Astro Blog

Two Scientists and Astrology

It is well known that up until the Renaissance and even beyond, the study of science and astrology went hand in hand. This was natural, because all people had to do was look into the night sky, then unobscured by night lights, and observe the magnificent display, and there seemed every reason to think that the heavens above and life below were interconnected. The correlation between planetary movement and human behavior was taken for granted. Read More

Make America American again

America has lost respect and standing over the last four years, and this is why President Donald Trump must lose the next election. He will fight to the bitter end, the streets of America will be battle scenes, he will not go gracefully, but in 2021 a new era begins, and the ocean will cover the wreckage of the Trump presidency. The Trump name will be removed from hotels, golf courses and all the tinsel products of his empire, as no one will want to be associated with his ignominy. As transit Neptune moves to square his Sun and eclipsed Moon, there will be nothing solid for him to cling to.

People need to just make America America again – the welcoming and generous country it has historically been. Read More

Zuckerberg and Facebook

In 1948 George Orwell wrote the novel 1984. It is said he reversed the last two digits of the book launch year to arrive at this mythical year when Big Brother was omnipresent through screens both visible and hidden. On May 4th 1984 Mark Zuckerberg was born. In our new digital age, where everyone actually carries around their personal screen, we inhabit the online world created by Zuckerberg: Facebook. Over one billion people, a quarter of the world’s population here in 2020 use Facebook. Through his initiative Internet.org Mark Zuckerberg plans to make the internet available to everyone in the world, then everyone will be on Facebook, so perhaps it is worth getting to know who this man is and what Facebook is capable of. Read More

Pandemonium

Everyone, in the astrological world at least, has known that 2020 was going to be a special year – even if they did not know precisely why. The reason for this was the rare conjunction of Saturn with Pluto in Capricorn (it’s an approximately 36-40 year cycle) which is turbocharged by Jupiter, and – at the time of writing here in March 2020 – Mars. (Note 1.) You have to go back over 400 years for a previous triple conjunction as strong as this. Now perhaps, we do know what is special about 2020. Read More

Brexit Postmortem

Everyone got tired in the end. On my many visits to the UK over the last three years, there was one constant topic on every news channel every day – Brexit. People dreamed of a second referendum, people feared a renewal of troubles in Ireland, where a hard border was not acceptable, people railed at the lies and misinformation that resulted in a Yes vote to Brexit. But with the slogan “Get Brexit Done”, the Conservative Party tapped into public exhaustion and won a resounding victory. Labour, with the unappetizing Jeremy Corbyn as leader, experienced its worst defeat since 1935. Boris Johnson won an absolute majority – and Brexit will be done. Fact. Read More

The 46th President of the United States

In this current period, when the USA is being run by a “stable genius”, in the President’s own repeated description of himself, Democratic hopes are being pinned on any candidate that can liberate the United States from the terrifying grip of a man who got elected in 2016 with the votes from the half of the electorate who clearly liked watching The Apprentice, where Trump was the big boss. Trump struck a chord with them with his promise to build a wall, put barriers up to immigration, protect the coal industry, repeal Obamacare (well, repeal Obama, really) and clean up the Washington swamp. Read More

Walls and Their Destruction

Trends in Germany and worldwide

It was 30 years ago that a thousand hammers chipped away at the most depressing construction of the 20th century – the Berlin Wall. How Berlin has suffered! After the First World War, the depleted (male) population of Germany struggled through inflation, strife between the communists who wanted to replicate the “success” of Soviet Russia and fascists inspired by the clear-cut and brutal ideas of Hitler. And finally the defeat of Nazi Germany with the occupation of East Germany by Russian troops, eager to exact revenge for the depravities they had suffered at the hands of the German invaders. Read More

The Truth is not the Truth

Four days after the election of Donald Trump, sales of 1984, the dystopian novel written by George Orwell, rocketed (Note 1), and it became a No. 1 bestseller. Clearly people were unsettled by the election of an obvious demagogue, and the puzzling resonance he found in democratic America. What may also have prompted this interest was the immediate manipulation of facts, which took place. For example, there was the extraordinary claim, made by his press secretary, Sean Spicer, that Trump’s Inauguration crowd was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe”. Photographs showed that this was demonstrably false – the audience was relatively small – but the lie was compounded by a subsequent interview with Trump’s advisor, Kellyanne Conway, when she asserted that this description was true, it was simply “alternative facts.” (Note 2). Read More

The Nodes and Human Destiny

Eclipses must be getting even darker these days. The South Node of the moon has just conjoined Pluto on April 5th, 2019 and, moving backwards in its retrograde cycle, goes on to conjoin Saturn on May 2nd. Could this be why astronomers, using an array of telescopes from all points of the globe, were able to finally photograph a black hole? Read More

Post-Depression Worlds

Looking back at events in the 1930’s, you wonder how the world slid into war and why countries could not see the writing on the wall. But living in those times, nothing seemed clear and most experts got it wrong. The British and French governments, under Chamberlain and Daladier, were convinced that appeasement in relation to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler was the wiser course, and only lone voices like Winston Churchill’s stood out for a more muscular stance. Astrologers in Britain predicted that war would not come, whilst one astronomer said that with the unusual alignment of planets in the early 1940’s, if astrology was supposed to work, war should be a possibility. Read More