As the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing begin to wind down, let’s take a quick look back at memorable moments from the competition. A chart set for the opening ceremonies (8 PM local time, 4 February 2022, Beijing, China) shows an exact conjunction of the Sun with Saturn at 15 Aquarius, pulling focus (Sun) to acknowledged masters and top achievers (Saturn) in their fields, in a quest for professional (Saturn again) recognition (Sun).
All politico eyes were turned to the “Old Dominion State” on Election Day 2021, where former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe sought to regain his old job and beat back a challenge from Republican Glenn Youngkin, a businessman with no prior political experience. Virginia’s increasingly blue tint, and a 10-point Biden victory margin just last year, not to mention McAuliffe’s earlier tenure of the office, all argued for a stately procession to victory, but in practice, the outcome was far from assured. Polls tightened in the weeks leading up to the election, with Youngkin showing significant leads in some, but a statistical dead heat in most.
For the second time in twenty years, California is holding a recall election for its governor. Like Gray Davis in 2003, the at-risk chief executive is a Democrat, Gavin Newsom, less than two years into his first term, former mayor of San Francisco. Unlike the successful challenge mounted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, there is no high-profile Republican candidate running to unseat Newsom in 2021. Rather, upwards of 40 little-known candidates have ponied-up to the electoral bar, from across the political spectrum, but Newsom is not among them, as the current governor is not allowed to run to replace himself.
“Door-knock for Warnock, and vote your Ossoff!” – Democratic slogan for the runoff campaign
Lost in the mishigas and melee at the Capitol on Wednesday was a political revolution of another sort, this one successful. Even as Trump supporters vainly stormed Congress to prevent certification of Biden’s victory, the last race of the 2020 election cycle was being called in Georgia. Against all odds, both Democratic candidates in two runoff races won, bringing the Dems to parity with the GOP in the US Senate. For the first time since 2009, Democrats control both houses of Congress and the presidency.
Asteroid Sisyphus is named for that worthy denizen of Hades, doomed to forever roll a rock uphill, only to have it roll down again, thus necessitating endless repetition of the action. As such, astrologically, Sisyphus represents futile action without purpose or accomplishment – repetitive, pointless effort which achieves nothing lasting.
In light of President Trump’s repeated, one might say endless, refusal to accept the clear results of the 2020 election, where Americans handed him his hat and showed him the Oval Office door, it occurred to me to take a closer look at asteroid Sisyphus, to see what role it might be playing in the election and its aftermath. It’s not just Trump who’s beating this dead horse: 90% of elected Republicans in Washington refuse to publicly acknowledge his loss, and his “legal team” has been rejected in all but one of the nearly 50 court cases filed to overturn the results in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.
There’s a new point (to me) which has come across my radar recently – asteroid TRIUMF, which may have bearing on the 2020 election outcome. An anagram for the Canadian national particle accelerator (originally called the TRI University Meson Facility), TRIUMF seems to operate well as its phonetic clone, “triumph”, an indicator of ultimate victory or success.
TRIUMF would of course have many applications not solely related to the political or career sphere, in theory pertaining to any successful endeavor. But this teeny orbiting rock chunk does appear to portray a pattern of influence on US presidential nominees and elections, at least in recent times.
