Bernie's Cool Choices

Seizing Chance, Sanders Makes Bold Progressive Picks to Shape DNC Platform. Though compromised allotment falls short of Sanders' suggestion, Vermont Senator doesn't waste opportunity to make progressive choices.

Seizing on the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) reluctant concession allowing him to appoint five members to the committee that writes the party platform, Bernie Sanders on Monday announced a suite of picks that included activists across the progressive sphere.

Sanders' appointees to the 15-member Platform Drafting Committee include: racial justice activist and scholar Dr. Cornel West, 350.org co-founder and noted environmentalist Bill McKibben, Native American activist Deborah Parker, Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), and James Zogby, a pro-Palestinian scholar as well as founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI).

Senator Sanders has picked wisely and well! I'm especially pleased about Dr West's inclusion. I've been a fan of his since I first saw him as a guest on Bill Maher's TV show, back in 2008. Below is the post I wrote then - it's relevant also, with regard to yesterday's post, because Dr West has natal Sun+ in Gemini.

Drive-by Astrology # 1 - Dr. Cornel West

More often than not "drive-by" is used in connection with shootings. I'm going to put the term to use in a more peaceful context: "drive-by astrology". Whenever I come across an individual whose natal chart proves, on first sight, to be an exact fit for the person I perceive, I'll post the chart with very brief reasons why it fits its owner so clearly. I hope this will provide a chance to see astrology working "before your very eyes" !

First up in the drive-by series: Dr. Cornel West, author, lecturer, public speaker, social activist, democratic socialist and major figure in African American academia, including the illustrious Princeton and Harvard. I've seen Dr. West on several occasions as a guest on Bill Maher's "Real Time". Each time I've been impressed by his eloquence, charm and ability to hold my interest, whatever the subject under discussion. He obviously has a brilliant mind, yet his approach is straightforward and lacking in all the scholarly affectation so often encountered among the egg-head community.
A descriptive paragraph from here:

"...... an eloquent lecturer, whose lithe and energetic body was
totally involved in the torrent of words and ideas that tumbled from his mouth. He asked his listeners not only to hear what he said, but to enter into his thought processes and share his enthusiasms or generate their own thoughts and enthusiasms. His speaking style was symbolic of his convictions, which rejected the divorce of body from mind, of emotion from intellect, characteristic of much philosophy since Descartes. In a time when many philosophers would be horrified to be called preachers, West (although not an ordained minister) was not embarrassed to preach an occasional sermon. For him a passion for social justice was as intellectually respectable and demanding as the most rigorous intellectual analysis of propositions, and the two were never far apart in his philosophy."

ASTROLOGICALLY DRIVING BY:

Born on 2 June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (I didn't have him down as an Okie!)Birthtime unknown.



Sun and 3 planets in Gemini (the sign of mental process, communication, a quick mind). Good start! Two of the Gemini planets are conjoined, Mercury and Mars at 22 degrees. Mercury is at home in its own sign, Gemini, therefore unadulterated by other influence, though strengthened and energised by Mars.

Saturn and Neptune are conjoined in Libra (diplomacy and justice), Moon is in Aquarius between 9 and 22 degrees (social awareness). So, Air, the mental element, rules - Gemini, Libra and Aquarius predominate. Gemini and Libra planets in close trine, and the Moon is very likely in trine to both, though how close we can't be sure. What a circuit, enabling all kinds of mental acrobatics!

One more point - in January 2002 Dr. West underwent surgery for prostate cancer. Saturn (restriction, limitation) visited Gemini from May 2001 to Dec 2002, hitting his 4 Gemini planets one by one along its journey, reflecting what must have been a very worrying and restricting time for Dr. West.

Exits left....

Last post for a few days. It'll be the birthday of anyjazz on 22nd, in celebration of that we'll be heading out tomorrow morning in a westerly, Route 66-ish direction. We're not certain for how long, maybe just a couple of days, or maybe a week, depending on how enthusiastic we feel once "on the road again".

If you ever plan to motor west, Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six............
You see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona....

Enthusiasm might even last until that latter point, from which a couple of side trips would be a possibility, north to Grand Canyon, South to Sedona with its great scenery, New Agey touristy attractions, and its four alleged vortices which, in Sedona I think are called vortexes. But I shall not be at all surprised to find that we end up somewhere quite different, in a place we've never heard of, let alone thought of visiting.

