Friday Bite 2 October 2026

The Mars Effect

“If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation — in this case we mean Kaliningrad, or maybe some other territories — of course, inevitably and immediately the question of Russian Federation using all weapons at the disposal of our country will appear on the agenda… We must realise that the ​moment ⁠when nothing can ‌be changed any longer may come very quickly and unexpectedly for everyone. The logic of escalating, ‌increasingly harsh retaliatory measures leads to ‌a fatal point of no return,” Vladimir Putin, 1 October

“The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.” Pete Hegseth, 1 October

“Can we just ask about the debt? Just because the debt just reached $40 trillion.”

“Well, Biden just killed our country.” Time Magazine interview with Donald Trump, 28 September

“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life. And that is with love.” Christa Pike, 1 October.

Monday was new year’s day for Mars as it crossed its northern spring equinox and began a new orbit around the Sun. Mars had just entered the sign of Leo on its way to oppose Pluto (Saturday) while Mercury squares up to both Mars and Pluto today. Mars, the planet of war, on the warpath! Mars represents many positive things – courage, leadership, incisiveness and passion, but it also puts its signature on confrontation and conflict. And I think the events of the past seven days adequately fulfil that promise.

• In the early hours of Sunday morning, a farmer noticed three white vans and several balaclava-hooded men acting suspiciously in the area around Fairford airbase in Gloucestershire, England.  She phoned the police to alert them to the activity. (American B52 and B-1 bombers loaded with munitions have repeatedly taken off from the base on missions to Iran since the war began in February.) Five men were arrested but released on bail the following day, much to the concern of the Trump administration, if not many of us. It transpired the vans contained petrol but no explosives and apparently one of the arrested men had also phoned the police in the early hours of Sunday morning. The mystery just got deeper and deeper. Yes, it was a potential terrorist attack and there was some evidence that Iran was behind it, but not enough and nothing to explain what the “terrorists” actually had in mind. On Thursday a sixth British Iranian national was arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist strike.
• On Wednesday on a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv the co-pilot attacked the captain in an attempt to seize control of the 737. The severely wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door and passengers were able to overpower the attacker. Pilots travelling on the plane as passengers landed the plane safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Benjamin Netanyahu immediately claimed the attacker had undergone Islamist radical indoctrination, but so far no official reason for the attack has been given.
• On Wednesday, Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman given the death sentence for murdering a classmate in 1995 survived two doses of a lethal injection. The execution was suspended and she was taken to hospital where she remains in critical condition. Pike’s sentence continues to be controversial as experts have accused her legal defence of failing to present mitigating evidence at her trial. Pike was raped by a neighbour when she was eleven and attempted suicide the following year. In the months leading to her arrest (then seventeen years old) she was removed from the family home after her mother’s live-in boyfriend physically and sexually abused her.
• On Wednesday, Russia launched its largest attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the spring. Earlier, the Russian president had addressed the Valdai Forum of International Russia experts in Moscow effectively maintaining that nothing was off the table were a NATO country to attack Russian territory.
• On 1 October, the Trump administration announced that it would exclude the UK, France and the Baltic countries from a NATO gathering in Poland next month to discuss the future of NATO. Other countries who did not receive an invitation are also big defence spenders and play key roles in the alliance, leaving their diplomats confused as to why they are being frozen out. (I think we know the answer to this: President Trump has made very little secret of his aim to abandon the international order which the United States and Western/European countries put together after World War II.)
• On Monday, Time magazine published an interview with Donald Trump in which he refused to rule out using the Insurrection Act before the midterms, demolishing the Kennedy Centre and annihilating Iran.

THERE WAS NOTHING particularly difficult about the Flydubai’s take-off from Dubai International airport on 30 September unless you take into consideration the Sun in Libra trining Uranus and Pluto and opposing the Saturn-Neptune midpoint creating one Kite configuration and a Mars-Pluto opposition generating yet another, plus a T-square formed by the Mars-Pluto opposition and Mercury. But we have to remember that these alignments were affecting every flight taking off at roughly that time – flights which encountered no incident whatsoever. However, two hours into the flight when the assault began, that picture had changed. Now, Venus was rising in Scorpio and at the intersection of the Mars-Pluto opposition.

Venus has been a planet of interest to me in recent months, largely due to her presence at the start of conflicts both in the past and present. I looked into her role not only as the goddess of love and all things pleasurable and harmonious, but as the deity of war in many mythological traditions. It may be in Venus’s gift to right wrongs and to see that justice is done, and although this might be best achieved in a court of law or in mediation, sometimes you have to go to war.

Venus rising at the moment of the attack reveals that this was indeed an act of war, perpetrated in this case by an Omani national who was prepared to die for a greater cause. (He may just be a suicidal maniac, of course.) Mars, which squares Venus has just culminated and is in one of Gauquelin’s key positions for top athletes. Over the years, I have noticed that Mars (and indeed other planets) assume greater power in this area of the horoscope as well as they do ten degrees above the Ascendant. That Mars, the old ruler of Scorpio and Pluto the modern ruler, are opposing each other and squaring the Scorpio Ascendant and Venus adds more than a spritz of symbolism to this potentially deadly incident in the skies. Given that the attack was foiled and the plane landed safely may owe much to Jupiter’s position six degrees from the Midheaven.

We do not have a time of birth for the woman who survived her execution, but she is a Pisces with Mars and Neptune squaring her Sun. She thus resonates with the themes of sacrifice and suffering and may well become a martyr to the cause of the abandonment of the death penalty in the United States. Christa has a close Jupiter-Saturn square, which has, among many factors, a connection with justice, affairs of state and law and order. Her destiny, we might say, is to become the agent of change. At this point in time her progressed solar arc Uranus is within two minutes of opposing her natal Mars, not only presiding over the most extraordinary escape from death but thrusting her firmly into the global spotlight.

