outpaced the growth in its domestic production, which resulted in increased natural gas imports by both pipeline and liquefied natural gas (LNG), particularly in peak winter months. Between 2010 and 2018, China’s domestic natural gas production increased by 6.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), accounting for 37% of total supply growth, while natural gas imports grew by 10.5 Bcf/d (63% of total supply growth) during the same period.

    Between 2010 and 2018, natural gas production from tight resources increased by 3.3 Bcf/d, while shale production increased by 1.0 Bcf/d and CBM production grew by 0.6 Bcf/d. In 2018, production from these resources accounted for 43% of total natural gas production in China, which included tight gas (28%), shale (7%), CBM (6%), and coal-to-natural gas (called synthetic gas) (2%).

    In the new subsidy program, which covers 2019 through 2023, CBM production qualifies for higher subsidies than natural gas produced from shale and tight formations, reflecting the higher cost of CBM production. For production from tight formations, only the incremental volume based on 2017 production levels will qualify for subsidies. Natural gas produced during the heating season (November–February) receives higher subsidies, giving producers more incentives to help alleviate shortages during peak winter demand. The Chinese government also removed the requirement for foreign companies to establish partnerships with domestic Chinese companies to operate in the oil and natural gas upstream sector.

    China has been developing tight gas from low-permeability formations since the 1970s. Tight gas production was negligible until 2010, when companies initiated an active drilling program that helped lower the drilling cost per vertical well and improve well productivity. Growth in production from shale and CBM resources has been affected by complex geology, deep reservoirs, low well productivity, and some of the highest per unit production costs of the Chinese natural gas resource base.

    In September 2018, the Chinese State Council set a target of 19.4 Bcf/d for domestic natural gas production in 2020. To meet this target, China needs to increase total natural gas production by 4.4 Bcf/d compared with the 2018 level.

  104. “Onething, well, what do you think Darwin’s theory of natural selection says?”

    Well, genetic variations happen; if they’re good they are kept in the gene pool and slowly tweak the species or ultimately lead to new ones.
    Perhaps your objection is to the idea that it is a random process? If so, I could agree that natural selection introduces an element that isn’t random, but everything that is given to it is random. It’s really relying on random mutations that is the issue. So I don’t see natural selection as addressing the real problem. But I don’t deal much with creationists. I’m a lot more familiar with intelligent design.

  105. Dana – if you’re looking at who in politics is acting like a (political) harlot, a better question is, “who isn’t?”

  106. Dennis, financial astrology is a discipline all its own, and it’s one for which corporations and investors pay a great deal. As J.P. Morgan himself commented, “millionaires don’t pay attention to astrology, but billionaires do.” (He was a client of Evangeline Adams, the most prestigious American astrologer of the day.) I don’t have the background at this point to venture into financial astrology, and it’s not something that interests me greatly — political astrology is more my style. But thanks for the suggestion!

    Kevin, that’s one possibility. Another is that the “baffling the laws of physics” business is smoke and mirrors, meant to distract attention from the actual capabilities of whatever they’re playing with.

    Booklover, excellent! One of the points of these posts is to encourage other people to try their hand at mundane astrology, so I’m pleased that you’ve done so. Will you be posting your analysis online anywhere?

    David, thanks for this. That’s exactly what I was trying to explain to Horzabky earlier — the fact that US shale production is peaking simply means that other countries, which have waited for us to burn through our reserves first, are now gearing up to bring their own online once the price begins to rise.

    Onething, okay, good — you’re better informed about it than most anti-Darwinists. The thing I think you’re missing is that the only random part of the process is the generation of mutations, and even that’s not really random any more. Those lineages that have survived are those that were better at pupping helpful mutations; thus the capacity to pup helpful mutations has been selected for. That’s why evolution moved so slowly at first, and picked up speed thereafter: by the time we got to the Cambrian period, the important lineages of multicellular plants and animals had already spent a billion years being selected for the trick of generating nonlethal and potentially helpful mutations at a rate much higher than chance, especially in times of crisis. That led to the “Cambrian explosion” and in due time, to us.

  107. JMG,

    I would subscribe to any content you put up on Patreon (or any other paywall platform).

    In regards to Horzabky. This strikes me as one of those “definitional” problems. What does he mean by “economic collapse?” Another depression like the 1930s? I think that is well within reason. Mad Max? Not likely. Something in between? Hard to say.

    Also, as you often point out, it can depend on where you are. The Middle East? That could get really, really bad. Canada? With the its only neighbor being the US to the south and access to land to the north, lots of natural resources, two oceans and the likelyhood that it will uncover more oil in it northern territories – not so bad.

    AV

  108. 1. Add me to the list of people whom would subscribe to quarterly astronomical chart. I prefer Subscribestar (Patreon’s competitor) or perhaps you could provide options for both so people can choose which service they’d prefer to pay?

    2. Would also love it if you would consider writing a beginner’s astrology book – maybe even with exercises included the way math textbooks give sample math problems to practice solving?

    3. Also a request for a former Archdruid’s own teachings on the evolution of Consciousness. Not just the planned companion book to Fortune’s Cosmic Doctrine but perhaps something of your own take on all the processes Fortune (and Meher Baba!) talked about – especially with terms, metaphors and analogies for mind training that are more current, relatable and understandable than what’s available so far? Meher Baba’s book was amazing but it is heavy on the Sufi lingo/Islamic worldview because most of his audience was Muslim (also his direct Guru was a Sufi). Most pages I kept having to flip to the glossary in the back to familiarize myself with Islamic and Sufi terms which gets tiring after a while.

    4. I would love to see your latest musings about Peak Oil, etc.

  109. About the ingress charts for Berlin, I have no concrete plans for publication. I wouldn’t know where to post them. That said, at the time, the ingress charts are otherwise rather business-as-usual, except for a heightened risk of criminality and terrorism (Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in twelfth house, Mars conjunct Jupiter, Aries ingress 2020).

  110. To Patricia – I think you misunderstood my statement. I meant a REAL courtesan. Did you not hear the stories about her extramarital affair with 60 year old Willie Brown (30 years her senior), who was at the time the Democratic Speaker of the California State Assembly? Willie himself says it’s true. He helped her get a political appointment to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board in 1994, a position that paid $97,000 annually. Five months later she resigned from the board, and Brown immediately appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, which at the time was a highly paid position with a salary of $70,000 a year for a basically do nothing “job”, and for which she had no qualifications. The positions on these boards are widely regarded as rewards for political favors, or personal favors. Brett Granlund (R), a former California State assemblyman, is quoted as saying about the Brown-Harris affair – “Screwing the Speaker has its rewards”.

  111. Regarding the potential influx of foreign money into the coming election cycle, I have found myself unironically wondering, for a while now, when we will see the emergence of an American Communist party whose message is, “we need to do what Beijing does.” Given the success of Russia’s influence operations like RT, it seems that something even more brazen would be worth the risk, and strategically opportune given that the Democratic Party is on the verge of a split.

    As for the entertainment industry, the obvious failure there would be the new Star Wars turning out to be a turkey, but I wouldn’t doubt that even more likely would be the failure or disappointment of one of the newly fragmented streaming services. My money would be on CBS. Like so many other 1990s kids, I’m pretty much committed to giving them my money for at least one season of the Star Trek Picard show, but I have no interest in any of their other content… and there’s no guarantee that it will be any good anyway, despite Patrick Stewart’s involvement, as the current executive producer for all things Trek doesn’t have a very good track record for quality storytelling. Not that our gracious host considers Star Trek to be quality storytelling to start with 🙂

    Broadly speaking about the entertainment industry, I wonder to what degree its consolidation (after this round of fragmentation due to the streaming wars) represents the building of a bulwark in the broader struggle for global cultural influence. So often these days, when I read an article from the Hollywood Reporter or Variety, the undercurrent seems to be, “Disney is the only one making real money.” Since the Democrats especially take so much Hollywood money, could entertainment execs, behind closed doors, convince the political class that their industry is actually a strategic asset?

