Posts by Alex Miller

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Virginia Reels: The Ginni Thomas Text Controversy

On March 24, 2022, Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported on text messages sent in November 2020 from Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to Mark Meadows, former President Trump’s then Chief of Staff, exhorting him to do anything necessary to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in office.  Sent days to weeks after the loss, Thomas deluged Meadows with false information, conspiracy theories, and strategies for reversing the apparent defeat. 

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Garden Glimpses: An Ant’s-Eye Equinox

Spring first unfurls in the garden, not in sweeping vistas, but dots of color punctuating winter’s drab.  A snowdrop emerges and glistens pristine white from a mulched bed; a crocus spreads its vibrant yellow blossom widely in response to the waxing sun, its bladed leaves slicing through the encroaching straw-colored grassy turf at the path’s edge.  Vivid green tips of mid-season daffodils rise upward in hopeful aspiration, massed in patches across the landscape.  The initial change of seasons is emphatic, but lost in panorama; it’s best viewed up close, at the level of the perforated earth, in much the way a passing ant might see it.

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Trump Update: Justice Grinds Slowly

If you’re a regular reader of these chronicles, you may recall that from time to time, I’ve referenced the autumn 2021 Pluto station in exact square to Trump’s natal asteroid d’Arrest as a probable timeframe for him being brought to justice.  Well, the autumn came and went, and while investigations have increased apace and in quantity, no charges were filed.  Astrologers can be purists, and nothing delights the heart so much as an appropriate manifestation exactly on the date in question.

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Garden Glimpses: First Stirrings

In the garden, March Madness has more to do with the weather than anything else.  One day it’s 72, the next night we’re down to 15 again.  Nature doesn’t seem to know which season it wants to be, and this dilatory musing can be a real challenge for the gardener intent on coaxing as much bloom as possible from the landscape.  Early heat can set tender buds to swelling, which later are subject to freezing if temps dip again, blighting the blossom and eliminating an entire season of bloom for some species.

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AAA Flashback: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I just couldn’t let the 25th anniversary of the premiere of my favorite show ever slip by without due acknowledgement, so here we go!  On March 10, 1997, the Warner Brothers television network opened the gates of Hell and unleashed “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, a teen angst horror hell-odrama about a high school age Valley Girl fated to battle evil in all its forms; the world would never be the same.  Creator Joss Whedon had assailed the topic in a 1992 theatrical film starring Kristy Swanson, but wasn’t done with the idea, not by a long shot!  TV’s Buffy was the guardian of a hell mouth in “everyman” Sunnydale, California, charged with slaying, not just vampires, but all manner of demons, ghosts, zombies, hell-beasts and things that go bump in the night.

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Ukraine: Eight Stations of the Cross of War

On Thursday, 24 February 2022, at approximately 5 AM local time, Vladimir Putin’s Russian Army invaded Ukraine, accelerating a process of intimidation and aggression that had begun eight years before with the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, and had continued with support for separatist movements in Ukraine’s easternmost sectors, bordering Russia, specifically portions of the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the Donbass region.  Since the beginning of the year, a series of planetary stations had reflected the inexorable march to war, eight cosmic turning points which built upon each other like tumblers in a lock, eventually unleashing the conflict.

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