I hope she comes through her life-saving treatment because somehow I feel she does not deserve to die for an act driven by passion (in this case jealousy) when she was too young and too damaged to control her actions. A life sentence maybe, but not the death penalty.

“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life. And that is with love.” Christa Pike, 1 October.

A lesson in love in the time of Mars.

Friday Bite 25 September 2026

Absolute Insanity

“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” Donald Trump, 21 September

“We have a right under the US Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government… [such a ban] would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.” CNN, 21 September

“Both China and the United States are leading nations in artificial intelligence. We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people.” Xi Jinping, 24 September

“Whoever wins AI, WINS!” Donald Trump, 24 September

SHORTLY AFTER I published last week’s Friday Bite, President Trump banned three news organizations – CNN, MS NOW and Politico – from the White House. On Monday, Politico filed a legal challenge against the order and as a result other networks, including Fox News, withdrew their journalists and camera crews from the White House. On Wednesday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order and told the White House to immediately restore pass credentials for the banned organizations. However, the administration continued to block the journalists until noon on Thursday. The timing of all this proved deeply embarrassing for the American president given that there was limited coverage of Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington.

It was another of those weeks when one shocking event followed another making it difficult to absorb the significance of them all.

• Sunday brought a second disastrous election result for Chancellor Merz with another region voting for Germany’s far-right AfD party.
• Sunday also produced an unequivocal win for Russia’s Unite Party. (Not sure this counts as a shocking development.)
• On Monday, the United Kingdom announced it would assist Saudi Arabia in its war with the Houthis, by providing air-to-air refuelling.
• On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham went to Washington to meet Donald Trump. (No royal invitations necessary: the meeting was cordial and uncontroversial.)
• On Thursday, Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an Open AI agent had hacked one of its government websites.
• Also on Thursday, President Xi Jinping arrived on a state visit to the United States. The event was suffused in amiability, the intention on both administrations’ parts to focus on cooperation as opposed to confrontation. To this end, protests over Tibet and Hong Kong were kept well away from the Chinese president’s view, the speeches were bland and instead of Chinese experts within the State Department and the national security council – people who understand China deeply – attending the state dinner, guests included billionaires and tech bros. There was no movement on AI safety cooperation.
• On Thursday, at the United Nations General Assembly, scores of delegates left the room when Prime Minister Netanyahu took the podium. In his fiery speech, Netanyahu defended Israel’s military action and attacked New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdami.
• And today, Iran said that it had told the Trump administration that it is willing to open the Strait of Hormuz in six days if the United States lifts sanctions on its oil exports, ends the war on all fronts – including Lebanon – and releases some of Iran’s frozen assets.

TOMORROW THERE WILL be a full moon in Aries, and it is a powerful full moon, thus its theme of closure and completion and ends-of-chapters will be in full flow. How wonderful would it be if this full moon were to preside over the end of the blockade of the Hormuz Strait and the beginning of the end of the war with Iran. However, common sense, recent history and the capriciousness of Donald Trump would say otherwise. At some point there will be a lunar eclipse or a full moon that places its signature on the end of this war, and it is certainly going to take a series of lunar steps to reach that point, but maybe this is not the final one. Nonetheless, this is a very significant full moon for the United States.

At the exact moment of the full moon, the angles of the chart set for Washington DC are those of its inception – the Declaration of Independence. We could interpret this as the current period having a great deal to do with the foundation of America and its constitution. The full moon falls at 3 degrees 37 minutes of Aries, thus flanking the United States MC-IC axis. And this full moon is sandwiched between Saturn and Neptune.

Neptune and Saturn have been tracing a path across America’s IC since the summer of 2025, and we have had plenty of evidence of the erosion of the nation’s founding principles – “all men are created equal with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness” – not least the actions of ICE and Trump’s mass deportation programme, which has seen armed federal agents carrying out operations at airports, outside suburban schools, hospitals and truck stops from Maine to Arizona.

Neptune was in Aries at the time of the American Civil war and it made a certain sense that the country would experience a similar division and breakdown of society and law and order this time round. The No-King protests have stopped and it would seem that many, if not most, Americans have become resigned to the fact that Trump is here to stay and that short of a democratic landslide at the midterms, nothing and no one is going to change the situation.

However, bit by bit, this administration is hoisting itself by its own petard.

Saturday’s full moon is not only flanking the US MC-IC axis but acting as the linchpin of a Kite configuration – Sun opposition Moon sextile Pluto and sextile Uranus, and a grand trine uniting the Sun, Pluto and Uranus. There is a second kite, this one with a Mars-Pluto opposition as its centre point and sextiling the Sun and Uranus. And there is yet another configuration – a Basket – which contains all the usual suspects – Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – and the Moon and Mars.

Rather than trying to find a neat little meaning for each of these configurations, simply recognize that with all these planets resonating at a similar degree, the equivalent of a mighty gong is being struck, reverberating across time and space and manifesting in a variety of significant events, not only for America.

We may not be privy to all the goings on in the global corridors of power, but we can see from the astrology, particularly the positions of the outer planets, that the decisions being made at this time are going to have huge ramifications for humanity. Whether we’re talking the development of AI, the Ukraine War, the situation in Iran and the Hormuz Strait, shifts are taking place, alliances are forming, betrayals committed and sacrifices made. And we shall look back at this time and see it for what it is, the consolidation of power in a handful of spheres of influence that has the capacity to wipe us out.