Steve Sailer's New Book On Barack Obama An Interesting Case Study For Astrologers

Steve Sailer's New Book On Barack Obama An Interesting Case Study For Astrologers
mumin_bey@yahoo.com, isteve.blogspot.com

With only a day or so to go before the big elections, online blogger and journalist Steve Sailer has come out with a book on Obama. Based on Obama’s own Dreams Of My Father: A Story Of Race and Inheritance, Sailer gives a guided tour of Obama’s inner landscape in his own words, borrowing large tracts of Obama’s first book, written when he was just 33 years old.

Astrologers are greatly helped when they can get access to such biographical works. Sailer has done a good job of breaking down an otherwise arduous read in the over 400 page journey that is Obama’s "Dreams".

The "official" data for Obama is Aug 4 1961 Honolulu HI with a clocktime set for 7.26PM ASHT. This gives an Asc of 18 Aqr 42, and an early Gemini Moon in the 4 house, at 3 degrees, 23 minutes. I’ve always been very skeptical of this birthtime option, and have chosen to stick with my trial rectification time of 3AM ASHT, giving an Asc of 29 Gem 49 and a Taurus Moon at 24 degrees, 37 minutes.

In this option, the Moon squares Uranus, ruler of the 9 house; in the "official" version, the Moon squares Pluto, ruler of the 9. Both chart options speak undeniably to Obama’s racial focus and obsessions. In the "official" account, Aquarius on the Asc and a Gemini Moon account in large part for it, both being Signs that are caught up with racial and interracial themes; in my own test chart, Gemini on the Asc, and the Moon square Uranus ruling the 9, again speaks to the same themes (plus the Gemini Asc, representing the point of entry into the world, the identity and literally, the body of a person, is as about "biracial" as it can get!).

In the "official" version, we have to note that Uranus is angular, in the 7 house, and ruling the Asc. In either chart option, the Leo Sun squares Neptune in Scorpio. Nuff said, insofar as astrologers are concerned. Sailer, for his part, is no stranger to controversey. Eversince his brush with death in a fight with cancer in the 1990s, he turned his attention to his true loves, writing about, among other things, Race. His efforts would gain him scorn in some quarters and acclaim in others, such is the way of anyone born under the Sign of the Archer (Dec 20 1958, Los Angeles CA).

What follows below is an introduction to Sailer’s book. Comment and reply, including any astrological commentary, invited!

Salaam
Mu

The Introduction to my book: "America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s Story of Race and Inheritance" We’ve posted online my entire 264 page book, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s Story of Race and Inheritance. You’ll be able soon to order a paperback copy for $29.95, but in the meantime, you can start reading it online here:http://www.vdare.com/half-blood_prince/To give you a taste, here’s the first chapter. (The killer chapter, though, is the second, which tells why Obama’s mother indoctrinated him in the dreams from his father.)

1. Introduction
I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book–namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope, 2006
The fundamental irony of Sen. Barack Obama’s Presidential candidacy is that no nominee in living memory has been so misunderstood by the press and public, and yet no other candidate has ever written so intimately or eloquently (or, to be frank, endlessly) about his “deepest commitments.”While journalists have swarmed to Alaska with admirable alacrity to ferret out every detail of Sarah Palin‘s energetic life, the media have drawn a curtain of admiring incomprehension in front of Obama’s own exquisitely written autobiography, Dreams from My Father. Because few have taken the trouble to appreciate Obama on his own terms, the politician functions as our national blank slate upon which we sketch out our social fantasies.Although many have supported Obama in 2008 because he seems to them better than the alternatives, he has also famously electrified throngs of voters. Yet, the reasons for their enthusiasm are often contradictory.For example, many Americans, whether for Obama, McCain, or None of the Above, appreciate the patriotic, anti-racialist sentiment in the most famous sentence of Obama’s keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention: “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”

Yet, Obama’s white enthusiasts are often excited by the candidate’s race, and for diverse motivations. More than a few white people, for instance, wish to demonstrate their moral and cultural superiority over more backward members of their own race. As Christian Lander’s popular website Stuff White People Like acerbically documents, white people strive endlessly for prestige relative to other whites, scanning constantly for methods to claw their way to the top of the heap. In this status struggle, nonwhites seldom register on white people’s radar screens as rivals. Instead, white people see minorities more as useful props in the eternal scuffle to gain the upper hand over other whites. High on Lander’s list of stuff white people like is:8 Barack ObamaBecause white people are afraid that if they don’t like him that they will be called racist.As one of Hillary Clinton’s advisers explained to The Guardian:If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.

Other white Obama devotees have very different rationales in mind. Some are eager to put white guilt behind them, assuming that Obama’s election will prove there is no more need for affirmative action. Stuart Taylor Jr. exulted in The Atlantic in an article called “The Great Black-White Hope:”

The ascent of Obama is the best hope for focusing the attention of black Americans on the opportunities that await them instead of on the oppression of their ancestors.

And some white Obamaniacs wish to enthrone the princely Obama to serve as a more suitable exemplar for young African-Americans than the gangsta rappers they presently idolize. (Don’t be so black. Act more Ba-rack!) Jonathan Alter rhapsodized in Newsweek:[Obama’s] most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community.

Remember the 1998 movie Bulworth, where Warren Beatty … tells astonished black Democrats that it’s time for them to “put down the chicken and the malt liquor…”That the candidate is black offers the country a potential advantage: it makes his intellectual facility and verbal adeptness more acceptable to the bulk of voters, many of whom found Al Gore and his 1355 SAT score too inhumanly cerebral to trust. If Obama, a superb prose stylist, were white, he’d be written off as an effete intellectual. But white voters are hungry for a well-educated role model for blacks. And blacks hope that his wife Michelle and his long membership in Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ are evidence that he is, as Michelle says, keeping it real.

Whatever their reasons, conscious or unconscious, white Obama zealots are prone to assume that Obama is the Tiger Woods of politics: as the postracial product of a happy mixed race family, he must be the anti-Jesse Jackson. His election will enable America to put all that tiresome tumult over ethnicity behind us.

Since 2004, Obama has himself stoked the popular hope among whites that his admixture of black and white genes means that “trying to promote mutual understanding” is “in my DNA,” as he asserted at the April 29, 2008 press conference in which he finally disowned his longtime pastor.

Obama’s 2004 keynote address tapped into an omnipresent theme in our popular culture, which is currently dominated by fantasy and science fiction epics largely about orphans predestined by their unique heredity and/or upbringing to save the world, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, Superman, Terminator, Lord of the Rings, and Batman.

Likewise, in politics, a fascination with breeding is both very old (going back to the days of hereditary monarchy) and very contemporary. The main qualifications for the Presidency of the current Chief Executive, Mr. Bush, and the Democratic runner-up in 2008, Mrs. Clinton, consist of being, respectively, the scion and consort of ex-Presidents.

More subtly, Obama launched himself on the national stage at the 2004 convention by devoting the first 380 words of his speech to detailing the two stocks, black and white, from which he was crossbred. He implied that, like the mutual heir to a dynastic merger of yore—think of England’s King Henry VIII, offspring of the Lancaster-York marriage that ended the War of the Roses—he is the one we’ve been waiting for to end the War of the Races.

In Richard III, Shakespeare concludes his cycle of history plays with the victorious Lancastrian Richmond (Henry Tudor, now to become King Henry VII) proclaiming his dynastic marriage to Elizabeth of York:

We will unite the white rose and the red …
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division,
O, now, let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs—God, if Thy will be so—
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!

Correspondingly, America’s half-blood prince reassures us that, as the son of what he called his parents’ “improbable love,” he will unite the white race and the black.

In contrast, many African Americans, after an initial period of uncertainty about a man sequestered throughout his childhood thousands of miles from any black community, have come to view Obama as their racial champion. They hope he will do in the White House what he tried to accomplish in his earlier careers on the left margin of Chicago‘s one-party Democratic political system as a community organizer, discrimination lawyer, foundation grant dispenser, and inner city politician: namely (to put it crassly), to get money for blacks from whites.

That Senator and Mrs. Obama donated $53,770 to Rev. Wright‘s church as recently as 2005 through 2007 suggests that this hope is not wholly delusionary.

Nonetheless, judging by his predominantly white campaign staff, the circumspect Obama would likely field an Administration in which minority appointees would not hold all that much more power than in the Bush Administration of Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Albert Gonzales.Which one is the real Barack Obama? How can we decipher The Obama Code? What is the Rosebud that reveals the inner Obama?

The overarching thesis of my book is extremely simple: that there’s no secret about Obama’s big secret. He spelled out exactly what he considers the central mandates of his existence in the subtitle of his graceful 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father. To Obama, his autobiography is most definitely not a postracial parable. Instead, it is A Story of Race and Inheritance.

The then 33-year-old Obama who wrote Dreams from My Father is obsessed with ethnicity and ancestry, as he relentlessly documents across nearly each of the book’s 460 pages. For 150,000 words, nothing diverts Obama from the subject of his racial identity.

What is the precise concern about race and inheritance that galvanizes Obama’s innermost emotions?Once again, it’s not exactly a mystery.Obama’s 1995 memoir reveals a genetically biracial young man raised by his white relatives who incessantly interrogates himself with the same question that the 139,000 mostly turgid articles and web postings catalogued by Google have asked about him: Is he black enough?

In particular, is Obama black enough to fulfill the dreams from his father and become a leader of the black race? Or will his half-blood nature and nonblack nurture leave him forever outside the racial community he treasures?

Doubts over whether he is black enough have tormented Obama since his youth. His psychological trauma helps make him a more captivating personality to contemplate than, say, his vanquished rival for the Democratic nomination, Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor. Richardson‘s unusual life story (raised among the elite of Mexico City, the descendent of one WASP and three Mexican grandparents) would seem at least as relevant to contemporary American politics as Obama’s famously exotic background. Yet, nobody paid Richardson any attention. That’s partly because Americans evidently find Hispanics less interesting than blacks, even though Latinos now significantly outnumber African Americans—and partly because Richardson is a hack, while Obama is something more refined and intriguing.

Despite Obama’s aesthetic talents, his actual politics aren’t terribly innovative. As conservative literary critic Shelby Steele, who is also the son of a black father and white mother, points out in A Bound Man, “For Obama, liberalism is blackness.” To be black enough is tied up in Obama’s mind with being left enough. As someone brought up by whites far from the black mainstream, Obama lacks the freedom to be politically unorthodox enjoyed by men of such iconic blackness as boxing promoter Don King, or funk singer James Brown and basketball giant Wilt Chamberlain, both of whom endorsed Richard Nixon in 1972.

(Why Obama being “black enough” would be in the interest of the 7/8ths of the electorate that isn’t black has never been answered. That’s hardly surprising, because the press has barely even thought to ask why Obama’s 460 pages about his feelings of race loyalty might concern any nonblack. It’s a question that wouldn’t occur to the typical 21st Century reporter. That’s the kind of thing that just isn’t written about in polite society.)

Remarkably, much of Obama’s campaign image—the transcender of race, the redeemed Christian, the bipartisan moderate, etc.—is debunked in Obama’s own 1995 memoir. Obama’s potential Achilles heel has always been that he has such a gift for self-expression combined with so much introspective self-absorption that he can’t help revealing himself to the few who invest the effort to read carefully his polished and subtle (but fussy and enervating) prose.

For example, Obama has spent millions in 2008 to advertise his mother’s race in order to ingratiate himself to whites. Obama supporter Matthew Yglesias blogged that one of the candidate’s June 2008 TV spots laden with pictures of the white side of his family should have been entitled “My Mom’s White! And I‘m from America!” Yet, Obama boasted in the Introduction to Dreams (p. xv) that he had “ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”Similarly, around Obama’s 27th birthday in 1988, between his three years as a racial activist in Chicago and his three years at Harvard Law School, he traveled to his father’s Kenya for the first time.