    Beekeeper, interesting that vaporized oxalic acid is a recommended treatment in your area, and glad that it works. When I was an assistant beekeeper a few years ago, the preferred treatments in our warm Central California climate were thymol, a gel extract of thyme, and formic acid. The formic acid, intended for fall treatment, originally came on a foam pad meant to be left applied for 2 to 3 weeks… it was then replaced by a gel extract left applied for 2 to 3 days, the fancy new Quick Strips! I remember my mentor applied the new version without gloves the first time, and when I came by the next day, the skin on his fingertips was peeling! Still relatively gentle for the bees, though… I believe not only is formic acid a component of bee venom, it is also the “sting” in stinging nettles.

  112. @ JMG & @ Onething who said “Well, genetic variations happen; if they’re good they are kept in the gene pool and slowly tweak the species or ultimately lead to new ones.”

    That’s pretty close to what I understand Darwin to have been theorising, EXCEPT he said nothing about genes. And even applying a genetic gloss, he’d have been saying variability in *phenotypes* happens, and natural selection is applied phenotypes..

    The reliance on genes and genetic mutations as the operative “cause” of all variation was added by the neo-Darwinian “Modern Synthesis”.

    I think many biologists remained dissatisfied with the synthesis (Lynn Margulis among them) esp in relation to the production of variation and of novelty, and have sought to enrich the range of recognised sources of variability and of novelty. Her contribution to that search was the theory of symbiogenesis.

  113. Another commenter’s nation preferences for the upcoming mundane astrology subscription caused me to wonder what my own top five would be. I’m leaning toward US-UK-Russia-China-India. They mentioned the EU and I wondered if an ingress chart is viable for a non state? I wouldn’t think so…the EU chart would be identical to the chart for the nation of Belgium and, while Brussels is the seat of the EU’s parliament, there is no head of state. Just curious. Also, would you mind providing us with a reminder of your preferred mundane astrology texts?

    I appreciate your cautioning about how looking too far ahead with ingress charts eliminates too much context. Your peek at the 2020 Aries ingress does indeed look grim for the Dems quest to regain the presidency. They’re already a complete mess for the most part, badly out of shape and breath and now the road ahead looms steeper and rockier. What will become of them? I know there are commenters here who foresee a literal rupture and the formation of a new third party. Do you sense that’s a real possibility?

    Jim

  114. PS @ JMG & @Onething. I definitely think Lynn Margulis would have said ALL the really interesting evolution & riffing on variability and novelty happened BEFORE the Cambrian Explosion. She’d have seen most of what happened to multicellular organisms after that as being inherently limited by the strictures imposed on organisms by the irreversible choice to go down the road multicellularity.

    (Not going to say *I* have the knowledge or expertise to make that argument, just pointing out that the argument also exists as a validly founded one within the world of evolutionary biologists). 🙂

  115. Some of the mundane charts that would be interesting to look at include the EU as a political project (probably the time of the Maastricht treaty) and the euro itself which many economists predict will fail eventually. The EU is increasingly becoming unpopular and people resent German domination of it.

    Also an alternative to Patreon in Subscribestar which doesn’t do censorship unlike Patreon.

  116. Well, that’s a line of reasoning that I have not heard before. I am scratching my head, not able to formulate a question. I don’t know that there is any way for such a thing to be true. I don’t think any one has much of a clue how life got here and all the paradigms are wrong.

    I think maybe Jeremy Narby came close – endogenously intelligent life form known as DNA purposefully mutates itself.

    My other supposition is that it has all been delegated to beings from archangels or gods, to advanced human entities on ‘the other side’ who make various projects of it. How else can you explain the duck billed platypus?

  117. Hey JMG here is a video talking about Google and Youtube enforcing foreign hate speech laws in the US that violate the first amendment. Kinda goes along with that little prediction about Democratic funding.

  118. Beekeeper in Vermont wrote ” there was a time not all that long ago when it was entirely Protestant and Jews and Catholics had no representation.”

    Wanting to check that statement, I found an excellent article on Wikipedia titled “Demographics of Supreme Court Justices of the United States.” It is full of data, dates and charts, broken down by a variety of criteria including religious affiliation.

    The first Catholic on SCOTUS was Roget Taney, appointed by Andrew Jackson in 1836. He served until his death in 1864. After that, there was no Catholic Supreme Court Justice until Grover Cleveland appointed Edward D. White in 1894. Since then, there has never been a time of more than a few months (allowing for appointment and confirmation of a justice to replace one who died in office) without at least one Catholic on the Court. A person born in 1894 would be more than 120 years old today; 1893 is before living memory.

    There have been a plurality (four) Catholic Supreme Court Justices since 2005 and a majority (five) since 2006, according to Wikipedia.

    Judah P. Benjamin’s name was floated for a nomination before the Civil War broke out and he chose to join the Confederacy. The first Jewish Supreme Court Justice was Louis Brandeis, appointed in 1916. There was at least one and at times two Jews on the Court after that until Abe Fortas resigned in 1969. No Jew served on the SC between 1969 and 1993, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a Justice. At present, there are a record number of Jews serving on the Court at the same time (three).

    I will agree that 1992 is “not all that long ago”, so Beekeeper’s statement is right about Jewish Justices but wrong about Catholics.

    There was also a period “not all that long ago” when there were no Protestants at all on the Court. Apart from this being historically unusual, hardly anyone remarked on it, which was surprising to me.

  119. Archdruid,

    I would totally be in favor of astrological readings. My vote would be for India, but since you’ve repeatedly said that you don’t know much about the country, the US works just as well.

    As for foreign funding scandal, are you guys watching the whole Ukraine thing unfold?

    Regards,

    Varun

  120. Hi JMG,

    my 1st comment here but I was a regular at the archdruid blog.

    Two points on your proposed astrology service.

    1) you note that financial astrology is a thing all by itself, which you have little interest in. Nevertheless, there might be a significant market from financial types for the work you intend to do anyway, i.e. focusing on political/economic aspects.

    In the Trump/Brexit era, financial markets have been dominated by political events to an extent not seen previously by any current market participants. For example, markets are rocked on a daily basis by tweets from Orange Man Bad, just to mention one of the more amusing aspects.

    Your political and geopolitical forecasts, whether astrological or otherwise, tend to be far more accurate than most market prognosticators can manage. As such I would think many traders would be interested in the service even if you make no specific efforts to adapt it for their use, i.e. without doing any more work than you already intended. It would just be a matter of them finding out that it exists and getting a look at your impressive track record.

    2) Patreon isn’t in the same big-tech league as Google or Facebook but it has the same approach to speech-policing. So your account can be zapped at any time if some random bunch of SJWs start shrieking about something you said that doesn’t reflect sufficiently-badly-for-their-tastes on Orange Man Bad, or you are not sufficiently enthusiastic about mass immigration, or … on and on it goes. Furthermore Patreon explicitly goes after off-platform behavior, i.e. they claim the right to police your entire life both online and offline and if anything you do or say anywhere doesn’t meet their ideological requirements (which they helpfully refuse to specify) then they will zap you. Also, if a bunch of SJWs claims that you said or did something, but actually the SJWs just made it up, Patreon will of course go with the SJW narrative and zap you.

    Youtuber Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) was zapped from Patreon for typically opaque reasons that they refused to specify. This led to Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson shutting their (huge) Patreon accounts.

    (Note: Carl Benjamin was mentioned here a while ago because he caused a big fuss as a UKIP candidate who refused to apologise for telling jokes that SJWs didn’t like).

    None of the 3 guys named above are “of the right”. They are all self-described classical liberals or even lefties but of course they commit the sin of being unwilling to kowtow to the SJW Khmer-rouge and so their social-media channels are always under threat.

    There was a partial exodus from Patreon, both from creators and subscribers, due to these events. I previously had a Patreon account but I cancelled it because the I refuse to fund the thought police through the commission that Patreon charges.

    Many alternative platforms sprung up, but the SJWs killed most of them by swarming the payment-processors (these days, even large banks will kill your bank accounts under SJW swarm pressure).

    One of the alternative platforms, called Subscribestar, found a way around the payment-processor attack. Initially the payment-processors took them down but they found a way to get back up and are still there. I haven’t actually used Subscribestar myself but creators that use it seem happy with the service. I notice that Dmitry Orlov is on there and his trademark sense of humour is in evidence: he offers and “Oligarch tier” where for $10000 per month “you get nothing!”.

    https://www.subscribestar.com/orlov

    Anyways, those are my 2 cents ….

