I’m feeling ambivalent about irony. Certainly I’m grateful to it for providing me with some of the best laughs I get these days; mostly from British humorists, who are masters of the form. And ironic prose is often challengingly amusing, offering a showcase for a kind of chilly cleverness. It must say something about our society that the use of

As the solar Eclipse of July 1st nips at our heels, Greece is in flames. The cradle of Western civilization is exploding with the cardinal Cross. Glimpsed sneaking away from the mayhem: none other than Wall Street's Goldman Sachs, who apparently helped Greece to mask its debt crisis with the same slimy credit-swapping tricks that trashed the world economy three years

Eclipse season began with the New Moon of June first. This month’s Skywatch discusses the series of squares taking place from Neptune in Pisces, the Great Dissembler. I thought of this ingress last weekend when I heard about the yogi Swami Ramdev, whose protest against corruption in government took a Neptunian turn. Accosted by the police during his hunger strike,

I do not have the stars-and-stripes flapping in the breeze this Spring evening. I don't have my "We're Number One" teeshirt on. I’m not giddy with jubilation about my country shooting Osama bin Laden in the face. President Obama claims that “justice was done;” seeming to gloss over the associations the word justice has with charges, public trials, evidence and so

It’s that time again. Soon the American airwaves will be bristling with round-the-clock coverage of the 2012 campaigns. Ambitious candidates are getting ready to hit the ground running, with their staffs of strategists, chauffeurs and stylists. TV executives and advertisers are licking their chops at the guaranteed spike in viewership, as they prepare to spend a year and a half

The confetti had barely been swept up in town squares all over the world after the triumph in Egypt. The American public was distracted elsewhere, trying to find a job, or keep a job. And suddenly we were in another war. Word was buzzing around the blogosphere that a post-March 11th natural disaster was likely

The human family is home, at any given time, to exactly the right heroes, geniuses and saints to keep itself balanced and alive on its checkered evolutionary journey. And when it is in crisis, it gives rise to Cassandras. Our epoch is chockablock with them. Some of them even announced the very date of the earthquake in Japan.

The revolution has reached Wisconsin. All in the scope of a bare few weeks, the world's mind has been blown by the jasmine rallies (see new lecture, Uranus Squared) in the Middle East and Africa, student protests in the U.K. and anti-government eruptions in China and Pakistan; among other uprisings all over the globe. The world-altering transits that have kept astrologers buzzing

The Longest Arm of the Cross, the transit of revolutionary (Uranus) and deep-structure (Pluto) change, is upon us.  The rebellion in Tunisia has spread to Egypt. Yemen is seething, Jordan is restive, and the Saudi royals are getting very nervous. As the resentment among the populations of these long-simmering Arab states boils over, the Uranus-Pluto square feels far less theoretical than it did

You may have heard, dear reader, about the recent alarm raised by an astronomer on NBC, since gone viral, that has led astro-philes everywhere to worry that their Sun signs have been misdiagnosed. Dr Kunkle (after whom I hope they name the next new planet, if not the next search engine) has pronounced that “The 12 signs were designated to