On his way to Africa, he spent three weeks touring Europe. But his racial resentments made his European vacation a nightmare. He found sightseeing amidst the beautiful ancestral monuments of the white race to be wounding to his racial team pride:And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I‘d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I‘d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. [pp. 301-302]Obama in Europe was like a Boston Red Sox fan in Yankee Stadium in New York. Sure, the House that Ruth Built was magnificently large and echoing with glorious baseball history, but that just makes it more hateful to a Red Sox rooter.

In Europe, I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine—stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I‘d become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation—I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there. [pp. 301-302]

On the other hand, Obama may be home free, because it can take a lot of effort to follow his Story of Race and Inheritance.The main happy ending in Dreams, for instance, occurs in Kenya when a friend of his father points out to him that even Kenyan culture isn’t purely authentically black African (the tea they love to drink was introduced by the British, and so forth). That even Africans aren’t wholly black by culture means to Obama, that, despite his background, he can be black enough to be a leader of the black race. He summarizes this revelation in his memoir’s brief but almost impenetrable Introduction.

So far, I‘ve minimized the number of lengthy quotes from Dreams from My Father because large dollops of Obama’s calculatedly perplexing prose can be daunting and disconcerting to the unprepared reader. Obama, who was already planning his Chicago political career when he published Dreams, eschews any sentence that could be turned into a soundbite. He has little desire to assist those readers and voters with merely normal attention spans grasp who he feels he is.

In his Introduction, Obama uncoils two serpentine sentences of importance. The first explains what his book is about, while the second reveals a primary lesson learned.

"At some point, then, in spite of a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny, in spite of the periodic impulse to abandon the entire project, what has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey—a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." [p. xvi]

Okay, that sentence wasn’t too hard to follow: Obama, like one of those questing orphan-heroes elucidated by Joseph Campbell (the professor of comparative mythology who influenced George Lucas’s Star Wars), goes on a semi-metaphorical journey in which he learns how to be “a black American.” Not, bear in mind, “a postracial American” or “a mixed race American” or “a black and white American” or just “an American American.” He wasn’t looking for “a workable meaning” for any of the identities that a citizen whose knowledge of Obama doesn’t go back farther than the reinvented image debuted during his first statewide campaign in 2004 might assume. No, Obama’s accomplishment was becoming “a black American.”

Next, after some literary pedantry about whether or not Dreams could be considered an autobiography, Obama delivers this doozy of a sentence in which he unveils, wedged between dashes and obscured by lawyerly stipulations, something crucial he’s discovered about himself:

"I can’t even hold up my experience as being somehow representative of the black American experience (“After all, you don’t come from an underprivileged background,” a Manhattan publisher helpfully points out to me); indeed, learning to accept that particular truth—that I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various struggles—is part of what this book’s about." [p. xvi]

That’s the kind of sentence that Sister Elizabeth, my 8th grade English grammar teacher, would force kids who shot spitballs in class to diagram on the blackboard.

Let’s unpack it slowly. Obama says that “part of what this book’s about” is “learning to accept that particular truth.” And what’s that truth? That, even though his life is not at all “representative of the black American experience,” he still “can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa.”

What then does he want to do with his racial brethren and sistren in America and Africa? “Affirm a common destiny.” And what does our Nietzsche-reading Man of Destiny mean by that? That’s where Sister Elizabeth can’t help us anymore. With Sen. Obama leading in the polls as I write this in mid-October 2008, it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see.

Obama’s most primal emotions are stirred by race and inheritance, as this overwrought paragraph from Dreams’ Introduction about how the “tragedy” of his life is also the tragedy of us all illustrates:

"Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down…well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns." [p. xv]

Of course, it is possible that since Obama published Dreams while preparing to run for the State Senate in 1996, he has transformed himself ideologically and shed his racialism.

After all, he suffered a soul-crushing rejection by black voters in his early 2000 primary challenge against Rep. Bobby Rush (who had been trounced by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1999). In emulation of Obama’s hero, the late Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Washington, who had progressed from the Illinois state senate to the U.S. House to the mayor’s office, Obama tried to wrestle the Democratic nomination from the aging Rush, a former Black Panther, in a district that was 65 percent black.

Rush scoffed at Obama in the Chicago Reader, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. …Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.” The third candidate in that race, state senator Donne Trotter, laughed, “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community.”

Obama carried the white minority, but the Panther thumped the Professor among blacks.

Overall, Obama lost 61 percent to 30 percent.Obama reacted to this racial rejection with “denial, anger, bargaining, despair,” as he described his long post-defeat grief in The Audacity of Hope. Obama apparently realized then that he would never have quite the right pedigree to appeal more to black voters than other black politicians do. (Moreover, Obama’s dream of using a House seat as a stepping stone to reclaiming for the black race Harold Washington‘s old post as mayor of Chicago seemed increasingly implausible for a second reason. It was becoming evident that local voters considered Richie Daley to be the trueborn rightful heir to his famous father’s throne of Mayor-for-Life.)

Eventually, Obama snapped out of his depression. He seems to have decided that even if he weren’t black enough to best Bobby Rush in the hearts of black voters, he is white enough to be the black candidate whom white voters love to like. In 2001, Obama gerrymandered his South Side state senate district to make it, as Ryan Lizza wrote in The New Yorker, “wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated,” snaking it all the way up from his base in Hyde Park to include the affluent whites of Chicago‘s North Side Gold Coast.

So, maybe Obama has changed what he called in Audacity his “deepest commitments.”

Or maybe he’s just learned to keep quiet about them …In his 2004 Preface to the reissue of Dreams, the older Obama denies that he has gained much wisdom in subsequent years:

"I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine—that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research." [p. ix]

Perhaps one of the hundreds of journalists who have followed Obama around for the last two years should have asked the Presidential candidate about the gaping discrepancy in worldview between his two books. When there’s a dispute between a man and his memoir, shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the man who wants to become the most powerful in the world?

Why hasn’t Dreams proven “inconvenient politically?” Why have so few in public life noticed that Dreams from My Father is (as it says right there in the subtitle) A Story of Race and Inheritance?

Besides the sheer intricacy of the prose style, racial condescension plays a major role in the conventional misinterpretations of Dreams. Middle-aged white liberals in the media tend to assume that being an authentic black male is a terrible burden for which nobody would aspire. Yet, around the world, hundreds of millions of young hip-hop and basketball fans struggle to reach African-American levels of coolness.

In 2000, without much insight into the real George W. Bush, America elected a pig in a poke to be President. How has that worked out for us? Putting partisan divisions aside, wouldn’t it seem like a good idea, on general principles, to try to understand clearly what a Presidential nominee has written about his innermost identity?

Obama spent the first four decades of his life trying to prove to blacks that he’s black enough. If the public were finally to become well-enough informed about Obama’s own autobiography to compel him to spend the four or eight years of his Presidency trying to prove to the nation as a whole that his “deepest commitments” are to his country rather than to his race, America would be better off.

This book serves as a reader’s guide to Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The would-be President has written a long, luxuriant, and almost incomprehensible book, so I have penned a (relatively) short and brusque book that explains who Obama thinks he is. I mostly follow his life as it unfolds in Dreams, up through his marriage to Michelle in 1992.

I especially emphasize the little-understood but critical four years he spent in Indonesia from age six to ten, during which his white mother, for surprising reasons of her own, set about systematically inculcating in him the racial grievances, insecurities, and ambitions that make up the pages of Dreams.I had once thought of tracking Obama all the way to the present, but I finally realized that book would wind up even longer than Dreams. Like Zeno’s arrow, it would never arrive at its destination. I respect Obama’s 2006 bestseller The Audacity of Hope as an above-average example of the traditional testing-the-waters campaign book. The test-marketed themes he ran by his strategist David Axelrod and dozens of others in the draft stage of the unaudacious Audacity, however, don’t hold my attention the way his lonelier first book does.You may be wondering by what authority I presume to challenge the Presidential candidate. Yet, this isn’t a debate between Barack Obama and some guy named Steve.

Fundamentally, this book consists of a debate between Obama and Obama’s own autobiography. I’m emceeing that debate. In what follows, I‘ve included big slabs of Obama’s prose for two reasons. First, if I just summarized what he wrote in my own words, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I was making it up. Second, I enjoy Obama’s writing style. As a professional writer, I envy the sonorous flow of his prose and his eye for novelistic details. I can’t write that mellifluously.

Of course, I don’t want to, either. By personality, I‘m a reductionist, constantly trying to state complex truths as bluntly as possible. Dreams, in contrast, is allusive, elusive, and inconclusive. Together, between my predilection for Occam’s Razor and Obama’s for Occam’s Butterknife, we make a pretty good team at explaining who Obama is. (I justify borrowing thousands of words of Obama’s copyrighted prose under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” If he doesn’t like it, he can sue me. Just make sure to spell my name right—it’s “Sailer,” with an “e,” not an “o.” I do urge you to buy your own copy of Dreams from My Father to read along with this book, so you can see if I‘m leading you astray. It’s quite lovely in its own self-absorbed artiste way.) Moreover, both Obama and I have written for many years on the knotty questions of race and ethnicity, of nature and nurture. Most people just think and talk about them, whereas Obama and I have written about them at vast length. Nevertheless, as Obama’s rise, jet-propelled by his race and inheritance, in four years from the Illinois legislature to the threshold of the White House suggests, everybody, deep down, is engrossed by these matters.

I spent many years in the market research industry, to which I was attracted because I have a certain knack for pattern recognition. During a sick leave for chemotherapy in the 1990s, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life, however long that might be, as a writer. Looking around for a market niche to specialize in, I noticed that among topics of great importance, the weakest journalism, in terms of quality of evidence and logic, was found in discussions of race. I set out to become the most intellectually sophisticated writer in that field. (I soon learned, however, why there is so little competition at writing honestly about race: it doesn’t pay.)

My approach is that of an empirical realist. I suspect that that by this point in our lives, Obama and I wouldn’t disagree much on the facts about race. We would likely differ on what to do about them. Unlike Obama, I advocate colorblind government policies. Of course, ever since he left community organizing in the slums of Chicago for Harvard Law School, Obama’s solution to his failing to solve racial challenges he has set himself has been to get himself promoted.

I don’t spend much time banging the drum for my political philosophy because factual matters are so much more engaging, but in case you are wondering, I advocate what I call “citizenism“ as a functional, yet idealistic, alternative to the special-interest abuses of multiculturalism.

Citizenism calls upon Americans to favor the well-being, even at some cost to ourselves, of our current fellow citizens over that of foreigners and internal factions. Among American citizens, it calls for individuals to be treated equally by the state, no matter what their race.

The citizenist sees little need for politically correct browbeating. Today’s omnipresent demand to lie about social realities in the name of “celebrating diversity” becomes ethically irrelevant under citizenism, where the duty toward patriotic solidarity means that the old saying “he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” turns into a moral precept.

As I finish my portrait of the politician as a young artist, it’s a few weeks before the election and the financial markets are tottering, likely ensuring Obama’s election. John McCain doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Grand Strategy of the Bush Administration—Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World (or as blogger Daniel Larison put it, “Imperialism, Immigration, and Insolvency")—has driven us into the ditch.

In the event that Obama manages to lose the 2008 election, rendering this book less immediately relevant, I can console my bank account with the knowledge that Obama will be younger on Election Day in 2032, six elections from now, than McCain is in 2008. So, I suspect this book will remain electorally pertinent. Moreover, if Obama somehow loses in 2008, we will hear forever that white racism was the reason, so it would be helpful to have a handy record of Obama’s own feelings on race.

This is not a book about who to vote for in 2008. In case you are wondering, in 2004, I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either George W. Bush or John Kerry, so I wrote in the name of my friend Ward Connerly, the campaigner against racial preferences.