  121. First of all, thanks to everyone who’s suggested SubscribeStar — I’ll definitely give it a look.

    Anthony, fair enough. When people start talking about how the global economy might collapse, though, I start to roll my eyes…

    Happypandatao, duly noted! In order to get a beginning astrology book published, I’ll have to start with something more specialized and build a reputation — there are a lot of beginners’ astrology books out there. I’ll also consider something on the evolution of consciousness, though if I do that the screams may get kind of loud.

    Booklover, if your readings look like business as usual, you’re doing it right. The most common way to mess up a mundane reading is to go looking for drastic changes; if there’s a drastic change on the way, you’ll have a hard time missing it unless you really try.

    Ian, two for two. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see either of those happen.

    Scotlyn, of course not — Gregor Mendel hadn’t even published the work that led to gene theory when Darwin published The Origin of Species. As I recall, though, Darwin postulated that some mechanism allowed for the persistence of heritable traits across the generations, and Mendel’s discoveries provided that. My take on Darwin’s theory obviously draws on Ilya Prigogine and Stephen Wolfram — it seems to me that both of them offer insights into how complex self-organizing systems can develop what we may as well call the capacity to learn over time.

    Jim, I’m probably going to do some sample charts for the EU and see whether I can get them to make sense. The others? It’ll depend on the size of the subscriber base, since that’ll determine how much time I can put into this project. Good mundane astrology texts are those Raphael and H.S. Green, both unimaginatively titled Mundane Astrology.

    Scotlyn, sure — and of course there’s a lot of complexity in the unicellular world.

    Bridge, I assume you’re talking about foundation charts (set for the time and place of something’s beginning) rather than ingress charts. I don’t find foundation charts anything like as useful, but I’ll consider exploring them.

    Your Kittenship, duly noted! I suppose the Elder Things might have bred multicolored shoggoths for show, as distinct from the ordinary iridescent black variety…

    Onething, the best explanation for the platypus I’ve ever seen is that Bacchus got really drunk when the gods and goddesses were creating the Earth’s life forms…

    Mushrooms, thanks for this.

    Varun, if enough Indian readers subscribe, I’ll get some books and a couple of online subscriptions and see whether I can do meaningful ingress charts for India. As for the latest media furore, I give it a week or less before it implodes in some really messy way — and I’m beginning to wonder how soon Trump will have someone deliberately pass on something that will blow up in the faces of the Dems, in a way that costs them in blood.

    Ecocat, thanks for this. Corporations are certainly welcome to subscribe once I get this set up!

  122. Hey JMG,

    I would be very interested to see regular charts for Australia! Hopefully there are enough of us here to make it interesting for you!

  123. Dana – no, I never heard that one, despite the media splashing everybody’s mildest (and this was not mild!) indiscretions all over the world. Wow.

  124. Hi John Michael,

    G’day and greetings to you on this fine and sunny then rainy Equinox!

    The reading was interesting, and I approve that you refer to your previous reading and discuss how it turned out. How else does one hone a knife?

    I’m an outsider to your politics, so I can’t really add anything to the discussion.

    However, I did notice an interesting thing with the images in the news regarding the Saudi refinery issue. Upon seeing the images in the news, a little voice whispered at the back of my mind that if a supplier was facing declining resources, damaging a refinery would be a great way to cover that story up. It also has the not inconsiderable side benefit of pushing up prices for the remaining oil which makes the whole business more profitable. If they were lucky, the installations may have even been insured. Dunno, but the precision of the holes in the industrial installations were just too precise and I’m guessing that is a story about proving capability.

    I’ll be curious as to how the readings story works out too, and I did note that there was talk in the news about how Britain would not muck around on a trade deal with us down here once Brexit had occurred. Although they do seem to be pretty good at mucking around up there right now! 😉

    My time has not been my own this past week, and for the first time last week in about a decade I neglected to make a comment. Bonkers.

    Cheers

    Chris

  125. Re: Trump’s alleged conversation with the Ukrainian President about Hunter Biden —

    What a GREAT way to get Biden-family corruption back into the news! If Joe Biden addresses his son’s business record, that takes him off-message for the campaign; if he doesn’t, what is he hiding? Either way, it’s probably distracting Joe and his organization.

    But Trump’s playing with fire here, because there may be some legal aspect that he’s not aware of. (I never, ever, would have thought that the alleged payment to Stormy Daniels could be consider a “campaign contribution”, for example.)

    By providing some new issue which might some day possible hint at an impeachable offense, Trump makes more trouble for Nancy Pelosi (who’s trying to suppress futile impeachment efforts), too.

    By the way, the photo illustrating Wikipedia’s article on Hunter Biden is bizarrely unflattering… and the text is no hagiography, either.

  126. Ian Stewart:
    I have used thymol with mixed results, maybe it works better in warmer climates. In order to have the sustained air temperatures necessary for it to work effectively around here we have to take the honey off in early August rather than in September. The formic acid strips that had to be left in the hives for a couple of weeks worked really well, but then they were replaced by the quick strips and nobody stocks the older version any more. The first time I used the quick strips the pile of dead bees on the ground in front of each hive was frightening; I didn’t count, but I would guess many hundreds (about two measuring cups full), perhaps including the queen, which is never a good thing in the fall. It happened just a few days before the bi-annual hive inspection from the state bee inspector so I left them on the ground for her to see and she agreed that it was way, way too many bees killed so I’ve never used them again. It’s such a relief that the oxalic acid is so effective, the major drawback being that the vaporizer is expensive, but it’s still roughly the same price as you’ll pay for a 3 lb. package of bees to start a new hive after the mites have killed your old hive.

    Debora Bender:
    Thanks for the close look at the Supreme Court demographics! There was strong anti-Catholic sentiment in the US during the 19th century, the Know Nothings were active in the middle decades of the century and anti-Catholicism sometimes erupted into violence, mostly in response to an increase in immigration from Catholic countries. Not being a lawyer and not knowing my way around legal history or a law library, I wonder if it’s possible to find anything peculiar to Catholicism or a Catholic worldview in the rulings of any of the 19th century Catholic justices? As with Amy Coney Barrett, is the issue that the justice is Catholic or the fear that the justice will rule in a particularly Catholic way? To me, those are two separate things.

  127. @ Beekeeper

    With Amy Barrett, the fear is that she will vote to repeal Roe vs. Wade should the issue come before the Court.

    I was only a kid at the time, but I recall that in the election of JFK vs. Tricky Dick Nixon back in ’60, the fear was not about any particular Catholic theology, but that Kennedy would be merely a puppet or an emissary of the Pope, and that the United States would fall under the control of the Vatican. A considerable amount of hand-wringing and dire fulminations about “Vile Popery” come to mind.

    Antoinetta III.

  128. I’ve been advised by a close family member that I have not explained my comments sufficiently for non-beekeepers whom I may have confused, so here’s what Dear Husband suggests I add: Varroa mites are a really serious parasite for honeybees, so serious that their scientific name is Varroa destructor. There are lots of different treatments for hives to reduce the mite load (it’s impossible to get rid of all of them) and the tough part has been to come up with something that will kill mites without killing bees. A lot of these treatments work by vaporizing or sublimation: you put the substance in the hive at a time when the ambient air temperature stays in a certain range and leave it for the prescribed amount of time, usually measured in days or weeks, then you go in and remove anything that’s left over. Some treatments are more effective than others, but most of them, including organic-approved treatments and such benign substances as powdered sugar, cannot be used when the hive contains frames of honey intended for human consumption. Therefore, beekeepers in colder climates need to remove the honey from the hive much earlier than they would have in pre-Varroa days in order to have the warm temperatures necessary. The end result is smaller honey harvests. Oxalic acid is great because the vaporizer heats up and you’re not relying on outside air temps so this method can be used even in cold weather; even better, it takes only a few minutes to treat each hive.

