End of the Line
So it looks like the Pentagon intended to target that hospital in Afghanistan, after all. (You remember Afghanistan — that war that’s over?)(1)
After changing their story a few times, the top brass admitted that the bombing by US special ops(2) that wiped out a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in October was not an accident. Apparently the U.S. advisers(3) had heard a rumor that a terrorist was inside.
Thirty civilians were killed, at last count, including three children. The strike came in multiple waves, burning patients 
alive in their beds.
I guess the ops are special in the sense of not being beholden to the taboo against war crimes.
Cycle bites the dust
We are now in the last-quarter phase of the Saturn-Pluto cycle, which has to do with overt (Saturn) and covert (Pluto) networks of power.
The obsolescence of the prevailing military (Pluto) /corporate (Saturn) mindset has been on display over the past several decades(4), and now the old cycle is staggering to a close. Until the new one begins, in 2020, appalling incidents like this are likely to be frequent. The world is in economic-socio-political meltdown.
This is the way of dying cycles. In the absence of consciousness, a pattern in its last throes gets dragged down by the weight of its own corruptions, and slogs heavily towards the end of the line.
The old kings-of-the-world approach does not and cannot serve the current era. If pursued nonetheless, it does nothing but harm.
Great Awakener
The Uranus-Pluto square, now waning, has stepped up the deterioration process. It combined Pluto’s fatal extremism with Uranus’ speedy intensity. Since its onset in 2008, global problems have morphed into catastrophes.
In the USA, whose chart the square has hit particularly hard, the populace is rattled and demoralized. Uranus in Aries (mobilization) has awakened those of us in denial, and radicalized those of us in ambivalence. The American public, always the last to get the memo, now knows things it can’t un-know.
Washington’s inability to do its job of day-to-day governing is the stuff of dark humor. Foreign relations have been reduced to attempts to make other countries amenable to big business: to supply cheap labor and to shelter taxable profits.(5) Since Pluto went into Capricorn in 2008 (6) we’ve watched “a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids sucking in all the nominal wealth of society” (James H. Kunstler).
Militarily, we’ve seen enough to realize the generals don’t know what they’re doing.
Flag-waving
Sentimental nationalism always used to work, to get the public pumped up for war. But Pentagon propagandists can no longer persuade people that bombing hospitals is necessary for the spread of democracy.(7) These days, flag-waving is all but dead among the educated peoples of the world.
Granted, there is tribal fervor aplenty – the Kurds, the Palestinians, the Catalans, the Scots (the Scots?). But the Fatherland ideologies that used to glue countries together when societies were more or less homogeneous — back before globalization and modern media — have become threadbare. Victorian notions of duty, honor and pride-in-country are as passé as the plumes on the helmets of the Queen’s Fusiliers.(8)
Brutal old-fashioned despots are back in power in Thailand and Egypt et al, most of them with support from the CIA. But the dictators, too, are failing to inspire their people with nationalist pride. They can’t even keep order (e.g. Syria, Iraq, Sudan) — the only thing tyranny used to be good at.
Not working
At this point in the waning Saturn-Pluto cycle, Americans with access to clean information are hip to the fact that their government’s military strategy is to pick a few violent groups to arm: the ones who seem the most likely to promote the interests of the policymakers.
The world is full of vicious zealots and narco-terrorists, but none of them have the power of the medal-decorated gangsters at the Pentagon and the war profiteers in Congress. It may or may not be true, as Americans are led to believe, that our tax money is going to arm the least-heinous group in each fight. What we do know to be true is that Washington has a long history of arming whichever set of fighters it thinks will destabilize the region Uncle Sam wants to control. (9)
But none of the Pentagon’s recent campaigns, neither the covert nor the overt ones, have been working. 
They’re not working because they can’t work. Adding killing to the killing is the opposite of a solution.
It’s the old way, and the old way has run out of steam.
New paradigm
The thing is, we all know, in our hearts, that the human imagination is far more creative than this. A random sampling of ordinary Americans could doubtless come up with dozens of approaches that 
would have better chances of working than the Pentagon’s. If left to our own devices – by which I mean, absent the propaganda designed to keep us from imagining it — most of us would say: Let’s build hospitals instead of bombing them.
If Fox News were to go dark tomorrow, ordinary Americans, drawing on their goddess-given common sense and empathy, would stop and think about how much of our tax money goes to building an aircraft carrier, and say, Let’s put it towards re-planting those war-ravaged fields, instead.
Some of us might say, Let’s have the Pentagon send the Army Corps of Engineers instead of soldiers. We could send them into ruined villages to repair the roads. We might say, Let’s build housing for the refugees. Let’s take the tax money that the tech companies are getting away without paying, and put it towards temporary housing.
In Europe right now, there are inventor-designer-engineers creating affordable shelters to keep the thousands of migrants from the cold of winter upcoming. Do we doubt that the USA could contribute any number of equally creative minds?