In any event, the significance of Obama extends far beyond politics. Win or lose, Obama’s life will continue to illuminate much about modern America.Nonetheless, the question remains. Would he make a good President?There is still one secret about Obama. We know how cautious and capacious his head is. Those of us who have read him faithfully know how fervent and unreasoning his heart can be. What we don’t know is which will win: head or heart.Obama may not know that yet, either.

Fortunately, politics never ends. Much to the disappointment of Obama cultists, January 20, 2009 would not mark Day One of the Year Zero. Obama’s inauguration honeymoon would merely provide a brief lull before mundane struggles begin over seeming minutia such as appointments to federal agencies, maneuvers in which Obama’s more racial and radical impulses can be tied up … if enough of the public understands his story of race and inheritance.

You can find my whole 264-page book at:http://www.vdare.com/half-blood_prince/

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

By Steve Sailer on 10/30/2008 Cited by 27 comments Labels: Obama

The Rise & Fall Of WaMu

The Rise & Fall Of WaMu
*From The University Of Astrology Forum on MySpace*: http://groups.myspace.com/uoaforum

10:11 AM 09/27/2008 Sat

Last week's reports of yet another financial behemoth biting the dust, this time the nation's sixth largest bank, Washington Mutual, gives us astrologers yet another chance to watch the stars at work on the Markets. I've been spending the better part of the morning so far astrologically tracking the rise and fall of WaMu, and I must say, the results have been striking to the eye.

So far in this tutorial thread, we have been mainly focusing on the ongoing movements of the planets thru their Signs and in terms of the aspects they make to one another, to give us cues as to the ebb and flow of the Markets. On certain occasions, we've also made use of particular horoscopes, such as that of nations, or institutions, such as the NYSE and DJIA. And, we've seen a bit of how Incorporation and First Trade charts work as well, often as a compliment to the aforementioned transit movements.

The WaMu chart is no exception. It both ties in nicely to the current transit scheme, and as well, works perfectly as a diagnostic and timing tool in its own right:
Washington Mutual Sep 25 1889 Seattle WA 12PM LMT; Placidus 10 Sag 12, Wikipedia. No time is known, so "12PM" is used.

Right off the bat, we can see why WaMu was so big, and its size contributing to its eventual downfall; Jupiter both rises in and rules the Sagittarius Asc, and is the Final Dispositor of the horoscope. Jupiter represents banking and credit. Note the close trine between Jupiter and Saturn in this map it mirrors that of the ongoing trine between Jupiter and Saturn in the skies as we speak. One line of thought in astrology circles is that one can expect major events to take place when natal configurations are "repeated" in the skies after one's birth. Known as "recurrance transits" these events are carefully watched for by some astrologers. I've been quietly observing this for myself, and I have to say, that it is indeed something to lookout for, as the WaMu meltdown shows.

Saturn in the WaMu chart rules the Noontime 2nd house of finances and banking, and its position in detriment in Leo, combined with its trine to Jupiter in Sag, speaks to its overdoing it in the acquisition and more importantly, *subprime* areas. Saturn in turn conjuncts Venus, ruler of the Noontime 10th house - the CEO - and is in Mutual Reception with the WaMu Sun, itself fallen in Libra. Another signal of bad decisions made at the top.

Venus is dispositor of no less than four planets in the WaMu chart - including the Sun, we also have the Moon, Mercury and Uranus all in Libra. This extreme emphasis on the Sign Libra brings our attention to that area of the Zodiac; in more recent years, WaMu was dedicated to lending to *everybody*, a classic Libran focus insofar as fundamental fairness is concerned. Yet, a major tenet of good banking is to assess risk properly; lending to those who have little ability to repay loans or credit, is a cardinal sin in the banking world. In short, it doesn't pay to "be nice" in the world of Finance, as WaMu has clearly learned.

Another key feature of this map is the rare Neptune-Pluto conjunction in Gemini, something that happens only once in some three centuries or so. Note how this conjunction is trine the Sun, and Pluto also trines the Moon. Neptune, as has been observed before, is not friendly to the World of the Markets, and almost always promises scandals, cooking of the books and other nefarious dealings, layoffs and downsizing, takeovers, mergers, and so on. And interestingly enough, a quick look to WaMu's Solar Arcs reveal an applying SA Neptune=MC!!!, to be exact only a few short months from now. The handwriting was on the wall for this bank. It was only a matter of time before it was going under. JP Morgan Chase ended up buying the bank for little or nothing, at $1.9B. Only a few years ago, WaMu posted up assets of more than $300B. My, my, what a difference a year makes.

We've observed that Venus, Jupiter and Pluto are the Money Planets, and their condition in a chart gives very strong clues as to said chart's fiscal health. For example, in the chart of the United States, it is telling that Venus and Jupiter are in conjunction, with the latter exalted and also ruling the Asc, while Pluto is in Capricorn, which for this astrologer, may suggest an exaltation placement, on the basis of the "higher octave" theory of the Outer Planets. It would certainly help to explain how the USA is among, if not the, richest nation on Earth.

In the WaMu chart, please note the following with regard to its Money Planets:
Jupiter, while angular, ruling the Noontime Asc and dignified, nevertheless is in tight aspect to a planet who both rules the 2nd house and is also in detriment, Saturn.

Venus, although also in tight aspect to Jupiter, is conjunct the same 2nd house ruler who is "hurt" by being in detriment, Saturn.

Pluto, is conjunct Neptune, and what's worse about this is that both planets are Rx.

Therefore, it was easy to see that the fiscal health of this institution was in question, on the basis of a simple assessment of its Money Planets.

Casting a tri-wheel chart that features the natal, Solar Arc and current transits, we see the following for Sep 2008:

Transit Pluto conjunct WaMu Jupiter
SA Saturn=Jupiter(!!!)
SA Neptune=MC(!!!)

Later I'll post up an astrological timeline of the history of WaMu; in the meantime, here's what journalist Steve Sailer had to say about WaMu's demise earlier this week:

"Washington Mutual's Last - Press Release - Ever By commenter demand, here's a commercial from the late, not-so-great Washington Mutual bank:
Thanks to a commenter, here's the last press release from the nation's 6th largest bank on the day before it finally went under:

WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer—Again Company ranks in top ten of Hispanic Business’ Diversity Elite and earns perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index SEATTLE, WA (September 24, 2008) – Washington Mutual, Inc. (NYSE:WM), one of the nation’s leading banks for consumers and small businesses, has once again been recognized as a top employer by Hispanic Business magazine and the Human Rights Campaign.

Hispanic Business magazine recently ranked WaMu sixth in its annual Diversity Elite list, which names the top 60 companies for Hispanics. The company was honored specifically for its efforts to recruit Hispanic employees, reach out to Hispanic consumers and support Hispanic communities and organizations.

The Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) civil rights organization, also awarded WaMu its second consecutive 100 percent score in the organization’s 2009 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which measures progress in attaining equal rights for GLBT employees and consumers. WaMu joins the ranks of 259 other major U.S. businesses that also received top marks in the annual survey. The CEI rated a total of 583 businesses on GLBT-related policies and practices, including non-discrimination policies and domestic partner benefits.

In both surveys, WaMu earned points for competitive diversity policies and programs, including the recently established Latino, African American and GLBT employee network groups, all of which have a corporate executive sponsor and champion.

“Diversity is an integral part of cultivating a welcoming, innovative and dynamic workplace here at WaMu. We are proud to be recognized for the opportunities and benefits we offer to all of our employees, including the specific efforts we have made to engage Hispanics and the GLBT community,” said Steve Rotella, WaMu president and COO. “We are committed to diversity at WaMu and pledge to listen to our customers and work closely with our employees to continue to make progress.”

These two recent honors build upon diversity recognitions WaMu received earlier in 2008. WaMu was named one of 25 Noteworthy Companies by Diversity Inc magazine and one of the Top 50 Corporations for Supplier Diversity by Hispanic Enterprise magazine.

About WaMu

WaMu, through its subsidiaries, is one of the nation's leading consumer and small business banks. At June 30, 2008, WaMu and its subsidiaries had assets of $309.73 billion. The company has a history dating back to 1889 and its subsidiary banks currently operate approximately 2,300 consumer and small business banking stores throughout the nation. WaMu’s press releases are available at http://newsroom.wamu.com.

Rex May has a cartoon take on WaMu.

The NYT reports:
Until recently, Washington Mutual was one of Wall Street’s strongest performers. It reaped big profits quarter after quarter as its then chief executive, Kerry K. Killinger, enlarged its presence by buying banks on both coasts and ramping up mortgage lending.

His goal was to transform what was once a sleepy Seattle thrift into the “Wal-Mart of Banking,” which would cater to lower- and middle-class consumers that other banks deemed too risky. It offered complex mortgages and credit cards whose terms made it easy for the least creditworthy borrowers to get financing, a strategy the bank extended in big cities, including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. With this grand plan, Mr. Killinger built Washington Mutual into the sixth-largest bank in the United States.

Okay, Mr. Killinger, but perhaps by now you've noticed the fundamental difference between Wal-Mart and WaMu: Wal-Mart takes money from lower- and middle-class customers, while you gave money to them.

While our increasingly diverse lower- and middle-class American residents have been spending a lot in recent years in our vibrant, globalized economy, they haven't been making a lot. (You may have noticed that our elites were united in their horror of "wage inflation" and did their best to combat it through encouraging massive immigration, outsourcing, cutting tariffs, and the like.) In the long run, that's a problem. To cover the difference between what the bottom 2/3rds or whatever of society was spending and making, they've been going more in debt to, say, WaMu.

You were able to mark that up as profits, which Wall Street celebrated, but eventually the clock struck twelve and the carriage turned back into a pumpkin.

To broaden the subject slightly, it's interesting that we don't yet have a name for this decade yet, even though it's almost over. All other decades for the last 80 years were named directly from the third digit (e.g., The Sixties), but nobody has agreed upon a quantitative title for this decade.

Therefore, we should feel free to recommend a qualitative name. Pardon the vulgarity, but at this point I can't come up with anything more descriptive and accurate than The Bullshit Years.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve SailerBy Steve Sailer on 9/26/2008 Cited by 52 comments Labels: political economy"

Alpha, Beta & Omega Males: An Evolutionary (Astrology) Look

Alpha, Beta & Omega Males: An Evolutionary (Astrology) Look

Posted: 20 Aug 2008, 06:45 AM on The Evolutionary Astrology forum on MySpace:
http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=messageboard.viewThread&entryID=67029506&categoryID=0&IsSticky=0&groupID=100071296&Mytoken=C4B18A79-E396-4B9D-9C802B931DC97EAD37285848

One of my usual haunts on the Web is a blog called Half Sigma, which I got turned on to while checking in w/another haunt of mine, Steve Sailer’s blog. Half Sigma often takes us themes and issues that greatly interest me, and I suspect, interests others but would never openly so say in public, such as Race, Class & Sex, to name just a few. Yesterday while "thumbing" through his archive, I ran accross something that seems perfectly fitted for a forum entitled "Evolutionary Astrology".

HS posits that instead of usual dichotomy of males, ie, Alpha and Beta, that there was a third catergory, Omega. He suggests that these three catergory of human males are an interesting study in how the human race gets on w/the business of reproducing itself. I agree.

As we all know, the Alpha Male catergory is pretty straightforward, even though we’ve live in an Industrial age now for a little more than a century, and the Alpha Male’s heyday was back during the Hunter/Gatherer and early Agricultural eras. Alpha Males are, simply put, usually bigger, strong, and/or had access to maximum resources so as to be more appealing to and thus, have the most access to femles, especially the choice females.