  129. The question that really weighs on my mind as we discuss peak oil and various political issues is whether or not the earth has the capacity to produce enough abundance for people to have a good life without slavery or destitution. It seems that all throughout history, there are large numbers of people living destitute lives while a very few lead lives of incredible wealth. I don’t mind there being rich people, but it seems to me that it is impossible to have incredible wealth without exploiting people unfairly. Fossil fuels are the real reason, I think, that we did away with slavery, but even then, the inmates in the concentration camps provided slave labor during WW2, and the immigration crisis is a matter of the elites wanting to flood their countries with cheap labor. Then there are also the sweat shops.

  130. Beekeeper–re SCOTUS. Regardless of the religious affiliation of any potential candidates, it is generally assumed that the list of potentials in any Republican president’s hands represents what now passes for conservative thought–anti regulation of business, anti reproductive and sexual expression rights, pro influence of fundamentalist Protestant beliefs in government, etc.

    As to how that affects different religions; things have shifted since I was old enough to pay attention to politics. For example, back when only the Roman Catholics had K-12 schools the thought of public money going to ‘private’ schools was anathema to conservatives. There were prolonged arguments over whether it was permissible to supply secular textbooks on non religious subjects to religious schools, or allow students to be released early to attend religious instruction outside of school. In fact some states (Oregon) tried to ban all private schools in order to stop the Roman Catholic parochial school movement. RCs were willing to spend money for separate schools because at that time public schools were unashamedly Protestant. They frequently had school prayers led by local ministers at graduations and Bible readings (from the King James translation) as part of school assemblies and so forth. The Protestant movement into private schools in the 1980s was a reaction to the banning of school prayer. Although the cases were filed by atheists, for the most part, many non-Christians breathed a sign of relief at the change. Now that most religious schools are right wing Protestant, diverting taxpayer money to them in the guise of the charter school movement fine and dandy in conservative eyes.

    It is obviously hard to pinpoint the influence of a justice’s religion on his/her rulings. No one is stupid enough to cite a Papal proclamation or an essay by Martin Luther in their official opinion. But I can recall several liberal columnists who felt that Scalia was unduly swayed by RC doctrine. Admittedly, perceptions are not facts, but they are certainly relevant to politics.

  131. JMG uw – Terrence Popp on Redonkulous primarily advertises books as well on his Youtube videos. The Pence Principle, and Poor Richard’s Retirement most notably.

  132. Beekeeper in Vermont remarked, “Not being a lawyer and not knowing my way around legal history or a law library, I wonder if it’s possible to find anything peculiar to Catholicism or a Catholic worldview in the rulings of any of the 19th century Catholic justices? As with Amy Coney Barrett, is the issue that the justice is Catholic or the fear that the justice will rule in a particularly Catholic way? To me, those are two separate things.”

    Those are reasonable questions. When I was in college, I took a class on the history of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. What I took away from that course was that the Court has changed its mind a lot about the boundaries of freedom of speech; the only trend I noticed was that the right tends to be restricted more during wartime and other periods of social tension, which is what you would expect.

    Apart from that one class, I have not studied SCOTUS decisions in any systematic way. Though not an expert by any standard, I know more than the average person about the views of the RCC and various wings of American Protestant Christianity throughout US history. I can make a few observations about that.

    1. For most of US history up to about 1980, Protestant churches were more permissive than the Catholic Church about divorce and the right to an abortion. Divorce law and abortion law were left to the states during most of this time. Legal questions about them were rarely heard by the Supreme Court until the late 1950s (Civil Rights movement and the first stirrings of Second Wave Feminism).

    All Christian churches supported bans on sexual activity between people of the same sex until a few decades ago. The reversal of previous Supreme Court rulings which had upheld laws that criminalize homosexual acts required some of the Justices to depart from the official teachings of their churches.

    2. Restrictions on the sale of alcohol, and the eventual ban on it, were entirely a Protestant project, opposed by Catholics and Jews. During the period when the Eighteenth Amendment was in force, I imagine the Court had no choice but to uphold it.

    3. During my lifetime, Catholic doctrine has shifted to a firm opposition to the death penalty. This is an area where the Court has leeway to impose restrictions, and it has done so at least once, by banning capital punishment for crimes committed by minors. This ban was enacted by a Court with several Catholics on it. I would expect that Catholics on the SC would be influenced by their religious beliefs to narrow the instances in which the death penalty can be applied, and make it more difficult to impose, but I have not done the research to see whether this is a consistent trend.

    4. A lot of the cases which the Supreme Court rules on are economic in nature: the right to organize a union, regulations on the conduct of businesses, regulations on the financial industry, etc. At various times, different branches of American Christianity have had more or less sympathy for the poor as a doctrinal matter. This has probably influenced the votes
    of various Justices, but probably not in a determinative way.

    5. It will raise some hackles for me to say this, but as a religious minority, Catholics in the US have been more supportive of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment than they might be in a country where they are the majority. I say this because a recent Pope (the one who did not die in office) made it clear in various public statements that it is still Catholic doctrine that Catholicism is the only true religion and that all other religions are defective or inferior in some way. The current Pope is doctrinally conservative; he does not call attention to this view, but he has not repudiated it, so it stands.

  133. Here’s a story on Biden from NYPost: apologies if someone already posted:
    https://nypost.com/2019/05/11/the-troubling-reason-why-biden-is-so-soft-on-china/
    Biden looks awfully weak for a front runner, if he even truly is anymore. My guess is Warren will be the nominee, but she will be walking into a storm of steel. Sanders-Gabbard could win, against Trump, but they will never allow that ticket. At this point, even a global and US recession or depression can’t stop him- it will just prove to people he got too little support from the swamp, and it will create a bigger base. Because at first, no one will know it’s the Long Descent – Trump will look foolish, perhaps, fifty years hence, however, his MAGA slogan leaves lots of maneuvering and repositioning room on the way down.

  134. Debora Bender:
    Really, really interesting comment!
    As for number 2, I remember reading somewhere that it was understood at the time that Prohibition would have special impact on Catholics and Jews and that this was a feature, not a bug. Somehow not surprising if true.

    It’s interesting to see you call Pope Francis doctrinally conservative; an awful lot of conservative Catholics believe he has violated or ignored a range of Church doctrines. Some of the objections to Francis seem (to me, anyway) to be awfully nitpicky, but I don’t recall hearing this kind of disapproval of another pope by the laity, at least not recently and not so vocally.

    Dana:
    I hadn’t heard all of that about Kamala Harris either. Did she think she could run for president and it wouldn’t ever become an issue? Not sure how you explain that kind of thing away, but I’d never be hired as a political consultant due to insufficient imagination.

    On another subject: just today I’ve noticed a slew of articles about strange happenings going on in the ‘repo’ market, alarming both Glenn Beck and Paul Krugman (could there be a pair of stranger bedfellows?) Anyone here with any financial market background who can put this in perspective? Is this just a Wall Street thing or something that will eventually trickle down to the rest of us?
    https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/17/business/overnight-lending-rate-spike-ny-fed/index.html

  135. John—

    I don’t know if this relates to Trump’s potential pending offensive, but an experience I’d like to relate:

    I was doing dishes and had some YouTube mood music (epic music for dishwashing, you know) when an ad came on. Normally, I’ll skip as soon as the option becomes available, but I let this one play through, as it was the first Trump 2020 ad I had seen. I don’t recall the content, as it was very brief, but at the end, the ad offered a link to a survey and as the last few seconds of the ad ticked away, I said “Why the heck not?” And clicked on the link.

    I was curious. Now the “survey” was obviously loaded, which wasn’t surprising. (Things like, “who do you prefer, Trump or AOC?”). But there was one truly fascinating element to the survey that induced me to complete it and send it in. As I am still on Sanders’ mailing list from 2016 and now on Trump’s, it put me in the interesting position of getting emails from both of them. Maybe I’ll get both bumper-stickers to go side-by-side, just for fun…

    In any event, what intrigued me about the survey was that, in addition to the blatant binary questions, there was a free-response section at the end: “Is there anything else you’d like to say to President Trump?” So I wrote a short paragraph about my views and sent the thing in. Since that time, I’ve gotten three more surveys, two of which also included free-response sections which I also took advantage of. (The other survey I didn’t answer.) This structure strikes me as unusual in that most political surveys I’ve encountered are tightly managed. I don’t know it means anything one way or the other, but I thought it worth noting.