Anyway, in other words there'll be a bloggy eclipse here, as well as the solar eclipse, tomorrow.

On the topic of travel, yesterday I found this lovely set of great photographs and comment - well worth a look: 50 Reasons to #Love the World

Also - one of my American heroes, Dr Cornel West appeared on Letterman's Late Show the other night - Dr West is always, always worth hearing:

Exceptionally Exceptional in its Exceptionalism?

Exceptionalism = The theory or belief that something, especially a nation, does not conform to a pattern or norm.(Free Dictionary).

Glenn Greenwald's piece in The UK's Guardian yesterday:
The premises and purposes of American exceptionalism ~ :That the US is objectively "the greatest country ever to exist", is as irrational as it is destructive, yet it maintains the status of orthodoxy, caused a few hackles to rise among the four long pages of commentary there. I didn't do a count but suspect that, on balance, more commenters were in agreement with Mr Greenwald's point of view than rabidly against it , but there were accusations of anti-Americanism slung around from an opposing faction.

I was happy to note that Mr Greenwald mentioned one of my American heroes, Prof. Cornel West:

Last week, the Princeton professor Cornel West denounced Presidents Nixon, Bush and Obama as "war criminals", saying that "they have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals". West specifically cited Obama's covert drone wars and killing of innocent people, including children. What West was doing there was rather straightforward: applying the same legal and moral rules to US aggression has he applies to other countries and which the US applies to non-friendly, disobedient regimes.

In other words, West did exactly that which is most scorned and taboo in DC policy circles. And thus he had to be attacked, belittled and dismissed as irrelevant.

My own 2011 post on Prof. West is at Dr Cornel West Speaks Out.

As for the myth of American exceptionalism - is that a myth? I think it has always been more propaganda than anything else: salesmanship on a mega-scale, aimed both inward to its captive audience of citizens and outward to anyone on the rest of planet Earth who'd listen. Salesmen are to be avoided, people who accept their spiel without independent investigation into their products are, at best careless and asking for all they'll get; at worst wide open to a descent into bigotry and hypocrisy.

The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.
H.L. Mencken

In fact, all that happened, back in the day, is that the USA took over the baton of exceptionalism and title of "The Greatest" after Britain's empire disintegrated, and other European empires were doing, or had already done, the same. Britain, in its turn, had remembered lessons learned long ago, from its time as part of Rome's empire - and so it went, and so it will go.....who'll be next? China? India?

Commenter "riggbeck" aptly quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley adding that, "Empires come and go, and they all think they're exceptional. Shelley had it right".

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".


While reading that poem this scene sprang to mind (from Planet of the Apes)~~

Dr Cornel West Speaks Out about the President

I'm happy to hear one of my American heroes, Dr Cornel West (natal chart below), speaking out against the current US administration and President Obama. First came a report of Chris Hedges' interview with Dr. West (see HERE). Some snips:

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West,
...........
“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there."

"I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade.....

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties. Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens.

Then came this appearance with Ed Schultz on MSNBC.

Dr. West has courage! We need more of this. A variety of viewpoints can be found in commentary around the net, but the best single-liner I've seen is one I'd have used myself: Dr. West simply said what needed to be said : the Emperor has no clothes.

For more on this topic and a response to Ms Harris-Perry's remarks by Kevin Gosztola - see HERE





I wrote a little about Dr West and his natal chart back in 2008 - here is the gist of what I wrote then:

Dr. Cornel West, author, lecturer, public speaker, social activist, democratic socialist and major figure in African American academia, including the illustrious Princeton and Harvard. I've seen Dr. West on several occasions as a guest on Bill Maher's "Real Time". Each time I've been impressed by his eloquence, charm and ability to hold my interest, whatever the subject under discussion. He obviously has a brilliant mind, yet his approach is straightforward and lacking in all the scholarly affectation so often encountered among the egg-head community.
A descriptive paragraph from here:

"...... an eloquent lecturer, whose lithe and energetic body was
totally involved in the torrent of words and ideas that tumbled from his mouth. He asked his listeners not only to hear what he said, but to enter into his thought processes and share his enthusiasms or generate their own thoughts and enthusiasms. His speaking style was symbolic of his convictions, which rejected the divorce of body from mind, of emotion from intellect, characteristic of much philosophy since Descartes. In a time when many philosophers would be horrified to be called preachers, West (although not an ordained minister) was not embarrassed to preach an occasional sermon. For him a passion for social justice was as intellectually respectable and demanding as the most rigorous intellectual analysis of propositions, and the two were never far apart in his philosophy."

