Friday Bite: 28 March 2025

Nothing to See Here

This morning, I awoke to the news of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake just north of Mandalay, Myanmar which brought down buildings as far away as Bangkok. The death toll is going to be high, but at the time of writing, there are no figures. In South Korea, wildfires continue to devastate the country. They began on 21 March and had doubled in size by yesterday. Deaths are put at 28 but more than 37,000 people have been displaced and over 88,000 acres of land destroyed.

It is as though Gaia’s anger and grief at the plight of Earth is manifesting in eruptions and uncontrollable elemental forces, mirroring the chaos and conflict all over the world.

FOLLOWING THE DETENTION and arrest of Istanbul mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu and more than one thousand opposition members and protesters, hundreds of thousands of people have poured into city streets across Turkey to protest. Imamoglu is seen as President Erdogan’s main political rival.

Turkey’s natal Moon at 29 degrees 55’ Gemini, currently being squared by Neptune and conjoined by the progressed Midheaven, while transiting Uranus is conjunct the fixed star Algol, is opposing natal Jupiter. As for President Erdogan, once considered one of the greatest leaders since Ataturk, he is currently facing a Uranus transit to his IC, a transit of Pluto to his Ascendant and a square from progressed Pluto to his Ascendant.

In these unprecedented times, we can no longer assume that the might of democracy will prevail and a leader will act in accordance with the rule of law and, more importantly, in a decent fashion. The new normal is to double down and lie shamelessly.

Nonetheless, leaders who have transiting Uranus on their MC-IC axis tend to fall from power, whether they jump or are pushed. The period around the new moon of 27 April is going to prove pivotal to Turkey’s future as well as that of the USA and Russia.

IN MY RECENT video on the Spring Ingress, I noted the presence of Jupiter on the Ascendant of the chart set for Great Britain and suggested that there would be some important developments regarding the monarchy. Sure enough, on Thursday, we learned that King Charles was to spend a night in hospital due to “side-effects” from his cancer treatment. While he has had to cancel a visit to Birmingham, the Palace remains upbeat, treating the situation as a “bump in the road”.

The current eclipse patterns do not make a huge impact on King Charles’ chart, although his progressions continue to give cause for concern. His progressed MC-IC axis is still hooked up to his Jupiter-Uranus opposition while progressed Saturn is conjoined to his Sun. Were we to be living in ancient Babylonia, astrologer-priests would be advising the King to step down and leave the palace so as to allow a proxy ruler to take the throne while the eclipse remained in play. (Solar eclipses were considered to be portents of the death or birth of a King.) Once the crisis was over, the King would be recrowned and everything revert to normal.

Just saying.

IT WOULD BE impossible for me to ignore the recent goings on in the Trump administration. On Monday, we learned that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic had been inadvertently invited to join a meeting of key members of Team Trump, including the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defence and the Director of National Intelligence, conducted over the encrypted messaging service, Signal.

During the meeting, Godberg witnessed the contempt in which Vance, Waltz and others held Europe, “I just hate bailing out Europe again” (Vance). He learned from Hegseth that their messaging over the forthcoming Yemen attack must be that “Biden failed” and that a way must be found to make Europe pay for the cost of the attack.

In the text exchanges that followed the meeting on 14 March, Goldberg learned precise details of the forthcoming attack on Yemen.  He received a text in the chain from Hegseth outlining the sequence of events leading up to and the timing and targets of the strike.

It was only when the attack on Yemen took place that Goldberg accepted he had not been the victim of a prank, but had, in fact, been party to a top secret discussion. And only when members of Trump’s administration began denying events and underplaying their significance did Goldberg publish the full transcript of the meeting and subsequent messages.

“We didn’t do this lightly. All yesterday, we were asking our contacts across the administration … since the president has declared this unclassified and … since the head of the CIA said there’s nothing sensitive or nothing classified in these documents, we just want to make sure that you [contacts in the administration] don’t have specific objections to this kind of information … going out in public.”

There are so many take-aways from this debacle. That the people in positions of such power are unqualified for their posts is but one. Just how little regard these top actors have for their European allies is another. Just how much power Vance wields is a third. Given that the president wasn’t in the room or even, apparently, party to the meeting and the ensuing fandango begs the question: who really is in charge?  And does this make Trump superfluous to requirements and only useful until a certain point is passed? Maybe we’ll discover at the end of April.

My fear is that like so many of the outrageous actions undertaken by the new administration and the jaw-dropping developments of the past 67 days, this one too will pass without consequence. And nothing will stop the dismantling of what was once a great democracy.

Friday Bite: 21 March 2025

Happy Days!

“I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution… I will prevent World War III…”  Donald Trump, Waco, 25 March 2023

“Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798

IN CASE IT passed you by, Thursday was International Day of Happiness. Who knew.