  136. @JMG, @Ecosophia readership

    Wanted to back up what Ecocat said about Patreon’s admission of their right to terminate any creator from their platform inclusive of doing and saying things away from their platform that they don’t agree with. On Youtube one can find a video by the CEO of Patreon explaining why they take that stance. He called it Manifest Observable Behavior. So if one says things, supports things or does things which Patreon finds objectionable one’s account can be terminated without warning.

    If I recall correctly one can appeal the decision but Patreon is under no obligation to grant it nor to explain why a creator’s account was terminated. From past de-platformings it seems to be random whether a creator will get an explanation of why they’re suddenly terminated. Yes, the CEO of Patreon said what one does, says and supports in one’s life *outside* of Patreon can and will be used for account termination. That’s why he called it (you could hear the capitals as he said it) Manifest Observable Behavior. Manifest Observable Behavior is the guiding principle used by Patreon for policing their platform.

    I have no idea if Patreon is doing this because they themselves believe in the justness of that policing method or if Visa/Mastercard or other Big Money groups has told them they won’t process Patreon’s transactions without evidence of such policing. As I understand it there is growing evidence that Wall Street is using their control of the U.S.’s payment processing system to de-fund groups/individuals they don’t agree with politically.

    …..

    Hmm. Well I just went to Youtube to try to find that video and it looks like Patreon took it down. At best one can find various other outlet’s response videos to it.

    It was after watching the CEO explain Patreon’s moderation policy that caused me to hunt for alternative methods of supporting people I enjoy listening to. While I can understand de-platforming someone who…say…is convicted of being a pedophile I don’t like the idea of supporting platforms that have a track record of defacto politically based de-platforming. If there were a track at Patreon of American Left creators taking as many de-platforming hits as the Right I might have not closed my account. And while Subscribestar is not ideal at least it has not shown any tendency to my knowledge of de-platforming political or social views that are out of favor with various upper-class PBS (Professional/Managerial/Security-State) interest groups.

    Having said that I know plenty of people like and use Patreon which is why I suggested maybe both (or even more?) options of how to pay could be offered?

  137. @ JMG – Re; the Franco-Prussian War; I think that Napoleon III forgot von Clausewitz’s maxim that no one (in their right mind) ought to start a war without a clear idea of what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it.
    I really to wonder what the Saudi’s could possibly hope to achieve by taking on Iran directly, with our without our aid. And even if we did side with the Saudis, how exactly would we realistically achieve anything that even remotely looks like victory?
    Frankly, if this business gets out of hand, a ‘twilight’s last gleaming’ scenario could develop very quickly.

  138. Ganesh, when I get things set up I’ll announce how people can request ingress charts for specific countries and what dollar value of pledges I’ll need to request in order to free up the time from other projects. I’ve got a fairly large readership on your end of the planet, so it’s certainly not impossible.

    Scotlyn, worth your while. The way that complex systems of all kinds self-organize in response to energy flow is one of the most fascinating fields of recent science, at least to me.

    Chris, you’re not the only one who’s wondered aloud if the Saudis may have done a false-flag operation.

    Lathechuck, the possibility that Trump staged the whole thing in order to get Biden’s little problem with family corruption back into the news has been discussed in various forums. Me, I’m agnostic — the stars haven’t expressed an opinion. 😉

    Starshine, I have nothing against Thunberg. She’s doing what most kids her age would have done, given a shot at all that fawning adult attention and the chance to skip school at will! It’s the slick, well-funded propaganda machine for which she’s become a sock puppet, and the slobbering adulation being spread around her by those who could actually do something significant about climate change by changing their own lifestyles, that to my mind deserves critical attention. As for her natal chart, without the birth time you’re missing half the most important details. I suppose someone could do a rectified chart using the date she first made the news as the critical point.

    Onething, depends on the number of people you’re trying to support relative to the carrying capacity. My guess is that human beings will always reproduce to the point that many of them will have to live in misery.

    Mushrooms, fair enough — thanks for this.

    Arkansas, that seems reasonable enough — well, except for your comments about Sanders. I don’t think he’d win at this point; too many people have noticed that he’s yet another millionaire talking about redistributing other people’s money.

    David BTL, thanks for this. That’s exactly the kind of cleverness I’d expect from his campaign — instead of telling people what they’re supposed to be concerned about, Trump’s people are finding out what they’re actually concerned about, and no doubt cycling those concerns over to the speechwriters and ad people. Politicians used to do that sort of thing all the time; those who figure out how to do it again will win election after election.

    Scotlyn, thanks for this.

    Happypandatao, fair enough. I’m currently considering setting things up with both Patreon and SubscribeStar, and doing so very openly, so that if Patreon gets a case of stupid and tries to deplatform me, my subscribers can switch to SubscribeStar with no hassle at all. That will also give Patreon a reason not to be stupid…

    Ben, a lot of people forget Clausewitz’ dictum, which is why he had to write it in the first place. Despots are particularly likely to do dumb things in war, because they don’t have to worry about getting support for their projects from a legislature or an electorate. I could see the Saudi leadership convincing themselves that they’re much stronger than they are, and can deal Iran a black eye and force it to back off in the Gulf and Yemen, assuming that if things go wrong the US will have to bail them out. Then things go wrong, Trump blusters but refuses to bail them out, and Saudi Arabia ceases to exist — it’s a story that’s happened many times in history.

  139. Beekeeper in Vermont,

    Nathan Tankus’ thread on Twitter is solid, detailing the technical subtleties and time bombs in intrabank operations. The moral of the story is that firms, being made entirely of human rationality and synthetic self-interest, are essentially unable to sacrifice for the greater good. Or, as Ian Welsh put it long ago, it is always rational to sell out.

  140. @ Beekeeper

    Re: Repo market

    I find Ed Harrison, who blogs at Credit Writedowns, to be very informative on financial issues. In his subscriber newsletter this week, he discussed the repo issue and his take that the problem was caused by a dollar shortage exacerbated by the Fed initially failing to provide the necessary liquidity. He concluded, “The Fed simply needs to boost reserves by running open market operations. And in short order, the problem will go away since they can inject an infinite amount of reserves into the system if they wanted to. But the fact that they need to even do this is a signpost of policy divergence.”

    The way I read his take is that the liquidity crunch in the repo market was just a failure on the part of the Fed to do its job (a Wall Street thing), but the underlying problem (shortage of dollars) was caused, at least in part, by the divergence in interest rate policies between the world’s major central banks. I think the issue may trickle down to the rest of us in the form of lower interest rates on savings if the Fed lowers its policy rate to be more in line with the rest of the world. That’s certainly something Trump has been haranguing the Fed about. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

  141. Happypandatao, I loved your typo. I envisioned a charge of aging liberals, armed with wine bottles, heavy tote bags, and cats, supported by a hybrid tank covered with I’M WITH HER stickers. They have been driven to berserker madness by a loudspeaker blaring “TRUMP 2020…TRUMP 2020…TRUMP 2020…”. General Nuisance takes one look at them and immediately orders a strategic withdrawal. A lady with long gray hair, who’s wearing a broomstick-crinkled skirt and Earth Shoes, approaches him and says, politely enough, “Excuse me, sir, can you direct us towards the fascist Trump supporters?” General Nuisance points towards the Forest of Lost Souls, figuring that’ll keep them busy for quite a while, and off the horde goes.

    On the bright side, after the horde has passed through, there are enough dropped wine bottles for Nuisance and his men to have a delightful afternoon, there are enough dropped cats for all those happy soldiers to take home a new furry friend, and the horde finds the lost souls and organizes them into various committees.

  142. Dear Arkansas, Chatter on leftist websites is that the DNC is planning to bring in guess who as goddess ex machina to save all us squabbling mortals from ignominious defeat. This is supposed to take place at the last minute, maybe even at the convention itself, in order to make that tired spectacle interesting. By this line of reasoning, Biden was brought in to head off Sanders and then implode or graciously give way or something and there would be No One Else but the Evil Queen herself. Democratic operatives have been quoted as saying that they are prepared to lose the presidency in order to crush the reignited progressive movement, which is becoming a major impediment to business as usual. When nobody from nowhere freshman Congresswomen like Katy Perry think it is OK to be mean to important bank presidents, things have clearly Gone Too Far.

