Tag Archive for: cengage IT layoffs cognizant

Astro-logical Forecast for Tuesday 11/10/2015: Art & Commerce

The Scorpio Moon drives  the day with a need for substance, deeply experienced and perhaps a tad controlling or controlled. Add in an investigative flair suggested by an easy connection between Mercury and Pluto, exact at 7:12 AM ET (but in effect over the past few days). Let the dirt be dug! Then add an expansive optimism for all of the details, as the Sun and Jupiter make yet another easy connection, exact at 9:17PM ET. How big can it get?

Around midday could be dreamy, as the Moon and Neptune are in harmony at 1:07PM ET. Wine with your lunch? As I peruse the dirt and mud(slinging) making today’s headlines, an escape sounds mighty appealing.

And now, the news.

With Venus at the Aries Point over the weekend (and now in Libra, sign of balance and harmony), we could expect matters involving social expression, women, aesthetics and money to pull focus. How interesting to see this op-ed in today’s NYT: “Being Dishonest About Ugliness”, encouraging people who tell children that looks don’t matter to get real. And here we see more on the theme of Real vs. Unreal suggested by the first of three exact squares between Saturn and Neptune. Remember how we were talking about that all last week?

Last night, a Modigliani nude gained prominence when it fetched a ginormous sum — over  $170 million–  at Christie’s.  It is the second-highest price (big!) ever paid for an artwork at an auction. The Modigliani is prominent for other aesthetic reasons:

Monday’s sale assuaged concerns that the Modigliani painting would be too risqué for some collectors.

“This painting leaps off the page as the most vibrant, sexual, lyrical of the catalogue raisonné,” said Ana Maria Celis, a Christie’s specialist in postwar and contemporary art.

Meanwhile in Canon City, Colorado, some high school students are terrified that they could face child pornography charges because they exchanged and collected nude photographs of themselves, using their cellphones.  In response, high school officials have mandated that all students must complete classes in figure drawing, art history and biology in order to graduate, as well as attend discussion forums on human sexuality and social mores through the ages.

OK, I made that up. In actual response:

Police are now poring through hundreds of sexted pics and Fremont County District Attorney Tom LeDoux has acknowledged the possibility that “students will have to register as sex offenders” in some cases.

Real. Unreal.

Back in June, Disney (a media company) made headlines when word got out that it fired a number of longterm IT staffers, replacing them with cheaper workers imported to the US on H-1B visas. The IT staffers would only receive severance packages if they were willing to train their replacements. Yesterday it was reported that a company called Cengage (they’re in the education business) executed a similar strategy in mid-October (its second one this year), telling laid-off workers that they would also lose their severance if they spoke to the press.

The press found out anyway, and today the NYT exposes more dirt how big outsourcing companies are scoring so many H-1B visas (hint: follow the money), and who is being hurt by this seemingly rigged system. Elsewhere, yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a number of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration, suggesting that the matters in question will be argued before the Supreme Court.  Why am I calling out these stories? Review prior thoughts on what we’re likely to see with Saturn in Sagittarius for the next couple of years.

It wouldn’t have been an all-day long Moon void yesterday without some mountain being made out of a molehill. How fascinating that the one that hit social media involved aesthetics (Venus at the Aries Point) and other themes suggested by the surreal potential of Saturn in Sagittarius square Neptune in Pisces. Have you seen the 2015 Starbucks holiday cup? It’s very red and very minimalist, prompting some to howl that the design is a “war on Christmas.” Former radio and TV evangelist Joshua Feuerstein told his 1.8 million Twitter followers:

“Starbucks removed Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus.”

No comment from Mr. Feuerstein on a study that was released over the weekend, concluding that children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households.

Matters of belief —  from the sublime to the ridiculous — are likely to continue to be hot topics in the foreseeable future, suggested by planetary patterns. In your own personal world, may you only experience that which is sublime. To find out how these patterns are likely to be reflected in your life, here’s the 411 on personal consultations. FYI, astrology is not a belief system. As a wise astrologer once said, however, it is a very good thing to know about.

Thank you for reading this forecast.

snowman