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Feeling the Chill | Evening, Nov. 9, 2004 There remains this whole question of what to do. My friend Ginger, an old friend and a smart one, wrote to me tonight and said the big shocker for her regarding the election is that votes really aren't counted as much as statistics are analyzed. I have heard people say that recounts are meaningless; they may be. There is talk of economic depression and military draft. The most massive battle of the war is being fought right now in Falluja. The ray of light is that when power gets too concentrated, it starts to consume itself. We are well within James Madison's definition of tyranny. I'll put it in large print, in yellow, so you can see it with your eyes closed. I did not make this up. Madison wrote a lot of other things that will send chills down your spine. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." -- James Madison I am, however, wondering how long it's going to take people feeling powerless to make them [us] feel angry. I think a grieving period is a good idea with a loss like this one, but you know, this was an election and not your best friend -- yet I'm hearing very little in the way of outrage. We are generally people too good to be angry. But by the time the meek inherit the Earth, I would hate to be around for it. If I may make a suggestion, if you're concerned about the election, and the state of the country and the state of the world, get out of the house and go where you can talk about it in person with people. I imagine the local Democratic club has something going on, maybe a friend's house, maybe take a couple of hours off from work and go talk to your local city or country representative. Back in New Paltz, the local McDonald's was the political hot bed every morning before the guys went to work. Whether if you live in a small town or a big city, I suggest you find people to communicate with, so that the word WE begins to have some tangible meaning. Just thinking out loud. At this moment it seems obvious that the war will awaken us to all of the problems of the world that we would otherwise deny. In some way it may save us from a much worse fate. So This it What it Takes, Maybe | Planet Waves for Nov. 9, 2004, 10:09 am CET My inbox keeps getting more intense. And I am not sure I want to get so deep into the psychology of the lust for war, and the simultaneous denial of human suffering, and the denial of human potential. But they are all the same thing. One critical issue that we will face is that we somehow have to acknowledge what is happening in order to do something about it. There is a lot of resistance to that. Most people just want to get on with their lives, which is challenging enough. But there is, I think, more resistance yet to coming to terms with how powerful, beautiful, intelligent and sexy we are. You feel that somewhere in there, yes? Anyway -- I got this today. It's from the Journal News, I think that's a Gannett paper in Westchester County, N.Y. Man it's really beautiful in upstate New York this time of year. Even the New York State Thruway is like a work of art. The most interesting thing that the writer, Chris Hedges said in his presentation, to my thinking, is how the war will cease to be an abstraction; that it will become deeply personal. It reminds me of what a TV show it is to so many. I for one believe that we can stop this before it takes a few million more lives. But we're going to have to work, and work well, and fast, and together, and I don't know many people who would rather spend their Saturday night doing social justice work rather than going out drinking. But as Bob said, the times are changing. Teenagers, parents, big brothers, help everyone 16-25 get their draft resistance files together. Start collecting letters that say you object to war on religious grounds, so that when you find yourself in the company of a Quaker or Unitarian Universalist who knows what they are doing, they have some material to work with. I mean it, start with a file folder that says, "Julie's Draft Resistance File." Did everyone see the Rumsfeld press briefing yesterday? Maybe CNN will rerun it. He's a real piece of work. Anyway, I digress -- a little. Begin quote: Reinstatement of the draft is imminent, war correspondent and author Christopher Hedges told a crowd of more than 120 students and residents yesterday at Manhattanville College. "We are losing the war in Iraq very badly, but the Bush administration will not walk away from the debacle without trying to reoccupy huge swaths of the territory they have lost," Hedges said. While working for The New York Times, he covered fighting in Central America, the Balkans and the Middle East, including Iraq during the first Gulf War. To regain territory lost in Iraq, it will take double or triple the current 140,000 troops, Hedges said during the last lecture in a series called "The Costs of War." The reservists and National Guard members who make up half of the U.S. forces are stretched to the breaking point and need relief, he said, and the draft is the only way to assemble the numbers needed. Reintroduction of the draft will be made in the name of the war on terrorism soon after an attack in the United States or abroad, he predicted. "The war in Iraq will no longer be an abstraction," he said. "It will become deeply personal. In the next few weeks look for shifts in administration policy leading in the direction of an escalation of the war." Hedges encountered no detractors at Manhattanville, unlike his experience at Rockford (Ill.) College in May 2003, when he was booed off the stage while giving a commencement speech shortly after President Bush's battleship announcement that the U.S. mission in Iraq had been "accomplished." On the contrary, many in the audience last night said they had braved rainy weather to hear Hedges indict the seductiveness of war and the dangers of mindless jingoism as an antidote to their depression over the results of the presidential election. "It's been a hard week and there are much harder times ahead. That's why it is so important for us all to be together tonight," said Connie Hogarth, who has a peace and justice center on the Manhattanville campus named after her. "After we finish grieving, we have to get back to working for peace and justice, and an end to this war and its killing." Prayers and Tears in Falluja | Planet Waves for Nov. 8 I pass the microphone to the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3986085.stm The Occultation
Zone | Monday, Nov, 8, 2004 We're now in the week of the occultations -- those four extra eclipses between the 9th and the 14th that I've been ratting the cosmic cage over for the past few months. Covering the astrology of the Bush administration for four years, I have learned not to get my hopes up. I think many astrologers are wondering just what it will be, to put it kindly, that in the end makes a difference. But of course nobody saw Sept. 11 coming, except perhaps for Michele de Nostradamus who knew there would be messed up stuff going on at this time in history. The issue with Herr Bush is really that "he" has a lot of cooperation being who "he" is, from the media, the political community and the press. I was reading today about how The New York Times killed the "Bush's bulge" story -- the story about the NASA photo analyst saying that the bulge under Bush's jacket the night of the first debate could not possibly be his shirt wrinkled. Yes, and I would love to see some professional photo analysis of the Pentagon crash scene -- the Times, incidentally, reports today that some crackpots believe that there was no Boeing 757 at the Pentagon (see link to movie below). However, this week some new and exciting things happen in the cosmos. The Moon makes exact eclipses to four different planets within five days, all in a highly sensitive point in the president-select's natal chart. I have to some extent offered my reputation on the notion that this would be an interesting week, and we'll see, I guess, please forgive me if it works out that all that happens is that George Washington chops down the cherry tree and says, "I cannot tell a lie." (I have always thought that Bush should change his middle name to Washington, as it would match nicely William Jefferson Clinton). Very little has been written about occultations; few astrologers have ideas about them. I asked someone very well-placed in the British astrology scene (well placed amongst books and people by the way) to have a look and to take a little poll for me, and he said this weekend: "Had a look around, asked a few people and got nuffin!" So, welcome to my living experiment. I believe that we will at least have some interesting revelations here in the occultation zone. Nov. 10 -- Moon Occult Venus, at 15 degrees Libra Nov. 11 -- Moon Occult Mars, at 30 degrees Libra Nov. 14 -- Moon Occult Mercury, at 14 degrees Sagittarius (on something called the Great Attractor which you can read about here: http://www.ericfrancis.com/sagittarius/sagittarius10.html ). http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/pentagon.swf From truthout.org | Sunday, Nov. 7, 2004 Tin soldiers and Nixons coming We're finally on our own -- Neil Young, "Ohio" The one name conspicuously missing from the news these days is WADE O'DELL, the president of Diebold Corp, which makes electronic voting machines. He is an Ohioan, he's a big Bush contributor, and he's got some 'splainin' to do, Lucy. Or perhaps we have some questions to ask. However, here is some news from Florida. Saturday Notes | Planet Waves for Nov. 5 People seem to be going through a grieving process, getting used to the fact that Bush has been selected again. There is a sense of disbelief and disconnect among the Americans I am meeting here, and people from France and many other countries. They are wondering what has happened in the United States and how people could do this to themselves and the world. It's really like the U.S. has broken off and become this insane island floating in the cosmos, and that is how it feels for here -- though all of us here have a piece of our souls there, and our friends and families who we love. Many are freaked about the possibilities of their little brothers and sisters getting drafted and sucked into this war. There are many ways that people are feeling their lives are threatened by what has happened. And many have the feeling that nobody gives a damn. A few weeks ago, I descended into the Paris catacombs with two friends, James and Heather, by buddies from Utah (I met them here) who crashed on my couch for a few weeks through the election time. The catacombs are a vast underground network of tunnels and caves that contain the bones of five to six million Parisians. You can go down there and look around. I got in free, with my press card; once again, it comes in handy. My old therapist Joe lived in Paris in the Sixties and I told him I went down and he said, yes, when I went down, they gave you a candle and told you not to walk far from other people. I realize now that there were not electric lights at the time, and probably no gates to keep you on the main path so you don't get lost in this network that spreads under much of the city. Today there are lights and gates. As the weeks have passed, I am slowly feeling the experience of confronting this place move through my mind and various psychic levels of my body. My whole psychological relationship to Paris changed in one afternoon, but like taking a homeopathic remedy, it's only slowly dawning me how deep that change is. I wrote an article about it as the last in my series in Chronogram magazine on the election, called If the Dead Could Vote. Here is the link. Thanks for tuning in. http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2004/11/backbone/planetwaves/ Hoax Hoax Warning | Nov 6, 2004 Upon further investigation, it turns out that the hoax warning about the IQ test score page may be a hoax and that the results appear to be real. Go fucking figure. No, we are not attempting to create a new myth of the Illuminati. Here is the link again, see note on top of page. And no, I am not blogging today. http://attenuation.net/files/iq.htm Hoax Warning | Planet Waves for Nov. 6, 2004 Heyo. I think it's probable that the IQ test score and the income test score links are hoaxes. However, that could be researched, I just don't have the inclination to do the work. And it may be true. In any event, the fact that it appears so plausible and perfectly believable is the weird part. I think I'll be on a little break from blogging Saturday - or that's what I claim now. Welcome to the many new readers I'm hearing from, and old friends who checked in with Planet Waves during the election swell and have touched base. It's truly good to hear from you. The Fruit of the Poison Tree | Planet Waves for Nov. 5, 2004 We have posted the entire edition of Planet Waves Weekly for today, which has my Friday essay The Fruit of the Poison Tree. This is my best shot at explaining what happened this week. Please feel free to pass the link on. I've included the rest of the edition as a sample of what the weekly newsletter is like for new readers. You may send the link, or the text, with proper credit. NOTE, I would call your attention to the link in my earlier post from today -- which shows a state-by-state breakdown on the basis of IQ score. And this link shows a state-by-state breakdown on the basis of income. Any opinions on which are more horrific? http://blog.evankai.com/red_v_blue_avg_personal_income.php More Subversive Propaganda | Planet Waves for Nov. 5 My friend James, out roaming Paris and checking in from a cybercafe, just sent me this. I offer it for your sabbath mediation. http://attenuation.net/files/iq.htm That's His Style | Planet Waves for Nov. 5, 2004, 9:40 a.m. CET "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," said George W. Bush, in his first post-election press conference on Thursday -- and one of the few of his administration. What an interesting comment. As I understand the term, political capital is your base of support. It's a financial metaphor for political wealth, and in those terms, it's like your endowment. You're supposed to earn interest on that money and let it grow, not spend it. But Bush is the quintessence of a rich man's son; he would have no way to know that. And he has gone bust on every venture he's been involved in. So when he says he intends to spend his political capital ("because that's my style," he added, in case we were wondering) what he is really saying -- despite what he intended to say -- is that he's going to blow off his own political party and grassroots supporters. That would be the next logical step. The Bush engineers must be convinced it's their destiny to rule the universe, now that they've actually got the numbers which claim they've pulled a majority vote. (The voter fraud emails are coming in so fast it will take me two hours to read them.) They've acted like they owned the galaxy even when they lost the first election by 500,000. Imagine them with a victory (of some sort or another) of six times that figure. It's a good thing for us that Bush plans to blow off his own political base, because they are the only ones who can get him under