Apophis Archives - Alex's Asteroid Astrology

August 30th, 2025 at 10:10am by Alex Miller

Minneapolis Church School Shooting

Shortly before 8:30 AM CDT on 27 August 2025, a black-clad individual approached the Annunciation Catholic Church school, while elementary students were celebrating a school-wide mass to commemorate the start of the academic year. Robin Westman, 23, began shooting through the stained-glass windows of the church, firing dozens of rounds before committing suicide. Two children, aged 8 and 10, were killed, and 17 others injured, including 14 children and 3 octogenarians.

February 24th, 2025 at 10:23am by Alex Miller

Trump’s First Thirty Days: Schlock & Awe

Donald J. Trump’s particular genius for creating chaos and mayhem was on full display in the first month after his second inauguration on 20 January 2025. A flurry of executive orders mandating everything from the end of birthright citizenship (a constitutionally enshrined right which requires an amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states to alter) to the quixotic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” (and would you like Freedom Fries with that?) was just the beginning. Most of the heavy lifting of dismantling the federal government was consigned to Elon Musk and his fabricated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who has proceeded to reflexively fire or eliminate thousands of workers with civil service protections and close entire agencies without congressional authority. Freezes on funding, hiring, and dispensing approved funds have rounded out DOGE’s resume.

February 3rd, 2025 at 08:25am by Alex Miller

Asteroid Sleuth: The Case of the Deadly Dessert

A family holiday party in Tores, Brazil on December 23, 2024, turned fatal, resulting in the deaths of three members, and the hospitalization of three others, from arsenic poisoning. Dead are sisters Maida da Silva, 58, and Neuza Silva Dos Anjos, 65; and Neuza’s daughter Tatiana, 43; a third sister, Zeli Silva, 60, Maida’s husband Jefferson, and Tatiana’s son Matheus, 10, were hospitalized with severe injuries but survived.

December 23rd, 2024 at 07:57am by Alex Miller

Death at Abundant Life

On Monday, 16 December 2024, shooting suspect Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, 15, discharged a 9mm handgun in a study hall at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing two and wounding six others, before turning the gun on herself. The incident, sadly, is hardly isolated, but it is unusual. The vast number of mass shootings are perpetrated by males, using assault-style rifles; women constitute only 5% of mass shooters, and with both victims also female, this becomes an “all-female” cast of characters.

September 7th, 2024 at 10:09am by Alex Miller

The Georgia School Shooting

Ah, back to school! I remember it well – the bookbags and lunchpails that had to conform to what was currently “cool” to avoid merciless taunting; catching up with what friends did over the summer break; the new pens, pencils, notepads and markers; readjusting to subpar school cuisine; the new clothes that were another potential pitfall of derision; and of course, the mass shootings.

No, wait – that one’s new. Well, new-ish; it’s been a quarter century since Columbine inaugurated a whole new rite-of-passage for American schoolchildren, replacing dodgeball with dodgebullet, and each year since, it seems we just keep upping the ante.

July 9th, 2024 at 09:18am by Alex Miller

Losing Their Heads: The Mars/Uranus/Algol Conjunction and the Republican National Convention

The Republican National Convention begins on July 15^th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. That date just happens to coincide with the precise triple conjunction of Mars, Uranus and Fixed Star Algol, all at 26 Taurus, conjoined the 24 Taurus Midheaven of Donald J. Trump, who will accept the GOP 2024 presidential nomination during the convention. Mars denotes resentment, anger, hatred and violence; Uranus suggests volatility, controversy, iconoclasm, fanaticism and insurrection; Algol forms the severed head of Medusa in the constellation Perseus, denoting both literal decapitation and metaphorically “losing one’s head.” If you can think of a better celestial thumbnail sketch of the modern GOP and its felon champion, I’d like to hear it.