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 […]

I don’t begrudge America for its over-the-top bliss-fest yesterday after eight hideous years of degradation any more than I’d begrudge a Gitmo survivor a vacation on a tropical isle. But after several pina coladas, even the most exultant celebrant will get a headache. And though I risk sounding like a crab, at best, and a […]

We are now making our way towards the climactic Full Moon of January tenth. Our much-beloved Obama is focusing heatedly on the economy right now, harried the while by the embarrassment of his lone Latino cabinet member being caught up in a (dare we say it?) less-than-shocking pay-to-play scandal. In between these troubles he has […]

(This is a post script to my New Moon posting, below.) I watched the quarter Moon in the darkening sky as the speakers’ voices rang out. Tonight we marched again down the streets of San Francisco in support of the besieged people of Palestine, this time to protest the ground invasion that had just begun. […]

The new year began, astrologically, with the New Moon of December 27th. Astrologers had been watching its approach with bated breath. Like its parallel transit exactly a year ago, when Benazir Bhutto was killed in Pakistan, we knew this latest Pluto-Mars duet would stimulate a vision of civilization breaking down. It was widely expected that […]