Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/16/25
Is Casey Means the second coming of Theranos?
Controversial surgeon general nominee Casey Means continues to attract the interest of Substack’s writers. The whole mess offers many opportunities to travel down rabbit holes, astrological and otherwise.
Continuing coverage of Casey Means
In Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/10/25, I explored the suggestion
made earlier this year that Casey Means is in league with the CIA. I had already looked at the natal chart of the CIA in other posts, so it was easy for me to simply run the CIA’s chart against the astrological chart of Casey Means., however, subsequently expressed a more practical (and probably more plausible) set of concerns in The Imaginary Casey Means:I never said, contrary to this unfortunate post, that Casey Means “must be” part of “a CIA plot.” I never said that “the deep state” had anything to do with her meteoric rise to national prominence.
I said — and I stand by every word — that it looks to me as if both Casey Means and Calley Means have been sent to us by scarier interests than the CIA.
Silicon Valley is scarier than any government agency, and far more powerful. The Means siblings, I maintain, are representing Silicon Valley’s interests, and not ours.
Wolf went on to describe Casey Means’s business, Levels.com, which has received massive infusions of venture capital funding. Customers of Levels.com wear continuous glucose monitors that transmit biometric data to their smartphones. Having access to this data is supposed to help them see how their food choices affect their health.
I was reminded of the big news story from a few years back about Theranos, another tech company that claimed it would revolutionize healthcare and received a lot of venture capital funding to do so. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, the thin blonde woman known for wearing black turtlenecks in the style of Steve Jobs, is now serving time in a federal prison because her blood testing device turned out to be fraudulent.
I therefore checked whether there were any obvious commonalities between the astrological chart of Elizabeth Holmes and the astrological chart of Casey Means. I didn’t see anything too glaring. Holmes has the Sun in Aquarius square Mars and Saturn in Scorpio, perhaps believable placements for a cartoon villain. In comparison with Holmes, the vibe I get from the Neptune-dominated chart of Casey Means is that she’s less focused and more easily swayed, for better or for worse.
Continuing my research, I listened to a September 2021 episode of the Space Trash podcast, featuring Desi Handal and Sara Armour, about the astrology of the Elizabeth Holmes drama. One simple but strange similarity between Elizabeth Holmes and Casey Means: the podcast noted toward its end that women were more skeptical than men of Elizabeth Holmes, going back to Holmes’s time as a student at Stanford.
Naomi Wolf said in her post about Casey Means, “There is a lot of condescension — unfortunately, much of it male — that followed the expressions of outrage from key MAHA voices, many of them female.” In my own following of the Casey Means story, I have also observed that the critics of Casey Means are disproportionately female, while her defenders are disproportionately male.
Wolf went on to point out that nearly 80 percent of Levels.com users are based in Mexico, which she said is “a well-known source for ‘bot farms.’”
That said, perhaps a Theranos-style scam is not the worst possible outcome for Levels.com. In an ideal scenario for Levels.com where its product works as advertised and all its users are actual humans, the result is that a lot of personal data is collected from those humans. Who gets to use that data, and for what purpose? The kindest thing that can be said here is that humanity does not have a lot of practice answering these ethical questions, as the ability to amass data on this scale is simply very new.
Going back to Wolf’s initial contention, I personally believe that the CIA is up to more than most Americans would think. Maybe there will always be a certain amount of that kind of sneaking around in the shadows. The idea of some top-down institution controlling everything is very Pluto in Capricorn, though. Now that Pluto has definitively moved on to Aquarius, Wolf is probably right that we need to worry more about a less centralized form of oppression hiding in plain sight — the tech companies whose products we use every day.
Other Substack content about Casey Means
, Synchronicity, Science, and The Search for MeaningByock, who is based in Portland, Oregon, provides a relatable description of the way alliances have become harder to predict since Pluto shifted into Aquarius:
In ways that make my head spin, the far right and liberal wellness world meet each other in RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement (one that includes some dear friends). The pick for surgeon general is in my demographic in various ways, including being a Portlander practically in my neighborhood, and she says many things about preventative healthcare, personal agency, and the failures of the American medical system that I agree with. Yet, in a display of extreme cognitive dissonance, she is fully aligned with an administration that has gutted healthcare infrastructure for people in this country and all over the world.
Name asteroids: Elizabeth Holmes, Casey Means, and me
The Space Trash podcast looked at the prominent placements of several asteroids with thematically relevant names in the natal chart of Elizabeth Holmes. For example, asteroid Lie is actually named after Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, not after the idea of the opposite of truth. However, in the natal chart of Elizabeth Holmes, the asteroid Lie is conjunct her Sun, which is just too fitting for someone who got caught in a big lie!
The following asteroids were discussed in the podcast: Actor (12238), Lie (26955), Achilles (588), Casanova (7328), Fame (not found on Astro.com), Icarus (1566), DNA (55555), Savage (29837), Banks (13956), Karma (3811), and Truth (249521).
