Friday 2/3/2017 & the Weekend: Venus Pulls Focus; Jupiter Turns Retrograde: Mars News Update
TGIF!
A comfort-seeking Taurus Moon drives today and SATURDAY — make your weekend plans accordingly. There’s a dreamy alignment between the Moon and Neptune today at 3:10 PM ET that you can use for inspiration. Later in the evening — at 11:19 PM ET — we will have the First Quarter Moon, perhaps lobbing a stubborn “let’s not change anything” challenge to the New Moon agenda you’ve been pushing.
Meanwhile, just to spark things up, Venus enter Aries at 10:52 AM ET. Venus refers to women, money, aesthetics and social expression. In Aries, it’s a bit of a flirt, frankly. It needs to know that it is loved by everyone. So it may well spice up your social interactions for the rest of the month, inspiring you to connect with new people. Just be advised that impulsive passions are likely to be up for a review when Venus turns retrograde on March 4th. Have fun in the meantime.
Moon will be void on Saturday between 5:42 PM and 11:44 PM ET, meaning that SUNDAY is brought to you by the Moon in information junkie Gemini, seeking to be the smartest kid in the room. If you’re up for a chat, a Gemini Moon is happy to oblige it, as well as your need for entertainment and multitasking.
If you’ve got a planet or angle around 23 degrees — two thirds of the way — through Aries, Capricorn, Cancer and especially Libra, you may be in an expansive phase in one or more areas of your life. Jupiter, the cosmic sugardaddy, has been hanging out at 23 Libra for a few weeks, getting ready to turn retrograde MONDAY at 1:52 AM ET. Jupiter retrograde suggests that whatever was expanding may now be subject to a review and/or delay. With Jupiter in Libra, the sign of justice, fairness, equality and balance, I expect we’ll see many delays in the headlines played out in court. Jupiter turns direct on June 9th. It returns to 23 Libra in early September, which I expect will be an extremely significant period of time.
Perhaps you’d like to know what the placement of Jupiter in your horoscope suggests for you. Jupiter transits often coincide with opportunities for honors and promotion — and I have plenty of cases in my files of clients whom I encouraged to make a pitch for expansion during a Jupiter transit — which resulted in success. Astrology is a very good thing to know about. What’s going on in your horoscope?Here’s the 411 on consultations.
And now, the news.
The action continues at a dizzying pace on all sides, reflecting the potential of Mars (action! warriors! guns! sports! cars!) charging through impatient, impulsive, go-go-go Aries. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), himself an impatient Aries, withdrew a bill proposing to sell off an area of public land equal to the size of Connecticut. What swayed him? In this planetary climate, it wasn’t the picnickers and tree huggers. Nope. Score this victory courtesy of the hunters and anglers who were outraged — and as a “proud gun owner,” what else could Rep. Chaffetz do?
Cars! Over 200,000 people have deleted their Uber accounts in the wake of the “perception that it was undermining a [JFK] taxi strike” in protest of P45’s thinly disguised Muslim ban. That’s amazing — and I say this based on personal experience. It is not easy to delete an Uber account; one must be resourceful and very persistent. The consumer backlash may have prompted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign from P45’s economic advisory council. Cars!
The new U.S. border controls were not kind to the former prime minister of Norway, who found himself detained at Dulles airport because of a 2014 trip to Iran, where he had given a speech at a human rights conference. So where was Kjell Magne Bondevik heading on this week’s U.S. trip? Spit take alert: he was going to the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where he would be hearing P45 use the solemn and reflective occasion to make a nasty jab about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings as the new host of a TV show which shall remain nameless. Gov. Schwarzenegger was quick to respond, as Stephen Colbert reports. (I mean it. Put the coffee mug down now).
Iran has since banned U.S. wrestlers from participating in the Freestyle Wrestling Cup.…and just now, more sanctions have been announced against Iran.
In other Mars-related stories, at the National Prayer Breakfast, P45 also vowed to “totally destroy” (because simply repealing it would not convey the destructive drive of Mars) the Johnson (Mars!) Amendment, which narrows the scope of how churches (i.e. tax-exempt organizations) may participate (i.e. fund) political campaigns.