Fox-fried brains
The classic reaction of a brainwashed citizen to such ideas is to dismiss them as unworkable. This is an attitude promoted by the powers-that-be, who have found that cynicism and despair make the public malleable. In training us to dismiss empathic solutions, they get us to do something that would be otherwise unthinkable: to accept the idea of endless war.
Why would they want us to accept such a thing? Dying cycles hold onto their lifeless values with an iron grip. When no other story but the generals’ is told, the all-powerful arms industry –- the single most profitable business in the world (10), after drugs — remains undisturbed. The entrenched systems of control remain in the hands of the same old forces, who keep the insanity going.
But the organic deterioration of the unworkable is more powerful still. We support this process by imagining the new way. We imagine what would happen if the corporate media’s fog machine were to suddenly stop, and the citizenry started responding differently to the world. If more and more people started living through the center of their birth charts. For millions of us, fear of The Enemy as a driving motivation would be replaced by humanitarian instinct.
The first thing we might do is fire all the generals. Isn’t this what we’d do with any other employee who failed as miserably and as consistently at their job as the generals are failing at theirs (and are we not, financially and technically, their employers)? Then we put their salaries towards thinkers who have a shot at making the world a better place.
Hearts and minds
In fact, peaceful fixes for social crises have been tried, throughout history, by far savvier leaders than these guys. There exist simple, practical solutions to conflict that have been proven to work beautifully, not only from an ethical standpoint, but from a strategic hearts-and-minds standpoint.
Consider the grassroots guerrillas in Lebanon a few years ago. In 2006, while Israel was bombing Lebanese villages 
with American bombs, teams of Hezbollah fighters went in and built schools and distributed food, winning – is it any wonder? — the undying support of the locals.
Last gasp
Here in the last-gasp phase of several long cycles,(11) the battle lines have been clearly defined. The square between Uranus (ordinary people) and Pluto (war makers, monopolists) even gave us a neat pair of numbers to describe the situation: 1 and 99 %.
We know only too well the investment the old players have in holding on. We understand that a few hundred energy industry titans have purchased enough politicians to scuttle global warming initiatives.(12) We know that the profits of the masters of war have risen along with the rise in defense appropriations. So it should come as no surprise that these folks don’t want to let go of the system as it is.
But theirs isn’t the only kind of power. The 99% have a different kind: a kind whose time has come.
Notes
1 Almost a year ago, in a ceremonial press release, the generals gave the no-longer-a-war a noble new name: “Afghan Resolute Support.” Flags were saluted, taken down, rolled up, and flown back to Washington.
2 The postmillennial version of the army, only more sinister. The line between the Pentagon’s imagination and that of videogame makers has all but disappeared.
3 It was announced in that press release last December that the 11,000 Americans remaining in Afghanistan would now be called “advisers.” In late October, Obama said he was sending some others to Syria, presumably to offer helpful special-op advice.
4 Saturn & Pluto conjoin every 38-40 years. The cycle now waning began in Nov. 1982 with a conjunction in Libra. Saturn and Pluto conjoin again in January 2020 in Capricorn. Since Jupiter will be in there, too, 2020 will be the beginning of three cycles: Saturn-Pluto, Saturn-Jupiter, and Jupiter-Pluto.
5 At this point, Big Business has more than two trillion dollars in profits stashed overseas.
6 When Pluto moved into Capricorn, the sign Saturn governs, we got a double-whammy focus on government and monetary systems. Pluto has all but eliminated deniability 
in the halls of power.
7 Democracy has lost the moral prestige it had back when wars started with “WW” and ended with a roman numeral; back when it seemed possible to be fighting for Uranian ideals. In our age, the empires of the Old World have been replaced by new ones that are neither geographical nor ideological: NATO, the Eurozone and the C’mon-Just-Let-Us-Take-Over-the-World Trade Agreement.
8 They died in the trenches in Flanders. See Modris Eksteins’ excellent The Rites of Spring and the Modern World, Houghton Mifflin 1989.
9 A bloody karma that has not begun to fade, because it has not stopped accumulating. Consider that for 24 years Washington has been dropping bombs on Iraq, each administration cloaking itself in a different rationale. Now the reason is supposedly to fight ISIS, who came to power as a direct consequence of the Pentagon’s purge of the Baathists in 2003. (This article by David Stockman is the single most important essay any Westerner — especially any American — can read right now.)
10 Global sales of weapons and military services exceeded $400bn in 2010. In the USA, far and away the biggest maker and exporter of killing machines in the world, the “defense” budget was approximately $312 billion in 2000.
11 The new Mountain Astrologer Magazine (Dec’15/Jan’16) looks at these concurrent cycles as they move towards the multi-conjunction of 2020.
12 It recently came out that Exxon spent millions of dollars on climate change research in the 1970s and ’80s, and then, faced with the damning science they themselves had funded, sprang into action getting ahead of the issue. They told their front men in Congress to start using the word “controversial” in their comments about greenhouse gas studies, and they poured money into groups that disputed such studies.
