You Can’t Count on the Worst Always Happening

“The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the ‘button’ to be ‘pushed’ by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point — that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment — is a fact against which belief rebels.” — Jonathan Schell

Dear Friend and Reader:

Lord knows we have enough to worry about. Many people with the longest list struggle just to get through the day — one day. They don’t face the week or the month or the quarter or the fiscal year.

They wonder how they’re going to make it through the morning. And the rest of us are pretty stretched. We don’t need any more. We don’t need the world to be any less stable than it’s become.

By all indications, it looks like every effort is being made to drag Iran into this latest outbreak of war in West Asia. What we are seeing is not so new, but really the inflammation and exploitation of tribal conflict that goes back not to Biblical days but somewhere around 1948. That is when one country (Israel) was imposed by the victors of World War II on another country (Palestine).

I understand that there is an ancient claim to what we are told is this land, said to be commanded in the Torah. I am also concerned that if I express my observations about this problem, my many Orthodox Jewish friends and Israeli stepmother will never talk to me again.

I’m not here to critique the idea of a Jewish homeland. To me, that is an important and necessary idea. Yet and as my teacher, the late Arthur Joseph Kushner, advisor to rabbis, used to say: “This cannot be about land. All there is out there is land.”

Hunger for Truth, Expressed in Words

The many Jews by whom I am (and have been) surrounded are righteous people, without whom you might not be reading me right now. That is how much they have supported my journalism since I was a teenager.

By “journalism,” I mean my hunger for truth, expressed in words. By “support,” I mean stand up for me in federal court, and local court, and get my work into The New York Times (repeatedly), and correct my copy, and do little things like get the teenage me up to the very top level of the JFK control tower at 2 pm one day, just in time to see the Concorde take off (in effect, showing me how the world works, and revealing that I can have access).

My family has an apartment near Tel Aviv where if I wanted, I could sleep in a warm bed tomorrow night after making the flight.

Here is a problem that may finally be up for discussion: that we are made to immediately “go tribal” on any issue whatsoever, and those on the “wrong” side are going to suffer shunning — and a concept I first learned in Holocaust Studies or was it one of my childhood besties around the same time, a kid named Randall Israel — scapegoating. For many years, the “wrong side” has been saying anything sympathetic to Palestinians, which is taken to mean not supporting Jews or a Jewish homeland.

Both “tribal” and “scapegoating” are messages of digital consciousness. Yes they are very old problems, but in the digital environment, they soak nearly every thought, every hope, every dream, every fear.

The False Provocation of World War

Rather, I am here to say something about what is being agitated and provoked by marketing executives, top military brass and the arms industry to get the words “World War III” onto the cover of the New York Post.

We must remember, as Einstein is reputed to have written, that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Presently, what used to be the “media environment” has swallowed all of consciousness and reality. The same medium through which you are reading this article is the one that woke you up this morning and the same one that I used to fill my tank with gas last night, and delivered the photos I took at a campaign event, and through which Planet Waves payroll was processed: digital.

In digital (a synthetic astral plane), polarization itself is magnified. We now live in a cosmos of zeros and ones, invisible to perception, which deliver my voice to you every Friday night, and deliver your pizza with extra sauce and mushrooms at the touch of a virtual button. There would seem to be no escape.

It’s also in this environment where plenty of people say that there is no such thing as a nuclear bomb (something on the long list of unproven ‘this does not exist’ memes). But I am not interested in finding out the hard way. (Yes, there are people who claim to be sincere in their belief that the atomic bomb does not exist and that Hiroshima was blown up not by the Enola Gay and Little Boy, but rather by a lot of TNT.

You can find them pretty easily.

The Marketing Scheme

Jon Rappoport, the grizzly codger of a (supposedly conservative) journalist (and satirist) who provided my first primary source documents about the fraudulent PCR back in 2020, has nailed the propaganda strategy in a few words.

In a column this week, he said basically that the media ploy is to show only the atrocities, provoke reactionary outrage and polarize the world into picking sides — then with the public manipulated, make a big war.

Make sure people have no idea that Arabs and Jews live side by side in perfect peace many places, including and especially in Israel (this, I have confirmed from my father and stepmom, who live there part of the year and want me to go there and see for myself) and Gaza.

He described a fictional marketing strategy meeting where news executives had somehow to spin the coverage to conceal one crucial fact. What exactly is that fact? What is the seemingly dangerous issue that must be kept under cover?

I will quote Rappoport:

This Does Not Mean People Aren’t Suffering — They Are

He is not saying people are not suffering in the midst of a horrid war.