control. They will be blown off, cut themselves loose, or be dragged down into the political abyss with him. Speaking purely in a political sense (other factors may intervene), because the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the president-select will presume he has them wrapped around his fingers, but that it is exactly those presumptions that will wear thin under the shocking influence of his caustic rhetoric and "morality" of his ever-more-horrendous war. There are many genuinely moral people in the United States of America, people who truly exist on the "live and let live" basis, despite the bad reputation that evangelical religion creates for itself, or gets created for it by those who abuse it politically. Many, many people take their faith in earnest, and many read the New Testament. If you ask me, Congress is one important forum where this drama is to be played out; those hallowed halls will, for a change, become the forum for truth, as even these rented-out specimens of politicians attempt to grab hold of the ship of state and sail it through those Neptune-square-Sun waters of the newborn progressed Pisces Sun of the United States natal chart, if only to protect their own portfolios. And Chiron has yet to reach Aquarius, which transit is the significator of the people awakening in a new and unusual way, with the help of all new media. We are in a situation where I have every faith that all things will work together for the greater good. Praise Jesus! Praise the Lord! Let the Games Begin | Planet Waves by Eric Francis Thank you for visiting. I am loving doing daily writing. I was Born to Blog, and thanks to Tracy D, the HTML deejay who wrote this blogging program from the first little < in the code, I can go positively wild. Thanks for all your mail, too. My inbox is once again being flooded with news of a different nature: the stolen election. Woo-hoo! This is very encouraging. As I said last night: Nobody should envy Bush. Nor do we need to think this is any kind of "fresh start." Nor do we need to worry that he can go too far with his agenda. He is going to be VERY busy. Poor old Karl Rove is going to need an entire security-cleared secretarial pool and a CIA-front PR agency or two to handle the work. (I am aware that Cheney gets the privilege a KFC run exclusively by the Secret Service down the block from the White House. Those agents wearing those red aprons, slinging the Extra Crispy... they draw straws to see who avoids the job. Okay... just kidding about the KFC...) Anyway, today's editorial in the International Herald Tribune (the international edition of The New York Times) was positively laughable: it was a kind of commitment to forget, saying we needed to give the 'president' a new start and see how it all went. Unfortunately for the psychological coping mechanisms of editors of a major newspaper, their computers are directly connected to the AP wire feed, and intelligent reporters come back to the office with notebooks full of material for editors to chew on. So the editors will be smelling the expresso any time now. Also, the astrology of the next two weeks promises a political circus to make P.T. Barnum turn green with lustful envy. I go over it a bit here: Below is a reprint from Oct. 18 Planet Waves Weekly, and in a slightly shorter version from the September Chronogram in New Paltz, New York, one of the original homes of Eric's writing. Coverage in Planet Waves Weekly continues each Friday. To reach Chronogram, go to If you like my writing, you can vote to support me, us and it (and stuff the ballot box all you like) by subscribing to Planet Waves Weekly. If you've long considered, come on, sign up! I've nearly worn out my computer writing to you. You'll get my weekly essay of the quality below or better, two horoscopes a week, the birthday report and special updates. The service is guaranteed, so there's no risk. There are all kinds of discount categories. And if you happen to not have any money at the moment, we don't discriminate (a little gift from the world of Pisces and A Course in Miracles). Click here to learn more about subscribing. See the Terms of Service for details, linked from the friendly sales page below. Have a look! Love from the 5th of Paris, e ----------- ENOUGH OPINIONS; it's time for the astrology facts as they relate to the presidential election. Consider this your fall preview guide. For many people, politics is no more interesting than baseball. But imagine that the ball game has had a formidable bet placed on it: the world. Then imagine the game is rigged. Let's work our way backwards, from the inauguration chart. We know the new president, whoever he is, will take office at noon on January 20. Charts cast for noon this day and time all have the Aquarius Sun in the 10th house; the Sun in this sign is a nice image of democracy (power to the people, Aquarius), and the 10th house is the domain of government, admiralty, high office, and command. This year, the Sun is conjoined by Chiron in late Capricorn, which is the highest planet in the chart. Sun-Chiron in a chart of this kind (a coronation or government event) is a fitting image for what has been called by many Chiron researchers a 'wounded king'. Whoever takes office, it would appear, will have some serious debility to deal with. And some intense unresolved legacy around his father, as Sun-Chiron contact often points to. Chiron is not always about wounds, however; it is more often about awareness. Lots and lots of in-your-face radical awareness, wherever it goes. Chiron in Capricorn, the guardian angel of our times, dates back to December 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks. That was when Enron declared bankruptcy and the beginning of an era when many more facts of the corporate and government world, often symbolized by Capricorn, came out into the open. Next year is the last year of Chiron in Capricorn, and the year of transition into Chiron in Aquarius (which begins in March and continues through 2011). The Capricorn era, which so far spans the Bush presidency (post 9/11), has brought an astonishing diversity of scandals that have forced many millions of people to pay attention to boring politics, to see what a 'corporation' is, and to have their illusions about the relationship between public life and private life shaken up severely. This is Chiron the iconoclast, shattering the idol of denial. Taurus is rising. That makes Venus the second planet to symbolize the new president. We find Venus in the 9th house (spirituality, international affairs) conjunct Mercury (all in Capricorn, adding a formal touch, and the mark of officialdom). Given that this is a conjunction in Capricorn in the 9th, we have an image of religiosity and piety. Venus, however, is opposed by Varuna, a planet beyond Pluto (discovered in 2000), in Cancer. Varuna is the equalizer. Mythically, this is a deity who was deeply concerned with the punishment of liars, and also one designated with the protection of water. He is often depicted carrying a noose. In eras past, Varuna was the supreme creation deity, whose name still evokes reverence in Vedic cultures. Somebody who often talks about God (Venus in Cap in the 9th house) has an actual meeting with the guy (Varuna in Cancer). And Varuna is not laughing. Now, in an alternate universe, this Mercury-Venus meeting in Capricorn in the 9th could also be an image of a scholarly, formal person; perhaps a lawyer, government official and international figure. One last note. The 8th house of this chart has a conjunction of Mars and Pluto in Sagittarius. Given that the 8th house, Mars, and Pluto are all images of passion, power, and power struggles, that the 8th is about money and death, and that Sagittarius is the sign of religious ideals, there is more than a whiff of jihad to this chart -- though it doesn't manifest right away. The 8th house always talks about what happens in relationship to someone or something else. Mars-Pluto is extremely compelling in this regard; this presidency is pushed to its limits, and there is the feeling of an 'enforced transition' of some kind pushed onto the new president; a lot of pressure to change, which has a violent and ideological feeling. Notice that Scorpio is on the cusp of the 7th house, which among other things is about open enemies. And Mars, the ruler of Scorpio, and Pluto, the other ruler of Scorpio, both show up in the 8th -- the house of powerful transitions, and in Sagittarius, the sign of religious fervor. It's almost like two terrible enemies get together. The new president seems to encounter this all rather directly in the next four years. There would appear to be a timing factor involved in these events. These events don't happen instantly. The early Gemini Moon will slide along for about nine months before the media really figure out what is going on. Once the Moon opposes Mars-Pluto in Sagittarius, the real intensity of this new administration's experience begins. The Election Chart Before there is an inauguration, there is usually an election. The election chart has many interesting features, as any circus clown could have guessed. The election figure is set for midnight of November 2 in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, where the election begins, and ends, before anyplace else. Dixville Notch, a small town in the north, has a long tradition of casting the election's first votes. The town's 26 or so registered voters meet at 11:30 p.m., each with his or her own little booth; the polls open and close within five minutes -- before the League of Women Voters members have brushed their teeth and gone to bed the night before getting up early to watch the polls everyplace else. Like most of the political charts of recent years (such as the election of 2000, Sept. 11, 2001 and many others), Mercury is extremely prominent in the election chart. See if you can follow how. Astrology loves to measure the horizon -- the exact sign and degree rising -- and this happens to be 26 degrees of Leo and 28 arc minutes (an arc minute measures one 21,600th of the total horoscope wheel). The horizon moves fast -- one degree every four clock minutes. So it's a lucky chance or synchronicity when a planet in the chart makes an exact aspect to the horizon, and in this chart it happens to be Mercury, at 26 degrees of Scorpio and 31 minutes. Close enough for you? This is a square exact to three arc minutes. Mercury is below the horizon. It's as if the tabletop of reality is balanced on the horns of this quick, tricky little planet -- balanced so carefully that if you sprinkle some salt on an egg on Dad's side of the table, the whole universe tips over. This tells me it's going to be a very close election, maybe too close to call. And note that Mercury is in Scorpio. There is something secretive going on. What could it possibly be? Hmmm. I wonder. Let's play detective. Mercury is about money, and data, and the news media. In this chart, Mercury also represents the public. Could the public somehow be having a hard time making up its mind because it's so confused and overwhelmed and feels such a heavy sense of burden? Mercury is sitting near one of those cool new little planets, this one being called Pholus (discovered 1992, a centaur, like Chiron). The energy of Pholus is like shaking up a bottle of Pepsi on a hot day, and then promptly opening it. There are going to be all kinds of secrets on which the election seems to hinge. Something is going to come out, and out and out. Just like it has for quite a while. More sex secrets, more money secrets, more death secrets: the only kinds of secrets people care about. (Have you heard about my secret bandanna collection? See, all other secrets are totally boring.) This chart has Leo rising. The Sun is the ruler of Leo, so if we want to know what's up with the election, the Sun is a good place to look as well. The Sun in Scorpio squares Neptune in Aquarius, the planet of delusion in the sign of technology. Square equals tension, and a tangible event forthcoming. Neptune in Aquarius is the astrological significator of, "The masses are not necessarily asses, but they are stoned on television, technology, Prozac, and -- Diebold." Diebold? Write that name on your Voter Registration Card. I quote William Rivers Pitt, author and editor of "Consider Ohio, widely considered to be the most important state in the upcoming election. Wade O'Dell is chief executive of Diebold, Inc., the most prominent company manufacturing these electronic voting machines. O'Dell is also one of George W. Bush's most effective fundraisers, a member of Bush's elite 'Rangers and Pioneers' cash-collectors. In a fundraising letter written in August 2002, O'Dell wrote, 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.' "This could be passed off as the words of a political loyalist, but once you factor in O'Dell's position as manufacturer of the voting machines themselves, the context becomes far more disturbing." Disturbing, perhaps, but let's just hope that they steal the election fair and square. This way, no buildings get knocked down, maybe people will figure out what happened the second time around, and then the winner gets the grand prize: the inauguration chart from hell. ++ Note from Jude | Planet Waves for Nov. 4, 2004 (blog below is 4th, too) Jude is the moderator of the Political Waves list, a free distribution list for news and information. You can subscribe here. Begin quote: OK, so...an Old Testament God won over Science? Crony capitalism won over a struggling middle class and flailing lower class? In the United States of America, abstinence won over SEX? Naaaahhhh. We added 16.5 new voters this year. We had a larger turnout than any since 1968. We stood in the cold rain, the hot sun, or under the bright stars, til 2am NOT to confirm our confidence in the Bush regime, but to change it. Sean P.Diddy Combs was chided by a reporter that the youth vote didn't count ... and he cited numbers that tromped that statement into the mud. It counted ... it just didn't count in the black box. We voted into contraptions that gave us no receipt and no solice, ultimately ... the Johns [Kerry and Edwards] COULDN'T track the vote, which I think is why they gave up so quick. There was no way to recount. We don't see it yet...but we will. We've established a progressive intention and infrastructure that isn't going away anytime soon -- the Dub spent the last year deflecting every accusation by saying it was political electioneering, but ... the elections done. Now he stands alone, responsible. He will not take responsibility, of course ... it will be up to us to hold his feet to the fire. When they break wind in Washington, we'll be there. The work is behind us, and ahead of us -- and we'll be ready. Meanwhile, we need a little cosmic time out -- we need to repot the plants that have grown wild in the last six months -- we need to rake the leaves in the front yard before the snow flies -- to get the car tuned up, the office desk cleared, the snafu's taken care of. We have friendships to catch up on, and children to hug. We need time to lick our wounds, and smell the roses. Take a Breath and... | Planet Waves for Nov. 5, 2004 All night I've been getting quite a lot of email from disheartened friends and readers... people who