By Fe Bongolan

While the world watches reruns of the royal wedding for this century, America’s military and international intelligence policies are taking a swerve toward a different direction. The announcement by President Obama of the appointment of CIA Director Leon Panetta to the post of Secretary of Defense, and the promotion of Commander of the US Afghanistan forces General David Petraeus to head up the Central Intelligence Agency, also known as the CIA, is the signal of that change.

Leon Panetta will be the new defense chief, after the retirement of Bush holdover Robert Gates. Photo from Washington Independent.

The White House is faced with two wars, a thing in Libya that looks and sounds a lot like a war, a continuing budget shortfall, a bloated military budget and a Congress and nation divided. With that in mind, the selection of Leon Panetta – a liberal – as Secretary of Defense is a good thing. The placement of Panetta signals the Administration’s intent to implement reorganization of the Department of Defense, with the goal of ultimately reducing its budget by $400 billion over the next ten years.

Panetta, a former Congressman from Northern California presided over a peacetime boon from the end of the Cold War, transitioning military bases towards civilian use while Chief of Staff under President Bill Clinton. The Presidio in San Francisco and Cal State Monterey are two models from Panetta’s home state where military bases were re-purposed for peacetime civilian use for public benefit.

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By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

For the last ten days, an ill wind has been blowing across these United States. Early in the week, over a dozen people died in tornadoes in the Midwest. Here in the Pea Patch, we were on alert for three full days, although we’re too small a spot in the road to have warning sirens; the closest little town, five miles away, had a siren but decided last year it could no longer afford to maintain it.

By Friday, the wind had swept through the South and taken close to 300 souls with it. Now much of the nation is poised on flooding, levees are failing, and dams are ready to burst at the seams. And all this at a time when public services are quickly disappearing, first responders are understaffed and underfunded, and the dollars normally stuffed into collection cans have dwindled to pocket change. If disaster capitalism is the fine art of making money out of human misery, business should be booming.

Capitalism, seems to me, is a kind of codified opportunism. It’s making the most of what you have, ‘capitalizing’ upon what is at hand. It’s an enterprising kid with a lemon tree who starts a lemonade stand. If his cousin has a lemon tree too, they might start a family business, but you can sell just so much lemonade in the neighborhood before you have to export if you want to grow.

We used to call that the American dream, but in the last few decades, those kids grew way too big for their britches; once they got a monopoly on lemon trees, they exported the jobs overseas. Now nobody in the old neighborhood can afford lemonade — and those kids don’t give a tinker’s damn.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Scorpio monthly of May 30, 2005

Certain emotional or household matters probably reached a critical point in the past two months. Critical does not necessarily mean bad but it certainly means a point of high awareness which likely exposed a weakness an unhealed injury or an unresolved issue of some kind. For that you can be thankful. You are not quite complete resolving this issue which has seriously undermined your confidence. But when you do return it will be substantially easier to address.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Midpoint and Orb Table -- the Royal Wedding

This is a kind of chart I don’t use too often anymore, called the Midpoints & Orbs table. It is a listing of the aspects, with the orb of the apsect (in degrees) above. What it doesn’t tell you is whether the aspect is applying or separating; that you have to figure out another way. This shows the last aspect between the Sun and the Moon was a semi-square (45 degrees, half a square, sometimes experienced as a ‘hidden square’).

The Sun and Moon have a midpoint, which is 17 Aries 31 degrees. That can be used a number of ways — such as searched for minor planets using all of the points I usually use and ticking the option to include the first 1,000 asteroids. That creates a set of about 1,100 points. Usually, every degree of the zodiac is filled or has two or more planets in conjunction.

Here is what we find at the Sun/Moon midpoint:

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Photo by Eric.

By SpongeBob SquarePants

PS, the story above has absolutely nothing to do with SpongeBob, but then I don’t really know what’s going on down at the bottom.

PPS, the things I learn in Wikipedia. SpongeBob was created by a marine biologist. To wit:

The basis for SpongeBob SquarePants was formed by [Stephen] Hillenburg in 1984 while teaching and studying marine biology at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, California, where he wrote the comic strip The Intertidal Zone, which starred various anthropomorphic forms of sea life, many of which would evolve into SpongeBob SquarePants characters. He left the institute to become an animator in 1987, and later attended the California Institute of Arts in 1992.

PPS, the headline translates to, “Tax on hotel rooms will be used to fund environmental battle against invasive Asian clam species in Lake George.”