He is saying something else. Since Planet Waves is supposed to be an astrology column, I can state here if no place else that the chart for this event — what I am calling the Sukkot Attack — shows that both “sides” in this conflict are coordinated by a single controlling authority. I can’t tell you if people on the ground know this, or who exactly that entity is.

I can tell you that to my eyes and ears, including from reading analysis not my own, that war itself is the agenda.

And to create that, you have to have a mortal conflict, and to have a conflict you have to have allegedly mortal enemies, and this is easy to fire up in a region where the whole geopolitical theme (not the social theme) is mortal conflict. Socially, the people seem to dig one another. Politically, as Pink Floyd sang in the song “Us and Them,” “the lines on the map move from side to side.”

We Must Be Careful What we Construe to be Real

However, we forget easily that we live in the age of CGI and deep fakes and old footage from prior situations retrieved and called brand new footage.

And in this environment, we must be careful what we construe to be real without firsthand knowledge, corroboration or serious examination. This is especially so when the whole point of the campaign is to get everyone riled up and begging for war and not for peace. If people beg for war, they’re going to get it.

And just in case you think the world is flat and Paul McCartney is dead and that Sir Isaac Newton lied to us about gravity and vegetables are all poison and there is no such thing as a hydrogen bomb — I assure you that the last item on this list is in a different category.

Even presuming for a moment that this is true, the concept, the idea, is what matters right now: the mere notion of global annihilation; the fear that this conflict could get out of so-called control, and the result will be someone dropping a nuke on Tehran, where they already have enough problems, and where the people don’t want this conflict any more than you and I do.

We all know one nuke will likely lead to another. So let’s not go there.

My Question This Week

Before I get into my astrological analysis — which I am saving mostly for the audio edition above, but will share in writing below for those who don’t like to listen — a very serious problem — many people don’t want to listen — I have a question.

As of this past summer, I’ve been writing the Planet Waves column for 25 years. And I want to know why, every other time I sit down to write, it seems like someone is about to blow the world up again, or is already doing so. Why someone is shooting ‘em all up and there is a pool of blood and then I’m casting the astrology and trying to figure out who actually did this and how and whether this all really went down the way we’re being told.

Are you sick of this yet? Or do you take it for granted? Or do you LOVE it? Do you want some more? Have you ever once expressed your outrage that this is being done to us?

The world and very possibly you are in a spiritually weakened state right now. People just seem inconsolable. A bitterness has set in from which there seems to be no escape. Yet spiritual consciousness is internally mediated. It is not about external “inspiration.” The point is not to have it available when everything is honky dory and you don’t need it. The point of spiritual training is to have your resources ready in the moments when you do.

The Astrology: Eclipses and Oppositions

It is troubling to me that this overflow of violence, aggression and polarization is happening in the time of eclipses. For about three weeks twice a year (which we are in now), there is an eclipse zone. In this zone, patterns take hold. That’s why I keep saying do what you love to do the day of an eclipse. Be who you want to be. Let your true self stand up. You have an opportunity to propagate what you want to be by the actions that you take.

Now for the other side: the collective side.

We just had an eclipse in Libra, which is upsetting the delicate balance of relationships (if used consciously, a new kind of balance can emerge). We are about to have an eclipse in Taurus, which can stand for the disruption of economic activity, food supplies and the stability of our lives, such as it is. We have a lot to learn about these things, here in the days of Uber Eats and the “pizza profile.”

It’s also somewhat normal that this is happening, as eclipses raise the psychic pressure and force events through a kind of Venturi. (See my old article, The Venturi Effect.)

That is thing one.

Thing two is that the month of November is all about oppositions. This of course follows an opposition that is inherent in a Full Moon eclipse that takes place Saturday, Oct. 28.

The Sun opposes Jupiter (aggrandizement). The New Moon, Mars and Ceres all oppose Uranus (shock/awe; food issues). Venus opposes Chiron (catastrophobia). Vesta opposes Pholus (ancestral issues going out of control). And on and on. This oppositional energy tends to provoke confrontation and facilitates projection: putting your stuff onto someone else, or them putting their stuff onto you.

In the spirit of A Course in Miracles and common sense, I am here to ask you two questions. One is, what do you want?

Two, about this war, is borrowed from ancient Roman wisdom: Cui bono?

With love,

You can’t depend on intelligence
ooohhh, you can’t depend on God
You can only depend on one thing
you need a busload of faith to get by, watch, baby

Busload of faith to get by.

—Lou Reed