Also spit-take worthy: P45’s remarks about African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass, as reported here by Seth Meyers. We do not have a confirmed birth date for Mr. Douglass, so we can’t look at his horoscope to see which planets are being activated by this sudden push into the spotlight. We can state with certainty that he died in 1895 — a fact that P45 and press secretary Sean Spicer may not have known. This means that Mr. Douglass could not have opened this Twitter account, even though many may find his alleged tweets amusing.
I was compelled to refresh my memory of what I learned about Mr. Douglass years ago — the first link in the above paragraph is to his Wikipedia biography. So many striking things — but these passages really jumped out at me:
When Douglass was about twelve, (slave owner) Hugh Auld’s wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet. Douglass described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman, who treated him “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another”.[19] Hugh Auld disapproved of the tuition, feeling that literacy would encourage slaves to desire freedom; Douglass later referred to this as the “first decidedly antislavery lecture” he had ever heard.[20] Under her husband’s influence, Sophia came to believe that education and slavery were incompatible and one day snatched a newspaper away from Douglass….
…When Douglass was hired out to William Freeland, he taught other slaves on the plantation to read the New Testament at a weekly Sunday school. As word spread, the interest among slaves in learning to read was so great that in any week, more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. For about six months, their study went relatively unnoticed. While Freeland remained complacent about their activities, other plantation owners became incensed about their slaves being educated. One Sunday they burst in on the gathering, armed with clubs and stones, to disperse the congregation permanently.
…which segues into another current newsmaker, Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World — a futuristic novel often compared to 1984. Brave New World was written in 1931, around the time of the last series of disruptive Uranus-Pluto squares. Mr. Huxley’s horoscope, like Mr. Orwell’s — is hot now, reflecting his renewed prominence. Transiting Uranus square his natal Mercury is one immediate suggestion that how Mr. Huxley needed to think is likely to be up for a fresh start. Mr. Huxley is a Leo with Moon in Taurus. From his biography on Wikipedia, we see the Taurus need for comfort and security (italics are mine):
The events of the Depression in Britain in 1931, with its mass unemployment and the abandonment of the gold currency standard, persuaded Huxley to assert that stability was the “primal and ultimate need” if civilisation was to survive the present crisis.
What does this have to do with Frederick Douglass and his crusade to educate slaves? From Wikipedia:
Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
Food for thought as we contemplate how and why the world has become what it is, in the wake of another revolutionary Uranus-Pluto square.
This just in: 1984 is coming to Broadway this summer. Told ya Orwell’s horoscope was hot.
UPDATE: the massive earthquake that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant happened in March of 2011, when Uranus (earthquakes, uranium) hit 0 degrees of Aries, suggesting prominent action in Uranian-related concerns. Mars was at 0 Aries on Saturday’; Venus is there as I type — both triggering the chart for the earthquake in 2011. Japan Times reports today that radiation at the No. 1 reactor is at its highest level since 2011.
This just in: Venus is now at the Aries Point — suggesting prominence in matters of women, art, money, social expression. There was a shooting at the Louvre. Two male CEOs — of Wal-Mart and EY — have been selected to advise P45 on…wait for it…women in the workplace. And there’s a new White House dress code: “women must dress like women.” I don’t even know what that means.
UPDATE: last Friday I noted that Mars would be meeting up with Scheat, a Fixed Star associated with unfortunate events and shipwrecks. This suggested the potential for Mars-themed actions to backfire, as reflected in this headline: “Trump-ordered Raid that Killed U.S. Navy SEAL Was Approved ‘Without Sufficient Intelligence'” The raid was on Sunday, on the Mars-Scheat meet-up. An 8-year-old American girl was killed, along with other civilian casualties. A $75 million military helicopter was (ship)wrecked. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Finally, in case you haven’t heard, there was never a massacre in Bowling Green, as everyone on Twitter is tweeting this morning. Was Kellyanne Conway confusing Bowling Green with Kent State? Two colleges — both in Ohio — I can see how that might happen. If you are too young to remember the 60s, four unarmed students who were protesting the Vietnam War were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970. This event has been called the Kent State Massacre — and Crosby Stills Nash & Young wrote a song about it. Cue “Ohio” now, please.
Isn’t there a game on this weekend? This year, I’m rooting for the commercials.
With Jupiter stationary retrograde, justice has been delayed. Will get to Neil Gorsuch next week — I hope.
Thank you for reading this forecast. Have a wonderful weekend!