Beta Males, those second tier guys who weren’t blessed w/such great genes, nevertheless were good guys, reliable, dependable and so forth. Back in the day their only chance of sending their genes off into the future was to hope for the Alpha Male to go off on the hunt or something like that, sneak into the harem and get a quickie before the Big Man came back. Other than that, it was the end of the genetic line for most Betas, until the Industrial Age, when male resources (wages) were more or less equalized and more guys had the chance to get a bride. Although she may not be the cat’s meow, it sure beat beating off for the rest of one’s life.

Oh, btw, Alpha Males make up roughly 10 to 15% of any population; Betas, roughly 70%. And another thing-Alphas do have one drawback, they tend not to be great nuturers, dads, and providers, whereas the opposite is true largely for Betas. This has given rise to what some Evo-types call the "Beta Strategy" where females would hookup w/the Alpha Male to get his genes and then get w/a Beta Male because he can provide better for the Alpha’s seed. In other words, Cuckoldry. But that’s another topic for another time.

Then we have what HS terms Omega Males. Again, these guys makeup about 15% of any given population, and are both lacking in sufficient genetic material AND material resources/social skills and thus are completely out of contention for copulating with females. These are generally the guys who live at home in Mom’s basement doing all kinds of geeky stuff, and looks it. Women wouldn’t give these guys the time of day, and that includes women who hangout in places like this one.

OK, so since we’ve briefly outlined the three types of males, the question becomes-how do we see this astrologically? I have a few theories, but I invite those reading alone (especially the ladies!) to chime in w/their thoughts. It seems pretty clear to me that Sexual Aspects play a huge role here. A male w/a lot of such aspects usually has the corresponding "animal magnetism" to attract females and get them to say "yes" moreso than Betas and definitely more than Omegas. So, when it comes to Alphas in general, that’s what I would expect to see, lots of Sexual Aspects, perhaps w/an additional refinement of said aspects occuring in Beastial Signs: Aries, Taurus, Sagittarius (at least the first half of the Sign anyway LOL), Capricorn, Leo.

Because Betas don’t have the raw Sexual power that Alphas have, I would expect to find an average amount of Sexual aspects at work here, along w/more "nuturing" astro markers-perhaps a strong Moon, or Jupiter, maybe a strong Neptune, something like that.

W/Omegas, hmm. That’s a good one. I suppose I would be looking for "outcaste" signals astrologically, but I’d need a bit more time as to how to formulate a postualte here. This is where we all can really jump in and toss the ball around.

So there you have it, the Three Male Types per Evolutionary Theory as set forth by Half Sigma. I think its a lot more valid than we may want to admit. And, there’s one more thing:

We have to remember that we Humans are only at the top of the foodchain, not apart from it. The Zodiac means literally, Circle of Animals, and we’re a lot closer to the Animal Kingdom than we think. This is especially true when it comes to things like "Synastry" which in so many ways, is a proxy for saying that we want astrology to help us get laid, and/or get laid more often.

Just keepin’ it real, y’all.

OK, that’s it. Discuss, and Holla Back!

Salaam
Mu

Is Today's Astrology "Gynocentric"?

Is Today's Astrology "Gynocentric"?

Posted: 21 Aug 2008, 09:22 AM on The Evolutionary Astrology forum on MySpace
http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=messageboard.viewThread&groupID=100071296&page=0&EntryID=67047370&CategoryID=0&get=1&adTopicId=0&lastpagesent=1&Mytoken=F780B4C8-DF06-4570-BE881C195ED2789136649436

Since it appears that my suggesting so has raised the hackles on Astrology’s Quasi-Feminist Contingent, I thought to devote an entire thread to this topic. For those who might have missed it, I’ll recap briefly. In my Open Letter to Zane Stein thread, I made the case that astrology in our time-and by that I mean, the Modern Era, since Rudhyar, and the following rise of Psychology being used in astrology analysis, study and work-is what I called Gynocentric, or in other words, astrology in our time is more and more seen, evaluated, communicated and written/presented, in a way that is more favorable to women.

Now, as you might guess, I’m prepared to defend my proposition, and to offer the most basic evidence of this, one only need look at the extant literature on the subject; note how its written, the word choice, perspectives and point of view therein. Moreover, consider the bulk of attendees at conferences, retreats and the like, you will find invariably that they are women in the main, even if by a simple majority.

Now, before the howling starts, let me say that I’m not-NOT-arguing that this is in itself a bad thing. What I am saying, however, is that astrology runs the serious risk of painting itself in something of a corner, because its this astrologer’s view that a lot of guys would be interested in seeking what astrology has to offer were it not for the Girly Perspective and Presentation.

What has occured in astrology over the past three or four decades is the notion that a kind of "unisex" approach can be adopted, and that the symbols we see can equally-keyword here-apply to both sexes. All the while claiming individuality, no less! Yet even hard science has proven again and again that men and women are PROFOUNDLY different, and the astrology must follow suit.

Of course, I suppose it doesn’t help much that many of the men that fill up the ranks of astrology, either as leading voices (considerably more at this level than are women, see for yourself) or as hardcore hobbyists, for lack of a better word, either don’t seem very interested in this topic because their interests in astrology take them away from dealing directly with people and more into the area of abstract concepts, like Mundane astrology, etc., or they have a more "feminine" view of the world, or, more cynically, they go with the flow because as that famous bank robber once said, that’s where the money is. And its no accident who pays a working astrologer’s bills, and from this standpoint, a business model, it makes sense to focus on your target market. But as a self-professed Anomaly, I like asking pesky questions of our craft. That’s what Cosmic Pests do.

So-is Astrology Gynocentric? You make the call.

Comments?

Holla back

Salaam
Mu

Suggested Further Reading: Astrological Eye For The Regular Guy, muminspeaks.blogspot.com, or Google it

Yao Ming: Successful Eugenic Experiment, Or Successful Astrological Timing???

Yao Ming: Successful Eugenic Experiment, Or Successful Astrological Timing???

Posted: 16 Aug 2008, 08:22 PM at The Evolutionary Astrology forum on MySpace:
http://forum.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=messageboard.viewThread&entryID=66985794&categoryID=0&IsSticky=0&groupID=100071296&Mytoken=24AF687D-3161-48B1-962DA24C2B23EA2A33711626

Steve Sailer’s done it again, w/his coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games at Beijing China. Here’s his take on Yao Ming: http://isteve.blogspot.com/. Its the second post down the page, can’t miss it.

In it he talks about how Yao Ming came to be; Ming is the product of an essentially arranged marraige between the centers and captains of the men’s and women’s basketball teams in Shanghai. Ming’s dad is 6’11"; his mom, 6’3". Ming himself weighed in at ELEVEN POUNDS, TWICE THE AVERAGE WEIGHT OF A CHINESE NEWBORN. His head was huge and square shaped, and his hands and feet were that of a three year old. At 10 years old he was 5’5"; in his early teens he was over 6’ tall.

And, according to the book, Operation Yao Ming, we have a pretty good crack at Ming’s birthtime, "shortly after 7PM" at Shanghai Hospital No. 6. The rest of the data is Sep 12 1980. This gives an Asc of 13 Ari 02 using Placidus houses and Tropical Zodiac.

Matchmaking, or arranged marriage, is a lot more common in the world outside the USA/West than most of us know or care about. Of course, w/feminist indoctrination here, arranged marriages have gotten a very bad rap, by way of the relatively few horror stories they trot out to dissuade anyone from hooking up that way. But if one takes the time to actually study the thing, one comes away w/the view that it ain’t all as bad as some would try to make it out to be. And besides, w/the American track record of marriage, no American should even be thinking about turning their nose up at the option, one that has a much better track record, I might add.

At any rate, Yao Ming’s story raises all kinds of questions for astrologers. As the Olympic games, especially the Summer events, since they’re much more racially and ethnically intergrated, shows us, Human Biodiversity is Real. There is no getting around the different body types and aptitudes, talents and inclinations, of so many groups of players and atheletes. There’s no denying that certain groups clearly dominate certain events (like sprinting and long distance marathons, where West and East Africans continue to dominate the field, for example), and while other groups lockup others. All of this points to an undeniable, if not brutally politically incorrect Truth:

That the horscope MUST accomodate these particularities, or astrology will have proved itself useless. Additionally, we can see that astrology, especially as practiced in the West, has to contend w/the idea of "matchmaking"-arranged marriages-w/the particular intention or purpose of producing children w/an edge. In a word, eugenics.

Largely discredited after the horrors vistied on the Jewish people by the Nazis in the Holocaust, Eugenics nevertheless is a deep area of human concern, and will in this astrologer’s view never go away.

The ever expanding fertility industry, w/ever increasing arrays of IVF options, is just one such example of this fact. Women can choose the sperm of high IQ achievers if they wish, and many have done just that. To wit, one Jodie Foster. Look it up.

To select for the best potential mate is fully human, and as noted above, as Foster is a lesbian, even among gay folks this is true. So we astrologers need to get busy talkin’, because there are lots of people out there not only looking for a match but one that can produce Kids w/the Right Stuff.

Again, Yao Ming: Sep 12 1980 "shortly after 7PM" CCT Shanghai China. Placidus 13 Ari 02. Comments?

Holla back

Salaam
Mu

Mu'Min Returns

I deeply apologize to readers of Mu'Min Speaks, aka The Mu'Min Bey Astroblog. I've been busy as I don't know what over the past four r five months working like a dog, and haven't had the time to do as much as I'd have liked. This meant that blogging on the astrology of the day has fallen a bit by the wayside. But the good news is that I'm back - and I've got afew things to post up to prime the pump a bit, if you know what I mean.

Over the Summer, I've had the good fortune to spend a bit of time over at the Evolutionary Astrology forum on MySpace, and the moderator there, Cristina Smith, a grand lady, has been very nice and kind to me. Please go and check her forum out if so inclined, lots of really good discussions going on there.

Anyway, the next series of posts will be taken from wider discussions that I sparked off that happened there at EA. I'll post up the links to each one so as to enable th reader to go there, see the whole discussion and chime in if they so choose.

Stand By...

Salaam
Mu

Jana Mackey - Death Of A Feminist

Taken from the Evolutionary Astrology & University Of AStrology Forums on MySpace...

I began this thread to once again highlight the fact that the Feminists in our Midst have some splainin' to do on a whole host of levels, and this Y chromosome native has had enough of the BS as to why they're unwilling to man up.

I've said numerous times that alot of women get into trouble because of stuff THEY DO, such as they're liking for what I like to call Thug Wood.

Well, in what can only be called an amazing display of synchronicity and astrological presicion, only two days after my ouster from Feministe, this post appears on their website:

"Thank You Jana MackeyJul 9 2008Posted by: Jill in Crime, Domestic Violence, Feminism http://www.feministe.us/blog/page/2/

We lost Jana Mackey last week, a young feminist activist who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Adolfo Garcia-Nunez killed her, and after he was arrested killed himself.

There’s a facebook group about Jana, where people are posting pictures and anecdotes about her. Her funeral will be held today. Her family is asking that if you wish to donate, you can send donations to:

Jana Mackey Support for Public Advocacy Fundc/o Dean of LawGreen Hall1535 W. 15th St.Lawrence, KS 66045

Thanks to Veronica for letting us all know about Jana. My thoughts are with Jana and her family."

Following the links provided, here's what went down; again, quoting directly from the websites denoted by their links:

"Family, friends and educators on Saturday remembered Jana Mackey as a passionate and motivated woman who was dedicated to community service.

Mackey, 25, of Hays, was found dead Thursday inside a home at 409 Mich.

She was a second-year law student at Kansas University.

“Everybody that knew her ... is really going to miss her,” said Beth Cateforis, a Kansas University clinical associate professor.

Mackey was a devoted advocate for women’s rights and worked in the Statehouse as a lobbyist, said Sylvie Rueff, who worked with her in the National Organization for Women, where Mackey was dedicated to reducing violence against women.

“It appears now she’s been the ultimate victim,” Rueff said. “I really could not believe she got killed because she was just such a remarkable woman.”

