Recently I watched a documentary on TCM which reminded me just how unusual 1939 was for the US film industry. So many classics were released that year, including “Gone With the Wind”, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “The Wizard of Oz”. Eighty years later now, I wondered why that should have been, so of course as an astrologer, for greater understanding, I reached for the ephemeris.
“To buy or not to buy, that is the question.” US President Donald Trump faced this apparent dilemma this week, as he floated a desire to purchase the island of Greenland from the Danes. The bizarre notion may have been prompted by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, rattling around the West Wing while on vacation from Elsinore, but initially it yielded mocking commentary from around the globe. Until Greenlanders rebuffed Trump, and the Danish Prime Minister called the idea “absurd.” Then The Donald went into full assault mode, calling the PM “nasty” and cancelling a state visit to Denmark, a NATO ally, planned for early September.
People often ask how I do what I do. And truly, it’s not that difficult, it just requires basic astrologic knowledge, solid data, detail orientation and the focus to do it (which my Virgo Moon grumpily supplies), allied with a bit of synchronicity, luck, happenstance or whatever you call it.
Recently an example encapsulating this process presented itself, and I thought it to be a particularly apt and illustrative case in point. Part of what I do is science, and part is art.
Early on the morning of Saturday, August 10th, 2019, billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, New York, in an apparent suicide attempt. Paramedics were called and lifesaving measures were begun, but Epstein was pronounced dead about an hour later at a local hospital.
On the night of August 8-9, 1969, four members of the notorious Manson Family invaded a rented home in Los Angeles and brutally murdered five people. Not much by today’s standards, is it? But at the time, the crime created a sensation.
Part of the impact was generated by the celebrity of one of the victims, actress Sharon Tate, who had rented the home with her husband, director Roman Polanski, out of the country on a movie shoot at the time. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant with their child, who also lost its life. Cult leader Charles Manson had earlier instructed Tex Watson to go to the house and “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can”.
Dayton and El Paso join the entries in “Baby’s First Pop-Up Book of Slaughter”, along with “A is for Aurora, C is for Columbine, O is for Orlando, P is for Parkland, S is for Sandy Hook, and V is for Vegas,” among others. Two mass shootings within hours rocked the nation on the weekend of August 3rd and 4th, 2019, as 32 people lost their lives in senseless violence, with dozens more wounded. At least one of the shootings was politically and racially motivated, with the killer avowing his desire to kill “as many Mexicans as possible.”
