VictoriaBazeley

To Dream of Brotherhood

I celebrated MLK day this year by reading Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech to a few youngsters and learning a little about his life. As I did this, I was struck by two things. One was what a great speech it truly was. The second was how "astrologically correct" his life and that speech about "the sons of slaves and the sons of slave-owners" one day sitting together at "the table of brotherhood" were. More…

Baby Horosocopes

I don't usually watch the Today show in the morning, but the other day I accidentally caught a short segment in which Ann Curry interviewed someone from the magazine Parents about baby horoscopes. It seemed to me that Ms. Curry was in obvious distress about the existence of the segment at all, and she opened with a remark about doubting the validity of horoscopes. The editor noted that a) the horoscopes were not science and b) they were extremely popular with parents. The editor then followed with some fairly bland statements along the lines of 'your curious Aquarian child will want to explore, so make sure your home is adequately babyproofed.' More…

The New Hampshire Primary Surprise

As I write this, major media outlets are very busy being surprised at the outcome of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. It's reported that the campaigns of Senators Clinton and Obama are also busy being rather surprised at the fortunes of their candidates. To me, the most surprising thing about this all this is that anyone is surprised that the pundits, the polls, and the predictions in that race proved to be less than accurate. After all, didn't they all just finish being surprised that Obama took the Iowa caucuses? Oh, I'm not exactly blaming the pundits and the pollsters for being wrong again. More…

2008: Happy Times for Traditional Values

The honorary mayor of Northridge, California (a community near where I live) mailed me a couple of booklets last week on how to be happy. I didn't ask for them, but apparently the honorary mayor was feeling full of Jupiterian generosity, and she mailed them to everyone in the area. The booklets outline the philosophy of an organization dedicated to safety and traditional values. The organization in fact seems to believe that the way to happiness lies straightforwardly in promoting survival by following some traditional precepts. Not only do the booklets give me detailed and handy instructions on exactly which traditional values to embrace ("do not steal" is always a good one), but they explicitly command me to tell other people to follow the booklet's instructions as well. And thus, in a nutshell, do we have what the 2008 Jupiter in Capricorn transit is all about. More…

On Giving

Is it truly better to give than to receive? Now that you've presumably given your gifts and opened your presents, you may have your own answer to that question. The LA Times, though, has an interesting article on why we human beings give, and not just on holidays. What interests me about this article is that it talks about the biological rewards of giving, and at least one of the studies in the article implies that not all of us are equally biologically rewarded by the experience of generosity and altruism. More…

Jupiter in Capricorn

Jupiter moved into Capricorn this week, and some of you will be feeling the effects quite soon. I personally started feeling them at the very tail end of last month (Jupiter often seems to jump a bit ahead of himself). There hasn't been a whole lot of emphasis on the sign of Capricorn in the skies for quite a while, and I noticed myself re-experiencing sensations I haven't had in years! It was quite nice actually. And it inspired me to post a few thoughts on how Jupiter's effects are actually felt in the lives of real people. More…

Not Exactly Peace on Earth, But Reason for Hope

This hasn't exactly been a great week in the peace on earth department. There was a distressing mall shooting on the news, distressing church shootings, and someone just told me about another mass shooting in Las Vegas. And somehow I am reminded of an old Chevy Chase joke from Saturday Night Live in which he would announce on the news every week "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead." Only in my head it goes, "The war in Iraq is still a war." The war in Afghanistan is still a war; the Israelis and the Palestinians are still not at peace, and so it goes. That's only a short list of the non-peace on earth things I wish would end that haven't. More…

Holly Jolly Jupiter

In the US, the holiday season traditionally coincides with the sun's transit through the Jupiter-ruled sign of Sagittarius, give or take a few days. That is, it lasts from around Thanksgiving to around Christmas. This year, it seems to have stretched a little further, starting earlier than ever. The holiday creep has been taking place for years, and I'm only just now getting around to noticing it. At first I was grateful, thinking it was getting longer to give old folks like me who don't do things as quickly as they used to more time to get those holiday tasks accomplished. But then I found out it was just cuz retailers are more nervous than ever about consumer spending. At any rate, here's my very informal musings on the astrology of the holly jolly Jupiter season. More…

Pluto and Privacy

Over the last week, two people have treated me to their rants on the subject of privacy--as in, there isn't any in modern society. One person took the position that our tell-all culture of celebrity and mass media encourages people to seek attention by giving up all semblance of personal privacy. The other person railed against the loss of privacy in the UK, a place where it seems virtually everything is recorded by a government, police, commercial or individual camera. The first person was expressing some of the zeitgeist of the Pluto in Sagittarius era, while the second one was lamenting the tone of the upcoming Pluto in Capricorn era. More…

Sun Sign Skepticism

I ran across a couple of mocking references to astrology in the media recently. One took exception to the "delusion" that the positions of heavenly bodies in "arbitrary" constellations could have any effect on personality. The other took exception to the idea that he would share general characteristics with other people born in an arbitrary portion of the calendar. The critics are right, I guess, about the arbitrariness. There are a number of different astrological systems, and they all have their own arbitrary groupings. Proponents of Vedic or Chinese astrology are just as attached to their systems as I am to mine, and yet we do not necessarily use the same "arbitrary" factors to come to our conclusions. Seems kind of suspicious to the "rational" or "scientific" or skeptical mind. So what gives? Why on earth do people continue to pay attention to something that seems so dumb to a certain portion of the population? More…