Sarah Jane Russell, executive director of the Ga Du Gi Safe Center, said Mackey worked as volunteer advocate for the nonprofit organization that provides support for survivors of sexual assault.

“Advocates are people who are on call 24/7 ... they do the front-line work with victims; they’re the ones who have heart. It takes a heart, and it takes being honey on steel, and she had that ... she had everything, and above all she had compassion for others,” Russell said.

Mackey was still on the list of advocates but was on hiatus during law school, Russell said.
“There are no answers. There are a thousand questions, and there always are when it involves domestic violence and sexual assault issues,” Russell said.

Mackey was enrolled this summer in the Paul E. Wilson Defender Project at KU, where she represented federal prisoners in appellate and post-conviction litigation in state and federal courts.

“I think we have pictures of her dog up in our workroom,” said Cateforis, supervising attorney for the Defender Project. “It’s going to be very weird to clean up after her. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Cateforis said Mackey was vibrant and had a lovely sense of humor.

“She was a pleasure,” Cateforis said. “I always looked forward to walking into class and seeing her smile and hearing what she had to say or hearing her big laugh.”

Mackey also was a singer and actress, receiving honors as an undergraduate for her theater performances. She was also given several scholarships for her law school work.

— 6News director Cody Howard and staff writer Janet Reid contributed to this report."http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2008/jul/05/victim_had_worked_reduce_violence_against_women/

Here's more info, this time on Mackey's ex:

"The suspect in the death of a 25-year-old Kansas University student has committed suicide while in police custody in New Jersey, according to Lawrence police.

Adolfo Garcia-Nunez, 46, was arrested Friday night in New Jersey, according to Lawrence Police Sgt. Paul Fellers. Fellers said in a news release Saturday afternoon that Garcia-Nunez committed suicide in custody.

Lawrence police traveled to Elizabeth, N.J., where Garcia-Nunez’s white Ford F-150 pickup was located unoccupied. Lawrence police received word Saturday morning that Garcia-Nunez took his own life.

“No further information will be available until our investigators return from New Jersey,” the release said.

Garcia-Nunez — a Lawrence artist who also went by the name Fito Garche — was suspected in the death of the student, Jana Lynne Mackey. Mackey was a second-year law student at KU from Hays.

Friday night, Lawrence police had issued an arrest warrant charging Garcia-Nunez with second-degree murder.

Mackey’s body was found late Thursday night in a home at 409 Mich., where Garcia-Nunez lived. Mackey and Garcia-Nunez had recently broken off a relationship.

After hearing of the arrest and apparent suicide, KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway and Law School Dean Gail Agrawal issued the following statements.

“The resolution of this tragedy leaves us all stunned. I hope that everyone will remain considerate of the needs of the family and friends of Jana Mackey during this terrible time," Hemenway said. "I thank the Lawrence Police Department as well as other authorities for their efforts in the investigation.”

Agrawal said the law school community continues to be grief-stricken by Mackey's death, and remains focused on getting through the tragedy together.

"While we are shocked at recent developments in the investigation, we remain focused on doing all we can to support her family and friends through this terrible time," Agrawal said. "We are making every effort to inform our students, faculty and staff of available counseling and emotional support. Jana was strongly committed to social justice, and in her memory, we hope to inspire others to share her cause."

According to police, about 4:30 p.m. Thursday one of Mackey’s friends reported her missing. About two hours later, Mackey’s vehicle was found in the parking lot of Lawrence Memorial Hospital. About 11:30 p.m. Thursday, her body was found inside Garcia-Nunez’s home, which is near the hospital.

Jana MackeyVictim had worked to reduce violence against women (07-05-08) "http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2008/jul/05/suspect_ku_students_death_commits_suicide_while_ne/
Here's Mackey's obit:"ObituariesJana Lynne Mackey 1982 - 2008 Lawrence Jana Lynne MackeyA celebration of life for Jana Lynne Mackey, 25, Lawrence, will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Liberty Hall in downtown Lawrence. Burial will be at 2 p.m. Thursday in Fairview Cemetery in Danville.Miss Mackey died Thursday, July 3, 2008, in Lawrence.She was born July 20, 1982, in Harper, the daughter of John M. and Christie J. Patterson Mackey. She graduated from Hays High School in 2000 and received an undergraduate degree in women’s studies in 2004 from Kansas University. She had completed her first year of law school at KU.Miss Mackey worked as a lobbyist for the National Organization for Women for three years. She was a volunteer advocate for the Ga Du Gi Safe Center. She was also a singer and actress.She was also involved with the Public Interest Law Society, Women in Law Society, Kansas Equality Coalition, Kansas National Organization for Women, KU Commission on the Status of Women, KU. Student Senate and Delta Force.Survivors include her mother and stepfather, Christie and Curt Brungardt, Hays; her father and stepmother, Mike and Anita Mackey, Anthony; four brothers, Todd Mackey and companion Sarah Bohm and Travis Mackey and companion Erica Washburn, both of Hays, Drake Brungardt, Baldwin City, and Bruce Adams, Camdenton, Mo.; and two sisters, Sara Brungardt, Hays, and Kimberly Minor and husband Ryan, Wichita. Friends may call from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. today and from 9 a.m. to noon Wednesday at Rumsey-Yost Funeral Home. The casket will remain closed.The family suggests memorials to the Northwest Kansas Domestic & Sexual Violence Services in Hays or the Jana Mackey Support of Public Advocacy Fund at the Kansas University School of Law, sent in care of the funeral home.Online condolences may be sent at www.rumsey-yost.com.

E-mail this obituary"http://www2.ljworld.com/obits/2008/jul/07/jana_mackey/

OK, boys and girls, now we gotta start asking some hard questions: what was a second law student, an vowed feminist dedicating her life to DOMESTIC ABUSE issues, doing w/a much, much older, felon, who's past crimes included DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, specifically, his last girlfriend before Mackey came along?

Maybe Mackey's chart can give us the answer:

Jana Mackey Jul 20 1982 Harper KS, no time known, source obituary available via Google search online

Right off the bat we see the deal - the New Moon in Cancer squares a Mars-Pluto conjunction in Libra, and we can include in this Mercury's square to these plaents as well, explaining Mackey's life focus on women's issues, domestic violence and law. Venus opposes Neptune in the last degree of Gemini, which of course means, that transit Pluto was opposed this Venus at the time of her death last week. The Venus-Neptune axis here of course, relates to a "something is other than it seems" vibe with regard to relationships; I'm pretty certain those who *thought* they knew her best really didn't at all; keep in mind also, that Venus is in Gemini, literally being two-faced along relationship/sexual lines.

Mackey's Mars-Pluto conjunction in Libra is key here, and goes to what I've explained over and over in regard to Thug Wood. Women who have such aspects in their charts tend to attract "dangerous" guys; Mars-Pluto combos are thee most prominent in the case of rape/DV victims. In an of itself, it does not function in a sexual sense for women, UNLESS Venus, the only female Sexual planet, is involved. Here, we can clearly see that it is, both due to the conjunction's Sign placement in Libra, but also because of the fact that its dispositor, Venus, is also trine to this very same conjunction, only making the links here stronger. This would mean that Mackey has quite a strong Super Sexual Aspect at work in her chart, for all three Sexual planets are tied together. Note again that Venus is opposed Neptune - I'm telling you, her friends never knew she got down like that.

Casting a morning Solarscope for Mackey, we see that Capricorn is on the Solar 7 house. This means that Saturn would be its ruler, and on her birthdate we see that it is exalted and Peregrine (Tyl), dominating the chart. Here's the link to a much older man, and with all these overtly Male planets - Mars, Saturn and Pluto - all in Libra, the Sign of Artisans, we see Nunez fitting the description to a T.

Interestingly enough, according to his MySpace page, Nunez was a Libra Sun!!!

Also, very interesting that Mackey would die as the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Virgo was forming, a recurrence transit that I've been reading up on of late. I tip my hat to Best and Blaschke. Additionally, Mackey had several very difficult Solar Arcs this year, that suggested very strongly, the possibility of violence or physical threat in some way.

And of course, Mackey was headed for her Saturn Return in only a few short years.

Mackey's birthdate reveals that she is all Water and Air, Emotions and Ideology, with NO EARTH to counterbalance things. Therefore, she had a very strong disconnect between the ideal and the real. And it ultimately cost her life.

I've said that my main reason for opposing the excesses - and let's be clear there ARE excesses of Feminism - was to challenge those who would craft public policy in its name. Already in the wake of her death, renewed calls for even more draconian measures are being floated in an attempt to pass more and more DV laws that hurt as many as they help, obstensibly. For those steeped in emoting and ideology, this is all par for the course, but for the rest of us sane thinking people, it was clear to see that Mackey didn't need more laws, just some commonsense. Warning bells should have been deafening for this young woman, but her emotions and ideology, to say nothing of her "hots" took control, and we all see the result.

I don't think it's an accident that all of this, my foary into Feministe, their posting of the Mackey murder, and Mackey's own life story, would all fall in line so dramatically. They serve to once again prove my point, that unless or until women start taking personal responsibility seriously, all of the laws in the world won't help them.

Including Jana Mackey.

So sad.

OK, folks - holla back

Salaam
Mu

Big Russ & Me: A Tribute To Tim Russert

Big Russ & Me: A Tribute To Tim Russert

6:25 AM 06/14/2008 Sat

Yesterday the nation was shocked to learn that one of its most powerful media voices, the venerable Tim Russert of Meet The Press had died suddenly of an apparent heart attack while at work. He was 58 years old.

I got word of this after I got back home from work yesterday, about 9PM, via email from a colleague and good friend. She asked if I was aware of this and if I had a birthtime for Russert; my answer had to be "no" on both counts.

Like all Americans, I too spent my Sunday mornings in my PJs, waffles at the ready, a stack of newspapers and magazines on the side and tv remote in hand tuned in to MTP, eager to see who Russ was gonna put on the hotseat this week. As the many tributes came in throughout the night attested to, from politicos like Bush and McCain and Obama, to rivals like Sean Hannity, Russ had both a keen eye and sharp mind as well as an Everyman sensibility and work ethic that, in a time of high post elites and blowdried hair, was a welcome change of pace for a locale as plastic as Washington DC. Tim Russert was, without a doubt, the real deal.

Born on May 7 1950 in Buffalo New York, Russ was a Taurus through and through, from his propensity for weight gain to his downhome roots and never forgetting where he came from. His Mercury in Taurus, interestingly enough, also Retrograde as is the current Mercury position in the skies above, gave Russert a thoroughness in a kind of Columbo way of doing things, always coming back to ask just one more question, in a way that belied his formidable intelligence and razor sharp mind (Jupiter in Pisces trine Uranus in Cancer, Sun trine Mars, genius). The first of his family to attend college, Russert was discovered by New York Senatorial powerhouse Daniel Patrick Moynihan and rose through the ranks to become to Senator's topmost aide. From there, Russ worked for then NY Governor Mario Cuomo in a similar capacity. True to Sun square Pluto and the Moon in Capricorn, Russ had politics in the blood.

But it was with his move to NBC in 1984, that Russ would literally, find is voice. With his extensive knowledge of political and American history, contact-networks and instincts honed over years of working the halls of Congress, Russert quickly rose through the newsroom ranks by getting all the inside dope on the political comings and goings of Washington, getting the juiciest scoops as a result. It all really paid off for Russert when, in the year 1991, he ascended to become Meet The Press' host, where he would remain until his most untimely death. From there, it was one heck of a ride - who could forgot Russ putting avowed racist David Duke on the spot during his failed gubernatorial run, or, better yet, Russ breaking out the yup, you guessed it, little whiteboard during the 2000 Presidential Florida debacle? True to all the Earth in his chart (Sun and Mercury in Taurus, Moon in Capricorn, Mars and Saturn in Virgo) Russ kept it real, which meant, in an age of "magic boards" and high technology, that he used the KISS rule - to great effect.