have worked tirelessly on this campaign, people who have watched the whole thing with shocked interest... emails from Craig's List from people seeking to marry a nice British or European boy to escape the rising tide in America... people wondering what to do about their nieces and nephews who are of draftable age... my buddy, a lawyer, who watched the polls in Pennsylvania and is just disgusted... people who are just generally worried about the future of their country and themselves... wondering what to do... There is really only one answer. Get a good night's sleep, have a cup of coffee and breakfast, and get back to work. Get back to work on the issues you care about and believed that Howard Dean or John Kerry or Dennis Kucinich were going to make better. Get back to work building community. So there is no campaign to work on. So you, and we, have suffered a blow and a loss -- but it's not one we didn't know was on its way, not one we could not intuitively feel coming... not one that common sense didn't lay out for us (someone not voted in cannot be voted out). Choose your issues and get busy. There are plenty. Let's get real about building our movement: not an anti-war movement but rather a movement for the good of humanity. And for God's sake please quit smoking so that you're stronger and so that you have a few extra years on the planet to build your projects and plans (if you haven't already figured that out). But please: don't feel so bad; there is still a part for you to play, and you can thank your stars that, because you'll have to look at [his] face every day and listen to [his] voice every day you still have a mission and a purpose on this Earth. Let your anger become energy. Learn to cultivate your anger, and put it to work building something real and true with your neighbors, friends and compatriots. Call these people up and ask them what you can do together NOW, today. If you're among the many people concerned about your young friends and relatives who may face the draft, take them to Quaker meeting on Sunday and introduce them during cake and coffee afterwards. Quakers exist still in just about every city and we're the ones who've talked about war resistance and the draft continually since the summer of 1973 (around when the last draft ended, despite the fact that it ended). Quakers are in the phone book under Religious Society of Friends. Or the Unitarian Universalists, they're good for this exact same kind of project too. There are other religious sects whose primary tenets involve refusing to partake in war on the basis of Christianity. Those concerned about environmental issues will have no difficulty finding projects or organizations to work for starting Thursday. A good place to start is The important thing is to keep your mind, hands and heart busy. Keep expressing your love, creativity and dedication. Keep your energy flowing. Keep living as if you have a purpose and a mission, because you do. Keep caring, because you do. Just because Election Day has passed does not mean anything. Nothing really changes; we live in the same country at the same time on the same planet. We face all the same situations. We live the same lives with the same concerns. An election is an abstraction; life is real. Speaking of elections, however: somebody won this one, and I don't suggest anyone envy him. Just like we live on the same planet and face the same situations as we did last week, so, too, does he. Now we know what they are; now we can read the newspapers and the Internet with interest, and now we know plenty of places and ways we can help out. And hey -- remember what Kurt Vonnegut said, because it's more important than anything right now. Make love while you can. It's good for you. Kerry Concedes | Planet Waves for Nov. 3, 5:27 p.m. CET If you have not heard, it's recently come across the news wires that Kerry has called Bush and conceded the election. This is fully understandable from a political perspective; it would be nearly impossible for him to govern the country having lost or "lost" the popular vote by three million. We may have a sense of relief that we've been saved the ordeal of witnessing recounts and legal challenges. But for Bush and his minions, this is a bitter victory, won at the cost of much killing and deception. For people interested in social justice, the real work now begins. Awaiting Word | Planet Waves for Nov. 3, 4:44 p.m. CET As you've probably figured out, the Kerry campaign has a decision to make about whether to fight for Ohio's electoral votes. As I understand it, here's how it works. Essentially, the Kerry campaign has to decide whether there are enough potential Kerry votes within the 140,000 to 270,000 (the numbers are conflicting) provisional and absentee ballots to possibly clinch the state. These absentee and provisional ballots are on paper. Kerry is currently behind in Ohio by 125,000 votes, most of which were tallied electronically. So prior to a count of those paper votes beginning, apparently in 11 days under Ohio rules, there is a statistical determination to make: within those uncounted votes, can there possibly be enough to close the gap? But this creates another problem. Even if Kerry were to win Ohio and thus the election, he and Edwards would be taking office with a defeat in the popular vote of about 3 million -- some six times the margin that Bush "lost" the 2000 election by. That would be very difficult, from what you might call a moral standpoint. Even though Bush set the precedent by losing the election and then taking office, it was by a smaller margin of victory, and Bush is a different kind of person. A Kerry campaign blogger in California just wrote to me. "Over one hundred thousand votes have NOT been counted in Ohio. Bush wants to declare a victory in New Mexico where the margin is less than 1,000. And there are voting machine problems in Iowa preventing full tabulation of the vote." Beneath this whole issue is the involvement of Diebold Corp., which makes paperless voting machines. Its president is Ward O'Dell, a good friend of the president. I have not heard this word mentioned on television today, whether BBC, CNN or CNBC, the only three channels I have available. Kerry is under a lot of pressure from the media to concede the election and "get it over-with." There is always a big move to "get back to normal" after a disruptive series of events like this. BBC is now reporting how well the financial markets are doing under the apparent clear Bush victory. I say that unless we demand that there be no winner until every vote counts, we're kidding ourselves about voting in the first place. Beyond Ohio | Planet Waves for Nov. 3, 10:00 a.m. CET | By Eric Francis We may ask the question: what happened? But the real question is what will happen now? I don't mean with the election. I mean with the United States, and as a result, with the world. At this point, the outcome of the election seems fairly clear. Everything is going to hinge on Ohio, to the extent that this is possible. That may take a while to resolve. And as promised by Wade O'Dell -- Ohio resident, top-level Bush fundraiser, and president of Diebold (the company that makes electronic voting machines) -- the 20 electoral votes of Ohio will probably go to Bush. It seems logical to concede the election on behalf of John F. Kerry. But as one of the old Hollywood greats once remarked of the movie business, "Nobody knows anything." In some respect with this election, everyone was wrong. Voter turnout, projected at up to 120 million, fell far short of that. Everyone, down to Jimmy Breslin, was off the mark somehow; he published statistics this week which showed that when polls were conducted of cellular phone users were factored in, Bush would be crushed. Young voters, Breslin said, would vote against the draft, and he went to bed after his last day of his long career feeling confident. Those who said that because Gore won the popular vote last time, Kerry could not lose it this time -- or it would be too close to call -- were wrong. If you believe the current numbers, Bush won the popular vote not only by a few solid percentage points, but by an actual majority of voters -- this, for the first time in many years. This majority is the alleged cure for Bush's rip-off of Florida last time, his loss of the popular vote, and his metamorphosis from moderate to aggressive conservative activist. Bush's margin of victory in the popular vote was more than he managed to pull out in the official polls, the whole cell phone issue notwithstanding. So the polls, even though they showed a slight Bush edge, were wrong -- and we don't know how or why. And it seems that the millions who protested the war allegedly made no difference. The countless lies told about the war allegedly made no difference. The 100,000 murdered Iraqis allegedly made no difference. The 1,100 dead American soldiers allegedly made no difference. The fact tat Osama is not Saddam allegedly did not make a difference. The fact that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks allegedly did not make a difference. The fact that the administration was warned of the Sept. 11 attacks allegedly made no difference. The millions of newly unemployed allegedly made no difference. The trillions of dollars in debt that our country has been plunged into allegedly made no difference. The tax cuts for the very richest Americans allegedly made no difference. But all the votes in the world cannot turn night to day, or make a lie into the truth. And no matter what anyone thinks, these issues and the people who care about them do make a difference. These issues don't change and they're not going away. The government officials who created them can drop the red, white and blue balloons on cue, and they can claim the record number of votes in history, but they still have to come back to work and face the same issues. They can turn around and blame the people who voted them in -- this used to be called a mandate -- but they still have to account for their actions. Remember that Richard Nixon was elected by a massive landslide -- he won 49 states in the 1972 election! -- six months AFTER the Watergate scandal became news. And he did not resign until the summer of 1974, after his entire top staff had resigned in disgrace, and many of were convicted of crimes. So what the president does, in fact does makes a difference. The fact that a constant and relentless drilling-in of fear was used to sell Americans on George W. Bush makes a difference, because in a sense if he is sworn in on Jan. 20, he will be compelled to deliver what he has promised, and to experience its effects. This will leave the people who understand something about fear and its effects to deal with that -- because those who are responding to fear, abandoning hearts and minds in doing so, are in a very real sense helpless. We all know the nation is deeply divided, but few have said exactly on what issue. I assure you, the issue is not political. It is true that all the votes have yet to be counted in Ohio -- and that the uncounted ones are provisional ballots, cast on paper. And it is true that there may be something very wrong in that state, and many others where Wade O'Dell's equipment was put to work. It seems unlikely that John Kerry will roll over and go down like Al Gore did. And yet it seems that without a clear majority of the popular vote, or clear evidence of election fraud, he has little in the way of a moral argument. Yet the "other half," that 49% portion of the country (at minimum) that has voted against Bush and his Iraqi holocaust, is a lot more concerned than it was four years ago because it now sees the results of what has happened from the theft of the 2000 forward. And for these people, the work is just beginning. The real discussions with our neighbors have yet to happen. It will be very interesting to see what comes out in the wash between now and November 14, and how John F. Kerry handles himself -- and how we, whose lives this election is all about, face the challenge of living consciously. The world is in a very delicate state right now, and becoming aware of this fact is a point of beginning, not a victory and not the end. We who know where we tread need to make every step count. Kerry Pounces On Antarctica | Planet Waves for Nov. 3, 5:31 a.m. CET John Kerry has won Antarctica by a more than three-to-one margin over George Bush -- at least at the huge McMurdo Station, the largest of three bases on the world's southern-most continent. According to our Antarctic source, Nicole, who called into Planet Waves editorial headquarters in Paris just before 5 am CET, Kerry received 66.8% of the the vote, Bush received 19.5% and Nader received 6.4%. The other votes were not accounted for. About 900 people (including a bunch of project managers who generally don't stick around for the cold weather) inhabit the base during the summer, and 452 of them voted -- about half of the population. Seasons in the southern hemisphere are opposite what they are in the northern hemisphere, hence, it is springtime there. CNN has projected that it is currently autumn in the northern hemisphere. There are two other American stations in Antarctica, the South Pole Station and the Palmer Station, though they are much smaller. Vote counts were unavailable for those stations. I forgot to ask Nicole whether the fact that Antarctica is melting influenced the vote. It probably did, just guessing. This was my first phone call ever from down there. Antarctica has no electoral votes, one of the few things it has in common with many other places. More on McMurdo Station here: Neptune Alert | Planet Waves for Nov., 3, 2004 The vigil continues here in the 5th arrondisement. For the first time I'm experiencing some kind of collective relief that the Dumya era might -- just might -- be ending. However, this might be a good time to interject with a bit of astrological reality. I am watching the projected projections of the potential electoral votes climb for the candidates; sleazebag analysts are polluting the minds of viewers; all of nothing is being analyzed to death. And the Sun is square Neptune. Whenever Neptune is involved in an astrological equation, there is reason for caution; this is sign that says slippery when wet. The square makes it especially slippery. The square is from Scorpio to Aquarius, and as I've written before, the square from the Sun to Neptune in Aquarius -- the sign of technology, and of the public -- strongly suggests the potential for fraud. I don't think this is going to be over any time soon. We are watching CNN and the problems in Ohio, which have been developing through the week, are continuing to mount. The state's electoral procedures have been in and out of federal court all week; at issue was a Republican plan to disqualify certain voters on the spot when they voted. This was knocked down by two lower court judges and then upheld by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals; the voters can be disqualified. Now, BBC is reporting that there are lines of people outside polling places in that state, even after the official closing hour; the governor wants to shut down voting; but judges have said the polls have to stay open. Meanwhile, I am aware that there are contested voting