Posts by Alex Miller

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Troemper Transits: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? More to the point, what happens to the poor schmuck caught between them? That’s the current position of the 45th President of the United States, whose celestial referent, asteroid Troemper, is caught in the vice of the forming Saturn/Pluto conjunction.   Between Saturn’s rock and Pluto’s hard place, Donald J. Trump’s cosmic moniker finds itself in its own “place of little easement”, with wiggle room so slight that Trump can neither sit, stand, nor lie down.

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AAA Profile: Mayor Pete

On Palm Sunday 2019 South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay candidate for the Democratic nomination for US President, in a speech before more than 6,000 supporters. Known affectionately as “Mayor Pete”, Buttigieg had been turning heads with a $7 million haul for his campaign in the first quarter of 2019, even before making his candidacy official. Third place showings in recent polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as several attention-grabbing interviews and speeches, mark him as a potential force to be reckoned with in the Democratic Primary contests.

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RIP Dad

My father passed away peacefully in hospice on Saturday April 6th, almost nine years after my mother. Dad had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago, but for most of that time, his disease was little more than a scheduling inconvenience, as he worked in doctors and chemo appointments amidst his hectic-paced life, perennially grumbling that these took him away from cutting the grass, washing down the kitchen linoleum, or shoveling the driveway. Remarkably, he never had symptoms from the leukemia, nor adverse side effects form the chemo; he was blessed. It was only in the past few months, after a fall while out hunting which left him with a broken ankle, that dad slowed down.

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RIP Jonas

We at Leo’s Cat Rescue experienced a sad passing on Wednesday, April 3, when our feline friend Jonas breathed his last. Jonas had been with us intermittently for three years, having come to us in January 2016 in the midst of the east coast blizzard, Winter Storm Jonas, from which he got his name.

 

Jonas was small, a mix of grey and white patches, with a bobbed tail, just half its normal length, which spoke of early trauma. He was friendly, and adoptable, but he fell through the cracks, and never found a home.

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AAA Profile: Adam Schiff

The glow of Democratic keeper-of-the-flame Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), former ranking member and now Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, flared brightly on Thursday March 28th, when the California congressman responded to his GOP colleagues’ calls for him to resign in the wake of the release of the Mueller Report, which Trump allies are wrongly asserting “exonerates” the President.

 

In a blistering five-minute takedown which brilliantly laid out the case for Trump’s culpability, malfeasance and unfitness for office, Schiff masterfully reminded Americans of exactly what the stakes are in this Constitutional crisis, the depths to which the Republic(ans) has sunk in condoning or tolerating this violation of presidential norms and common decency.

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Brexit Deadline Looms

There were a lot of bad and flawed decisions that came out of 2016, like the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. With Uranus and TNO Eris locked in embrace and opposing Jupiter, populations across the globe that considered themselves disrespected, marginalized, or disadvantaged (all Eris) rose up in revolt, seeking change (both Uranus), with responses which were overblown and expressed in the political realm (both Jupiter). At least in the US we can say that only a minority of the electorate supported this ill-considered change.

 

Not so in the UK, where voters narrowly approved the British exit, or Brexit, from the European Union. In a sterling example of why we don’t generally submit complex policy decisions to the whims and prejudices of the uninformed masses, Britain now faces that most dreaded of possible outcomes from the vote: a Hard Brexit, with no deal achieved to replace Britain’s about-to-be-severed continental connections.

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