Hello and good morning!
With the late-breaking news of the Gulf oil leak being stopped for an integrity check, we've decided to check in with the astrology for this event and how it fits with the blowout's event chart -- an astrological "integrity check" of our own. The well's capping may very well be good news, but it carries themes fitting with the "Anti-Sixties" idea we've been exploring in recent issues of Astrology News: it's the flip image of the expansive role we saw technology play in society four decades ago. In addition, we've included Eric's spot-on water sign horoscopes, a quick introduction to using one's rising sign (by way of our Midyear Audio Report), and an announcement for the much-anticipated Cancer Birthday Audio. To subscribe to the full issue of Astrology News each week, please check out our reasonable six-month and three-month options. If you're new to our service, here is a free one-month trial offer.
A Pause in the Anti-Sixties
Dear Fellow Traveler:
How does it feel not to have crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico?
As of the current moment, the blown out Deepwater Horizon well is still capped "like a soda bottle," in the words of
The New York Times. This is part of a 48-hour integrity test to check whether oil will leak out underground or elsewhere in the system once it was sealed and therefore put under pressure. For the first time in 86 days, after many failed and dubiously sincere attempts, the flow of oil was finally stopped Thursday afternoon at 2:25 pm local time. BP's well is the deepest in history, situated a mile under the Gulf and dug to a depth of more than 35,000 feet. A collaboration of BP, Transocean, Mitsubishi and Halliburton, it was completed in September 2009.
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A video image Thursday afternoon of the blown out well showed no oil flowing.
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On the night of April 20, disaster struck when the pressure coming from inside the well exceeded the pressure from above the well, causing an explosion and fire and resulting in the oil gusher coming from the wreckage. Eleven people were killed. Two days later the massive rig sank, taking with it 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Up to 100,000 barrels a day of oil have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico every day since. Added to this are millions of gallons of the toxic dispersant Corexit, which has been turning the oil into an underwater haze contaminating vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico.
Everyone is wondering the same thing: why couldn't they have capped the well sooner? To my mind, the answer to that comes in two parts: one is it's not easy to work with robots in the midst of tangled metal and and crude oil a mile under the ocean, and two, there is a lot we don't know. The integrity test -- putting the whole well system under the extreme pressure caused by capping the well -- reveals how much we don't know about what is going on, a detail we should always remember. Emails, blogs and some news reports circulating on the Internet have been describing things like the possibility of fractures in the rock floor of the Gulf of Mexico, a massive methane bubble near the surface of the well and various other worst-case scenarios. BP's incompetence and silence lends credibility to these possibilities, and the integrity test confirms that company and government officials may have similar concerns.
News reports say that pressure inside the well system is being checked every six hours. If the pressure remains high, they know that the cap, the destroyed blowout preventer and the underground system are holding up. If the pressure drops, they know they have a leak somewhere in the system. This is a temporary measure until two relief wells designed to intercept the flow of oil beneath the ocean floor are complete, which we're being told will happen in August.
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Fleecing the Rubes
By Judith Gayle |
Political Waves
Sometimes it seems there's nothing to say about our political system that I haven't said already. Politics both molds and is molded by our social structure, confirming the notion that politics is personal and proving that we can't escape our choices, however much we'd like to. Remember, too, that no choice IS a choice for the
status quo. We long for someone to correct our social and political ills and bring us back to sanity, so we can continue living our lives in the comfortable humdrum and perpetual competition that define us. We thought that someone might be Obama, but he's proven to be a president in a systemic straightjacket. We need someone whose only vulnerability is Kryptonite.
The American system of democracy, despite its warts, is still head and shoulders above other forms of governance, thanks to the vision of our founders. When Ben Franklin said, "It's a Republic, if we can keep it," he wasn't just whistling
Yankee Doodle. No ideology -- whether socialism, communism, or democracy -- has ever sustained itself without continual adjustment and reinvention. To America's credit, her diverse melting pot of immigrants kept intellectual variables alive and active in the political conversation. The progressive base behind the union and civil rights movements that catapulted FDR into a New Deal could not have existed without the socialists and communists. Along with the industrial growth of World War II, progressivism gave us several decades of stability and prosperity never seen before in America.
The conservatives have been fighting that vision of the nation ever since. In one corrupt decade, they traded an unregulated free market for any last bits of humanism they might have embraced. Taking from the rich to distribute to the middle-class and poor is anathema to conservatives, who happily pour billions of welfare dollars into the pockets of corporations while the 'great unwashed' scramble to keep a roof over their heads. Chaos works in their favor. Cheap labor suits their purpose.
It seems as though the movers and shakers planned this, doesn't it? Essentially, they did. I don't think they were insightful enough to realize how dangerous the game would become; the obsession for wealth seldom takes the long view. As Naomi Klein points out in her book,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the successful exploitation of chaos in order to increase wealth and power for a few has produced a pattern of manufactured disasters, such as war and economic upheaval. Klein defines disaster capitalism as "the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock." She contends that although the pieces required to maximize this activity took years to design, it wasn't until the Twin Towers fell that the re-engineering began in earnest.
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Planet Waves 2010 Midyear Report is Ready
Dear Fellow Traveler:
The midyear audio report is ready. For subscribers, this is a
12-signs-for-one-price audio product. Originally planned at 10 minutes per sign, it came out to about 25 minutes per sign, with an introduction for all the signs. This report will work for your Sun, Moon and rising signs -- and you can even scope out what's going on with your kids and significant others. The report is ready. I've raised the price for all 12 by $5 as promised; the project came out so well that the signs are being sold individually to non-subscribers. The report covers outer planet transits, the cardinal T-square and the eclipses in Cancer and Capricorn. It's solid astrological work and I trust you will find it helpful.