machines in Ohio, which will likely be a separate challenge. Ohio has a lot of electoral votes, 18, and is the home of the Diebold corporation, which has made a lot of those controversial touch-screen voting machines that don't print receipts. The corporation's president, Wade O'Dell, is a good friend of Bush and long ago promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes. The Neptune square to the Sun is in the natal chart for the election; the whole process is under its influence; and this aspect will continue to form for the next approximately 36 hours, perfecting on Thursday. And as I have explained elsewhere and on this week's Q and A column on Cainer.com, we have a series of eclipses of planets by the Moon between Nov. 9 and 14 that this whole situation seems poised to tip or pivot on. As hopeful as I would like to be, I think this is going to be a long game. I don't predict a clear winner yet, but that's not rocket science. Except to say that I am pretty certain that, in any event, Kerry will get more actual votes in total. Back in a bit. 3:09 am CET Reporting from France | More from Nov. 2, Paris Watching BBC-World, holding vigil. It's close to midnight here. Reports over in Europe are that there has been the highest voter turnout in 40 years. There are lots of scenes of long lines at the polls. I don't think this is any kind of show of popularity for war. Yaz Boland is sitting here on watch with me and she's insisting that all those people coming out voting are the same ones who marched against the war in February of 2003 and at the Republican National Convention. I can tell you that if I were a campaign manager for the Democrats, I would feel very good about the turnout. I didn't see any massive pro-war marches outside the Democratic National Convention. We are watching a BBC segment about families who have lost children to hostage situations, and it's obvious that this would be considered "biased journalism" on any American television station. After all, it's real evidence of pain being caused by this war. Ah, somebody changed the channel. Now we're watching a CNN report live from here in Paris that says 70% of the French want boot Bush. And they reported that Kerry won by a two to one margin in the straw poll at Harry's Bar, where Americans gather to watch the election results come in. The question is: these people currently in power have shown they will stop at nothing. What makes us think they're going to play by the rules now? Let's keep watching. There's a long way to go, and a long way to the Libra occultations of Venus, Mars and Jupiter by the moon that happen next week. My current prediction is that whatever happens tips on that. Back in a bit. Any readers who feel like calling -- you're welcome to drop a ring to 001 33 1 4329 0834. That's the exact number to dial from the United States. The Cell Phone Issue | Planet Waves for the evening of Nov. 2 Well, leave it to Jimmy Breslin to dig out this little bit of news. It seems that those Bush-Kerry polls, which have been remarkably, well, the word is flat, as the nation and the world have plunged into disaster, were missing something: the people who use cell phones. Standard polling, because it uses demographic statistics in its sampling (age, location, income bracket, to name a few factors) leaves out cellular phones. You never know where someone is going to pick up their phone, so that doesn't fit the old rules of statistics. In the article you'll read below, the legendary Jimmy Breslin, a columnist whose name is associated with New York and the word "newspaper," got hold of the stats. If you sample only cell phone users, John Kerry crushes Bush in this election like a paper cup. That's a lot of voters -- and a lot of people have cell phones: there are 170 million in use in the US at last count. This is a perfect example of old paradigm thinking versus new: a massive factor being left out of the discussion. Now this is good news, on the one hand, if you support Kerry. It is equally infuriating because for the past God knows how many weeks, we've been told the election was neck and neck. This may have made people who favor responsible use of your tax dollars, sane use of the military and coherent sentences work a little harder. But it also pumped up rather unnaturally the credibility of King George II for those who need to know they are voting with the herd. I leave the rest to Jimmy. But it turns out that this is his last regular article after a career that must span 40 years. New York will not be the same without his regular contributions to Newsday. Jimmy -- thanks for teaching the rest of us how to do journalism. You know we love you. Why Kerry will beat Bush | By Jimmy Breslin I will be back with an evening edition in a little while. But this just came in from one of the Planet Waves champion news readers... the last regular column by the legendary Jimmy Breslin. November 2, 2004 One day last May, I assigned the election to John Kerry. I said it early, and often. As I looked more, I saw that it shouldn't even be close. I said that in this space more than once. Now I am so sure that I am not even going to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for I must rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue project. Besides, if I was up, so many people, upon seeing every word I said of this election coming true on television in front of them, would be kissing my hands and embarrassing me with outlandish praise. So I go to bed with total confidence. I will get up and stroll to other meadows. I invented this column form. I now leave, but will return here for cameo appearances. And I leave today as the only one in America who from the start was sure John Kerry would win by a wide margin. Let me tell you why. This began when I noted that it was obvious, but overlooked that George Bush had lost the last election by 500,000 votes. He was close enough in Florida for it to be stolen in court. The reason he was close was that Ralph Nader had 125,000 votes in Florida, most of whom would have voted for Gore. Anybody who had voted for Gore four years ago would never vote for Bush. So Bush started this campaign behind 500,000 votes. Nor is there Nader. He has reduced himself to being the village idiot. When I figured in the people shocked by the dead bodies of young Americans in Iraq, and brutalized here by unemployment, there was no way to make the election seem close. I said this in this newspaper several times. Each time as I was typing, the words of the late great Harry (Champ) Segal kept shouting in my ear: "Go naked on this one!" When published reports showed a million new voter registrations in Florida and about 800,000 in Ohio, I made the election a lock. They were not rushing out for George Bush. And these poll takers were ignoring them. Any part of a million votes in Florida, most of them of color, would sweep the state. The reporters said the nation was divided. They were afraid to say anything that might upset this view. You've been had by the news industry. Not once, even after the first debate when Kerry scored a technical knockout, did they take a step and call it as it happened. "War of Words" was the closest they could come. Finally, one thing kept clawing at you. Cell phones. Long I have wondered how many there were. Everybody I know, smart people, politicians, news directors, thought that there were, oh, 40 million or so. I call the cell phone institute in Washington last Sept. 12. They told me that there were 165 million cell phones in use in the United States, That is 165,000,000. One month later, I asked again. It was up to 170 million -- 170,000,000. Yes, a great number also had land lines. But of this 170 million cell phone users there were 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, and these people usually have no other phones. That had to be Kerry. Not one cell phone in the United States had been reached by a political poll. These old-line poll takers don't know who cell phone users were or where they lived. So you were getting CBS/New York Times polls proclaimed as most important and real. One hundred seventy million cell phones and you don't poll one of them. The polls they are pushing at you in the news magazines, on the networks, in the big papers, are such cheap, meaningless blatant lies, that some of these television stations should have their licenses challenged. They have a poll number for every one of the "battleground states." I'm awaiting the casualty list from Gettysburg. Then a night or so ago, somebody finally tried a poll of cell phone users between the ages of 18 and 29. John Zogby conducted the survey in conjunction with Rock the Vote and the results showed Kerry at 55 percent and Bush at 40. Then the Kerry people ran their own poll, which took a lot of work. It was the first time they had reached any cell phone users. The result was Kerry 59 and Bush 39. Then I saw on television yesterday, and I hate to single him out, but he singled himself out, this fellow Bill Schneider on CNN and he is their election expert and he said that cell phones didn't mean anything. He's right. They didn't mean anything in 1950. Oh, but these young people never vote, the tales read. They will this time, and because of a one-word issue. Draft. Every time Bush, or one of these generals he has, stands up and says there will be no military draft, everybody young figures this means there probably will be one by January, which will put them in the real battlegrounds. They rush to register, and then today they go to the polls to vote. Thanks for the use of the hall. ------------ This is Jimmy Breslin's last regular column for Newsday. He will write from time to time. Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc. How King George the First Got In | Planet Waves for Nov. 2 Gather round everyone and listen to your old Uncle Eric tell a little story from when he was a boy. It's a scary story, so I'm telling it during the day. And I know you may not believe it, but I do value my reputation as a journalist, even if I happen to tell tall tales from my fishing trips and African hunting adventures back in the old days. When the Reagan/Bush ticket was running in 1980, there was a situation involving 52 hostages in Iran. At this point in history, Iran and Iraq were one another's enemies, and at war. Iraq was good friends with the United States. Now, stop giggling, kids, this is a serious story. Iraq was our friend because they were a country not run by Islamic fundamentalists (who we have to hate), and because Saddam Hussein was on the CIA payroll -- a federal employee. Sorry, I don't have copies of his paycheck stubs, but this fact is very easy to research and is well known and acknowledged, except of course in U.S.A. Today. Iran -- where the dues wear turbans -- was our official enemy. In fact, the turban dudes were such enemies that we funded Iraq's war against them; after all, the enemy of our enemy is our friend, and we had to help Saddam defeat the mean fundamentalists. So we sold Saddam lots of weapons, including biological and chemical weapons (which is, in truth, now George W. Bush could claim that Saddam had them -- the U.S. and the UK sold them, but we're ahead of ourselves a bit -- see footnote below). So Iran had these 52 hostages (taken in 1979), held in the United States Embassy, and a guy named Jimmy Carter was president. As long as the hostages were held, it looked very bad for him, even though (just like with hostages today) there was very little he could do about it. What happened next was the Reagan/Bush campaign made a little deal with the Iranians. It went like this. You keep those hostages through the election, and when we make the other guy look like a sissy and win the election, we'll give you all the weapons you need in your war against your enemy, Iraq! And that, basically, is what happened. Reagan/Bush campaign ran on a platform promise of "no arms for hostages" at the same time as they were trading arms for hostages, and for the election itself. (Do these people ever just get elected? Um, no.) We all know about the story of those guns sold to the Iranians. The name Ollie North is familiar to most people. He was a lieutenant colonel working on the National Security staff. Remember his pretty secretary, Fawn Hall? Remember his devoted boss, John Poindexter, who used to have Condi Rice's job? Well, they were responsible for making sure that the Ayatollah Khomeini got all those weapons, secretly of course, in the war against our friend and his enemy Saddam Hussein. It was a dirty trick, and a betrayal of the trust of the American people, and of Saddam, but it worked. In fact it worked so well that Ollie North had a great idea. Let's take the profits from these illegal arms sales and, since nobody can find out about them anyway, we'll buy guns for our friends down in Central America, the Contras. The Contras were a swept-together band of unemployed mercenaries that were gathered together by the CIA. Their job was to kill civilians in Nicaragua, to scare them and make sure that a constant state of war eroded the support for the democratically elected president, Daniel Ortega (that worked great). It was a federal crime to fund these guys; something called the Boland Amendment prohibited it. But we're talking about a secret operation, not legitimate brutal killing. This funding went on until 1987; the Contra terrorists took aim at farming cooperatives, schools, and hospitals -- soft targets that could not shoot back. Then one day it came out. This was called the Iran-Contra scandal. I am the last person on Earth who remembers the story. Ollie North and John Poindexter were fired by Ronald Reagan, who said he had "bitter bile in my throat," so angry was he upon hearing about this. Of course, Ollie had briefed him regularly -- but the "president never knows" and so Reagan was protected. This scandal, which represents the very roots of how Reagan and Bush took office, and how they maintained their office, was the big mar on their administration. Still, George was elected in 1988, and then decided that his old friend and employee (who he betrayed), Saddam Hussein, was the new enemy. In that move, Saudi Arabia became our friends. The rest, as you know, is history. Okay, that was just a scary story. Now, please don't be too frightened to vote! PS, the end result of this was that for 10 years, Iraq was pounded by attacks from Iran; then in 1991, the United States led a massive war, and bombing of Iraq continued all the way through the Clinton administration, which left Iraq without a pot to pee in, much less water to drink. Then King George II ascended to the throne... ---- Here is a bit about the United States and England selling weapons to Iraq. URGENT SPECIAL REQUEST: Please switch your bookmark for this site to ----------------- Strange Attractors | Planet Waves, evening of Nov. 1 Nancy, my astrology client from earlier tonight, is a student of something called Systems Theory. As she uses the concept, this is an attitude toward learning or an approach to reality that applies a more complex understanding the situations we observe and experience in life -- including the life of the planet itself. It is, kind of, the exact opposite to linear thought. Astrology is an example of a complex systems