But perhaps his biggest noteriety came from an unlikely place; in 2004 Russert wrote what would become a runaway bestseller, Big Russ & Me, a book about his life with his father, Tim Russert Sr., and the lessons he'd learn from "Big Russ". Russert took a chance writing and promoting such a book in an age where men in general and dads in particular are portrayed as everything from Deadbeats to Dimwits, to everyone's surprise the book became a huge hit, with Russert being crowded by people wanting pictures and wanting him to sign their books, not because of Meet the Press, but because Russert's book brought home to so many Americans, the meaning of fatherhood and the good memories so many of us have, of the unsung heroes of the American landscape, the guys who worked from can't see in the morning till can't see at night in order to make a better way for their families and their kids. Big Russ & Me was a loving tribute from the son to the father, and it is with a very bittersweet pill that I contemplate all of this, on the day of my own son's 3rd birthday, and on the eve of Father's Day nationwide. Russert had Saturn Rx in Virgo, a fitting image for his dad, a man who worked two fulltime jobs and couldn't attend those special moments and occasions with young Tim, but did what he had to in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Its something millions of us can relate to. I know I can.

Because this month is also the one in which my own father, Robert Lindsey, would be born, Jun 26 1935 in Savannah GA. And like Big russ, Bob never took me to a baseball game, we never went fishing or camping, none of those things. But he taught me many things that I would carry on into adulthood, one of them being a strong work ethic (since I was conscripted into working with him on the weekends rehabbing homes), sticking to a job until it's done, and standing up for oneself when the time came to do so. Like Big Russ, Bob was from the Old School, who never had much of a formal education, but seems so much smarter than the eggheads of today, and who's life experience was priceless. This year also marks the tenth anniversary of my dad's passing, and so when I heard of Russert's yesterday, it really took some wind out of my sails. The nation weeps, and so do I.

As Pluto continues its sojourn through Capricorn, as the United States experiences its first Pluto Return in this Sign, as Pluto squares the MC, and as it prepares to make one of the most profound choices in its national history in choosing between a man who is shaped by the profound lack of a father in his life, and one who is undeniably shaped by the wisdom of his, Russert's passing at such a crucial time (Russert died during his Saturn Return - so fitting in light of a heated debate I'm currently engaged in elsewhere on the Web!) will act as yet another signpost to look back at the past with an eye of carrying forward its best parts into the future. Perhaps the fictional Jedi Master Yoda said it best, in his last words to Jedi trainee Luke Skywalker:

"When gone am I, the last of the Jedi you will be; pass on what you have learned."

The job of any father, indeed, all fathers, is to pass on what they have learned to their sons.

Big Russ up there in Buffalo NY passed something great to his son, the Big Russ we all knew. Let's keep on passing it on.

Go get 'em, Russ!

Salaam
Mu

Don't Beleive The Hype, Part Three: Post-UAC Analysis & Comments

Don't Beleive The Hype, Part Three: Post-UAC Analysis & Comments

3:45 PM 05/24/2008 Sat

And so, the Week that was - the world's largest gathering of astrologers ever, taking place last week at Denver CO; some 1600 astrologers in attendance from accross 45 countries, all gathered in the spirit of comraderie and learning, a good time to be had by all. I've been reading along the various websites, blogs and chatrooms/forums about the week's festivities with great interest, and have already weighed in on what I call the Joni Patry Problem in my last two installments. In this, the final installment on 2008's UAC, I intent to revisit the Patry issue, along with some key things that stuck out at me as an observer watching it all go down from my perch on the World Wide Web.

But first, before I begin with what some would consider a searing critique, let me extend a strong biggups to those who organized the event, and to give congrats to this year's winners of the Regulus Award, chief among them Ms. Bernadette Brady and now we can officially say, Dr. Robert Hand. Additionally, I would like to recognize all the younger folk at this year's events, and Mr. Lutin's apparently quite successful stageplay, "Plutopia". And, I want to just say to my friend Nick Dagan Best, now you see why we brothas like our trucks so much, hmm? LOL!

Now, with all that out of the way, to the good stuff...

Dispatches From The Center Of The Universe
Here's astrologer-reporter Eric Francis' May 16 2008 "dispatch" from the UAC convention floor; he asks a very good rhetorical question...

"Second, there appears to be no serious discussion of sexuality. I have not read the whole catalog, but I have not seen anything even coming close to the topic. This verges on astonishing, given the number of people who come to astrology for sexually-related subject matter, and the even greater number for whom it surfaces as a theme or issue they need to address. How, exactly, are astrologers supposed to help anyone if they are not informed? How are they supposed to keep their composure and objectivity if they have no training or experience with these kinds of very necessary discussions?"

Ahhh, a very good question indeed; but I have to remind my Piscean brother Mr. Francis, that the answer is only an Occam's Razor's arm length away - the astrology business' biggest consumer are women, most over the age of 40. And women as a rule are quite sensitive about having open discussions about sex, especially when the face on the other of said discussion is a male's, which remains the case for the bulk of astrologers of any real consequence (and I've written about this, too, something you will NOT hear discussed in any real way at ANY astrology conference) - hence recourse to roundabout talk about "relationships and synastry" and so forth. And if you're an astrologer whose lifeblood is dependent on that demographic helping you to keep the lights on, well, you adapt to market conditions accordingly.

If anyone doubts this, go and see for yourself. As long as its couched in "romantic" terms, you can get away with it, perhaps moreso if you happen to be a woman astrologer; but in general, given the Sexual Harrassment times in which we live, it would be suicidal for a Hand, or a Brennan, to *really* go there within an astrological analysis of astrology's biggest consumer block. What to do about it, you might ask? Well, talk about why we don't talk about it, would be one. But what's the chance that'll really happen, hmm?

Astrology's Young GunsPerhaps one of the highlights, and indeed, rising stars at this year's UAC, was the emergence of a young and vibrant contingent of astrologers, headed up in the main by Christopher Brennan, a Hellenistic astrologer and scholar. My understanding is that quite an impressive showing was made by Brennan and crew, who was put in at the last minute as presenter after initially being peed on for being too young; as it turns out, he is now UAC's youngest faculty member. Good on him!

But, being the dour man that I am, I gotta raise some questions, difficult ones, I'm afraid before the cheering starts - astrology, at its base, is not about lectures or techniques or fresh faces, but about LIFE itself. And no amount of pyrotechnics will take the place of actual life experience. This is why the Saturn Return is so important, and why in many circles, especially the more Eastern ones, doing astrology "for real" is frowned upon *until* one has had enough life experience.

I'm not just pouring water on the parade either, I speak from my own experience, as a early twentysomething starting out in astrology. As I look back on it now, there's just no way I could have made any real sense helping people, because while I knew the symbols and Signs and whatnot, I didn't know LIFE. No dis to Brennan, but really - what can he tell some over 40, a man let's say, about Love? Loss? Death? A mortage? A divorce? Not saying that he should know all things, certainly not. But without life experience, its hard to really put the symbols we see into proper context for the client. Which is probably why Brennan doesn't lecture much about actually working with clients. It is wholly understandable.

Moreover, the current love affair with the Young Guns papers over other things as well, which I'll save for a future installment. But I'll say for now, that one of them is the tendency not to drill into them the importance of getting life experience along with their astrological education. I wish the Young Guns well, and would exhort them, with all the knowledge they get, that they also get understanding.

The Joni Patry Problem Revisited
In many ways, my critique of the Young Guns trend ties itself intimately into the Joni Patry problem. As is well known world wide by now, on May 16 2008 according to Eric Francis, Patry announced that she had Barack Obama's birthtime - only, the "time" turned out to be little more than a grown up version of what we used to call "Telephone". You know the game - someone whispers something to you, and you pass it on to someone else, and so and so on, and after awhile, no one knows where it came from and the whole thing done got twisted. It's a fun game for kids. It's a disaster for astrologers, who suffer from a huge inferiority complex as it is due to astrology still struggling to process its feelings of being so roundly dissed in the Western world for the past few centuries, and sporadic assaults by Skeptic Tanks like the Amazing Randys.

One of the reasons why I spoke so forcefully and vociferously as I did in relation to Patry was because of several things, her being a highly regarded Vedic astrologer by many, among them - but another reason was because the manner in which she was given carte blanche to do what she did shows a huge gaping problem in the basic mindset and utter lack of critical thinking in the whole of the astrological community - a "name" astrologer makes a grand announcement to the world about the birthtime of a presidential candidate, based on heresay and secondhand information, if one can call it that -

AND NO ONE CHALLENGED HER. AT ALL.

I'm not talkin' 'bout after the lights go off, I'm takin' 'bout right then and there - why didn't somebody, anybody, get off their duff and say, uh, hold up Ms. Patry. Exactly where did you get this time from? Why can't we see the document? Why can't we at least know the names of your client and "campaign manager" he/she claims to have gotten the time from? I mean, why didn't the whole darn production STOP until this was sorted out? What the buck is up with that???

You mean to tell me that we can be suckered that easily? For all of our computer this and young astrologer that and Plutopia the other - it was all for a secondhand account of something that cannot be proven, in any way, at all? Lois Rodden has got to be doing backflips in her grave - and it's my view that we all took a collective dump on it if this is the best we can do. Talk about a regression to the mean.

And then we wonder why we still get chumped by Skeptics?

The Obama Panel - And The 800LB Gorilla In The Middle Of The UAC Living Room
But the Patry Affair was but one of UAC's highlights. Another, that attracted a bit of news coverage, was the star-studded astrologer panel on the 2008 Presidential elections. As you might guess, I have some thoughts to critiques of this as well, but to set things up, please share with me this insight by a colleague and friend of mine, the man known to the astrology world as Astrobarry:

"Another confounding condition, making such 'prediction' a dicier proposition still, is the glaringly blatant bias with which most astrologers come at this question of who'll be our next president. Would you be surprised to hear that the UAC tides were overwhelmingly in favor of Obama? Hardly. From lectures to coffee-break chatter to the official entertainment, no pretenses toward objectivity were made. A leftist/Democratic bent was presumed by virtually everyone in every context… and while that presumption was likely true as far as the participants' personal views were concerned, it isn't an especially open-hearted way in which to approach sociopolitical astrology. (I was admittedly flabbergasted when one of my favorite astrologers quickly glossed over discussing Obama's challenging astro-transits, in order to focus on ripping Clinton's and McCain's charts to shreds.)

Isn't our job as astrologers—cultural commentators with cosmic consciousness, really—to shed light on how things are and could be? When our egos get intimately woven into the formula, however, it often instead becomes a variation on that theme: an exposition on how we personally want them to be. Which isn't necessarily a 'bad' approach, as it's relatively rare for our egos not to jam their grubby little fingers into every last pot… but if we don't fess up to that upfront, we have the potential to confuse our wishful thinking for reality."

Uh-oh. He ain't supposed to talk about THAT, afterall, such things aren't good for one's career, don't you know. But I deeply thank Astrobarry for his sage insight for it pierces a veil that has long shrouded our community. And that is this:

Why DO we have such a hard Left leaning community groupthink? Is it simply a natural outgrowth of being interested in astrology...or is it a sign of something a bit more, shall we say, political? What happened to all those lectures I'm sure was to be had at UAC, about "professionalism" and "objectivity" on the part of the astrologer? Hmm?

And, why is there so much gushing and love for Obama, in a setting that is for all intents and purposes virtually White? Now, I don't know about anyone else, but my highschool Psych class covered this, it's called Overcompensatory behavior. Don't nobody fall on a sword here, just keepin' it real. Folks who try to get a handle on their stuff often go overboard in the other direction and we all do it to a lesser or greater degree. Maybe that's the other reason astrologers in general are likened to the "on its side" orbit of Uranus, hmm?

