Ahmadinejad and the Future of Iran
THE FUTURE FOR IRAN
At the time of writing - four days after the chaotic Iranian election on June 12th 2009 - there are still wild protests on the streets of Teheran and other major cities, as supporters of candidate Mousavi demand that there be an accounting for their disappeared votes. An estimated ½ to 1½ million people have taken to the streets in defiance of a ban on demonstrations, the current president Ahmadinejad has mobilized the feared Revolutionary Guard militia, and at the last counting seven people have been shot and killed. Read more
Counseling Couples
In life there is what we think happens, and what actually happens. What actually happens is difficult, if not impossible, to establish objectively. There is a Russian proverb that says, “Never trust an eye witness”, and this theme has often been explored by artists and film directors. The most recent may be Vantage Point (2008), which is a film directed by Peter Travis in which a presidential assassination is recalled by six different witnesses. Their combined stories finally reveal the true story. In Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), four different people recount different versions of the murder of a man and the rape of his wife, but in this case no objectively truthful version is established. In the last analysis “truth” is not absolute, but something arrived at by consensus, and this makes the cultural environment we are brought up in a crucial factor in how we all agree about reality. Read more
Afghanistan - past and future
The Wild Transition from 2008 to 2010
Trends for 2009
Barack Obama
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At the recent United Astrology Congress in Denver, Colorado a panel of five astrologers discussed the coming US election in November, and all expressed powerful reservations about doing so because there was no birth time for any of the (at that time) three contenders that was confirmed to be true. This situation has radically changed. In an effort to put to rest rumors that he is not a natural born US citizen, which he of course is being born in Hawaii to an American mother, Obama has had his birth certificate posted online. (Note 1)
Prediction and Psychological Transformation
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When royal astrologer John Dee consulted with Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, he almost certainly gave her good advice about matters of state. He certainly chose an auspicious day for the coronation (note 1) as Elizabeth had a long a successful reign that spanned 44 years. But there are some things her probably did not do. He probably did not dwell on the fact that her father, Henry VIII, had declared her a bastard and disinherited her. He probably did not dwell on the psychological consequences of her father having her mother beheaded for supposed adultery. He probably did not reflect on Elizabeth’s ability to have a rewarding love life after her quasi-incestuous relationship in her mid-teens with Thomas Seymour, the 2nd husband of her stepmother and guardian Catherine Parr. (Note 2)
Kenya
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In April 1994, when Pluto and Jupiter conjoined the North Node in Scorpio the worst genocide of the 1990’s took place when extremist Hutu militias murdered an estimated 800,0000 to 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. It seems that the continent of Africa is so often subject to huge upheavals with so much loss of life, whether through Aids and curable diseases, through famine, or through civil war. Since 1994 Pluto has moved from Scorpio, through Sagittarius – religious terror – and here in the beginning of 2008 it is in Capricorn, so the astrological observer is inclined to a degree of nervousness about what new areas of human experience will undergo painful transformations. When Kenyan elections on December 27th 2007 took place and were followed by riots killing up to 1000 people, the question arises whether one of Africa’s most prosperous and stable countries is about to descend into chaos.
The Evolution of Love
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Tests have shown that if astrologers are presented with horoscopes for people they do not know, they do much worse than they expect to, when trying to describe who they are and what they do. For example, it has been shown that astrologers do no better than chance when trying to match horoscopes to professions. In actual fact people are so incredibly different, and there are so many of them, that it is impossible in reality to consistently predict what people are like, and what they do. With about 5 billion people in the world, and every one of them different, astrology is still a fantastic instrument, because it can assign a unique and complex signature to each individual, which can subsequently be interpreted according to a set of rule.