approach to reality. While it's not always used this way, it is very easy to put it to work, generate a lot of data, and then take an approach to understanding reality that defies normal logic. Not logic, rather conventional logic. Even in the most basic astrology, the number of variables is astonishing, and then the whole thing is spun like ten or twenty roulette wheels within time, it all stops somewhere -- and then you have your chart. In systems like Gaia (the Earth) or your chart, there is an intelligent but seemingly unintentional reality that emerges and takes on a life of its own. To grasp this, to take advantage of it and to see it working, we will need to go past Enlightenment ideas like empiricism (linear statistics). For example, the polls between Bush, Kerry, Nader and "other" are basically deadlocked at 49% to 49% to 1% to 1%. The polls may differ slightly and change over time, but they don't for example account for how many people change their mind on a given day. Two people switching sides would cancel one another out, but that data is valuable, and completely lost in the oversimplified results we get. Switching topics a bit, in the Systems Theory of knowledge, there exists something called a Strange Attractor. Hopefully I'm not plastering the concept with mud in my ignorance, but as I understand it -- applied to social theory rather than pure physics -- it is first of all something that shows up. That something, which would normally be perceived as negative or disruptive, then takes on a life of its own, and everything goes in a whole new direction. Instead of seeing that something as an enemy, you can instead choose to see it as an opportunity; a choice point; an emergent. A big example is the Vietnam War becoming a power source for social progress, and sparking the environmental movement, and many other movements. I assure you that President Johnson didn't plan it that way. Nancy called me back about an hour after our session with a little story. She had just returned from Democratic Headquarters in Carmel, California. Apparently, MoveOn.org had attempted to get 100 volunteers to canvass and watch the polls in Nevada, a deeply divided state -- more liberal in the cities (Vegas, Reno), conservative and often fundamentalist in the rural areas. (It''s also the home of Burning Man.) Anyway, when the MoveOn organizers got to the meeting point in Nevada, 900 people had showed up to do the work. There is a lot of energy being raised by the current events of the world, negative as those events are. True, it's all a bit sluggish. People are a little rusty coming out of their shells and looking at one another's faces, but they soon remember how it's done. Phenomenal moments of protest can be separated from one another by 18 months (the F-15 peace protests in 2003 and the massive rallies in Manhattan at the Republican National Convention). But the energy is rising; awareness is rising; people are already voting by the millions; one of my best friends is among the thousands of attorneys going to the polls to keep an eye on things. I have never seen such good journalism in all my years in this field. People are getting involved with life. This is incredibly refreshing, a sign that the planet (and in particular American society) has a pulse. Nancy's site is: The Eve of the Revolution | Monday, Nov. 1, 2004 Planet Waves by Eric Francis ONE way or another, today is the eve of the revolution. Whether we like politics or not, or believe it to be remotely meaningful or personally important, we have reached the end of one particular road, and the edge of one particular experience of life, and have arrived at the point where another begins. Tomorrow is perhaps the day we will vote out of office a man who stole the presidency, pulled off his "moderate" mask and screwed over the United States and the world. Or it's the day we will vote to support someone we think is the great savior of democracy, the brave warrior, regular guy and the enemy of our enemies. Or it's the day we may make a real decision and choose a candidate who can at least speak in sentences and think for himself. Or it may turn out to be the day we discover our electoral system is such a mess we can never trust it again. But any way you look at it, this is indeed the eve of the revolution -- somebody's revolution: maybe not mine or yours, but a day on which history turns and never turns back. Whether we look at Tuesday's election as a referendum on the criminal, vicious holocaust being waged against the people of Iraq, or as the choice between "faith-based" and "reality-based" existence (a distinction so kindly explained recently by a senior Bush administration official), we stand on the eve of revolution. A lot has changed in the United States and the world around it during the past four years. We have seen how much can change in how little time. But it can get worse. It can get worse, for example, because at least in the current president's first term, the Nov. 2, 2004 election was always on the horizon. There was an inevitable reality checkpoint coming, and political strategists like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney knew that. Now we're at that point. This is our chance for a review, with the power to dismiss. Imagine what could happen were there no such limit during the next four years, because for those in power, there's nothing to lose; the administration's actions will never subjected to direct review by the people again -- at least not by election. Perhaps consider whether there will be any democracy at all left after four more years under the present insanity. In the midst of the election controversy of November 2000, The Onion portrayed Bill Clinton, bedecked in medals, dressed in white and wearing dark glasses, as having declared himself president for life. The Onion's jokes never stray far from the truth. Though there are many frightening and corrupt aspects to this election -- such as voting without actual ballots or receipts, the ongoing exclusion of blacks, poor people and expatriated Americans from the process, and a population addicted to sugar and mindless television -- many issues have been forced to the surface of consciousness. Yes, the Swift Boat campaign ads are disgusting, but they are a sideshow. Politics and policy have become the actual focus. We are hearing high commanders of the military, retired and sitting, say that the Iraq strategy was flawed from before the beginning, that we were lied to, that we took a big diversion from the real war on terrorism, and that now, as a result, we are heading down a very dark road. This kind of honesty is truly amazing, and it's even being reported -- but it seems that little of it is getting past people's fear. Or it's creating fear; reality can be scary, they keep telling me. With all due respect, those who believe the United States got rid of Saddam Hussein because he was a bad man, or because he was in cahoots with Islamic terrorists, or somehow associated with Sept. 11, have not done their homework. Devote one afternoon to reading about this issue and you will see. In fact, you will be shocked at the extent of the deception -- and at how readily available good information is if you work Google for a few minutes. In recent months, George W. Bush has had to explain his lies again and again, fumbling for words and even a coherent thread of thought. Lately, we've heard what Bush has to say about his war, his tax cuts, about human rights and civil rights. It is quite stunning when the commander-in-chief looks like he should be under psychiatric care and still cannot pronounce the word "nuclear." What a moment, when we saw when Dick Cheney asked about the $7 billion Halliburton contract for Iraq in front of tens of millions of viewers, and all he could do was grin. We have also heard another point of view, that of a senator who has been involved in national politics for more than 20 years -- taking the lead on some impressive issues that, unfortunately, don't really work for TV (exposing the cocaine-Contra connection, for example). This is a person who fought in Vietnam, rather than went AWOL. Someone who seems educated enough and distinguished enough to meet with other world leaders. Someone who, as a young man, had the conscience to stand up against Vietnam when he figured out it was obviously wrong, and got his message out far and wide. Though tomorrow may seem in many respects like another ordinary Tuesday, we stand at a parting of the ways, with a choice before us: a choice of what path to take toward the future. True, this is always the case. We make many decisions that turn out to be monumentally important, and often they are as subtle as deciding which of two ways to come home from work. Today, it will finally be obvious to anyone who looks and feels. It will be obvious to anyone who studies George W. Bush's face as he speaks, and watches his facial expressions go by as he makes his various incoherent, hateful and blatantly dishonest statements. Listen to the tone of his voice. There is nothing there at all. It is certainly obvious to anyone who understands that the next president will name three or four justices to the Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice. Many of the federal judges Bush has nominated in the past four years have been genuine extremists, with several, according to Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com, even going so far as to object to the Bill of Rights being part of the Constitution. Appointments to the Supreme Court are the one way a president can ensure his legacy continues into the next generation or two, and right now the Conservative Wish List is being worked, big-time. Do we want to continue a legacy of the government screwing over every constituency except his own, the one he calls the "haves and the have mores"? Bush has ravaged government programs that support children, the elderly, and -- most disgusting of all, while trumpeting his support the troops rhetoric -- have made life extremely difficult for military families in these already excruciatingly painful times. I am amazed that there's not more anger at this last fact. Yet whether the next few steps are taken blindly or not, at this point it's impossible to go straight ahead, each as individuals, or as a society. We will choose one path or another. As a result, this is a time when many people will split off (voluntarily or not) from the mainstream and go a different way than the seeming majority, or the majority around you. You may need to make a decision about what you value that differs from what your husband, parents or friends think. We stand on the cusp of when we, Americans -- who run much of the world, consume most of its resources, and give so little back -- can consciously acknowledge that the Earth hangs in the balance of our actions and choices. The global atmosphere is heating up, and nobody knows how long that can continue before the ecosystem breaks down. We have for the past four years watched the federal government treat global warming like it's a joke. It is not a joke, yet to set that right, we need to begin taking action now -- and pray that it works. At the same time, we can now make the most conscious choice ever about whether we favor a life of preemptive war or premeditated peace on our tiny little planet. Are people sick of war yet? Or for many, is it an addiction? Symbolically and in reality, we are not only choosing what kind of person we want as our leader. We are making a decision that is based on our ability to distinguish whether someone is actually a man of character. We are choosing who we identify with as the true representative of humanity. We are choosing between rage and reason. Between revenge and cooperation. Between irrationality and intelligence. Between isolating ourselves and telling our most precious allies, France, Germany and the United Nations, to fuck off, or rather, working within the world community -- a critical task right now, and a difficult one even when people have their heads on straight. We are choosing between a way of existence in which facts don't exist or have no meaning (that would officially be called "faith-based"), and a one where we take conscious steps and look at the path before us before we step ("reality-based"). We are deciding what we mean by "we." I write this realizing there are many people who don't view what has gone down during the past four years as being particularly unhealthy, just as scary. Most people's lives were completely untouched by the Sept. 11 attacks, the PATRIOT Act, and the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq -- or so they think. The slow bleeding of resources has hit home with many people, though it's true that the vast majority fail to make the connection. Those million-dollar bombs could hire a lot of teachers in your town, pay for extended unemployment benefits, or provide better health care. Instead, our country invests almost all of its resources making war, and the personal corporations of the current president and vice president profit directly. This is so disgusting I can barely believe I'm typing these words. For many of us, particularly those who carry unresolved anger and violence from childhood, the game of Attack and Strike Back is perfectly normal. It even feels good. There is simple justice and logic to it; a sweaty, angry sense of self-satisfaction. Let's get the bastards. But the world is too fragile for that right now; we are too fragile for that, and besides, it doesn't work. For many people who feel that one religion is superior to another, what is going on makes perfect sense. For those who feel that one race is better than another, we are living in fabulous times, when the money that would have gone to educate our children -- millions of dollars per hour -- is used to kill someone else's children, who happen to be of a different race and color. For those who deal with the fear of death by hastening it, these are beautiful, even exuberant days. For those who's personal mythology involves the Apocalypse, this is more exciting than a Beatles reunion. But then there is the stench in the air. It's the reek of greasy smoke you can't discuss with your neighbors, because they'll deny it, or it will upset them. It is the stench of death in Iraq. But it's also the fear of everything: the mortgage overdue, the empty fridge, foreclosure looming, no health care, your child having problems at school that you have no idea how to deal with. Violence and believing lies are not the answer. There are solutions available, but they don't begin or end with bombing and killing people. For those who have the luxury of thinking beyond their own needs, there is the fear of a world that loathes us and is terrified of the judgment of our leaders, with good reason. There is the fear of losing civil liberties so fast we can't keep track of it. There is the fear of the planet striking back, fear of cancer as a result of environmental pollutants, the fear of our children inheriting a world not worth living in. To live today is to live with a lot of fear, but violence does not make it better. There can be healing, but we have to invest our psychic energy into healing, loving and creation first. The American public sometimes feels like a cowed and terrified battered wife, afraid to escape the tyrant; it seems she chooses to endure the terrors she knows over the unknown terrors he's convinced her only he can protect her from. The thing is, in some places, uncomfortable discussions are happening. Millions -- millions of Americans -- protested the war in Iraq, even before it started. Many people are aware that there are serious problems facing the world, many of which have their source in the United States, and I know many who are willing to change their lives to help stop those problems and create a better life for all of us. In actual fact, we live in a society where the power of our government originates with the people, and is delegated up to the government. Uncle Sam does not give us our rights; rather, we give the government its privileges. That's one of the more interesting things about the United States constitution. We are a republic, not a monarchy. This is not flowery talk, but a fact of civics. That power may be difficult to access once it's been assigned, and (as has happened quite a lot lately) it can be stolen and used against us. But in truth, the authority of government comes from us, though nobody is going to return it to us on a powder puff. Bono, talking about the song Helter Skelter, said it well: Charlie Manson stole this one from the Beatles. We're stealing it back. ++ ---- Published by Planet Waves Digital Media All rights reserved. Copyright 2004. 