  143. I do seriously hope you are wrong about humans always reproducing over carrying capacity. It’s seriously **** on woman and children and everyone involved, humans are complex creatures to raise in my experience they are gifts but more isn’t always better, and its no fun being a complicated intelligent creature treated as a breeding cow. I do hope the next spirituality be female energy based (or have some balance to it) to help protect our daughters from being reduced, long live loving respectful men and the vasectomy.

  144. @ JMG: re – “good times in farm country” prediction from your Aries 2019 ingress chart: I’m not sure that the results were that mixed regarding the ‘difficult weather conditions’. Not from the news, but from a comment from a visitor passing through from Iowa a few months ago (here in New Mexico). He said not all areas were affected and that other areas in the region were expecting a decent harvest. I have no idea what the reality is, but the visitor gave a broader perspective than what I had heard on the news.
    Re: paid subscription to quarterly US and international astrological forecasts – would it be possible to get access to a particular forecast at a single-issue fee? (yes, i realize subscribers get what amounts to a volume discount, but certain forecasts might interest me a lot more than others).

    @ Rita Rippetoe – re: school prayer: My mother, for one, was happy to see the end of prayers in the public schools. She came of age during the Great Depression in a small midwestern town; she grew up Protestent Christian but not in one of the mainstream churches , poor working class (enough to eat because they kept a milk cow, chickens and a garden, but otherwise scraped by with both parents working at what jobs they could get). She remembered school prayer for the self-righteous manner in which the prayers were read, with themes geared toward ‘the Elect’ (she made it sound like an early form of the prosperity gospel of more recent times). I hardly think she was the only (Christian Protestant) person of her generation who applauded the end of prayer in public schools. For myself, I have no memory of prayers being read when i was in school, either that area had no official prayers or the readings were mind-numbingly dull and bland.

  145. Hi John Michael,

    Elementary, my good Sir! 😉 Shale oil is not the oil in town that is becoming unprofitable to extract in these enlightened times.

    Speaking of flows and self organising in the face of such flows. I’ve noticed that there is the slightest and merest whiff of a trend of increasing numbers of oldsters bailing out of rural areas. I can’t suggest in all honesty that most of them ever put their land to productive use. And of course the story has always been the case, but what is interesting to me is that whilst their properties are stupidly over priced, and here is the conundrum for them, they’re have to offload their ‘stuff’ on the cheap. There was a time when this ‘stuff’ some of which is actually really useful, was more highly valued. For those that are able to self organise…

    I’ve been contemplating your claim for a long while that the power balance will shift away from the cities and back to rural areas in the long run.

    Cheers and happy Equinox (for Friday) to you and yours.

    Chris

  146. When Debbie Wasserman-Whatever and Hillary snatched the presidency from Bernie Sanders and handed it to Trump on a silver platter, I dropped out completely. I recently started looking at the news each day and noticed that CNN is in love with Elizabeth Warren but will absolutely never ever ever ever mention Bernie Sanders – do you have any insight into why this is the case? I mean, I get why they hate Bernie, but why the love for Warren? I am only asking because I have a very vague memory of you mentioning Warren months ago but I cannot remember the context and haven’t been able to find it – maybe I had a dream?

  147. JMG, would the creation of Japan be the moment when Izanami gave birth to Honshu, or the moment Ninigi-no-Mikoto, grandson of Amaterasu, descended to plant rice there? Or when his great-grandson, Jinmu, became Emperor?
    Either way, I wouldn’t blame you for not taking on Japan. That’s my husband’s family. I ought to have him work it out.

  148. I forgot to mention that population should be within some reasonable level. But I don’t think it is primarily the number of people that causes poverty. You completely glossed over the idea that megawealth involves some kind of unfair advantage. Just like empires, some people find ways to extract wealth steadily from various endeavors, and if they do that it necessarily means less for the general populace, right? My question is actually more like, if we prevented megawealth, would there then be enough to provide a decent life for almost everyone? I say almost, because some people just don’t have it together no matter what.

    As to Sanders, wouldn’t his policies redistribute his own wealth, too?

  149. Rose, do you really think that it’s only men who choose to reproduce past carrying capacity?

    SLClaire, I use SolarFire Deluxe version 6. I could use something much less loaded with features, but that’s what I have.

    PatriciaT, interesting. The way the subscription services are set up, you basically have to pay for a monthly subscription, and that gets you access to the whole range of forecasts. I’ll be asking for $5 a month, so that should be within most people’s range.

    Chris, fascinating. How many of them do you think were basically suburbanites who wanted more space than usual?

    Jason, Warren won’t change anything; Bernie might at least make the attempt. The entire game plan of the Democrats these days is to maintain the status quo at all costs.

    Patricia O, I have no idea. Fortunately you don’t need a foundation chart to do mundane astrology; ingress charts drawn up for each solstice and equinox do everything that’s required, and all you need for that is the longitude and latitude of the capital city, and an ephemeris. If enough people are interested I could certainly do one for Tokyo.

    Onething, societies vary in how much they concentrate wealth in the hands of the rich, and yet pretty much every society has destitution and misery, so I’m far from sure having huge amounts of wealth in a few hands — absurd as it is — has that much impact. As for Bernie, sure, on paper…

  150. Re # of kids: I have one, but as he is 6’4” and weighs 240 pounds, he may possibly count as 1 1/2.

  151. Dear Lady Cutekitten, that is what I said, rather less politely, when I first heard it. All I can say now is the rumor is making the rounds. There a few indications. Mme. C seems to have been rather active on twitter; some potentially embarrassing court cases have gone nowhere; the carefully staged debates seem to be designed to make all participants look like idiots. I am waiting for the day when all candidates jointly refuse to participate in any more of them.

  152. What’s happened since woman have had a choice, and what happens in cultures where woman choose when to reproduce? There are natural variations some woman want seven some want none but overall it turns out children are a massive task that involves many close calls with death.

  153. Re: odd-looking animals, look up “Amebelodon”. You won’t be disappointed.

    Also wondering what the discovery of Planet Nine will mean astrologically.

  154. @JMG and @Onething – people talk if wealth as something to HAVE, whereas, I see it as more a matter of flows.

    No one HAS wealth, what they HAVE is exclusive control of the gateway to a flow that others need access to and/or they have “rights” (as in privileges”) to the fruits of the efforts of others. In our society this is exercised through endebtedness (net debtors, in essence work for the benefit of net creditors), and through asset ownership – where the asset is either highly “productive” (ie not paid anything close to what they are worth) labour, or property to rent out, whether in slums or in tree-lined avenues. There are other ways, but these are the tried and tested ways that are applied in our society.

    To me, the problem is an ecological one. If you see that flows always follow gravity (which in the case of control and privilege spells wealth) then a society needs a way to reverse the flow at some point so that what is linear can become a cycle. In hydrology, evaporation is an important flow reversal which turns the whole thing into a cycle, in the body it is the heart which returns blood from the feet to the head.

    In the present day, taxes seem to be the only “heart” (as in, flow reversal mechanisms) that are built into our fibabcusl system, but mostly they are commandeered by the already privileged, to whom all things already flow, and seldom reach the poorest, from whom all things flow away.

    I wish people considered these matters more in terms of flow than in terms of “having*.

  155. Dear JMG,
    just the info I got from my “unconventional” sources.
    Trump will be re-elected (really, this info was given to me before he got elected the first time… Yup, the sources said that Trump would have been elected twice). The reason for his victory this time would be on account of the weak Democratic oppositor chosen.
    After the Second mandate by Trump, Democrats will win the next elections. This time, a woman will be elected. So expect a woman as USA President in 2024.
    Expect also Boris Johnson win the next elections in Britain, and also Le Pen win the next elections in France.
    UE breakup is expected after these two outcomes, it seems (dont’ really got a precise timeframe from the sources).

