Weekend Entertainment Guide 8/23/24

RFK Jr. speaks, Virgo season begins

It has been a big week for politics in the United States! The four-day Democratic National Convention resulted in the nomination of Kamala Harris, which was historic in many ways — including being my first-ever win on gambling website MyBookie. Paid subscribers to my Substack can access my detailed Democratic National Convention liveblog, as well as my Republican National Convention liveblog from last month, by going to astrologybooks.substack.com/chat.

After that, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech today on the future of his campaign. The address wound up taking place in Phoenix, Arizona. I watched the livestream on The Hill, which showed an empty podium until 11:45 am PDT/2:45 pm EDT. (The Hill only has short excerpts of the speech available for replay, but Rumble has the whole thing, starting about 41 minutes in.) I blogged about many charts relevant to the event last night, but here is finally the correct chart of the speech.

Well, I could not have predicted what Kennedy was going to say. In a Solomonic splitting of the baby, he claimed he was suspending his campaign but not terminating it. He is withdrawing from the ballot in about ten battleground states but staying on the ballot in states that are solid red or solid blue. People in the states where he remains on the ballot will still be able to vote for him. If neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump receives enough Electoral College votes to win, Kennedy said he could wind up in the White House.

I had never heard of such a thing, but Douglas MacKinnon explored the idea in an article for The Hill in March 2024. If no candidate receives 270 Electoral College votes, the election goes to the House of Representatives. Each state’s delegation then has one vote that the representatives must decide upon amongst themselves — they aren’t tied to however the people of their state voted.

Kennedy’s reasoning for withdrawing from the battleground states was that he does not want Harris to win the election. He accused the Democratic National Committee of targeting both him and Trump with legal warfare. He identified his top disagreements with Democrats as censorship, war, and the handling of chronic disease. However, he acknowledged that he disagrees with Trump on some issues too.

On MyBookie, Kennedy’s prospects are actually heading up. As of late morning on August 12, 2024, a $20 bet on Kennedy had a potential win of $1,600. As of 5:09 pm PDT on August 23, 2024, a $20 bet on Kennedy had a smaller potential win of $1,320.

A smaller potential win means that your bet is less risky — that your candidate is more likely to get elected. MyBookie still thinks Harris and Trump are the top contenders, though, to the point that you’d actually lose money if you bet on something that obvious. Currently, a $20 bet on Harris has a potential win of $17.39, and a $20 bet on Trump has a potential win of $18.18.

Hot on Substack

Jeanna Kadlec

, on spiritual discernment

Kadlec gives specific recommendations regarding how to use discernment when consuming astrology content online — a very Saturn in Pisces lesson!

Kim Lindgren

, Hitler Birth Chart Analysis

Lindgren presents the structure of evolutionary astrology in an organized way while analyzing the birth chart of Adolf Hitler.

Anita Ashland

, The influenza of the Sun

Ashland comments on the Leo-Aquarius polarity in the context of Jungian psychology.

Posts about the 2024 election

Dorothy Oja's PlanetWeather

, Kamala, First Of Her Name!

Oja analyzes the natal chart of Kamala Harris. She points out that Harris was born at a Full Moon of 27° Aries/Libra, so her Sun and Moon both align harmoniously with the USA Sibly chart’s Moon at 27° Aquarius.

Frederick Woodruff

, The Sentimental Magic of Tim Walz

Woodruff comments on traits common to Aries men including Tim Walz and his own father.

Posts about the Sun entering Virgo on Aug. 22

Wandia Mugo via

Astrologers' Co-Op

, Virgo I: Very Demure, Very Mindful

Mugo provides a case study of Michael Jackson, who has his Sun, Part of Fortune, and Pluto in the first decan of Virgo.

Bryan Winchell

, Virgo Season 2024 Is For Reflection, Refinement and Getting Ready for 2025

Winchell provides a week-by-week breakdown of Virgo season’s transits. He notes that, on September 3, Mars in Gemini will square Neptune in Pisces like it did when the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged in September 2022, potentially bringing that incident into awareness again.

Alison Dale

via

Astrum Opus

, The Sun Enters Virgo

Dale describes the medical associations of Virgo and also connects the sign of Virgo to the life stage of being in one’s thirties.

Free online events

Kepler College will provide an open house about its educational programs at 1:00 pm PDT on Saturday, August 24. Register here.

Wanda Sellars will give a webinar on chart shapes through Kepler College at 10:00 am PDT on Saturday, August 24. Register here.

An update on literary cancel culture

Freddie deBoer, though writing from a non-astrological perspective, describes basically what I have been saying lately about the approaching shift from Neptune in Pisces to Neptune in Aries.

. . . most people who have been committed to social justice haven’t had any big public conversions. That would entail admitting that they were wrong, and people don’t do that. No, the sign that we’re in a post-woke moment is not that people like me criticize that style of political performance but that the types who were once the most enthusiastic about it have gingerly stepped away. It’s not lefties turned Republicans, it’s a mass evolution in the behavior of the educated white liberals who have always been the true foot soldiers of woke politics: a communal sense that a lot of the typical vocabulary and tactics of the social justice era are destructive and, worse, cringey. And so we’ve seen meaningful change in the default presentation of the American left-of-center in a handful of years, change that has developed the same way this kind of change always does - slowly, slowly, slowly, then all at once.

I agree with deBoer that this change is now happening slowly — and I think the all at once is going to take off after Neptune enters Aries in March 2025. Literary cancel culture cannot be allowed to go gentle into that good night, though. People who have participated in that need to pay for the emotional damage they have caused in my family life, and I want them to do so by implementing the proposal I described in “A Law Written in Tears.”

In preparation for writing my own essay in Changing of the Guards, the anthology I plan to put out this fall, I have started going through my diaries from Pluto’s transit through Capricorn. I found this passage from February 21, 2016, when I was in the process of deciding to walk away from fiction writing. At the time, I worked as an administrative assistant in a medical specialty office and provided financial support to my parents.

Where I’m at now is, there is so much suffering in the world that is not preventable, like the illnesses of our patients at work, and publishing the novel and the consequent worry over hurting people’s feelings is a suffering that is totally preventable. All I have to do is walk away from it and find something else to do. . .

This is how deep and terrifying a hold literary cancel culture had at that time — it managed to put the prospect of reading an insensitive novel on a par with developing a life-threatening illness.

As it ultimately happened, even walking away from fiction writing entirely wasn’t enough to keep me from hurting anyone. I was wrong, but I was in an absolutely impossible situation — and literary cancel culture needs to be held accountable for its role in trapping me there.