TGIF!

The Moon is in Sagittarius, driving the weekend with a need to expand your horizons and express your righteous opinion, boundary-pushing as it may be. It’s OK to feel as if you’re a little bit outside your comfort zone as you broaden your mind.  Moon enters Capricorn at 10:02 PM ET on SUNDAY, inviting you to take care of business — on Labor Day, no less. Meh!

Five minutes after midnight on MONDAY, Venus exits Leo for Virgo, where she will stay until September 29th. Venus refers to who, what, and how we need to love. Virgo can be in a constant quest for perfection. It’s the “quest” part that led to the conventional astrological wisdom that cosmetic surgery is ill-advised when Venus is in Virgo. How can it ever be satisfied, when it’s so keenly aware of every little “fault?” You can use the discerning needs of any planet in Virgo for organizing, analyzing and sorting. If that planet is Venus, focus on your values, your money, your aesthetics and your social expression.

No sleeping in on TUESDAY. The Capricorn Moon will not be void.

And now, the news.

This week’s headlines sure as heck are in sync with astrology, as you may recall from Monday’s forecast:

• Mars in Gemini sextiles Jupiter in Aries on Thursday morning
• Mercury opposes Jupiter on Friday night

Both of these patterns suggest BIG, as in BIG action/assertion re: Mars...and BIG ideas/communication re: Mercury, especially in sports, courts, travel and publishing:

• Billions and billions of investment in clean energy and new manufacturing initiatives here in the United States, as Heather Cox Richardson reports.
• $1 billion in federal economic grants headed coast-to-coast
• The BIG economic news should have been Tuesday’s top story, but it was overshadowed by the release of the DOJ’s timeline of its efforts to recover classified documents unlawfully taken by TFG and squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago. The DOJ’s filing was accompanied by a photo of some of the classified documents found (in his office, where he frequently entertained guests, according to a statement made on live television by one of his lawyers). I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a security clearance and thus had never seen a classified document. Thus I found the photo helpful, as I could now accurately visualize what was being talked about. Here is a link to a gifted article from the Washington Post, in which they explain everything we can see in the photo.
• Today, DOJ released an inventory of all that was recovered, and this detailed list notes that classified documents were commingled with articles of clothing, news clippings going back over a decade and nearly 50 EMPTY folders marked “CLASSIFIED“…all of which drives home — just as the image in Beth Owlsdaughter’s Tarot Card of the Week drives home — the irrefutable, undeniable evidence that TFG is and always has been a threat to our national security and our American democracy. AND — and this is key, because this forecast is about astrology — the threat TFG poses to our democracy aptly reflects patterns in the horoscope of the United States (e.g., U.S. Pluto return), and the authoritarianism vs. democracy battle suggested by recent major planetary cycles, including the Uranus-Pluto square of 2011-2016, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 2020, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 2021, the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction of 2022, and the current Saturn-Uranus square of 2021, the latter of which is back for a final round through this fall.
• Elsewhere in “overkill,” Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the 77-year-old former leader of Myanmar, was sentenced to another three years of prison, but this time with hard labor. Her party “crushed” the military-backed opposition party in what international observers deemed a free and fair 2020 election, and the losing party retaliated by staging a coup.  ICYMI, a fitness instructor unintentionally captured part of that coup on camera.
• Also in “overkill,” an Ohio man stung 20,000 times by bees is expected to recover.

Meanwhile…

• Twitter is finally adding an edit button — so typos in tweets can be corrected!
• The battle of the epic TV series is on: Rings of Power vs. House of Dragon — which one are you w
  