Last week a reader asked how to work with the rising sign aspect of my reports, and I'll get to that in a moment.
As you know, we're in the midst of one of the most unusual alignments of our lifetimes. This is the cardinal T-square that is synonymous with 2012. At the heart of the matter is the square of Uranus and Pluto, the one that will make the Sixties look like a walk in the park. That square is within three degrees now, joined by Jupiter, Saturn and a pair of eclipses. All of this is lined up with the Aries Point, which is like a magnifying/focusing effect. Everyone is affected by this astrology no matter what their sign.
Some people are experiencing this as calm weather, and by the way, I don't suggest you worry about that. There are some individuals and some charts aligned harmoniously with the current process of rapid change. When you look back on these years you will be amazed at what you experienced, who you became and what you accomplished.
For others, there is quite a bit of unrest, turbulence, pressure and weirdness, and you may be wondering what is next. This report will be applicable to both perspectives, because they are two sides of the same process.
The audio introduction is about half an hour, then each sign gets about 25 minutes devoted to it. I am also including a wrap-up segment summarizing what I learned doing the 12 signs, covering the eclipses specifically. The report is ready now. We're offering this for only $24.95 to existing clients now. Later on in the week, we will be selling each sign separately, so you'll save substantially by ordering right away.
I write Sun-sign horoscopes and detailed reports that work whether you know your natal chart or not -- that is my specialty.
Now for the reader question, which pertains to how (for example) the Aquarius birthday report relates to Aquarius rising; or how any one of the signs in the Midyear Report works for your rising sign.
The great Patric Walker, one of my spiritual mentors, once said of astrology: "It's all about the houses." He was a newspaper astrologer, so he meant the solar houses of a horoscope column.
He meant it for natal charts as well. It's possible to take a chart with an accurate ascendant (based on your birth time) and strip out all the planets and just read the house pattern -- that's how well houses work. So when I think through your astrology, about 51% of my energy goes into what house an influence (such as an eclipse) occurs in. For your Sun sign, I use the solar house system, which works beautifully. I also suggest you know your rising sign and pay as much attention to my interpretation for that sign as you do for your Sun sign. And as a Cancer rising Moon child, I pay attention to lunar energy all the time. So the better you know your chart, the more information you'll have available from my work -- and the better the value.
To find your rising sign, all you need is your birth time and a five-minute trip to Astro.com. If you don't feel like doing that, your Sun sign (also called your birth sign) will give you the information you're looking for.
Here is the
link to order your Midyear Report from Planet Waves (instant delivery). Subscribers can still get all 12 signs for one price -- $24.95. If you're currently a subscriber to
Planet Waves Astrology News,
renew early combined with the report and get a discount on both. Make sure you use the same email address that your issues come to!
For readers who have not subscribed to Cosmic Confidential,
here is a combined offer for $44.95 -- all 12 signs of Cosmic Confidential plus all 12 signs of the 2010 Midyear Report. If you purchase the combined offer, you will receive instant access to Cosmic Confidential, your confirmation letter will contain access info for the Midyear Report.
You can also order by phone by calling Chelsea at (206) 567-4455. Thank you for doing your metaphysical shopping at Planet Waves.
Yours & truly,
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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, July 16, 2010, #824 - BY ERIC FRANCIS
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| | Where are you now? How is your life different than it was one month ago? I don't mean this rhetorically -- I mean it in the temporal sense. I suggest you get out a date book or calendar and go back one month from right now and notice where you were, what you were doing and who you were with. What has changed? In what ways have you found direction? Have you released certain persistent emotional issues that seemed like they would never give you a break? And, in the odd chance that you are facing new challenges, I would ask: is there a way you can interpret those developments so that you see them as points of growth, awareness and maturity? On our planet, that is the name of the game.
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The Cancer Audio Birthday Report is now ready. This is more than a hour of astrology for Cancer and Cancer rising, covering the cardinal T-square from a personal perspective. I’ve also included a 20 minute tarot reading using the Voyager Deck by James Wanless. For instant access, order here for Cancer and Cancer Rising. Only $14.95, this also makes a meaningful and economical birthday gift.
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| | Your life is an example of how one's outer relationships reflect the relationship you have with yourself. Over the past few weeks you've had many hints, clues and illustrations how this is true. You have seen what is possible when you are scrupulously honest with yourself: the bonds that others seem to place on you suddenly dissolve. The reason they do is because others cannot really place bonds on you; that's something that only you can do to yourself. Your inner relationship is now at the stage where you may, if you want, go beyond self-bondage and into a place where everything you do is in harmony with who you are. As you develop this method of living, you'll figure out that you would choose to do many things differently -- and I would remind you the choice is still open.
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| | You are no longer bound by your old ways of doing things, or by the emotional patterns that held you there. Indeed, every facet of your life is an invitation to do things differently. This mainly involves daring to go past the emotional limitations that held you back; that urged caution; that had you sidestepping challenges; that made you believe that you always needed a path of retreat. It is challenging for a Pisces to learn how to live boldly and not feel like you're going to offend the whole world. Just remind yourself that somewhere, someone is offended by everything and therefore it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that you take your life into your hands consciously, and live each day to create the life you want. Get used to feeling some mixture of entitlement and wide-open willingness. Get used to saying yes when you mean it. And remember: you are the only person who can give yourself permission to truly live.
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Pisces Birthday Audio by Eric Francis is available. Check this link for more information. |
