Click here for Part One. Dr Decay Pluto is about death and putrefaction. If you’re looking for a breath of fresh air, it’s probably not the first planet you think of. But I would argue that it is the most refreshing of all cycles to track right now, because it forces us to take the long […]

Saturday’s wedding at Windsor Chapel won’t mean much in a week. Hyperventilating fans will get their breath back, and pounce upon some new tidbit to distract them from global crises. But if we view all mass events – the great, the small, and the artificially inflated – as emblematic of the world moment, the spectacle was […]

Alpha Dogs After more than a decade of moving fast and breaking things, [Zuckerberg] should slow down and clean up the mess. — Andrew Marantz We have an extraordinary chance this month to consider some of the key themes underlying world events of the past decade. And what it might look like to take responsibility […]

Native Son (For Part Two, click here.) There are ways of looking at this appalling presidency that have nothing to do with politics per se. Those of a Jungian frame of mind, for example, might propose that Trump is a creation of the collective consciousness. A transpersonal astrologer, and even some historians, might say that he is not an aberration but an epitome. Uncle Sam’s Evil […]

(For Part One, click here.) We (Not You), the People Everywhere we look, cultural institutions are dissolving. What’s the best way to participate in this chaotic historical moment without losing our sanity? Or, to put it in more spiritually ambitious terms, how do we express ourselves from the center of our charts while a shit storm […]

Beyond Incredulity It’s hard, isn’t it? watching Trump’s most vicious fans on the march, righteous and emboldened. It is painful in a different way — as in, bitterly ironic — to watch marginalized rural folks cheering for policies that would eviscerate their own interests. It is galling to see struggling, out-of-work Americans fawning over a billionaire who […]

We know that what we see on the news isn’t reality. On some level of awareness, everybody knows that no matter what type of corporate media they’re watching —  straight-up propaganda like Fox News, or propaganda-lite like CNN — they’re seeing a carefully sanctioned story line. But this doesn’t let us off the hook for what’s going on in our world. It doesn’t […]

(Continued from Part 1) Still not getting it It isn’t for any lack of information. An avalanche of critical consensus has described what happened in November as a massive rejection, by ordinary Americans, of the status quo. Trump’s win has been called “a very, very bad answer to some very good questions.” In a colossal waste of opportunity, those questions are still not […]

  Nobody told this brain-washed Manchurian Candidate that he was supposed to shoot the president, not grab the throne for himself. — Iain Sinclair Donald J. Trump is like a figure in an apocalyptic comic strip, created for us by gods(1) who decided we were too slow to get the point via more subtle means. Up until last […]

Have you heard of the World Happiness Report? It sounds like a children’s book, or a fantasy movie: too charming and healthy to be a real thing. But it is. It’s an annual document compiled by the U.N. (1)  The most recent one came out last month on the Vernal Equinox, the first day of the zodiacal year. From this date, astrologers infer […]