“Smithfield Farms.” The name invokes green pastures, happy cows and sweet pink pigs milling around under a blue sky in Pennsylvania or Kansas. But it is in La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico that we find the “Smithfield Farms” plant associated with the first case of Swine Flu. The four-year-old boy who is believed to be its ground-zero victim lives near the…

I have an image in my head that features Pluto as Santa Claus. He’s just arrived in the state of Capricorn, and he’s sitting there benevolently on his Santa chair. We sky-watchers are lined up at the velvet rope, waiting to sit on his knee and tell him our fondest hopes about what we want out of the next sixteen…

As Pluto (breakdown) continues to oppose the US Venus/Jupiter (beliefs about money), received wisdom is taking a beating in the USA. And as the economy implodes, Neptune (disillusion), Chiron (wounds) and Jupiter (make that big wounds) are hitting the US Moon (the public mood). Those Americans who have their eyes open are getting the sense that everything they were taught to believe about…

With every month that passes, it’s becoming more important to stay clear-headed. Things are moving very fast, and we need to know what’s going on. We need to devise, quite deliberately, mechanisms to stay tuned in to truth. The news on TV is not where we will get the truth. (Let’s not even talk about commercial radio. That whole medium…

Any skywatchers who have ever been enchanted and perplexed by the elusive planet Neptune are in luck. Its myriad mysteries are being writ large by the rare transit now looming in the sky. Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune are joining forces in a conjunction that peaks for the first time on May 27th. Everything you associate with Neptune, the god of dreams…

The next seven years are going to be big. Forget the five-and-ten-year plans your consultant told you to make. We will all be flying by the seat of our pants. You astro-heads already know this. There’s been a lot of talk about the Grand Cross, the major configuration that will dominate the sky through 2015. […]

Remember in The Wizard of Oz, when Toto started tugging at the curtain behind which the old scamster was pulling levers; and the big scary face intoned, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”? The Great American Meltdown we’re watching now has much in common with that other great American tale. This time […]

I am looking forward to Neptune doing its number on the US Moon (Sibly chart). On many different fronts it should bring home (Moon) the issue of drugs (Neptune). But if sanity is to prevail people are going to have to confront how insane it’s been so far. Take the foreign policy disaster some wonk […]

From most of Obama’s fans there’s been a deafening silence — the sound of people feeling stunned — rather than a real response to his handling of the Mohammed rendition lawsuit: his green lighting of the CIA’s continuing authority to carry out secret abductions to certain Washington-selected countries. But the fact that he has chosen […]

What are we to make of Obama’s eagerness to amp up the death pit of Afghanistan, which foreign-policy-wise was America’s aboriginal Iraq? Historians know that the idea of “winning” there is a joke. No colonial power has ever come close. Over the centuries, all of the expensive attenuated military attempts to steal the Silk Road […]