The current Mercury ‘storm’ phase and Mercury’s station direct on Friday involve some very special astrological features, and Eric covers them all impeccably in this week’s premium member edition of Planet Waves. Apropos of this event in Scorpio, he also considers the secretive (as in, ignored by mainstream media) and precarious situation involving Unit 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.
All this — plus your 12-sign horoscopes for this week and astro-news briefs — can be accessed through a single-issue purchase here. Or, sign up for our friendly, free, one-month trial membership here.
Here is the PBS special on the Fukushima incident one year later. It’s a mainly a diary of the first few days of the event. I think those who were up around the clock trying to surmise any scrap of news or information that week and into late March ’11 will appreciate, at least, that we were concerned about something that was actually happening. This program really is just a statement, where nuclear power is concerned, of how little needs to go wrong in order for everything to go wrong. All you need is for the plant to lose power — that’s it. No quake, no tsunami, just loss of the grid and failure of backup power and the cores turn to lava.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/japans-nuclear-meltdown/
Re: the government healthcare website — having been immersed and around web projects the last five years, the delays and challenges are simply not unusual. In fact, they are the norm.
Web projects are notorious for needing extended deadlines. One common excuse: we’ve never built anything like this so can’t really guess how long it will take. Time estimates are generally meaningless.
Never mind that other industries have figured out how to plan around unexpected challenges. The web industry is still rather young, and many shun the idea of “best practices.” Rather, the prevailing attitude is that technology changes so quickly that there’s no such thing as an established approach that will work, universally, on most any project.
Finally, it’s all too common for the “client” to be completely clueless about sites, technology, and how they’re built. What they see as a simple change may require months to implement, or may require undoing months’ worth of work.
So for me, all this uproar over the site seems like misplaced expectations. The naive lost where old worlds and new collide. The greater failing, in my mind, is that anyone expected the site’s development to follow a timeline at all.
Fukushima news, finally in the mainstream media,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24847381
Wow. Both the Virgo (my rising) and the Pisces (my sun) are SPOT on for me this week. I can’t believe it; they speak to exactly what I have been feeling and going through and thinking this past week (and often throughout my life). That last line of the Pisces one is exactly what I feel in myself but was afraid to believe. Thanks for teasing out the real stuff of the astrology right now.
Yes, once again, I second Strawberry’s comment, and was also knocked for six by those lines (grateful to you, Strawberry, as I usually reach Friday eve completely clobbered and barely able to string two words together!). Thank you Eric, Amanda, everyone for this amazing edition. My horoscope was so totally bang on, too.
Eric, I am breathless. This lead article is a Master Class in assimilating impossibly complex & disparate themes. I can’t say I’ve ever seen you off your game, but you are so clearly rising to the occasion of this incredible time in history. Time and again, your insights took my breath away. From the Solar eclipse “reaching down to your soul and equalizing the pressure between levels of yourself you may have had no idea existed,” to the unutterably simple & profound “What limits on banality are you setting for yourself?” If I wasn’t in love with you before, I would be now.
I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep at it — you’re becoming a giant in a field of Lilliputians.