Born on 2 June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (I didn't have him down as an Okie!)Birthtime unknown.



Sun and 3 planets in Gemini (the sign of mental process, communication, a quick mind). Good start! Two of the Gemini planets are conjoined, Mercury and Mars at 22 degrees. Mercury is at home in its own sign, Gemini, therefore unadulterated by other influence, though strengthened and energised by Mars. (PS: Here I have to eat my words, written in the post about Newt Gingrich's Gemini planets earlier this week : "too much of a good thing" I said. My prejudice was showing. My bad.)

Saturn and Neptune are conjoined in Libra (diplomacy and justice), Moon is in Aquarius between 9 and 22 degrees (social awareness). So, Air, the mental element, rules - Gemini, Libra and Aquarius predominate. Gemini and Libra planets in close trine, and the Moon is very likely in trine to both, though how close we can't be sure. What a circuit, enabling all kinds of mental acrobatics!

One more point - in January 2002 Dr. West underwent surgery for prostate cancer. Saturn (restriction, limitation) visited Gemini from May 2001 to Dec 2002, hitting his 4 Gemini planets one by one along its journey, reflecting what must have been a very worrying and restricting time for Dr. West.

Drive-by Astrology # 1 - Dr. Cornel West

More often than not "drive-by" is used in connection with shootings. I'm going to put the term to use in a more peaceful context: "drive-by astrology". Whenever I come across an individual whose natal chart proves, on first sight, to be an exact fit for the person I perceive, I'll post the chart with very brief reasons why it fits its owner so clearly. I hope this will provide a chance to see astrology working "before your very eyes" !

First up in the drive-by series: Dr. Cornel West, author, lecturer, public speaker, social activist, democratic socialist and major figure in African American academia, including the illustrious Princeton and Harvard. I've seen Dr. West on several occasions as a guest on Bill Maher's "Real Time". Each time I've been impressed by his eloquence, charm and ability to hold my interest, whatever the subject under discussion. He obviously has a brilliant mind, yet his approach is straightforward and lacking in all the scholarly affectation so often encountered among the egg-head community.
A descriptive paragraph from here:

"...... an eloquent lecturer, whose lithe and energetic body was
totally involved in the torrent of words and ideas that tumbled from his mouth. He asked his listeners not only to hear what he said, but to enter into his thought processes and share his enthusiasms or generate their own thoughts and enthusiasms. His speaking style was symbolic of his convictions, which rejected the divorce of body from mind, of emotion from intellect, characteristic of much philosophy since Descartes. In a time when many philosophers would be horrified to be called preachers, West (although not an ordained minister) was not embarrassed to preach an occasional sermon. For him a passion for social justice was as intellectually respectable and demanding as the most rigorous intellectual analysis of propositions, and the two were never far apart in his philosophy."

ASTROLOGICALLY DRIVING BY:

Born on 2 June 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma (I didn't have him down as an Okie!)Birthtime unknown.



Sun and 3 planets in Gemini (the sign of mental process, communication, a quick mind). Good start! Two of the Gemini planets are conjoined, Mercury and Mars at 22 degrees. Mercury is at home in its own sign, Gemini, therefore unadulterated by other influence, though strengthened and energised by Mars.

Saturn and Neptune are conjoined in Libra (diplomacy and justice), Moon is in Aquarius between 9 and 22 degrees (social awareness). So, Air, the mental element, rules - Gemini, Libra and Aquarius predominate. Gemini and Libra planets in close trine, and the Moon is very likely in trine to both, though how close we can't be sure. What a circuit, enabling all kinds of mental acrobatics!

One more point - in January 2002 Dr. West underwent surgery for prostate cancer. Saturn (restriction, limitation) visited Gemini from May 2001 to Dec 2002, hitting his 4 Gemini planets one by one along its journey, reflecting what must have been a very worrying and restricting time for Dr. West.