• The U.S. Department of Transportation announces its Airline Customer Service Dashboard, with actual improved customer service. For example, 8 out of 9 airlines now waive rebooking fees and provide vouchers for meals and hotel stays if a flight is delayed or canceled because of mechanical or staffing snafus.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs will now provide pregnant veterans with expanded reproductive health care services in cases of rape, incest or when the health of the pregnant veteran is threatened.
• Big news in sports: Serena Williams’ upset win at the U.S. Open — and she’s still going strong!
• Mary Peltola defeats Sarah Palin in a special election to become first Native Alaskan elected to Congress  and more. Peltola is another apt example of the tension reflected by the Saturn (old guard) – Uranus (avant garde) square. In Peltola’s case, she’s a staunch Democrat with a reputation for kindness,  and she maintains friendly ties with those who may not share her political party affiliation. If you’ve never heard of ranked-choice voting, which was approved by Alaska’s voters in an initiative in 2020, Alaska’s state website explains it all for you.
• Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the former Soviet Union, has died.
• Jackson, Mississippi — the state capital — has no running water after recent heavy rain and flooding.  The state has no money to pay for the infrastructure repair.  Governor Tate Reeves (R-MS) has asked the federal government for financial assistance, which President Biden immediately approved.  Mississippi has two senators and four congressmen in Washington. Of those six, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) voted in favor of the landmark Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; the other elected representatives — all Republicans — voted against it.  
• “Ravil Maganov: Russian oil chief dies in (alleged) ‘fall’ from hospital window.” The oil chief had been critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Finally…

President Biden gave a widely-publicized speech in Philadelphia last night. It was so widely publicized, I thought I might watch it live on the TeeVee. Imagine my surprise when none of the Big Four U.S. networks carried it, apparently because it was deemed a political speech, as opposed to an announcement on U.S. government policy. In the speech (with a blood-red backdrop that looked like something you’d see on a night with Moon in Scorpio), President Biden addressed the elephant in the room, calling out MAGA extremists and their leader, Donald Trump, as a peril to our democracy for their willingness to “fan the flames” of political violence for the sake of power at any cost.

Astro-logically, this “newly aggressive line of attack Biden has unleashed” (reports the Guardian) makes perfect sense. Avid Readers will recall that Biden’s Scorpio Sun was recently activated by transiting Mars in that aftermath of two lunar eclipses, and we expected a genie to jump out of a bottle or a curtain to fall. This is what is happening now, right? As another op-ed opines, Biden’s “rose-colored glasses are off” (an astrologer might argue that transiting Neptune is no longer opposing his Midheaven, as it was from 2019-2021). Or, as Bard College professor Joseph O’Neill tweeted, “Perhaps the most powerful element of Biden’s speech is the unspoken message to the Republican Party that the era of Democratic cowering is over. That is a very important step in the termination of an abusive relationship.” Can’t stop thinking of that Tarot Card of the Week image. Stick a fork in it, already.

The former guy’s horoscope was triggered by transiting Mars (as you may recall), and his surge of assertive energy included a vow to pardon anyone who participated in the January 6th attempted coup, should he prevail in 2024. Not only that, but in the Sibley horoscope for the United States, note that the U.S. Moon at 27 Aquarius was also activated by recent eclipses and transiting Mars. Thus, we expect a surge of bottlenecked energy affecting the entire country.  Astrology supports America now finding itself at a crossroads, with a critical midterm election on the horizon, and a choice to be made (though astro-logically, we have a few years to go before we can see how it will all work out). Democracy or authoritarianism. What will it be? (And yes, perhaps in a few years, a third option will have emerged).

This isn’t a new dilemma.  In November 2015, I posted a lengthy bit on potential fascism in the United States, suggested by planetary patterns.  Here is one from 2011, noting that events that happened in the 30s are up for a potential revisit. Astrology is amazing.

I’m thinking I’ll take Monday — Labor Day — off. Look for the next Sneak Peek at the Week on Tuesday. I will create a video Whether Forecast on Sunday — sign up here to have it delivered to you via email. And Whitney and I will soon be back at our mics, recording Episode 15 of “Off the Charts: A Stellar Newscast.” That will drop next Friday.

To schedule a personal consultation, here’s the 411.

Thank you for reading this Forecast — and sharing it with your friends.

This wall relief of Aphrodite (Venus) and Hephaestus (Vulcan) is hopefully still intact in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Vulcan is the blacksmith of the gods, and Ancient Greeks thought he was the true ruler of Virgo — not Hermes/Mercury.

I thought it was an apt image for the ingress of Venus into Virgo on Monday.