    Maybe would you take notice, and check if the outcomes are right?

    Have a nice day
    Phitio

  156. Re # of kids

    I, too, have one and she likes women. (Although, admittedly, there are ways around that constraint in the reproductive department.)

    Re Warren

    John, I don’t recall you having discussed her too much. I haven’t taken too close a look at her policies, as I was rather turned off by her speaking out against the Electoral College early on. But her plans sound more like limited redistribution layered on top of the present system, rather than fundamental change of the system.

    @ Nastaran

    Re DNC shinnannigans

    I hadn’t heard about that. Interesting notion. That would be a terribly blunt move, if it were an actual plan. I’d have a hard time seeing how that solves there dilemma, though. More like throwing gasoline on the fire. The mere fact that the rumor exists is an indicator of the internal situation of the party.

  157. @ Anthony C Valterra

    “In regards to Horzabky. This strikes me as one of those “definitional” problems. What does he mean by “economic collapse?” Another depression like the 1930s? I think that is well within reason. Mad Max? Not likely. Something in between? Hard to say.”

    Kerosene in short supply will mean the end of civil aviation. Diesel fuel shortages will mean difficulties in resupplying supermarkets, hence food shortages in urban areas. Unreliable electricity supply will mean power cuts, and, if those power cuts last more than two or three days, no tap water (because here in France, and probably in the US as well, water plants only have two days worth of fuel to power their generators), no gas for transportation (gas pumps are electric). Flush toilets are useless without water, which means that people living in apartments will have to use chamber pots again and empty them where they can. Etc.

    Economic collapse is when all this becomes part of daily lilfe, rather than an isolated accident. Eventually, whole urban areas will become unlivable and will be deserted by their residents.

    Mr Greer wrote: “what I was trying to explain to Horzabky earlier — the fact that US shale production is peaking simply means that other countries, which have waited for us to burn through our reserves first, are now gearing up to bring their own online once the price begins to rise.”

    Shale production is an ecological disaster. In my opinion, other countries will begin producing shale oil only when their survival is at stake, and nobody cares about the environment then. Those countries will produce just enough shale oil for their own needs and to pay for absolutely necessary imports, because oil in the ground is better than worthless dollars (or euros) in the bank. It won’t much help the rest of the globe.

    Mr Greer wrote: “gimmicks will be found to arrange for them to be extracted. (The US approach of spinning the presses is just one option.)”

    Sure, but the number of possible approaches is limited. Slave labor comes to mind. That’s the solution Nazi Germany used, when it turned coal into gasoline during WWII. The Fischer–Tropsch process is known since the 1920s, but it pollutes a lot and it is uneconomical. The Nazis solved the problem by using prisoners of war and camp inmates as free manpower and commandeering much of the equipment from occupied countries. I expect to see similar solutions in the future, but under the banner of patriotism or some other ideology, something like people being drafted to work for food and shelter, as they did in China under Mao Zedong’s rule.

  158. Hi John Michael,

    Life can be rather strange. I get clear insights into distant troubles, but then I can also misread some numpty website (I definitely do not mean yours) and end up with the wrong date for the spring Equinox down here which I thought was Friday. Turns out that it was today, which was fortunate because I felt earlier today that I was pushing the 48 hour grace period that we spoke about a couple of years ago. Turns out I had nothing to worry about other my impaired mental capacities… Duh! I can’t say that I’m a fan of this interweb thing, although it provides good conversations and we get to learn many things – like the correct date for the spring equinox! And I appreciate your good grace at not correcting my earlier bits of dumbness and stupidness, and no doubt it all just sounded confused to you. At least I’m providing entertainment which is more than can be said of some folks! I’ve been working too hard of late, still if one wants to produce something, one must first work.

    I’ve entirely lost my train of thought and this comment is turning rapidly into a stream of consciousness comment. Might have to do something about that… Here goes.

    Mate, I’ve looked hard about the place for about the last dozen years, and in all that time I’ve met maybe a couple of handfuls of people who know very much about the land and can practically demonstrate their knowledge. That is hardly surprising given the very low percentage of people involved in agriculture (less than 2% of the population I believe). As you quite correctly posit, the rest are after space buffers. I’m still not sure what to make of that, but I suspect that at some point in their lives, the maintenance of the land becomes too great a burden for them and they move on. The word ‘tie’ comes to mind and I feel quite strongly that there are cultural and spiritual ties to land. I’ve been pondering that story ever since you mentioned the older and now unfortunately lost knowledge regarding ancient temples and other places of worship. It may be that our culture is too mobile to recognise such bonds? But there is certainly something to the story that’s for sure.

    Cheers

    Chris

  159. Nastarana said, ” Democratic operatives have been quoted as saying that they are prepared to lose the presidency in order to crush the reignited progressive movement, which is becoming a major impediment to business as usual.” Do you have citations for these statements? It does seem as though that’s exactly what happened last time.

  160. Jonathan and Ryan:
    Thanks so much for the additional links for financial information! I keep nothing in the market, but the husband likes to watch the numbers on his monthly statement go up and down (mostly up in recent years) although most of the money he keeps there is the result of an unexpected inheritance; in other words, money we could possibly lose without decimating our finances.

    Ryan:
    You said that for the rest of us this could lead to lower interest rates paid on savings accounts. I think I average about two or three cents a month in interest right now; it would be a shame to lose all that extra cash. 😉

  161. Lady Cutekitten:
    Your son sounds like my oldest, who still eats like 1 1/2 people even though he’s years past his last growth spurt. He’s involved in weightlifting too so he looks even bigger.

  162. Nastarana, very interesting, thank you. Gabbard is the only candidate I can relate to on that side, and she has some inner dignity. It’s interesting to watch the highly hierarchical Dem Party struggle with the new populism. That makes sense: keep HRC in seclusion at Versailles, and then sweep in at the last, at maximum peak insanity, when all are desperate. It’s such a traditional playbook move. And it may destroy the party forever. Trump decimated the Republican party, it’s not the same anymore. But the Dems can’t go that route.

  163. JMG:

    $5/mo for quarterly astrological readings? I could just subscribe the months you give the readings? Or would I be missing a smorgasbord of benefits?

  164. RE: having kids….

    I’ve always thought there needed to be some justification (at least in a country like ours) for limiting childbearing. You can be in a position where they would never let you foster or adopt but you can have your own kids? I know couples with way too many kids for their economic situation and next to no chance that their economic situation would ever improve to the point that they should think of having more kids–but they balk at the idea of a vasectomy or tubal ligation because “that’s so final”. Overshoot indeed.

    RE: Biden…

    RealClearPolitics has Biden out front but notes that the bidding market has Warren out front. For Dems, Warren is a much better choice than Biden, but I agree with Nastarana that Biden is not going to be the candidate, he is a useful tool at the moment, unless Dem leadership is completely blinkered and clueless. A Hillary rematch is nonsensical at this point, except that all the Dem field has gone progressive, and only Hillary or Biden command the authority to impose the status quo on Dems again, in this environment. So for the powers that be, it does seems that Biden or Hillary>Trump>the rest of the Dem field.

  165. People on the DNC whispering about running the Hildabeast again??? Are they high? I mean, they gotta be on drugs, no?

    Great theatre, of course. Stock up on beer and popcorn.

    Antoinetta III

  166. “Fibabcus!” would be another good word to substitute for unDruidly Anglo-Saxon words. “Fibabcus!”, if pronounced forcefully, would be an ideal Druid-safe way to tell about what you said when you dropped that can of soup on your foot.

    (Not that I myself ever use unDruidly words. Just trying to help less restrained soup-can-droppers.

  167. Dear Phutatorius. here is one link to a site which some consider “fake news”. Draw your own conclusions. ( I will say that I do rather resent the implication one finds in many discussions that the rest of us have no faculty of critical intelligence and must be told what to read and what to avoid.)

    https://www.opednews.com/articles/Is-the-Democratic-Establis-by-Henry-Samson-Attacks-On-Bernie-Sanders_Bernie-Sanders-Presidential-Campaign_Berniei-Sanders-Progressives-Largest-Facebook-Grou_California-Democratic-Party-190827-103.html

    I found the entire story of interest.

