Here is feast of solitude
A fiddler grim and tall
Plays to dancing kings and wives
Assembled in the hall
— R.H.
Dear Friend and Reader:
Once again, we’re being confronted with a mass casualty incident involving firearms. This is on the heels of every other kind of disaster, or the threat of one, in rapid sequence since the Aug. 21 eclipse. By now every American has heard the story: someone set up a position on the 32nd floor of a resort hotel in Las Vegas, and opened fire on a country music festival across the street. According to the police, and press reports, there were more than 500 casualties, including 59 dead.
Remember that nearly all of us are experiencing this through the internet, and at the same time, few are considering the impact of the internet on events and our perception of them. The internet influences the speed that the news travels, as well as its impact. The internet also means that videos of the crime and the crime scene were available almost instantly.
Straight away, as always happens these days, the “false flag” theories have come up: that is, ideas about how actual events fail to match up with the official story that’s being repeated with absolute unanimity by all media from Fox to The New York Times to MSNBC to Democracy Now!
They are all taking different positions on the gun issue itself, and perhaps asking different questions, though the core narrative is remarkably consistent no matter what the position of the outlet: a lone shooter, with no known motive, did this all by himself. (To be fair, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC had one guest for about five minutes Monday night, who was present at the scene and who described his perception of multiple shooters.)
For anyone spreading fear, Las Vegas was the perfect setting for such an incident: it’s one of the unofficial capitals of the United States. Almost everyone has been there, and even if you hate the place you love the place. Everyone can relate. It’s pure Americana, as is country music. Between the internet and Las Vegas, it’s easy to write yourself into the story.
Ultimately, the idea of any false flag theory is that the government did it. There are many plausible versions of this. But we don’t need any theory or potential false flag operation to see that: this is about the true flag, the stars and stripes of the United States government. Our government allows, and encourages, people to possess weapons of war, where those weapons are used routinely on the people.
The effect is a proxy war on the people, waged on behalf of the people who arm the population. Armed citizens take their own guns and do the bidding of those (for example, in Congress, and in state governments) who allow them to have those guns.
The effect is the same as that of any terrorism: to inflict shock and horror, and to keep the people in a helpless state. When you hear guys with guns talk about uprising and revolution, this is what they mean.
It’s also essential to remember that the 2nd Amendment, or Article 2 of the Bill of Rights, was a compromise with the South, particularly Virginia, so that their slave patrols could be armed. That’s another way to say: the point of the 2nd Amendment was to preserve slavery, at gunpoint, for the states that had it and planned to keep it.
The inherently racist nature of the 2nd Amendment must be kept in mind at all times as this debate roars on. You can read about this in an article on Truthout, or in this law review article written by the professor quoted in Truthout.
As it turns out, the 2nd Amendment is doing its job rather well, keeping people enslaved by fear and the specter of death. Yet the 2nd Amendment contains the language “well-ordered militia” and “security of a free state.” There’s nothing especially well-ordered about what we see going on, and it’s certainly not contributing to the security of a free state. Interpretations of the 2nd Amendment that allow people in general to be armed always ignore those two phrases, the ones that establish the rationale.
The 2nd Amendment was also written in the day of the musket. To politicians writing in the 1780s, today’s automatic weapons, laser gun-sights, night vision and silencers would seem like something from an alien civilization or the Book of Revelation.
Earlier this week, I read something actually shocking in The New York Times: “Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (including suicides, murders and accidents) than the sum total of all the Americans who died in all the wars in American history, back to the American Revolution. Every day, some 92 Americans die from guns, and American kids are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway of Harvard.” Let’s see, if that many people died from chewing gum or TV dinners, how long would it take to ban those things?
The American death toll of the Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975, stands at 58,220. Every 633 days, that many Americans die of gunshot wounds. The guns are allowed and widely available, and their purchase is facilitated by the United States government, and by extremely lax state governments such as Nevada.
In a courageous Op-Ed piece, again in the Times, Rosanne Cash, an old friend of Planet Waves, wrote this week: “Last year, I performed at the Concert Across America to End Gun Violence with Jackson Browne, Eddie Vedder, Marc Cohn and the Harlem Gospel Choir, and we got death threats. People wanted to kill us because we wanted to end gun violence. That’s where we are: America, 2017.”
Where guns are concerned, the government is, in many ways, under the seeming control of an organization called the National Rifle Association (NRA), which pretends to be a popular grassroots organization but which is really a lobby group fighting for the profits of gun manufacturers.
Here’s a list of the top congressional recipients of political donations from the NRA. There’s a vast disparity between Republican recipients and Democratic ones; this is a dirty deal between the Republicans and the NRA.
Rosanne wrote, “There is no other way to say this: The NRA funds domestic terrorism.” But we must remember that the NRA, as a registered charity and tax-exempt corporation, is really a creature of government power, and it’s influencing the government itself. The two are functioning as one entity, playing a shell game when it comes to facilitating the death toll of a Vietnam War every two years.
When you look at the astrology chart for the event, whether in traditional format or using modern planets as well, the government’s fingerprints are all over this event. It all comes back to the government [see both formats displayed here]. This could easily be misread as “false flag,” though that’s not what the chart says; or at least not on its face.
Everything in the chart comes back to the 10th house and its ruler Jupiter, to Capricorn and to Saturn. This is not a case of a “secret enemy” such as with the Sept. 11 incident. There’s nothing covert about it. This chart is menacing because everything is out in the open. Due to the denial factor, it’s a kind of open secret.
What is the motive for this open war on the people? Well, using an approach I learned from Gestalt therapy, we can look at the effect to see the motive. It would seem to be fomenting a new civil war, the flames of which are rising from the embers of the last one (which I believe the South won, or we would not be having this discussion).
Remember that the United States is headed for its Pluto return. This is just one element in a complex pattern that involves Saturn, Pluto, Eris and other significant planets, and develops rapidly between now and the exact Pluto return, on Feb. 20, 2022.
The United States is deeply divided, only now the division is between the people with guns and those without them. Or perhaps more properly said, those with guns who advance them as an end unto themselves, rather than as a potentially useful tool of rural life or tasks such as transporting large quantities of diamonds on a regular basis.
This is a different purpose from gun nuts who stockpile weapons in support of some fantasy of revolution or free-for-all, or of defending themselves against some Black people’s uprising that, from their mental framework, they have reason to fear. Yes, in the minds of many of our fellow Americans, the thing to really, really worry about is a “slave revolt” by the very people they have held down for centuries of American history. This is most likely a sick projection of their own minds, though we are all living with the results of that.
There are many ways to begin to get a grasp on this problem. The country could require guns to be licensed, registered and insured like cars are — a DMV of guns. We could dial back the proliferation of assault weapons, which could be defined as any weapon convertible to fully automatic (that seems to be what happened in Las Vegas).
Then again, there may be a bigger problem. After prying into this story for the past four days, my belief, based on the available facts, witness reports and video evidence, is that there was at least one person shooting from the lower floors of the hotel. And if that is true, I would ask: what are the implications of that? Many things happened in Las Vegas on Monday and in the days after that we did not hear about, and for which there’s no room in the discussion. Why is that?
In the article below, I’ll look more closely at the chart of the incident, and see what we learn. Thanks for tuning in, and for carrying on.
Oh, one last thing: if you’ve never listened to Planet Waves FM, this is a good week to check out my analysis of these events and their implications, spiritual and social.
With love,
— Additional research by Cindy Ragusa