Dear Friend and Reader:
Frank Zappa is reputed to have said, "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." This may seem cynical, and as a lifelong observer of politics (since the 1972 election, when I was 8), I have long pondered this idea.
What Frank really said in a 1987 interview with Keyboard magazine is, “I say politics is the entertainment branch of industry, and government is what we need. We have a diverse population in the United States, with all kinds of different needs that have to be taken care of. That is the righteous function of government."
The misquote and the real one amount to the same thing. Politics is a distraction from what is really happening in industry. The business of America is business. On his way out of office in 1960 and 1961, Pres. Dwight Eisenhower famously (and repeatedly, three times by my count) warned of the "military-industrial complex," as he called it, spreading its influence everywhere, down to every school board in the nation. He meant that the priorities of industry, driven by government contracts and a military mentality would, if not blocked, take over all of civilian life.
Remember that what ended the Great Depression was not the New Deal but rather World War II. And our economy has been based on militarization ever since. That is why the U.S. is always involved in a war, which is currently World War CV-19.
We are now in the final stretch of the 2020 election. Though this might not normally make interesting discussion fodder for those residing outside the U.S., this year might be the exception.
In this article, I’ll give an overview of 2020 election astrology, which I will continue on Friday night’s Planet Waves FM (usually posted by about 10 pm EDT). Sometimes it helps to read about something, then to hear it presented as audio, then to reread. I will also do a video, though not this week.
‘There Will Be A Continuation’
Here is the news: asked by a reporter Wednesday whether he would "commit here today for a peaceful transferral of power after the November election," Pres. Trump gave an unusual answer, though I guess one not so strange for him.
"We’re going to have to see what happens," he told Brian Karem of Playboy during a news conference at the White House. "You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster."
Wait, since when does Playboy get a White House press pass? Who knew it was still in print? (Act now and you can get the official iconic covers face mask.) Was it a day-pass or a permanent credential? Anyway, Karem asked the right question.
"I understand that, but people are rioting," Karem responded, repeating the question.
"Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation," the president responded.
What exactly does he mean? Get rid of the ballots? South Park covered this one back in 2012, when Eric Cartman did just that (cleverly hiding them in a Hummer dealership, where nobody ever went anymore).
As for the "continuation," it could be one of two things: either he thinks he will be president regardless of the results of the election, or there will be a continuation of policy despite who is president. George H.W. Bush is reputed to have said something akin to that on election night 1992, when he lost to Bill Clinton.
The Business of America is Pandemics
Now we can have visions of Special Forces troops entering the White House in January, on orders of newly inaugurated Pres. Biden, dragging out Trump and his men. This would make first-class reality television.
But the agenda of industry does not change. That is the real continuity. I know that Trump is being blamed for all things that have gone wrong with Covid. I am no fan or admirer, though I do not believe this is about him. Neither the National Institutes of Health (NIH) nor the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have changed their approach to viruses in decades. There was the false Swine Flu incident of 1976, with no cases and 40 million Americans injected with a botched vaccine. There was the equally absurd and atrocious false Swine Flu incident of 2009. Both of these were sold to the public as pandemics.
Between them was the debacle of the NIH declaring in 1984 that AIDS was caused by HIV when not a single scientific paper had demonstrated that at the time, nor ever has. Nobody has been able to explain the phenomenon of a "gay virus," either.
Today, nobody would be able to get away with claiming there is such a thing.
AIDS exists; a proven connection to the virus (originally branded as a leukemia virus called HTLV-III) does not. I recognize that this still sounds fringey to some. But if you’re curious about the history of HIV, AIDS and virology, check out this book.
All of these events cost many billions of dollars and resulted in incalculable grief and injury.
The Covid crisis has cost us trillions and much of the economy. But the real cost has been the public trust, and the needless loss of life in many, many people who could easily have been protected rather than endangered. It is my view that most of what we are calling Covid deaths could have been prevented — at least as far as the virus was concerned.
It’s still too early to know exactly what has happened with Covid, but we have many of the same people involved as in prior incidents, including CDC lifer Robert Redfield and NIH lifer Anthony Fauci. And it’s difficult to miss that the issue is being driven into a frenzy by electoral politics. The only issue that the Democrats have is how bad of a job Trump has done handling Covid. You would think they would have more, but I am not hearing about anything else.
One thing we can say about Covid is that all countries had the same approximate experience, whether they locked down or not, shut down or not, mandated masks or not. I know this goes contrary to the narrative. The problem with the narrative is that it goes contrary to the data. With all my daily work, reading, research and interviews the past seven months, I cannot tell you exactly what happened. But I am confident about what did not happen, and which claims are absolutely false.
And I am confident that whatever is being repeated every five minutes on CNN, by the numbers, Covid is not an issue today nearly all places in the world. It is certainly not a pandemic today. But you might think it is if you don’t understand the PCR and what it is being used to "prove." This video uses official data and breaks down the issues coherently country by country.
I am not saying “be careless.” My message has always been be careful. Part of being careful means being well-informed, and figuring out when you’re being lied to, and figuring out the truth for yourself. This is a big responsibility, though ultimately, you are responsible for your life, your health choices, and for what you do with your precious mind.
When Things Going Wrong is the Plan
Either way, or some other way, we are being poised and prepared for a shit-show. You don ‘t need astrology to tell you this. We are in one of those situations where if anything can go wrong, it will — except that the "going wrong" seems to be part of a careful plan, as the president has personally indicated.
With every cable channel beating the war drums for a second lockdown, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is already promising as much in the UK (a country of more than 55 million, where claimed Covid deaths are now in single digits many days, and under 20 most days). Does he or anyone really think you can stop a virus? I thought we were “flattening the curve” to avoid overwhelming the health care system. (This is when the alarm was sounded that 1 to 2 million healthy Americans would die from this virus. Is anyone at all grateful that no such thing has happened, or is the glass always half-empty?)