    Dear Arkansas, many of the younger members of some of the groups in the new populism are no longer willing to be bought off with swag and perks–you get to be “director” of this shiny new “foundation” one of our donors is funding, etc. After the 2016 loss, many who were counting on directorships, ambassadorships, govt. jobs, and so on, not only lost out but were confronted by angry constituents–How could you let this happen?

  168. @ Beekeeper

    Oh I know, but as the European Central Bank tries to push rates further into negative territory, more banks in Europe are passing the negative rates to their customers. If that happens here, we may soon be paying two or three cents in interest each month to our banks to hold our deposits. You may want to save all that extra cash in case the bank wants it back. 😉

  169. John–

    An astrological question for you, though I don’t know if it is something that you can answer yet.

    One event that I would anticipate occurring as the US empire winds down and the center of global power shifts elsewhere–particularly if this country embarks on a more nationalistic, versus globalist, path–is that the UN headquarters would move out of the US. What signs would you look for, either astrologically in the stars or among the more everyday clues here on earth, that such a shift is forthcoming? My guess is that we are a little ways from this yet, though a provocative second Trump administration might give folks reason to begin considering it…

  170. I would sign up to the monthly thing. You would need to leave details here at Ecosophia.
    I understand most of the concepts now, I just struggle terribly with the (what appears to me) sophisticated jargon. Like going into a hardware store and everyone talking about gauges of nails etc
    A layman’s glossary would be most useful!

  171. JMG,

    So you don’t think Warren is serious about single payer? If someone would do something to break the medical monopoly, that would be a huge change. But if they mess it up by not setting it up so that prices are competitive and transparent, then it won’t make much difference.

  172. Scotlyn,

    I liked your flow idea; it’s a very good description.

    JMG,

    I dunno, maybe wealth isn’t the only reason for poverty but I am thinking of a factory owner who pays low wages and is very wealthy. What if that factory were employee owned and there wasn’t someone at the top taking millions out every year.

  173. Hello

    Long time reader first time poster . I have few questions for you firstly do you know any very good astrologer to recommend? All i get through my searches is commercial bots/spam sites. Also can you give particular titles that can be used by a beginner for astrology ?

  174. Many of my friends are quite concerned that the curent cold culture war will turn into a hot civil war. Such a breakdown ought to be predictable by astrology, right?

    Would you consider a small P.O. Box for old fashioned money orders and/or checks for subscribers? I cannot make heads nor tails of what USPS says about prices: https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/notice123.htm#_c202 so I figured I’d best ask you if it would be reasonable or not.

  175. Scotlyn,

    re: the hydrological cycle, this is a BEAUTIFUL analogy, thank you! I’m so glad someone else is looking at the ecological aspects of economy itself, rather than just the ecological consequences of prevailing economic activity, or worse, insisting on the neoliberal ecology that there is no forest, only trees trying to maximize their individual store of bird droppings and exchange wood for the best price they can get.

    On the other hand, JMG notes that the wealth at the top and the condition of the commoners don’t have a very strong relationship over history. Indeed, Joseph Tainter’s conception of negative marginal returns on increasing complexity as a causal factor in societal collapse indicts the growing burden of those who do not provide material and other necessities of society (takers, like Mitt Rmoney, the gazillion standards and their respective compliance and certification specialists, and 99.9% of the political class) on those who do (makers, like the truck farmer or the craftsperson).

  176. Rose, you’re confusing correlation with causation. Significant drops in birth rates happen in every civilization that reaches the point we’re at nowadays, irrespective of the legal status of women; it happened in the Roman world, for example, where women had no more legal rights than domestic animals. This is one of the reasons I encourage readers to get a good cross-cultural sense of history — it helps avoid mistaken assumptions based purely on the present and recent past.

    SpiceisNice, there are quite a few newly discovered planets and dwarf planets that astrologers are studying these days. That’s been business as usual among astrologers for more than three and a half centuries, since Uranus got noticed! It’ll take decades of hard work to get a sense of the newcomers’ influence and effects.

    Scotlyn, I ain’t arguing. That’s why I keep on encouraging people to get past this notion of being able to store wealth.

    Phitio, duly noted! Now we both get to watch and see.

    David, no, I haven’t discussed her much. My take is that she’s basically doing the Obama schtick, that is to say, promising hope and change but gearing up to deliver four more years of business as usual.

    Chris, yes, I thought that was what was going on. I don’t expect that to change much until the Long Descent gets far enough along that access to fertile land is the most effective way to stay fed. The old proverb that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach has relevance here too…

    David BTL, well, they have to find someone to blame when the fantasy falls apart!

    DT, yes, you could do that, but I’m hoping a fair number of my readers are willing to tip me a fiver each month to help support my blogging habit, and treat the forecasts as a pleasant side benefit. I plan on posting something monthly at least at first, and more than that when there’s a lot going on — for example, right after the Capricorn ingress there’s a solar eclipse and then a lunar eclipse, and eclipse charts are classic tools of mundane astrology. I’ll look forward to the next visible comet, too!

    Scotlyn, I rather like “fibabcus”. It belongs on the same list of useful terms with “fooftawoo”!

    David BTL, hmm! I’ll have to do some research into that.

    Samuelharvest, so noted! I’ll certainly announce things here — in fact, stand by for an initial announcement — and a good astrological glossary would be useful for a writing project I’m about to start work on, so thanks for the suggestion.

    Onething, even if she wants to go with single payer, I don’t think she has a chance of getting it through Congress in the teeth of the medical industry. As for wealth and poverty, sure, but people get greedy and sooner or later somebody figures out how to game the system.

    Emily, if you’re in the US, I recommend contacting the American Federation of Astrologers to find a good astrologer — they require members to pass exams to show their astrological chops. As for books, I’m not sure what’s available these days — it’s been quite a few years since I was reading intro books on the subject! Anyone else have a suggestion?

    BoysMom, a civil war would definitely appear in advance in astrology, and I haven’t seen the signs yet. As for a PO box, I have one — drop me a comment marked NOT FOR POSTING with your email address and I’ll send you the address.

    Andy, thank you for taking it seriously.

  177. General announcement time! I’ll be letting people know on tomorrow’s open post, too, but for those of you who are still reading this late in the comment cycle and might be interested, I’ve got Patreon and SubscribeStar accounts set up at this point to handle regular political and economic astrology posts. You can find my Patreon page here —

    https://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgreer

    — and my SubscribeStar page here:

    https://www.subscribestar.com/john-michael-greer

    The two pages access the same material, so you don’t have to sign up for both! There are two posts up so far — an introduction to mundane astrology and an expanded version of the Libra 2019 ingress for the United States. Subscriptions are $5 a month — I may add further tiers if and when I get other offers lined up, but we’ll see. If you’re interested — why, thank you for your interest!

  178. I can easily send you $5/month for such service without messing with Patreon or SubscribeStar, if I understand you. No problem! Will set it up along with my E.O.M. list of checks to write. Pat

  179. Onething,

    re: trusting Warren to implement single payer, I absolutely do not. It would destroy her daughter’s business of providing business consultants to pharma companies. I think her conversation with Larry Summers is her entire theory of change: be a “team player” and we’ll let you be seen throwing a few loaves to the people.

    JMG,

    In case you catch the time to answer, would that above link of Warren’s family to pharma, and/or her daughter’s NGO sinecure and corruption of the Working Families “Party” (medium-quality source) who have been desperately trying and failing to hide the fact that their entire leadership sold out the membership for $45000, be found in that 8th house Neptume trine 11th Moon?

  180. JMG, not really for posting, but I want to know if it’s OK to consolidate my monthly contribution to you so I only make one payment. I’ll up the payment by $5 for the astrological forecasts, but can I just make the entire payment through Patreon and cancel the recurring Paypal subscription? If there is a reason not to do it, such as costs on your side, please let me know. Thank you, I really enjoy your work.

  181. Patricia M, I’ll have to work out a convenient way to get you access, but let me see what I can do.

    Jonathan, no, it looks to me like something much bigger than that. $45K is chump change.

    Ryan, that would be fine! Thanks for asking.

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