The Next Season | Nov. 22, 2004, 11:06 a.m. Today begins a new season in the story of the world. Scorpio is ended; the Sun went into Sagittarius about 10 hours ago as of this writing. This year for all of Nov. 22 the Sun is in Sagittarius; it's not always the case. Today is the 41st anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which occurred with the Sun in the last degree of Scorpio. As I have said before, the Sun in the last degree of a sign creates a doorway, one that we need to watch carefully. Venus is about to join Mars and the south node in Scorpio, recalling the Venus retrograde in Scorpio of late 2002 -- a troubling, difficult time for many people. Now, with the south node (release) finishing its 18 month transit of Scorpio, and the Venus-Mars conjunction about to happen here for the first time since prior to the retrograde of fall 2002, we get many images of closure and completion of a long phase of relationship history. The conjunction is exact Dec. 5 and has been the source of many of my references to December for people born under a variety if signs, particularly Taurus and Scorpio. Mercury and Pluto made the first of three conjunctions this weekend, in the 22nd degree of Sagittarius. Mercury retrograde begins on Nov. 30, but as explained in Planet Waves Weekly, the shadow phase began some time ago and extends through around the 5th of January. Though we leave the eclipses and occultations that surrounded the election of 2004 behind us, the election issues are far from over. I leave you with a long quotation from the magazine In These Times, an alternative news journal for which I've done a few pieces back in the day. From "Let's Get Real" By Mark Crispin Miller November 16, 2004 http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article_rss/lets_get_real/ To let ourselves believe that the "election" was legitimate because this claim or that has been disproved (apparently) is to not honor reason. On the contrary, a veritable sea of evidence, statistical as well as anecdotal and circumstantial, supports the claim that Bush, again, was not elected by the people. To nod agreement that this was indeed an honest win is to forget how Bush was shoehorned into office in the first place; to ignore the ease with which electronic totals can be changed without a trace; to suppress the fact that Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S - the major manufacturers of touch screen voting machines and central tabulators-are owned and run by Bush Republicans, who have made no secret of their partisan intentions; to deny the value of the exit polls, which turn out to have been "mistaken" only in the swing states; to downplay the weird inflation of the Bush vote in county after county, where the number of votes for president was somehow higher than the number of voters who turned out; to ignore the bald chicanery of the Bush supporters who ran the central polling station in Ohio's Warren County and forced out the press and poll monitors so they could count the vote in secret; to forget the numerous accounts of vote fraud coast to coast throughout the prior weeks of early voting; to overlook the fact that every single "glitch" or "error" that has been reported favors Bush; to ignore the countless instances of ballots - absentee, provisional, thrown away or left uncounted; to forget that the civilian vote abroad (some four million Americans) was being mishandled by the Pentagon (which had somehow become responsible for doing the State Department's job); and to ignore the many dirty tricks reported - the polling places quickly relocated at the last minute, the fake voter-registration drives, the thousands of Americans who found themselves not on the rolls, the police road-blocks, the bullying pro-Bush poll workers, the machines that kept translating votes for Kerry into votes for Bush. And so on. To forget or ignore all this and to accept-on faith-the mere say-so of Bush & Company (and our compliant media) is to make clear that you are not a member of what the Busheviks deride as "the reality-based community." Those who help discredit false reports are doing that community, and this erstwhile democracy, a precious service. But, those who would abort the whole inquiry in the name of science or journalistic probity and "closure" are putting that community, and this nation, at grave risk.++