Carpe Diem (in case the future sucks!)

Trying to predict the future, by whatever method, often turns out to be what's commonly known as "a mug's game".

I have a very old copy of Pathfinder Town Journal, dated December 1953 - picked it up in an antique store on our travels many years ago. When the magazine was published, topics were much the same as we find in magazines and on the internet today, but many steps back: the atom bomb, elections, new car models, black and white TVs, cookie recipes, weather and more. No astrology column. There's a paragraph in a piece titled Looking Ahead asking : "What will the US be like in 1963?" John E. Haines, VP of Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. predicted that in 10 years from 1953:

Planes will fly round the world non-stop in less than 18 hours.
Rockets will reach the moon.
Residential air conditioning will be as commonplace as automatic heating is today.
Houses will be built of plastics.

Not bad! He did rather well, I thought. I wonder, though, did anyone see the hippie culture coming? It took over more or less where the "Beat Generation" left off, a year or so later than 1963 though. Did anyone predict it? I suspect not.

For a smile or two in much the same vein, pay a visit to the illustrations at
A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000.


Now.... I asked in a blog post here, in late 2012, what might the USA be like 10 years from then? That'd be 2022/3. Ten year spans don't always see major differences occur on a national level - on a personal level, yes, certainly! Just for fun, I said in 2012, let's haul out the ol' crystal ball. As there was more than enough doomladen commentary and fiction around, I decided to aim for a somewhat brighter version of 2022/3. However, due to my rose coloured glasses approach, I have become the personification of that "mug in the game". It's almost seven years on now - do any of my intentionally starry eyed predictions look any nearer to coming true? Not a chance! Here they are, or were.

The USA has, for 5 years, had benefit of a very efficiently run national system of health care, with state of the art hospitals and clinics available to all, financed by a reasonable level of contribution by all citizens and residents, at a rate according to their earnings level.

A simply administered cure for some types of cancer has been discovered.

A completely biodegradable material invented to take the place of plastics in most applications.

The US Constitution, after years of struggle, updated and amended in two areas: corporate personhood rescinded, and the Second Amendment re-written and clarified.

All US military occupation abroad terminated in 2021, surplus weaponry still being destroyed and materials re-cycled. Currently in process of finalising nuclear arms agreements worldwide. A small but efficient military force remains in place in the US. The majority of military personnel are employed in a range of capacities updating, re-building and extending a variety of public transit networks, nation-wide, and running them efficiently on behalf of the government.

Future Present?

Granny Weatherwax didn’t hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her. She didn’t like the expression at all.
(Terry Pratchett in Wyrd Sisters)

Art or Inebriation? New Exhibit Allows You to Absorb Alcohol Through Your Skin
by Kate Federici, MSW.

....Alcoholic Architecture, a pop-up bar installation in London, England. Visitors enter a room and become immersed in a gin and tonic cloud of vapor, which has been pumped through a high-powered humidifier. The vapor is absorbed through the skin and eyes. And because the alcohol bypasses the liver and goes directly to the bloodstream, the intoxication is very intense and immediate. This is why the maximum amount of time allowed in the vapor area is 50 minutes, which is equivalent to drinking a very large gin and tonic. As far as safety goes, visitors are required to wear a poncho, leaving only their hands and face revealed because exposing too much skin to the vapors is dangerous. However, they are allowed to bring in an alcoholic beverage with them as they enter the breathable alcohol area of the bar and are encouraged to “breathe responsibly.”

Why is this appealing to people?

This method of consuming alcohol provides less calories and makes it easier and faster to get intoxicated. But even more than that, it’s a novelty experience....

Sci-fi movies love to show us flying vehicles scooting around skyscraper dense cityscapes. I've usually considered encountering one of these as unlikely as ever meeting one of those egg-headed wide eye-socket alien beings. However....

Up, up
and away
It's more than 100 years since
the Wright Brothers. But humanity
has never stopped dreaming of flying
free like a bird

Humanity has always dreamed of flying. Leonardo da Vinci sketched out his idea for a “helical screw” flying machine in the 15th Century. But it wasn’t until Orville & Wilbur Wright made the first successful powered flight in 1903 that the dream showed signs of becoming a reality.