1,02 For an email copy of this, drop a note to francis@planetwaves.net Reprint rights extended in all media, with notice and credit to Eric Francis. It's Oh So Quiet | Sunday, Oct. 31 The news remains fairly quiet just 36 hours before the election. It seems the PR strategists who run the world (I'm one of those people who believe they exist, but beware, I also ask comets for advice) have planned a normal-seeming election campaign. No Code Red; nothing spectacular; nothing to call attention to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. That's a good thing, I think, because we don't need any more bad news in the world and also because -- at this point -- the less manipulated this election looks, the better it is for everyone. Let's keep the focus on those ballot machines and the legal process that will very likely follow. There is something to be said for all of us acting and voting in earnest, and experiencing this with a calm state of mind. The most interesting bit of news that's got out has been the video tape of Osama bin Laden, which appeared Friday. I am finding it entertaining how he's being turned into the subject for "three minutes of hate." However, he is worth listening to. It's always good to know what your enemy is thinking. Speaking to the American people, bin Laden said in a translation by CNN: "I wonder about you. Although we are ushering the fourth year after 9/11, Bush is still exercising confusion and misleading you and not telling you the true reason. Therefore, the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated." This should send chills down the spine of Americans. He is saying that Bush is still creating the same situations in the Middle East that led to the Sept. 11 attacks, and skewing the reasons why they happened -- and thus leaving the United States vulnerable. In response to Bush's claim that the terrorists hate freedom, Osama pointed out that Sweden was not attacked. Osama, a former CIA operative against the USSR, says his enmity against the United States goes back to its support for Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when towers in Lebanon were destroyed. "As I was looking at those towers that were destroyed in Lebanon, it occurred to me that we have to punish the transgressor with the same -- and that we had to destroy the towers in America so that they taste what we tasted, and they stop killing our women and children." It gets more interesting. "We found no difficulties in dealing with the Bush administration, because of the similarities of that administration and the regimes in our countries, half of which are run by the military and half of which are run by monarchs. And our experience is vast with them. "And those two kinds are full of arrogance and taking money illegally. "The resemblance started when [former President George H.W.] Bush, the father, visited the area, when some of our own were impressed by America and were hoping that the visits would affect and influence our countries. "Then, what happened was that he was impressed by the monarchies and the military regimes, and he was jealous of them staying in power for tens of years, embezzling the public money without any accountability. And he moved the tyranny and suppression of freedom to his own country, and they called it the Patriot Act, under the disguise of fighting terrorism. And Bush, the father, found it good to install his children as governors and leaders." Whatever we may think of bin Laden as a philosopher, we may want to take into account some of his ideas about military tactics. He comments on the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center -- though notice he does not claim credit for the attack on the Pentagon, which appears to be unrelated to the attacks in New York: "We agreed with the leader of the group, Mohammed Atta, to perform all attacks within 20 minutes before [President George W.] Bush and his administration were aware of what was going on. And we never knew that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his people in the two towers to face those events by themselves when they were in the most urgent need of their leader. "He was more interested in listening to the child's story about the goat rather than worry about what was happening to the towers. So, we had three times the time necessary to accomplish the events." Then he adds: "Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked." We should keep in mind that the bin Laden family was involved as investors in the Carlyle Group, Papa George's company. Astonishingly, Osama's brother was meeting with the corporate board in Washington as the attacks happened. More than 100 members of the bin Laden family, along with many other Saudis, were allowed to leave the United States in the days following the attacks when no other planes could fly. And the U.S. made no special effort to track Osama down. It is very interesting that more than three years after the attacks, he can get on American television and pre-empt the news with the power of a sitting president -- after $200 billion spent, 1,100 American and 100,000 Iraqi lives lost. I can tell you this: 99% of what we think we know about Sept. 11 is wrong. I encourage all of my readers to read the full transcript of the bin Laden video. Read the primary source documents when you can, and notice how little is actually quoted in most news stories. We will be distributing it to the Political Waves list as well. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/bin.laden.transcript/ As your reward for tuning into Planet Waves tonight, you may click here. http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/contentPlay/shockwave.jsp?id=this_land&track=0&ratingBar=off Catch you Sunday. Happy Halloween. By the way, I have just the article for this time of year, posted a few years ago to StarIQ.com. It's called Unbroken Chain and it's the story of Halloween. http://www.stariq.com/pagetemplate/article.asp?PageID=1670 Not Too Late
Planet Waves for October 30, 2004 | by Eric Francis Yesterday, Planet Waves Weekly was running late. This happened for a few reasons and, as often occurs, they started to pile up on one another, culminating with our server being infiltrated by a spammer who dumped in 1,800 pieces of corrupted email that took about two hours to fix. It began with my visit to L'Observatoire de Meudon Thursday to learn something new about the Cassini Space Probe, the Huygens Titan Probe and Titan itself. This became a good [legitimately working] excuse for a rare day off, even a mid-week day off. I know some people confuse my reality with that picture of me on the beach in the south of France that you see everywhere, and think I live a life of leisure writing the occasional interpretation, but good week is one in which I get a full day off after about 60 hours. So, after a rushed session of work Thursday morning, I left the house at 10:45 with two friends, who were serving as navigator and helmsman, and headed out of the city to the observatory, and explored the cosmos known as France for the rest of the day. This is usually my day to write the Planet Waves essay. I could have written it ahead, but was not going to write the post-eclipse essay before a total lunar eclipse. I feel it's best to wait, if possible. By Thursday night I wasn't writing anything and by Friday morning I went to work on the rest of the issue (besides the horoscope). This was obviously, per editorial convention, going to be a wrap-up my of pre-election coverage, which began nearly a year ago. A reader sent in that AFP article about Indian astrologers predicting a Kerry win, and I had a good news peg to begin working off of. I wrote my piece and sent it to Tracy, who proofs and formats it before you get it. Wrote the birthday report. Then got back a proof edition of the final text, which Tracy posted online to our new mirror site. And, reading it over, I realized I had written a bad ending to all that election coverage. Basically, I said, okay, it may be a dis-aster (going against the stars) but Bush may walk off with it again. Now, I admit openly to being extremely cynical about this election, which is the result of 20 years of watching American politics with some dedication. Long before there was a second candidate, it seemed inevitable that there would be another round of election fraud, fraud to dwarf the first. I have felt fairly well weighted down, and at times crushed, by four years of horrid news one day worse than the next. I am not someone who can just ignore it, or not for long. My way of dealing with the world situation is to interact with it in some way, usually by reading, reporting and writing. But I could not get a good attitude about this election. I realize now that this had a few components. One was feeling demoralized by how Al Gore won and then threw in the towel last time. His performance in Fahrenheit 9/11 drove that home. Perhaps he was well-advised to bow out; perhaps they would have killed him had he fought. I don't know. Another factor was having no great love for any of the candidates. Howard Dean would put a little knot in my stomach (for example). But lately I have moved into an apartment with a TV and I've been using it. I've spent a lot of time watching news channels I haven't studied in years, listening to idiotic commentaries, comparing BBC to CNN, and watching the debates. And over that time, John Kerry has seemed more and more like a decent human being. You cannot usually tell from TV, but you can tell from pressure. He is under a lot of pressure, and he seems steady, clear and intelligent no matter what gets thrown at him. Good thing, too, because if he winds up president, the next four years will demand the highest level of strength and integrity -- maybe more than was demanded from any president since Lincoln, who stewarded over the Civil War, or Roosevelt, who presided over World War II. Part of my cynicism came from not being able to see a third way. That is, a way between Kerry simply winning and Bush simply stealing the election. But lately that third way has dawned on me. I expect, from reading both legal analysis and astrology charts, that there is a fight ahead. It is more than an election: it will be a legal battle and possibly a battle in the streets for control of the United States and its resources. True, in any case, the Big Boys will be in charge. But finally, under the current scenario, we have reached a moment in history where what is bad for Joe Voter is even bad for Joe Corporation. No, not Halliburton, but your average, big non-military kind of company that is feeling the same squeeze as everyone else, that needs a measure of freedom and a healthy economy to function. I speak not of the 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq as a result of the war, news of which broke this week. Recognizing that they are people is something that a lot of us here in the States struggle with. The third way is that Kerry wins; Team Bush again attempts to steal the election; and we don't let them get away with it. We fight, we scream, we email, we call, we march, we yell, we fax our senators and the Supreme Court, we argue with our neighbors, we get real, we feel the passion and the anger, and ultimately we don't let it go down, and if perchance the election is stolen, its stolen after a fight we all remember well and keep going with. And as it happens, I figured out that this was the ending that I wanted while yesterday's edition was moments away from going out, sparked by a reader who just happened to Instant Message me at the moment I was going over the final text. I read to the end and thought: Hey, that's not the ending I want!! As a writer this is an important moment. I am not saying to you that how I end an astrology essay determines the fate of anything. But it is my way of stating clearly what I want and need, and being open to accept that -- even if it seems a bit unreasonable. It's my way of voting for the reality that I want. I am learning how important that is. I am not much of a baseball fan these days, but I found this article by Will Pitt to be really touching. It's callled "Believe." Also -- I want to thank Tracy Delaney, my amazing web assistant, for programming this instantly-updating blog from scratch, and for making many other changes to the site that are slowly appearing (like that cool little PW logo that appears in the subject header, rollover links, and many other improvements). Tracy, THANK YOU. Hello subscribers, Planet Waves Weekly has gone out. Apologies for the delay and thank you for your patience. --Eric Francis Attention subscribers -- we are experiencing a listserver problem, so Planet Waves Weekly Friday edition delivery by email has been delayed. Please check http://planetwavesweekly.com and log in for your edition posted to the web. Sorry for the inconvenience! We are working on the problem with our ISP right now. Here is a perfectly fine excuse to set politics aside for a moment. But not for long, of course. Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting L'Observatoire de Meudon, a space sciences center just outside Paris (near Versailles), where part of the Cassini Space Probe mission is being run. I was the guest of Dr. Athena Coustenis, a scientist who has devoted her entire career to studying Saturn's largest moon, Titan. This past Tuesday, amidst much other less interesting and much more distracting fanfare on the planet, the Cassini probe (launched in 1997 and which reached Saturn this past summer) made the closest flyby to Titan of any prior spacecraft. The photo above is from that mission, thank you to NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency for its use. Titan is of interest to astronomers and also to Earth-based scientists (people who study the atmosphere, geology and biology of Earth) because it's a relic of the condition of our planet 4 billion years ago, when the solar system is believed to have come into formation. Titan is half the size of Earth; it has plenty of gravity; and it has a dense atmosphere containing lots of nitrogen and methane (a source of carbon, which Earth life is based on). But it's way out in space, some 10 times the distance of the Sun to the Earth, so it's in deep-freeze. At the peak of daylight, Titan gets just 1% of the Sun's energy that rains on the Earth, so Titan is like a frozen specimen of the early Earth. Trippy, yes? Visiting Titan is like taking a trip back in time, and that is precisely what something called the Huygens space probe is going to do in January 2005. Huygens (pronounced hoy-gins) is a fancy little ship that will be launched from Cassini and dive into the atmosphere of Titan. During its approximately two-and-a-half hour descent to the surface, it will measure winds, study the temperature, composition and density of the atmosphere, and take thousands of photos of the sky and surface of the planet, functioning until the last moments before impact. (The story of how the light bulb that will illuminate those photos near the surface is pretty funny, but basically, scientists tested a million light bulbs to determine whether they are reliable devices, discovered that they are, then went and built their own). When it reaches the surface, there are a few possibilities for what happens next. Huygens is not equipped to make a soft landing. It will either "crash, splash or roll," as the scientific mission papers say. If it reaches the surface intact, it has just a few minutes to sample whatever material it happens to wind up in -- be it a methane lake, or a bit of ground -- and sent the data back to the main probe. It is equipped for either solid or liquid experiments. Surface work on Titan is limited by several factors. One is that the ship may not even make it onto the ground in one piece (for example, it may just crash on a flat surface or big rock). Most of its job is to sample the atmosphere and take a lot of pictures. If it does get to the surface, that is a cold place, and batteries don't function well under those conditions. And if it lands in liquid, it will sink in under three minutes. But the real limit on what can be done on the surface is that communication between Huygens and Cassini must be contained within a window of opportunity during which the smaller probe's signals can reach the larger one. Once the two are out of range, Cassini takes 16 days to orbit Saturn, and no probe at this stage of technology can last that long on the surface of Titan, which is basically a rainy, foul-smelling swamp of brutally cold oily slush. Yum. Now, as I write this, I need to pinch myself and say out loud: this is not science fiction. This is the real thing. Sitting in the observatory's cafeteria with my friends Heather and James, talking to this exuberant, curious and exceedingly friendly scientist, allowed it to feel all the more real. Dr. Coustenis (I am sure she would rather I call her Athena) is on teams for three of the experiments, two of which are on the Huygens probe. This is someone who has studied the ancient data from the Voyager mission (a Saturn flyby in the 80s) for 15 years, and she will be taking part in a mission where an actual probe is dropped to the surface of Titan. Really, I could barely sit still, I was so excited for her. Then as the cafeteria began to fill up around us, with many of the great scientific minds in France, it occurred to me, there are a lot of really smart people in this room. Most of them were smiling as they ate lunch and talked. I'll be developing this story after the election. I have LOTS of other material on Cassini, Huygens, and Titan -- with some fun side stories as well. After having lunch with Athena, I went with Heather and James to the infamous Chateau at Versailles. This is the palace of the 17th and 18th century French monarchy, and frankly it makes the White House look like a slum. More on posh slumming in America, the price of oil and the state of politics in tonight's edition. And there will be a full rundown of election-related astrology in today's Planet Waves Weekly, along with the Friday horoscope. Subscribe now and we'll give you instant access! http://www.planetwavesweekly.com/sales/home.html Catch you later. European readers: the edition will arrive late in the day, mid-day in NY and early in the Western US. Shameless Marketing
Pitch | Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 THANK YOU all for visiting Planet Waves, which will be updated here daily, twice daily and more through the peak of election news. We will be bringing you the morph of astrological, political and social viewpoints that makes Planet Waves what it is, and I'll be referring you to the best writing by other authors that we find. Planet Waves lives by the words of Hunter S. Thompson, the doctor of journalism: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." The Planet Waves project is (financially) supported entirely by subscriptions to Planet Waves Weekly, the subscriber horoscope-newsletter service we publish each Friday. This is our highest level of service; its the only place to access my weekly horoscope (which comes with a supplemental Monday horoscope and often, an extra article, too). This is the most timely, up-to-date and edgy writing I create, and, I'll say it again, it includes the weekly horoscope. As the Sun moves through each sign, I write about 5,000 words JUST on birthdays during that phase -- the weekly birthday report, which most subscribers read top to bottom. Each week as i write this thing, I realize it's worth the price of the whole subscription. If you're one of the people who is new to Planet Waves, or one who has been considering subscribing for an aeon, what can I say: how about, "Sign up and make us both happy." The newsletter is GUARANTEED. If you don't like it, we'll refund your remaining issues. You can order by phone, mail order, credit card or Pay Pal -- all the details are on this link, below. If you live in North America, you can call Chesea toll free at 877 453-8265 and she can take your order. http://www.planetwavesweekly.com/sales/home.html Speaking of which: we are the only web page that I know of that offers actual, amazing, in-person, toll-free customer service. No clicking on links and hoping somebody answers your inquiry. No doing business with companies that sort of don't exist. We are real people who work every day to serve YOU. And we love it. I'll give you one more reason to subscribe: the annual horoscope. Planet Waves does the most impressive annual horoscope project I know of. And the 2005 Annual Edition will be available to subscribers only. And another. The growth of my writing career has finally made doing personal astrological sessions an option. When I phase out doing personal consultations, the first step will be making them available to subscribers only. But the best reason to subscribe is to support Planet Waves, your one-of-a-kind source of astrojournalsm, out-on-the edge viewpoints, independent news reporting and the furriest freaks in the astrological business. Morning After Eclipse, Paris, Thurs.,
Oct. 28 This is one of those 'let's see what the day holds days', if there ever was one. True, that's every day, but the day following an eclipse is worth watching carefully. We are already in an unlikely time with strange things happening. Is it some kind of omen that the Boston Red Sox, John Kerry's home team, won the World Series for the first time in nearly a century? And on the night of an eclipse, at that? Reports are coming back that the event was magnificent. It was, unfortunately, raining in Paris. But that's the game with eclipses. Some people travel thousands of miles to witness them, then gamble on the weather. For some of those people, the clouds actually part. In any event, this morning there is the familiar post-Full-Moon drop in tension, which must feel like the sudden release of PMS. It is distinctly hormonal but it also feels gravitational and emotional; could it all be the same thing? This will be a short entry this morning. Those who are space watchers or news watchers may have noticed that Tuesday, Oct. 27 was the historic flyby of the Cassini Space Probe past Titan, the great moon of Saturn. What most people don't know is that part of the Cassini mission, a cooperative effort of the European Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA's contractor in Pasadena, California) is being run from just outside Paris at L'Observatoire de Meudon. On Thursday, after getting my Q and A text in to the editors at http://Cainer.com I will be visiting the observatory and interviewing Dr Athena Coustenis, a long-time scholar of Titan, who is in charge of three experiments on the mission, including two on the Huygens Space Probe that will be dropped from Cassini to Titan in early January. Titan is of interest to astronomers and other Earthlings because its terrestrial and atmospheric conditions are believed to be very similar to Earth's in the early years of the solar system, some 4 billion years ago. I'll have more on that interview, and a first-hand look around the laboratory and its magnificent outdoor facilities, in this space, with full coverage in Planet Waves Weekly. Planet Waves, by the way, began its journalism career with a lot of writing about the Cassini Space Probe back in 1999. Here is a reprint of one of my pieces from 1998, written that summer. A big apocalyptic, but all in good fun of course. http://www.planetwaves.net/thinking.html PS, the new chart above is accurate except for one thing -- the Grand Quintile it depicts comes with the Moon 10 degrees or so further into Taurus (see yesterday's entries). This one puts the star of the Grand Quintile into a connection with this morning's eclipse. It is connected, but not geographically like you see above. We're still looking for the perfect chart. And it may have changed before I update this blog again! -->> Subscribe! http://PlanetWavesWeekly.com/ Taurus Eclipse & Grand Quintile - Weds, Oct. 27 - Thurs., Oct. 28, 2004 As of Wednesday evening Paris time, the Moon is in the last degrees of Aries, opposite the distant planet Huya. It's an appropriate last aspect prior to a potent eclipse across the Taurus-Scorpio axis. Huya involves a mythology of rites and rituals to the dead. We are now entering the Days of the Dead, the last few days of October and the first few days of November, when the veils between the worlds are said to be the thinnest and our deceased ancestors the nearest. This is one of the High Sabbats of the Celtic calendar; its counterpart is Beltane, the celebration of springtime, abundance and fertility. I was asked by a friend when the last time eclipses came to the Taurus/Scorpio axis, and the answer is in 1994 and 1995. The last lunar eclipse in Taurus was Nov. 18, 1994, and that was a penumbral eclipse, nothing as impressive as the total eclipse overnight tonight. It was the only Taurus lunar eclipse of that whole cycle; and we would need to go back an additional nine years to find another. But this Taurus eclipse is very much upon us. If you are feeling unusual tension, unease, difficulty or experiencing intense opposition of some kind, try to take it easy and figure out a way to bide your time for the next 12 hours or so. There are sure to be some who are surfing this energy, but those who are more emotionally-centered, watery, psychically sensitive or slightly less than perfectly stable, you might be feeling the tension and heat. Later this evening, the Moon enters Taurus at 7:27 p.m. Wednesday (Paris time, six hours earlier New York time), and then the eclipse is about 8 hours away. The eclipse, an opposition between the Sun and Moon (also the Taurus Full Moon) is exact at 5:07 a.m. European Time and 11:07 p.m. Wednesday night New York time. So basically the eclipse occurs Wednesday evening Pacific time, late Wednesday night Eastern time, and early Thursday morning London and European time. Then on Thursday evening at about 7 p.m. Paris time, the Moon moves into position completing a Grand Quintile aspect, making a five-pointed star including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto. The chart for this is posted above. This will hold an effective orb for about six hours. Quintile aspects are patterns that flow. There can be unusual experiences of events opening up, breaking free and moving. Just the fact that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto are meeting in various types of quintiles is impressive. It show an unusual degree of contact between a group of planets all of which work very well together. We'll see how well they work as the problems and circumstances of our lives work themselves to a new place in the coming day or so, as new information is revealed, deadlocks broken and solutions made obvious. Much has been written about this event: http://www.harmonicconcordance.com/NewSite/AstrologicalMusings--Quintiles.htm I think that Johnny Mirehiel, who makes his interpretations, is a good astrologer -- though remember that the formulas he gives for understanding the aspects are proposals rather than final statements on the subject. More on the Quintile pattern tomorrow and in Planet Waves Weekly on Friday. -->> TO NEW READERS: My horoscopes are published in Planet Waves Weekly each Friday morning. Subscribers also receive a supplemental Monday horoscope as well. Each Friday there is a lengthy weekly birthday report which provides more than 1,000 words a week for the birthdays under the current sign, and essays on current events and astrology. To subscribe, sign up here: http://www.planetwavesweekly.com/sales/home.html Don't forget your Freedom Plugs... http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=17961 Thoughts on Awakening, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004 Paris. I woke up thinking that what's missing from the current events of the world is that this is all leading someplace positive. We live in times that are a mix of somber, stoic or sober, looked at one way, and out-to-lunch delusional, looked at another. Look at who is having all the fun. It's not really legitimate to have peace and freedom on your mind and still be celebrating. I give a lot of credit to anyone who dreams a little in this stretch of history. I know we have to fit our dreams into financial aid packages, long-term hopes, personal growth and subtle changes. It seems like the world is too messed up for anything else (besides raw corporate ambition). Yet if you want to pick a moment when we in America had reason to really freak out, turn the clock back to the 1950s when we had to get used to the notion that the atomic bomb could end everything in 15 minutes. It should have started with the first dropping of the bomb. Everyone born since this time has grown up in the nuclear shadow. We never really stop to think how this shapes our world view, our psyche, our way of life. No matter what we do, we're going to be living in this shadow, at least for the foreseeable future: likely, all our lives. So we need to bear that in mind, and in a sense dance with it. And every day we're being given a lot more to fear and we need to dance with that as well. Pushing it away won't