This is turning into a global-scale episode of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Especially when the Road Runner is the eminently unreliable polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which is proven to be able to create an outbreak out of no cases at all.
If that is true, it can certainly enlarge the seeming scale of any actual outbreak. This is a digital device, run through computers connected to the internet.
The PCR test is part of the digital mirage we are living in. It has nothing to do with sickness or wellness. It is not a diagnostic tool in any sense of the idea. It is subject to all of the properties of digital. Even The New York Times finally acknowledged the PCR problem. [I corresponded with the writer of that article this week, and tomorrow on PWFM will tell you what I learned. The discussion centered on why the Times reported the same thing in 2007 but never acknowledged that fact.]
Whatever happened in the spring, we are now at a stage where all that is increasing is the false "case" count created by the PCR, which — according to the Times and every other informed source — can get a Covid-positive result from any sample put into the machine merely by increasing the number of cycles.
The Covid situation is already a setup for an election disaster. Yet it would likely be one without it: both seeming sides in this struggle are sure that the end of the world will ensue if the opposing candidate wins. The problems of our nation go much deeper than politics.
The Election Day 2000 and 2020 Charts
First, there is really no longer an "election day" in the United States except in name only. There is also no way to time the first ballot. So the chart for Election Day is a symbolic one. Usually I use the chart for a minute past midnight in Dixville Notch, NH, though this symbolic "first place that reports results" is just that.
This year, conveniently, we have a major astrological event on Election Day: Mercury stations direct right in mid-afternoon. Though "I seek a future different from the past," it turns out that understanding the past is one of the best ways to figure out what’s going to happen in the future.
Mercury stations retrograde in about two weeks, on the evening of Oct. 13. The retrograde starts in Scorpio and ends in Libra, with the station direct occurring at 12:50 pm EST on Tuesday, Nov. 3 — right in the middle of Election Day. Those who follow Mercury retrograde know that the days around the station can be a bit tumultuous.
We know this as "Mercury storm," and the person who popularized that phrase — he did not make it up, and he told me he forgot where he first read it — is Jim Shawvan. In 2000, Jim was asked what he thought would happen with the election. He was a good person to ask, because Mercury would station direct just as the polls closed in New York. This happened in the very last degree of Libra — indeed the very last few arc minutes. Incredibly, this was in a one arc minute conjunction to Pallas, the asteroid of politics.
Shawvan said that the election would hang in the balance (Libra, in the last few arc minutes), and that the results would not be known for a while. He said it could go to a legal battle, which it did, in the form of Bush v. Gore, which was litigating the Florida recount. Florida was within a few votes (remember "dimple chads" and so on). The Supreme Court’s decision on Dec. 12, 2000, gave Bush Florida, which in turn gave him the election with 271 electoral votes, one more than the 270 required to win.
Though this was not at issue, a study by major news organizations found that Gore probably won Florida by a range of 42 to 171 votes out of 6 million cast. Gore also won the popular vote by about 500,000 votes. But thanks to the wonders of the Electoral College, Bush took office, and the results were not pretty: the Sept. 11 incident happened soon after, followed by two wars which have yet to end, and the rise of the national security state swallowing everything and everyone.
Now we have Mercury stationing direct on Election Day for the first time since 2000. It does so in mid-Libra, not in such dramatic fashion as the last few arc minutes, dangling by a few threads of paper like a hanging chad. But the station direct occurring on Election Day assures confusion, indecision, misinformation, disinformation, and just about everything else you can do to information except have it be accurate.
Other Factors in the 2020 Chart
One difference between then and now is that in 2000, most people still got their news from television. These were still the days of AOL; most people did not have broadband. The psychological effects of digital were not fully overwhelming us; it was still possible to be shocked by the theft of an election.
We are now living under full digital conditions. Everything is digital, including TV. Today, I don ‘t believe anything is shocking. There is no context in which to be surprised. Anything that can go wrong already has — or so we think. One exciting feature of the 2020 chart is the Gemini Moon square Neptune. In a mundane chart, the Moon represents the public. In Gemini, the public is divided. Square Neptune, this "division" is what supports the political ruse.
We see the effects of digital in the chart as Mercury stationing direct opposite Eris, which also happened (with greater precision) on the equinox earlier this week. Mercury, as it is now, mixed up the Saturn-Pluto-Eris square pattern that has so shaken things up this year.
We have already experienced a total collapse of customs, norms and respect for the law in U.S. society. We can account that to Trump doing his thing, and we can account that to a broad, national response to a disease situation mostly led by Democratic governors.
Under full digital conditions, we have no political norms. Many feel the Constitution is a stuffed bird in a museum. But this chaos is not coming from the political realm. It is going to the political realm, which is itself fully subsumed in digital.
As you watch the election antics unfold, remember what we learned from Eric McLuhan:
“The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted."
It is difficult to see this distortion from within the phenomenon, because it bends all of reality around it. Digital technology is so powerful, presenting so much data, that most people simply zone out rather than hold their attention on an issue.
I can’t say that I blame anyone for this, though we must wake up and stay awake. And I think it’s crucial that we not see the issues we now face as being political in nature, but rather digital in nature. And that is leading to many other conditions of society that we will need to understand before we can address them.
With love,
PS — I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, though it is my studied understanding that the seasonal flu shot is the least necessary, the least effective and the most dangerous of all of the "vaccines." It is being pushed hard now by the captains of industry and titans of the CDC. I would urge my readers to take extreme caution about getting this or any other irreversible injection of viral materials, metals and chemical compounds.