Future-gazing city planners always envisaged flying cars and planes - life in three dimensions. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) his genetically “pure” overlords rise vertically into the sky in their flying machines..........

Filed under "U"

If news stories were filed alphabetically, according to planetary "flavour" these would be filed under "U" for Uranian, possibly cross-referenced under "N" for Neptune:

Magnetic Hyperloop pod unveiled at MIT

***********

The Flying Machine in Your Back Garden

***********

This Man Has Had Incredible Access to Pentagon Secrets for Decades—Now He's Joining a UFO Data Project:
Christopher Mellon spent 20 years in national security which gives his interest in UFOs extra weight.

Squinting Unpredictably

The illustration below comes from the cover of an old "Pathfinder Town Journal" dated December 1953, acquired from an antique store years ago.



In 1953 topics were much the same as we find in magazines and on the internet today - but many steps backward: the atom bomb, elections, new car models, black and white TVs, cookie recipes, winter weather, and more. No astrology column is to be found in the magazine though. A page titled Looking Ahead has a paragraph headed "What will the US be like in 1963?" In response one John E. Haines, VP of Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. predicted:

"Planes will fly round the world non-stop in less than 18 hours.
Rockets will reach the moon
Residential air conditioning will be as commonplace as automatic heating is today
Houses will be built of plastics."

Not bad....not bad !

Now....what will America be like in 2017?

By the way, I wrote the above in December 2007. We're now much nearer to 2017 - could almost see how it'll be, squinting a little past the hurdle of the 2016 presidential election in the US. That hurdle, though, will make all the difference to how things will be in 2017, and to how things will be a further 10 years on still, which I predict will be the most unpredictable of all. Astrologically, with Pluto in Aquarius then, it'll be when real change becomes part of the universal scene.

Arty Farty Friday ~ Norman Bel Geddes Had "Seen the Future"

Norman Bel Geddes (art deco, designer, 1893-1958). The 2.49 minute video below, plus a couple of quotes, put what we need to know neatly into a nutshell, and saves wear and tear on my typing fingers too. While I'd never heard of Norman Bel Geddes until now, his daughter Barbara was a familiar face, as "Miss Ellie" in the TV hit series Dallas , a decade or two back.

Norman Bel Geddes was one of those only-in-America figures, part grandiose visionary, part inspired tinkerer, part exalted entrepreneur, and all self-creation — right down to designing his own name. The Futurama exhibit Bel Geddes created for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair attracted 5 million visitors, and as they left the building they were handed a button that said “I Have Seen the Future.” Boast and slogan rolled into one, those words were also advertising for Bel Geddes. Seeing the future, and remaking the present in its image, was what he did. (See HERE)



From Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas website

When you drive on an interstate highway, attend a multimedia Broadway show, or watch a football game in an all-weather stadium, you owe a debt of gratitude to Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958). Bel Geddes was both a visionary and a pragmatist who had a significant role in shaping not only modern America but also the nation's image of itself as leading the way into the future. Bel Geddes was a polymath who had no academic or professional training in the activities he mastered—designing stage sets, costumes, and lighting; creating theater buildings, offices, nightclubs, and houses; and authoring prescient books and articles.

Bel Geddes believed that art, as well as architecture and design, could make people's lives psychologically and emotionally richer. He influenced the behavior of American consumers and helped make industrial and theater design into modern businesses. Believing that communication was key to shaping the modern world, Bel Geddes popularized his vision of the future through drawings, models, and photographs.

He was born in Adrian, Michigan on 27 April 1893. I haven't found any birth time so far, the chart is set for 12 noon.

"I Have Seen the Future"...? There simply has to be some strong Uranus link in his natal chart - or Aquarius, or both.

All but one (Mars) of his natal planets are in degrees 1-10 (first decan) of their signs. Not sure whether that's significant; if anything it means that the signs' attributes will shine through clearly. First 10 degrees of any sign are said to be governed by that sign's ruler.

Sun/Venus/Jupiter form a tight cluster, a stellium, in Venus-ruled Taurus, this underlines Bel Geddes' artistic talent which has manifested through his visionary design skills, in a way rather bigger, grander (Jupiter) than products of yer average artist with paintbrush and canvas.