A lot of people who are definitely not happy are those who thought they would be embarking today from London’s Heathrow airport to distant places or flying in from them. A catastrophic fire at a nearby electricity substation shut down Europe’s biggest hub. Flights are expected to be disrupted for the next few days. Mercury retrograde…

In the past seven days (see smiley face above) we have celebrated the safe return of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore who spent nine unplanned months on the International Space Station due to issues with their Starliner capsule. Given the state of planet Earth, they could be forgiven for wishing their stay could have been extended.

As they splashed down, the occupants of Gaza were scattering among the rubble to find safe spaces as Israeli bombs once again rained down upon them. More than 590 Palestinians have been killed since Tuesday. Hamas and Israel blame each other for the end of the ceasefire: Hamas declaring Israel broke the deal by reneging on its commitment to move to a second phase while Israel maintains Hamas has refused to release more hostages or agree to a new proposal to extend the ceasefire by several weeks.

It may or may not be a coincidence, but a day or so earlier the United States launched a “decisive and powerful” wave of air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen who continue to attack shipping in the Red Sea.

As I often say, the period between eclipses is fragile.

Also on Tuesday, Presidents Trump and Putin held their much vaunted telephone call regarding a potential ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump described the conversation as “productive”. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to Moscow, who days earlier had been kept waiting eight hours for a meeting with Putin and appeared to have been sent off with a flea in his ear, described the call as “epic and transformational”.

For his part, Vladimir Putin expressed his “fundamental commitment to a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine war in collaboration with his US partners, which would be long-term and sustainable”. However, there were non-negotiable caveats: Ukraine must demilitarize and cease to accept foreign military aid… yada, yada, yada. The Russian president also agreed to a partial ceasefire on “energy and infrastructure” targets, meaning bridges, hospitals, railways and other civilian installations.

Hours later a Russian drone slammed into a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Sumy.

On Wednesday, President Trump announced that the US was planning an American-led privatisation of Ukraine’s power plants. This appeared to be news to President Zelensky who reposted, “Ukraine power plants are Ukrainian and belong to the Ukrainian people…”

I COULD GO on. Every single day, a raft of actions and statements are issued by the Trump administration, sowing seeds of confusion and frustrating attempts to rein in the tsunami of unconstitutional moves. It is as though the shock of it all has rendered those who could and should do something to stem the tide, into paralysis.

Of all the jaw-dropping events of the past week, top of the list was Donald Trump’s decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in order to deport hundreds of mostly Venezuelan immigrants, some allegedly members of the Tren de Aragua gang, to El Salvador where they will be held without trial in a notorious prison. Within hours of this decision, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed lawsuits claiming the Trump administration had unlawfully invoked the Act. In response, Judge James Boasberg of the Federal district court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order.

The order was ignored.

Mind you, you need to thread your way through a whole lot of semantics to prove it.

According to the timeline, Judge Boasberg convened the hearing regarding the unlawful invoking of the act at 5:00 pm on Saturday. At 5:26pm GlobalX Flight 6143 carrying a number of immigrants departed Harlingen, Texas bound for San Salvador.  At 5:45 pm a second flight, GlobalX 6145 took off from Harlingen. Between 6:45pm and 6:51pm while the planes were in transit, Judge Boasberg orally granted the Civil Liberties Union’s and Democracy Forward’s motions. Eleven minutes after Boasberg issued his written order, a third aircraft, GlobalX 6122, departed Harlingen bound for San Salvador at 7:37 pm.

Based on the above timeline, the Trump administration violated the court order.

Not so, according to the White House press secretary:

“The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory. The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict. Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear—federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion. A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.” 

The invoking of the Alien Enemies Act gives a president unparalleled wartime powers. The act has only been invoked on three other occasions: The1812 World War, World War I and World War II. It is self-evidently only applicable during a war when the country is in danger of an invading and hostile force. However, using the act to deport immigrants may only be the tip of the iceberg. On the basis of such an act, a president does not have to ask the courts for permission to invoke martial law.

Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in the early hours of Saturday morning, and hours after a total lunar eclipse. This lunar eclipse, as I explained in my last Friday Bite, intersected the lunar eclipse upon which the American president was born. Here’s what I said.

“The significance of this astro-scape for Donald Trump cannot be underestimated: it is the signature on his downfall.”  In the same way that the Sun at the peak of its powers at mid-summer is simultaneously beginning its decline, this recent total lunar eclipse marks the beginning of the end for President Trump, primarily in political terms. I think it is also significant that of the many and varied infringements of the law, civil rights and the constitution perpetrated by Elon Musk, DOGE and the Trump administration over the past sixty days, using the act of 1798 as a means of mass deportations is the “final straw”. The elephant in the living room can no longer be ignored: the United States is in a constitutional crisis. And the astrological signature on that crisis is the recent eclipse, which conjoined the USA’s Neptune while transiting Neptune is within a degree of the nation’s IC.

Astrologically speaking, the next major crossroads we need to look out for is 27 April, the new moon in Taurus and the third and final Mars-Pluto opposition.