Massive tornado hits Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

This week’s tornado outbreak has many events many places — but the epicenter seems to be the one yesterday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Here is the chart for that event, and a bit from the Wikipedia page on this week’s outbreak.

A violent tornado outbreak from April 25 – 28, 2011, affected the Southern and Eastern United States, leaving catastrophic destruction in its wake, especially across the state of Alabama. The outbreak produced destructive tornadoes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and affected several other areas throughout the Southern and Eastern United States. Widespread and destructive tornadoes occurred on each day of the outbreak.[3]

As of 8:05 a.m. EDT on April 29, 2011, over 300 people were reportedly killed as a result of the outbreak. However, the exact number is unknown as search and rescue efforts continue, and consequently, various sources differ on the exact count. All except five of the deaths occurred on April 27, although it is unclear whether these are included in the total number of fatalities.[1][2] 210 of the deaths occurred in the state of Alabama alone.[1] April 27 was the deadliest tornado day in the United States since the 1932 Deep South tornado outbreak of March 1932, and the deadliest tornado day since modern tornado forecasting began in the 1950s.[4] Over 300 tornadoes were reported over four days, including 211 in 16 states on April 27.[5]

[snip]

At around 5:10 p.m. CDT, a very large and exceptionally destructive tornado struck Tuscaloosa, Alabama.[15] About 40 minutes later, a tornado from the same parent supercell, possibly the same tornado, struck the northern suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. A tornado emergency was issued for both cities. A debris ball was observed by the Birmingham NEXRAD[2], indicating that the tornado was causing extreme damage. Photos from the damage path showed total devastation. According to the Alabama Emergency Management Agency at about 11:00 p.m. CDT on April 28, at least 36 people have been killed in Tuscaloosa. Search and rescue still continues in the city, so this death toll may rise further.[16]

– Wikipedia

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Despite the fact that every month is “Self-Awareness Month” at Planet Waves, May brings us a special reason to celebrate — courtesy of the folks at Good Vibrations and Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Today’s lead article urges us to take matters into our own hands (and hearts, minds, souls and bodies) in an effort to form whole, authentic relationships to ourselves — and then each other.

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Yesterday, I asked what royal astrologers — assuming they exist — were thinking when they planned the chart for today’s wedding of William and Kate (which began at 11 am London time, 6 am EDT). The chart has one unusual property — the Pisces Moon is void of course, meaning that it’s not making any aspects to other planets prior to entering the next sign. That’s not the kind of thing that you would expect a professional astrologer to include in a chart this important — the marriage of the future king and queen consort. To me this suggests the chart was not planned by astrologers but rather was based on a guess that worked out pretty well. One thing that seems to have been intentional enough was putting the wedding on the day of Catherine of Siena. Catherine, of course, is the formal way to say Kate.

Chart for today's royal wedding places the concentration of planets at the top of the chart. Venus, the blue girl, is the most elevated planet. The void of course Moon is high up slightly toward the right. At the bottom of the chart is Saturn in Libra, occupying one of the chart's most potent angles, the IC. This tells us that no matter how modern the new couple may be, there is a deep anchor into tradition.

Let’s look at the very basic elements of traditional astrology first. The whole endeavor looks royal enough; the ascendant grants the appearance of things, and the chart has Leo rising — a sign of royalty. So there is something kingly about it; it is the marriage of the future king.

At the top of the chart (skewed a little to the right), the Aries cluster is in the 10th house — the house of the king or the president, so that is royal enough. There is a lot going on in this house; the affairs of state are definitely a key part of the subject matter of this chart.

With Aries on the 10th, it’s not too cynical to say that the business of state is war. But with Venus as the most elevated planet, we see at least a pretty face being put on that agenda, and at best, the possibility for something else. On the personal level, Venus in Aries as the most elevated planet suggests that this is the chart for the coronation of not merely a princess but rather of a queen.

Yet the narrative of a chart is usually told most articulately by the Moon. And the Moon is the odd thing about this chart — it’s void of course. That is to say, the Moon is late in a sign (in this case Pisces, late in the zodiac), and it’s not going to make aspects to any other planet before it enters the new sign. It’s a little like saying there is no story. The Moon is in Pisces, but it’s void in that sign, which can subtract the energy in question rather than add it. Pisces is about empathy, going through struggles together, service and public contact (the latter point emphasized by the Moon as well).

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