Here’s a comma-separated list of just the identification numbers that you can copy-paste into the Manual Entry box of the Additional Objects section on Astro.com so you can add these asteroids to the chart of your choice: 12238,26955,588,7328,1566,55555,29837,13956,3811,249521.
After running the asteroids against the chart of Elizabeth Holmes to verify what was said in the podcast, I ran the same asteroids against the chart of Casey Means. I thought the results weren’t as striking, but that’s still useful data to have — it suggests that the two women are not quite living out the same set of archetypes.
Then I ran the same asteroids against my own chart. I apparently have the asteroid Lie prominently placed on my Venus-Ascendant conjunction in Libra. Well, there may be limits to what this line of inquiry is equipped to accomplish!
Feuding astro-twins: Nicole Shanahan and Calley Means
Casey Means works closely with her brother Calley Means. Both of them were involved with negotiating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2024 election season. The Means siblings are sometimes mistaken for twins, but Calley Means is almost exactly two years older than Casey Means.
The much closer astro-twin of Calley Means is actually Nicole Shanahan, who served as the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his independent campaign for president before he endorsed Trump. Shanahan, born September 26, 1985, is two days older than Calley Means, born September 28, 1985.
Shanahan’s birth time is publicly known — she posted it on X. Calley Means’s birth time is unknown, and I don’t even know the city of his birth for sure. Wikipedia just says that he was raised in Washington, DC. Shanahan’s known Moon is at 7° Pisces. A noon chart for Calley Means gives him the Moon at 1° Aries, but he could have the Moon on either side of the Pisces/Aries cusp.
I looked at the synastry between Shanahan and Kennedy while Shanahan was still Kennedy’s running mate. Calley Means, having a very similar chart to Shanahan, would have a lot of the same synastry with Kennedy that Shanahan does.
I commented on Shanahan and Kennedy having Midheaven trine Midheaven in synastry, and that is one commonality that couldn’t be applied to Calley Means as the Midheaven is unknown for Calley Means.
What should be essentially the same: Shanahan/Calley Means Saturn square Kennedy Pluto, Shanahan/Calley Means Saturn sextile Kennedy Venus, Shanahan/Calley Means South Node conjunct Kennedy Saturn, Shanahan/Calley Means Pluto conjunct Kennedy Saturn.
Shanahan has publicly expressed criticism of both Calley and Casey Means. Perhaps it’s a bit like Charlie Chaplin slamming his near astro-twin Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator, as noted in Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/10/25. Having a similar chart to your astro-twin could give you a similar set of strengths and weaknesses, making it easier for you to spot their flaws.
Shanahan and Calley Means both have a Venus-Mars conjunction in health-oriented Virgo, broadly T-squaring a Chiron-Uranus opposition. It makes sense that they were both drawn to alternative approaches to healing. Shanahan, Calley Means, and Casey Means all have the Sun in Libra square Neptune in Capricorn, likely reflecting optimism and idealism.
Shanahan has her Pisces Moon opposite the Venus-Mars conjunction in Virgo. However, Calley Means’s Moon on the Pisces/Aries cusp opposes the Sun-Mercury conjunction in Libra and squares Neptune in Capricorn. This would be one of the main differences between the two charts.
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One of the many “deep dive” researchers I sometimes listen to is a woman named Alison McDowell.
Last year, she did a few of her epic presentations on RFK Jr. and some of his connections to Silicon Valley (among other things). Along with what I view as a huge moral blind spot on the Israel-Palestine topic, those connections were enough for me to trash any possibility of voting for RFK, Jr. (this was before his candidacy was finished).
Like all of these topics, it’s very complicated and requires nuance in our thinking and feeling. On one hand, considering how every time I visit the US (usually every two years or so), I see a populace that is increasingly unhealthy, I believe it IS time for a maverick to shake things up in how y’all do public health. It shows the level of complacency and complicity in most of the media that they can’t even concede this rather obvious point.
I’m reasonably sure when most of those media “elites” gather in their version of a cocktail party, one thing most share is a contempt for what they see as a lazy, overweight American public. Unfortunately, I think too many of them may be somewhat isolated from that world, and, worse, most of the media outlets they work for are corrupted by Big Pharma advertising money. The point is they know that American public health is bad and getting worse, but they have many incentives to keep mum about it.
For all of those reasons, I’m happy a lifelong litigator is heading the HHS. I have been disappointed we haven’t really heard much from RFK Jr. about what he’s up to and this raises my long-earned cynicism.
As does the Casey Means nomination. Reading and hearing some of the critiques, including Dr. Wolf’s article, bring me back to those McDowell videos. While I can appreciate that new tech can be useful in raising our awareness about our health, it’s definitely troubling to see that so much of our personal data seems to be collected by Silicon Valley and they potentially shared with governments.
Wild times, indeed!
Means-watch pt deux. So interesting to hear the Silicon Valley connection. So, between Casey and Elon's DOGE accessing data from Health & Human Services, is this all just a huge data mining free-for-all? ps I initially mis-read Theranos as Thanos without my glasses on, lol - I really hope she's not the second coming of Thanos :/