I for one was struck by the outpouring of support, obstensibly, for Obama by the panel and the general attendees on one hand, and the virutal absence of people of color, especially African Americans, at UAC overall. Talk about a disconnect. Talk about cognitive dissonance. To say nothing of virtually any talk about the very racial times in which Obama finds himself, now officially dubbed as "the race candidate".

Very, very, interesting, says this astrologer.

I could go on, but I think the above suffices as to just how far we've come as astrologers, and just how far we've yet to go. Here's another quote I found on the internet some months back that I think really gives us all some food for thought as UAC 2008 fades into memory; think it over for yourself, and ask some hard questions:

""White liberals are openly, breathtakingly hypocritical. The appearance of racial rectitude is perhaps America’s most highly-regarded virtue, but it comes at essentially no cost.
You don’t have to have black friends, you don’t have to have Mexican neighbors, you don’t have to send your children to schools where no one speaks English, and you don’t have to invite Hmong refugees to your dinner parties. You can be racially respectable without doing anything. Just gush about the things you, yourself, carefully avoid: integration, multi-culturalism, and diversity.

"This is the Clinton/Kennedy/Bush racket.

"People get away with it because everyone is in on the charade. By any real racial test, by any measure that requires sacrifice, everyone fails, so whites never apply real tests to each other. Mouth the right clichés and you’re on the side of the angels. Racial rectitude is therefore the most cheaply bought virtue in American history— and also the most easily forfeited. Because only words matter, not deeds, a single sentence can wreck a career."

- Jared Taylor, in an online debate he had with Steven Sailer

Here's to UAC 2012.

Salaam
Mu

Don't Believe The Hype: Reconsiderations Of Barack Obama's "New" Birthtime Part Two - Vedic Analysis

Don't Believe The Hype: Reconsiderations Of Barack Obama's "New" Birthtime Part Two - Vedic Analysis

7:53 PM 05/19/2008 Mon

Having laid the groundwork for my argument that the "new" birthtime for Barack Obama is highly suspect, even flatout false, I will now turn to the Vedic astrological evidence supporting my contention. Here I should like to note to those unfamiliar with my writings, that I have, for nearly the past two years, worked intensely with a rectification "test" time of mine which yields a 29 Gemini Asc using the Tropical Zodiac. It has come through again and again with regard to timing measures and captures the symbolism of his life very well. But, because I could never be 100% certain of Obama's birthtime, I have resisted offering a Vedic analysis of his chart.
Until now. Fate it would seem, has forced my hand.

For earlier today, as I was doing a bit of research in preparation for these essays, I ran accross Ms. Joni Patry's (the source of the "new" birthtime for Obama) Vedic analysis of his chart. Of course, per the Sidereal Zodiac, she uses a Capricorn Asc for Obama, placing both Jupiter and Saturn in the 1st house, with the Sun and Mercury in the 7th. And while she finally concludes that should Obama be the nominee of the Democratic Party, he will loose against Republican nominee Sen. John McCain - and while I agree with her that it is my contention that McCain is the likely winner, at least at this point - I most vociferously disagree with her astrological reasoning for Obama, on the basis that the birthtime she uses yields a chart that does not comport in the least with what we know about Obama's life.

So, as I layout my case now, please let me say that a fundamental premise of astrology, any kind of astrology, is simply this: if the planets don't fit, you must aquit. Period. If the chart doesn't match the reality of the native, then you can be pretty certain that you have the wrong chart. This is the core reasoning behind Horary in the Western tradition, and as far as Vedic goes, with its long and strong reputation for getting pinpoint accuracy in predictions, the same thing goes.

Here is the timed data, again, based on my rectification tests, for Barack Obama:

Aug 4 1961 3AM AHST (NOTE: I had previously listed the time as 4AM and used daylight savings time; I have since learned that Hawaii does not and has not used DST for many, many years. It was NOT in effect at the time Obama was born. My bad.) Honolulu HI; Lahiri 7 Gem 41; Mrigshira, rising Naksatra.

I begin.

In the book Light on Life, a must-have introductory, yet comprehensive, text on Vedic astrology, Hart Defouw offers the chart of slain Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, whose birthtime still is a source of great debate and controversy among astrologers in India to this day. Defouw shows how a skillful use of the houses and graha yogas (planetary combinations, or formulas, not unlike midpoints etc.) can aid the astrologer in coming to the right conclusion in the rectification process. The reader is kindly asked to compare and contrast my analysis of Obama using a Gemini Asc and Ms. Patry's using a Capricorn Asc, and see for themselves.

With regard to Obama, let's quickly note some very basic, yet highly signficant facts about his life:

1. He is bi-racial; his mother is White, his father is Black; his mom from Kansas, his dad from Kenya.

2. He is the author of two highly successful, bestselling books, the source of his wealth according to widely published reports. One of his books is an autobiography which at the center, are the longings for his father; the other takes its title from the only father figure he's ever known, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's sermons.

3. He came out of nowhere to become a serious Presidential candidate, at this point all but certain to be the Democratic nominee.

4. He has two children, both girls; his marriage to Michelle Robinson Obama is stable and without scandal or incident.

5. Both his parents died at relatively young ages, and when Obama was young himself. His mom died when he was in his early 30s; his dad died while he was still a boy.

6. Both parents remarried; his mom once (two marriages), his dad at least four times.

7. Obama has attended among the best schools IN THE WORLD, from a very early age. He is the first African American ever to be on the Harvard Law Review.

8. A major scandal erupted over the nature of the church Obama attended, to which he was first forced to address in the form of a "race speech" in Mar 2008, only to come back to address the situation again a month later.

OK. I think we have enough bare-bones info on Obama to begin an astrological examination.
First, the Asc - Gemini is the perfect fit - the bi-racial identity, the "two faces" he seems to show the public, especially in light of the Rev. Wright scandal (note 9th lord Saturn in the 8th house of scandal! More in a sec), the book and speech writing, the education and even his *two* daughters, when you take into account Venus, as 5th lord, sits in the Gemini Asc. Its all there. Not so for Capricorn rising.

This Asc position makes even more sense when one considers Mercury, the Asc Lord, is placed in the 2nd house, long known in Jyotishical circles as a house of classical learning. It forms a Budhaditya Yoga with the Sun, amplifying his innate intelligence. Mercury rules the 4th house of formal educational degrees; Venus, as the 5th lord of intelligence and bookwriting (along with the 2nd house!), again is in the Asc. Obama has studied at Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard Universities, and holds a degree in Constitutional Law.

For the parents, we would want to see the 4th and 9th houses, that which represent the mother and father, respectively. Here we can easily see what the problems were. As Mercury is both Lagnesh and 4th lord, it is right to take the karaka, or universal significator, or the mother and use that planet instead of Mercury, leaving it to represent Obama alone (we will employ this method yet again in another key area of Obama's life; stay tuned). The Moon represents the mother in all horoscopes, and in this one we can clearly see that it is damaged by being placed in the 12th house, arguably the singleworst place to be by house for the Moon. Among other things, Obama's mother spent much of her life away from the land/country of her birth, living abroad and mainly in and around Indonesia, where she would meet her second husband and give birth to a second child. The 12 house represents foreign lands. The 12th house also represents sorrow, misery and suffering, even death. But the Moon's exalted! Shouldn't that account for something? Well, not a lot - that's because the Moon itself has just entered its Sign, meaning that its still a beat weak because it's at a junction point between two Signs; this is known as Rasi Sandhi. One thing that I always remind people of, is that an exalted planet may not be all its cracked up to be; one must make a careful inspection of the houses and other planets involved before proclaiming all the promised benefits of such a planet. However, we can tell that Obama was indeed very close to his mother, as Moon Sign Lord Venus is placed in the Asc and very close to the rising degree.

As for father, things don't look so well either - Not only does the 9th lord, Saturn, sits placed in the 8th house - one of the worst houses for a Vedic chart - but Ketu, another first rate malefic, actually sits in the 9th. This is a perfect symbolism for the father, Barack Obama Sr., a man who had many wives (at least two of whom were White - note Rahu in the 7th from the 9th, i.e., the 3rd house), who had a drinking problem, and who eventually died in an automobile crash which severed his legs, and whom Obama the Younger only met ONCE in his entire life! ALL of the themes of the Nodes - Rahu and Ketu - come alive in this chart using the Gemini Asc insofar as the parents are concerned. Saturn is closely conjunct Jupiter; although Saturn is dignified, Jupiter is not, and placed in the radical 8th house will suggest that Obama the Elder may do things he's not too proud of later. Among them were his taking wives unbeknownst to his current ones. The 8th house has long been known as that of disgraceful acts. Jupiter represents one's morality and ethics. Both are heavily involved here in the Gemini chart option. This position does not bode well for the father's health and longevity, as the 8th house is the 12th from the 9th. Loss.

If we no consider the 7th houses away from the 4th (radical 10th) and 9th (radical 3rd) and keep in mind what Parasara said about combinations for multiple spouses, it is easy to see using the Gemini rising chart how Obama's parents could remarry so frequently. Parasara says, that if the 7th lord is conjunct or aspected by a benefic, there will be many spouses; the same will be true if the 7th lord is exalted.

Looking at the 7th house from the 4th, as note that Jupiter is aspected by the "multiple-minded" planet Mercury. For the 9th, we can see that the 7th lord is conjunct this same Mercury, and is now aspected by Jupiter to boot. Hence we see the multiple marriages.

What about Obama's marriage? Surely the Gemini rising chart must give some clues there, right? And indeed it does - Jupiter rules the 7th and is aspected by Mercury, This not only joins the 1st and 7th houses together by rulership, but also brings in some added "benefits" in the form of additional yogas, namely Satkalatra and Bahu Stree, both of whom are highly favorable for happiness in marriage. Also, note Venus' aspect on the 7th house as well, and Venus is Darakaraka (planet of the spouse) in a man's chart.

Lastly, before we move on to Dasas, let's consider Obama's meteoric rise to fame as a politician and serious contender for the White House. To be able to do something like that must indicate some powerful Raj Yogas, or "king making" combinations, yes? And we find them in this map, in this way:

As mentioned many times before, Venus is the 5th lord of political issues, and sits closely conjunct the Geminis Asc point; this accounts for his huge popularity.

Lagnesh Mercury gets the full aspect of Jupiter and Saturn, who both form a Dharma Karma Adipati Yoga, as these planets rule the 10th and 9th houses respectively. Jupiter is no doubt fallen, but Saturn "lifts" him up somewhat by himself being in his own Sign to act.

Note how this combination - Jupiter and Saturn - become strong again in the Chandra Lagna, or Moon Ascendant chart, now sitting in the 9th from the Moon.

And note how strong the Navamsa chart is, lifting the qualities of Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu! That is very rare to see in Jyotish, a Navamsa that strong. And the exalted Nodes, sitting in the 1-7 house axis in this chart, guarantees that Obama will not only mesmerize the mass media and public at large, but that he will also be "the race candidate". Indeed, he has. On all fronts.

Let us now consider the Dasa scheme of some of the key events in his life. Obama was born at the very end of Mars Dasa, not a good sign for the father sticking around, as Mars lies in the 7th from 9th. Obama himself reports that his father left him and his mother at the age of two - just as Rahu Dasa was getting off the ground (beginning Sep 1961). Obama Sr. would divorce Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, in 1963. Rahu was running both its major and sub periods at this time - and please note again, that the 7th house from the 9th is activated, as both Mars and Rahu are placed there. Both Mars and Rahu represent severing, especially when placed in a Sign like Leo, ruled by the malefic Sun.

Now, if we consider Obama's mother's second marriage, which ran from 1966 or so, till about 1980, we can clearly track the events by way of the Dasas operating in Obama's chart at that time. For the earlier period, we can see that Saturn sub period in the Dasa of Rahu was running. Saturn is conjunct Jupiter, who is 7th lord from the 4th house of mother in Obama's chart per Gemini rising. For the divorice from the second hubbie, we can see that Jupiter Dasa was just beginning. Keep in mind please, that Jupiter is not well placed in the Rasi, or birthchart, for Obama.