work. As many of you know, I am a devoted student of the 1960s. I have been since the years when I edited the student magazine at SUNY Buffalo, Generation, and our suite of offices included a tiny store room full of ancient Buffalonian yearbooks. It was clear that something huge had happened in those years, many things, that the people had changed and that society had changed; events still hung in the air of the Main Street Campus, which was gradually being phased into a medical and dental school, but there were places where the spirit of the times were alive. There was a tunnel that the janitors would let us into, connecting Harriman and Norton (Squire) halls, that was covered with astonishing graffiti - with messages from other decades. I developed my curiosity in an independent study project with my American Studies professor, Michael Frisch who - in a very 1960s way - also gave me academic credit for my work as editor because he believed that it was both academically viable and a worthwhile contribution to the university community. That ethos was strong in anyone touched by America's moment of revolution and freedom. It was okay to use our resources for cooperation and for the betterment of our world. Simple. I began to form an impression off that era, which was - I assure you - every bit as intense as our own. My impression went a little like this. There was a holocaust going on called the Vietnam War. It was ripping through society with a dark energy. Many people understood it was a vicious injustice supported by nothing but lies and corporate profits. Thousands of boys were coming home dead. Remember that most of the 54,000 soldiers killed in that war were killed between 1965 and 1971, so there were something like 5,000 - 8,000 young men per year dying. Everyone was subject to the draft except those huddled on college campuses, most of whom were protesting the war. But the anti-Vietnam War movement was not just an anti-war movement. It was a vast social movement that was either building toward or including feminism, ecology, reform in education, an upsurge in the music and the arts, and many revolutions in society, government, academic thinking and the family. Upheavals are not just fun. This was also an at times terrifying, usually unstable time: John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (all of them, not coincidentally, the great liberal leaders of our century) had all fallen to assassins. Andy Warhol was attacked in 1968 but survived, dying too young 18 years later. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin - three of the most brilliant musicians of the era (and many others) - had in fairly rapid sequence died of drugs and alcohol. The stability that America had come to know, artificial as it often was, from the mid 1940s through the early 1960s, had vanished and was replaced by a nonstop social earthquake that was nearly impossible to sleep through. Some people did. But throughout it, my impression was there was the sense that we are in this together. There was an urgent sense of community. There was the belief - that's all that we need - that the people, that's us, can make changes and improve our lives by changing both ourselves and changing the structure of society at the same time. There was a sense that we need to work with powerful ideas that can shape our minds, and we need to teach and teach and teach. The astrological heart of the 1960s was VIRGO because of the Pluto-Uranus conjunction of that era: service, teaching, healing, organizing, developing the intellect. The sense today that we're not in this together, that it's 'every man for himself', is a manufactured experience. It is manufactured mainly by advertising, by economic changes that have consumed all our time, and by academic programs that have made us afraid of one another (Abstinence Only). We need to create something else, something of our own, if we want to get past it. Or, perhaps, looked at much more simply, we need to get something out of the way: the fear of contact, the fear of admitting our fear, the fear of acknowledging that something is happening that we need to deal with, and ultimately, the fear that it may be too late to put events on the planet back on a positive track. I am not saying that it is too late. I'm saying that it's natural to have that fear and we need to face that fear first, if it's in the atmosphere. That is going to take an unusual degree of honesty, an unusually safe space. I can tell you this: we have a lot more freedom than we use. Over the past 25 years that I have been witnessing current events consciously, I can see that something has been taken from us. The freedom to dream. The freedom to feel we can use our strength to create a better world. The notion that we can create something together. Yes, we're allowed to move up in the world, and we're allowed to join the rapture, and to watch television. There are better dreams and there is a lot we can offer one another, if we would only dare, and dare to receive. >> Update for evening of Oct. 26, 2004 I heard that the link to Lie Girls isn't working. Here's a new version of the same link. http://www.liegirls.com/quicktime.html ef Planet Waves Daily for the evening of Oct. 26, 2004 It's time for a little video break. This first presentation arrived via Chelsea, who got it from Via Keller, the founding illustrator of Planet Waves, who said she wishes she had thought of it. It's called Lie Girls. http://www.liegirls.com/quicktime.html. Chelsea is now casting her vote for president in Tallahassee. I have asked that her boyfriend document this spectacular event with his digital camera so that we can share it with you. While I was showing the Lie Girls video to a friend, I was alerted to the existence of Ebaum's World and its rendition of the State of the Union Address, which I share with you. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/presaddress2.shtml Catch you in the morning. -- Eric Francis We're now in the final day and half before the total eclipse of the Moon in Taurus. As I write, the Moon is in the 14th degree of Aries, just at the midpoint of that sign, and the Sun is at 4 Scorpio, exactly opposite the Chiron discovery point -- we are very close to the Full Moon. When the Moon enters Taurus at 7:27 pm Wednesday (Paris time, five hours earlier New York time), the eclipse is about eight hours away. I don't have a sense yet of how people are responding to this astrology. I'm feeling rather edgy. My sense of humor is still in bed. I am still feeling traumatized by the time last week that my friend made me scrambled eggs with sugar. I don't notice the people around me feeling that way, they seem fairly friendly, but I do notice an increase in intensity. There's a lot of movement in the lives of people around me. Though I am a bit surprised by how quiet the news is. True, it emerged over the weekend that nearly 400 tons of high explosives are missing from Iraq (less than one pound of which is enough to take out a jet liner). It's being widely reported that the site was not secured by the U.S. military when Iraq was invaded. But now suddenly we have the reassurance of an embedded NBC television crew (traveling with the 101st Airborne Division) that these explosives were not there when the Americans showed up at the scene some months ago. So, says NBC, they are still missing but it's not the commander in chief's fault. This is according to the great news organization that I call WGE. This is to say, NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the world's largest military contractors. I always wonder why you don't see that little detail when you read about them or see one of their news reports. GE has manufactured a lot of guidance systems for nuclear bombs, and much else besides. And they are not the paragons of virtue (see my earlier report on them at this link: http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200103/conspiracy.asp Then there's the new report on how supporters of Bush believe that Iraq and al Qaeda were directly linked and that Iraq had actual weapons of mass destruction; and how supporters of Kerry have exactly the opposite perceptions. At least this is logical: people are voting based on their perceptions. The problem is with those perceptions; the weapons of mass destruction issue has been debunked a million times -- there were no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons found in Iraq -- and Bush has personally refuted the Saddam-bin Laden connection. But then in the next breath, he calls the war in Iraq a war on the terrorists, suggesting that these are the people who knocked down the World Trade Center. Here is the link to the Program in International Policy Attitudes home page at the University off Maryland: http://pipa.org/ It would be nice, as my friend on the French Customs Service seemed to hint was possible (see yesterday's entry), if the election were as simple as people voting for who they wanted. Unfortunately it's not so simple at all. Besides the whole issue of the Electoral College (which has a fabulous cafeteria and bookstore on its tree-lined campus, by the way), raising the possibility that, yet again, the majority chooses one candidate and the other takes office -- there are lots of technical and legal issues floating around. Voting problems have already begun to surface, including the voting computers not taking well to the heat in, of all places, Florida. There are literally thousands of lawyers ready to go into battle in closely contested swing states. It is possible that there will be an electoral college tie. The boys in Washington have been doing a good job of maintaining the image of normalcy with this election campaign. They have a real opponent, which raises the credibility of the whole process. There has been nothing out of the ordinary; no Saddam trial to point to as a sham; no red alert; and to keep the process appearing real, there have been mud-flinging debates and plenty of stump speeches and sleazy television ads. Everything is looking good, from the label on the soup can. There is much astrology yet to come. Let's stay runed. >> Back in Paris... Monday evening... Arriving from Amsterdam, I waited till the crowds had passed and was one of the last people to get off the train. Striding along the platform I was stopped by a group of cops, who announced that they were with the French Customs Service. [In French.] "Do you speak French?" [In French.] "A little." [I would prefer to have this kind of discussion in English.] [In decent English.] "Do you have more than 7,000 euros or its U.S. equivalent? Or tobacco, alcohol or anything else to declare?" "Nothing like that." [I don't mention all my new bandannas, eight of them, hard-to-find perfectly square ones, including several new shades of pink.] "Do you mind if we search your bags?" [Very friendly and polite for cops. Compared to the Canadian border police these guys are perfume salesmen.] "Not at all." "What country are you from?" "United States." "Can we see your passport?" "Sure." I reach into my laptop case and -- not kidding, really by accident -- hand the guy a copy of Raphael's Ephemeris. The symbolism of this is not lost on me. Oops, I reach into the same pouch again and produce my passport and take back the little booklet. They look the passport over and get busy on my bags. It has been through flood and I often carry it in my back pocket. I am always envious of these people whose passports look like they carry them in a gold box. Meanwhile, I'm about the last person off the train, so there's not a line behind me. This affords me a higher level of service. "What do you do?" "Writer." I had them my official press identification. Occasionally it is good for something. "Who do you write for?" I start listing countries where my columns run, leaving horoscopes out of the story. Now, I know how cops profile, and I'm a little difficult to peg this way. I look like a morph between part early middle-aged touch of gray wearing a starched pressed dress shirt, part wood-elf and part hippie-kid, wearing one yellow glove and one orange glove on either hand. Pink scarf. My official photos are suitable for White House credentials, starched and pressed. I'm not sure if this particular combination is in their cop manual. "Where were you?" "Amsterdam." "What were you doing?" "Visiting a friend" [this is the only right answer to that question, ever]. "Do you take drugs?" "No." "Never?" "Never." [They are just being thorough of course, in case you change your mind in the three-second interval between the two inquiries. Some cops will ask you four or five times hoping you change your mind.] "Would you empty your pockets?" "Sure." I begin to empty my pockets with a kind of eager enthusiasm. Remember that in such moments, as friendly as they are, you're supposed to be apprehensive; you, after all, are alone, and there's a whole crew of them, looking very official with black gloves and cool uniforms and very much in control. Searching your most private objects. This puts the squeeze on the potentially guilty. A lot of psychology is involved in police work and good cops take pride in this part of the job. While they do all of this this, I'm keeping track of who has my passport and watching the bag search with one eye, looking at the cop questioning me with the other, answering his questions. I pass them my leather jacket for them to have a go at, ask them where they want all the stuff from my pockets, with the slight insinuation that they should be more organized. "Do you have a box of some kind?" "Put it all here," on top of a bag they're done searching. They are curious about the homeopathic remedies I'm carrying. I say they are homeopathic remedies, which the French have actually heard of; American security agents treat these little tubes of sugar pellets with labels written in Latin like they're potential long-range artillery. One guy frisks me. There is always a curious intimacy to this experience that nobody is supposed to notice. They reassemble all my stuff, give me back everything, and thank me for my cooperation. It's a sincere thank you. Then the sergeant has one last question before I'm admitted to Paris. "Who are you voting for, Bush or Kerry?" There's a twinkle in his eye. I smile. "Kerry." "Thank you for your cooperation," the sergeant says again. "Thanks, guys." I flash them the peace sign as I walk away. Hello from Amsterdam, one of the sweet spots in all of
Europe. Indeed there will be a weblog here beginning tonight. Thank you Tracy for the programming overhaul of the homepage that makes this possible. We're still working on a redesign, so you'll be seeing some changes over the next few days. I suspect that the weblog will be a bit more frequent than daily during these next impressive weeks in history. I know things seem pretty quiet on the American scene now, but from the look of the charts we're going to get one of the greatest political performances in living history, and perhaps since a good deal before. I'll also be keeping up with the astrology in a bit more detail, adding information about aspects and other developments. For now -- back to Paris -- catch you after the Moon goes into Aries and we begin officially. Peace & passion -- Eric Francis Eric will be blogging here from
Monday. |