Obama's father died in 1982, right in the midst of Jupiter-Saturn Dasa(!); Obama's mother died in Nov 1995, right after the onset of Saturn Dasa began. Please note that, from the 9th, Jupiter and Saturn are in the 12th from the 9th, aspect the 10th which is 2nd from the 9th and aspect the 7th lord - all Marakas. In the case of the mother, please note that Saturn aspects the 7th from the 4th, is conjunct the 7th house (from the 4th) lord, and finally aspects the 2nd house from the 4th as well (radical 5th).

It was during the latter time, that Obama began to get interested in politics. In Jyotisha, there are two major planets that speak to political aims; one is the Sun, and the other is Saturn. And in Obama's case, both impact strongly on his Lagnesh Mercury.

Obama won his US Senate seat in the largest margin ever in Illinois state history, some 70% of the vote. Saturn-Venus was running at the time; please note how both these planets are friends and rule trinal houses for the Senator, per the Gemini rising chart.

It would be under this same combination that Obama would give his riveting address at the Democratic Convention at Boston in 2004. This was when he reached national prominence.

He then decided to run for the Presidency with the Moon running its sub period in early 2007; in Mar 2008, the Rev. Wright scandal broke, as Mars sub period in Saturn Dasa began. Please note two very important things here - Mars sits 8 houses away from Saturn, Bhavat Bhavam; and that when two natural malefics run their major and minor periods at the same time, lookout! We can also add that Mars is an enemy to Mercury. Saturn rules the 9th house of preachers, churches and father figures. That Obama would be forced to cut all ties with Wright only a month after his famed "race speech" is again another testimony of both the Dasa scheme at work, and as well, the Gemini rising chart.

And that brings us to the present time, with both these planets still very much in operation, to last until the Spring of 2009. With both Mars and Saturn aspecting Obama's Piscean 10th house, and with the 10th lord debilitated in the 8th house, it is hard to see eventual victory for him; in this I would agree with Ms. Patry. But the point remains, that until we can actually see a birth record that confirms that which she told the world the other night at Denver, I then maintain that the evidence I have offered in this essay is every bit as valid as anything she or anyone else has said. As I've said earlier, if the Planets don't fit, you must acquit!

Comment and reply, invited.

Salaam,
Mu

Don't Believe The Hype: Reconsiderations Of Barack Obama's "New" Birthtime Part One - Horary Analysis

Don't Believe The Hype: Reconsiderations Of Barack Obama's "New" Birthtime Part One - Horary Analysis

6:48 PM 05/19/2008 Mon

With the 2008 United Astrology Congress, which was held in Denver CO this year, about to go down in the history books, perhaps now is the time to (re)consider this year's Main Event of sorts - the revealing of a "new" birthtime for Democratic Presidential candidate, Illinois Senator Barack Obama. According to noted Vedic astrologer Joni Patry of Dallas TX, Obama's point of entry into this world occured at 7.11PM local time at Honolulu HI. For Western astrologers, this clocktime yields an Asc of 14 Aqr 21.

Although I did not attend the proceedings, I am told that this event was attended with much fanfare and pomp; the local and national news covered the event; and it appears that Ms. Patry is getting quite a bit of press mileage out of it all. But there's just one small problem with all of this:

The time she reported, is not so.

How can I be so sure, you may ask? Of course, if you're as intense an astrology enthusiast as myself, you already know that Ms. Patry's "reveal" sounds quite dubious - she gets wind of the birthtime from a client who got it from a "campaign manager" in the Obama campaign, by way of a "closed-access government website" - meaning, that no one can actually get a hardcopy of the birth record that actually has the birthtime on it.

It reminds me of the "telephone" game we used to play as kids.

According to reporter and astrologer in his own right Eric Francis, who was in attendance at the time of the announcement, the matter is being investigated by Astrodatabank, with Patry assisting. As it now stands, the birthtime is being given a "DD" rating per the late great Lois Rodden's grading system for astrological birthdata. "DD" is considered highly suspect, and until or unless someone can come forward with the goods, rightly so.

But this alone only says that the data is a bit shaky; it does not necessarily mean that it is false.

Or does it?

That's where astrology comes in.

Being the good man that he is, Francis punches up a chart for the exact moment that Patry gives out the "new" birthtime, Fri May 16 2008 at 9.39PM MDT Denver CO. The resulting Asc, using Placidus houses, is 15 Sag 56, and while Francis does give a bit of an analysis of this chart, and opens the door as to whether the time given by Patry is indeed correct, he holds off from giving a definitive judgment, saying that he wants to defer to British Horary Master Geoffrey Cornelius. I can't blame him; Cornelius is the man.

But when one has been doing Horary as long as I have, all that is needed is a trusty copy of Christian Astrology - William Lilly's magnum opus - by one's side. The answers lay therein.
On page 70, Lilly gives clear instructions as to whether a report or rumor be true. Here's what he said, regarding a report he got that the town of Cambridge was taken by the King's army:
"A Report that Cambridge was Taken by the King's Forces; if true?"

Question background: "In the yeer 1643, His Majesties Army being then Rampant, severall Reports were given out, that his Majesty had taken Cambridge, &c. a wel-affected person enquires of me, if the newes were true or false? Whereupon I erected the Figure ensuing, and gave Judgment: All that we heard was untruth, and that the Towne neither was, or should be taken by Him or his Forces."

Horary chart data: April 21, 1643 GC, 4:29 pm GMT, London (00w10, 51n30) Placidus 4 Lib 47

Lilly gives his analysis:

"First, I considered that the Angles were all moveable, and that Mars did vitiate the cusp of the 10th, and Saturn the cusp of the 7th, one argument the Report was false.

Secondly, I found the Moon cadent, and in Gemini, a Signe wherein she nothing delights; a second strong evidence of a false rumor.

Thirdly, I found North Node on the cusp of the Ascendant, a Signe of good to the Parliment, for the 1st house signified that honorable Society: I found Venus Lady of the Ascendant, and our Significatrix, in her Exaltation; but Mars, Lord of our Enemies Ascendant, viz. the 7th, entering his Fall, viz. Cancer, and afflicted by Square of Saturn; I saw the Moon seperating from Jupiter, placed in the 7th and transferring his light and virtue to Venus, which gave me reason to expect, that there would come good to us or our side from this report or Rumour, and no benefit to our Enemies: I saw Mars and Saturn in a Square, which assured me our Enemies were so full of division and treason, and thwarting one anothers Designes, that no good should come unto them upon this Report; and so in short, I judged Cambridge was not taken, and what we heard of its taking were lyes."

If one casts the chart in question they can clearly see that the 7th house, representing the army, is in bad shape, as its ruler, Mars, is fallen in Cancer. The King himself, is represented by the 10th house, ruled by the Moon, Cadent by house and peregrine by Sign. Finally, we can see that another fallen planet, Saturn, is moving toward the 7th cusp. All of these factors do not look good for the rumor to be true, and in fact may be indicative of a lie. At the very least, false.

Hence Lilly gives the astrologer some very strong points and tips as to ascertain whether a rumor or report be true or false. In this case, whether the rumor/report that Barack Obama was indeed born at 7.11PM, is true, or not.

So, let's now consider the moment Ms. Patry annouced her "new" birthtime for Sen. Obama:
Again, as Francis notes, Sagittarius rises, making Jupiter its ruler. The Asc in Horary always represents the "Querent", the one who is asking the question. Since there was no such question in this case, we can take the Asc to represent Patry herself, which seems to fit, given that she has a very "firery" look about her. Jupiter is fallen in Capricorn, and Rx to boot, something that does not bode well for her information being accurate, as she is the source, being the one who is announcing to the world what time Obama was supposedly born. To make matters worse, Pluto, a malefic planet, rises at the Aries Point in Capricorn (opining on matters relating to Politics before the Public) and is also Rx. In a Horary, such a thing to see is not a good augury for a favorable outcome.

Next, the Moon in this chart is at 24 degrees Libra - right in the path of the Via Combustia, held by many to be among the Strictures Before Judgement of a Horary Figure. Moreover, the Moon is Void of Course, having trined Neptune as its last aspect. As Francis rightly points out, Neptune itself is within "striking distance" of the 3rd house cusp itself, and in any event rules the intercepted Sign Pisces in the 3rd. Moon does indeed rule the 8th house of secrets. A VOC Moon is another of the Strictures, and almost always is a signal that what is demanded of the querent will not come to pass - in this case, that Patry's announcement that Obama was born at 7.11PM, is in someway false.

But wait, there's more!

On Mon May 5 2008, at 10.49AM MDT, Moses Siregar III, a prominent astrologer in his own right, announces on the Horscopic Astrology forum, a discussion group on MySpace that boasts upwards of 6,000 members, that he has Obama's birthtime but cannot reveal just what it is yet; it will be revealed soon. Casting a chart for this data, as I did when I first got word of the matter, we again find some interesting things:

1. The Moon, ruler of the Asc, is exalted in Taurus and placed in the 11th house of forums and groups; this shows how important Moses is to the astrology community, that he is a part of its "establishment". This feature alone, suggests that the chart is indeed radical and fit to be judged. It is also interesting that the Moon moves to sextile Uranus, ruler of the 8th house of secrets, holding Neptune there as well.

2. That 18 Can 30 rises, holding a deeply fallen Mars in the Asc. This represents the impulsive nature of Moses on that day, running forward with the news of this false report. As Moses is now the "source" we can clearly see that the information he brings cannot be relied upon.

3. Please note that Jupiter is again fallen in Capricorn and in the 7th house - Obama. This is the first sign that the birthtime Moses has is not accurate. Also, please note that Jupiter is in a Mutual Reception with Saturn, which is in Virgo - the Sign of Jupiter's detriment - and yet another signal that the birthtime Moses has on Obama is suspect.

In other words, both the Patry Announcement chart and this one above, both have some strong things in common: both have the Moon heavily involved, per Lilly's rule; both have fallen planets associated with their Ascendants at the time of their respective announcements, suggesting that they got the wrong information. In that we now have two such "announcement" charts, one made as a kind a "sneak preview", we can be fairly certain that the data that is now the rage throughout the astrology community, cannot be relied upon as accurate in any way.
But there's one final loose end...what about Mercury in the Patry chart?

Indeed, Francis refers to this winged planet as "the trickster", and that "he's looking right back at us". I take that to mean, as the great George Orwell so elegantly put, that to recognize the truth that is front of one's nose, requires a constant struggle. Mercury is very much dignified on that night Patry made her earthshaking announcement. Mercury, in its own Sign of Gemini, in the house that represents the great man himself, Barack Obama, has to point to only one conclusion -

That he may very well have the Sign of the Twins rising in his chart. And that will be the subject of Part Two of this essay.

I would just like to close out by saying that I for one am quite a bit disturbed, annoyed and disappointed by the actions of both my colleague Moses Siregar, and Ms. Patry, whom I have never met but have heard a great deal about. Both of these people have been around astrology around long enough to know better - they both should have done a much better job of vetting astrological birthdata, especially when its as important as who the next Leader of the Free World is likely to be. We astrologers work so hard - Lois Rodden in particular has worked so hard - to bring exacting standards of competence and precision to our Art. And for it to be put aside in the name of "scoops" is to my mind, the chief reason why astrology has not yet been taken seriously by the public at large. I find then, quite a bit of irony that all this would go down as the world's largest gathering of astrologers takes place; a bit of information that is procured secondhand and that cannot be verified in any way at all for a public figure.

Lilly has got to be rolling over in his grave.

Coming up: If the Planets don't fit, you must acquit!

Salaam
Mu