Natal Moon could be in either detail-oriented Virgo ruled by Mercury, or Venus-ruled Libra; either would be fitting. Saturn in Libra here draws artiness from Libra to modify, but not extinguish, its solidarity and serious intent.

Here it is! Uranus, planet of all that is futuristic, unexpected, a tad eccentric. A generational planet, but in this case closely aspected - in opposition from Scorpio to those three Taurus planets. Uranus is shaking up any traditional feel towards which Earthy Taurus might easily be drawn, instead Uranus injects into the mix a longing for all that could be new and exciting, while Taurus stubbornly retains practicality as a requirement.

Uranus is further emphasised by a Yod formation which links, by helpful sextile, Mercury (communication) to Neptune/Pluto (creativity/transformation) in Mercury-ruled Gemini; then links both to Uranus in Scorpio to form the Yod's apex. This, though a scratchy kind of mix draws out the futuristic from what might otherwise have remained in realms of the mundane.

Thinking Back and Forth

In December 2007 on this blog I asked a question of myself: "What will America be like in 2017?" The question didn't inspire me sufficiently to hazard a guess. It felt, to me, as though things were coming up to a state of flux. Almost anything could happen during the next ten years, I thought.

The state of flux, or a muffled whisper of it, arrived with 2008's election of Barack Obama as president of the US. After a short "honeymoon" period, though, things trundled on much as before. The feeling that "almost anything could happen" dissipated, became "it could, it should, but it won't - at least not in the USA".

There are still two years left before that original ten year span, to 2017, will be complete. Within that span another general election will take place in the USA. This time I don't get the feeling that "anything can happen"; I get the feeling that what will happen is already planned, and that the time is almost here for a gradual feeding, into the collective consciousness of the US, tons of political brainwash. This time I get the feeling that my time span for a true state of flux to arrive needs to be extended by around 5 more years...to some point after 2020. Changes brought about then will likely be the overture to later and much bigger changes.

A little astrology, helps me to look further ahead, to a time when even my husband's great-grandchildren will have either passed on or be in their final years, and their children will have reached maturity. So, what will the outer planets will be doing in, say, 90 years' time?

In 2104 there will be a Uranus/Pluto conjunction. This one in Taurus. The last Uranus/Pluto conjunction was in 1965/6 in Virgo. To find the previous one in Taurus we must look back into the centuries Before Christ - 322BC and 576 BC (see Richard Nolle's list HERE).

Will great-great-grandchildren of today's population live through an updated re-run of the turbulent years of the mid-1960s: Vietnam war, civil rights activism, hippies, etc? There's no doubt that if the human race manages to survive that long, there will be turbulence. Turbulence which could make the mid 1960s look serene by comparison. The conjunction in Taurus has a distinctly robust flavour, far more so than that earlier conjunction in Virgo. Taurus, like Virgo, is an Earth sign, but Taurus is Fixed Earth, and more determined, single-minded and focused.

Could it take 90 more years for the revolution many of us feel a need for now to manifest? Perhaps the great-great-grandchildren of today and coming years will live it for us. I hope that most will survive; eventually the worst will be over, a new world will truly begin taking shape.

"And prompt me, that my tongue may utter forth"

A few random prompt questions from the soon to close Plinky Prompts website. These come from last summer's prompts. I think responders are meant to write a few paragraphs, but for me, here, and any who wish to add their two penniworth in comments, just a few words or sentences will suffice.
(Quotation in title is from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus: V, iii)


Can anything be funny, or are some things off limits?

There are some things which ought to be off limits for joke-making. Yes - I know all about the benefits, and there are many, of Free Speech. I realise that what some consider to be off limits remains material and an easy target for some comedians - that doesn't make it funny! Joking about a person with any kind of disability, for instance is unkind and obnoxious. I particularly dislike the use of the word "spazz" or spastic, which sadly is heard in that recent offering from Weird Al Yankowich, ironically titled "Word Crimes", and has put me off him completely. I found the whole thing unfunny, smug and faintly elitist.

Another prompt along the same lines:
Is political correctness a useful concept, or does it stifle honest discussion?

You might as well say "does courtesy stifle honest discussion?" At its root, political correctness is old fashioned good manners, courtesy, empathy, sensitivity to the feelings of others.


And something completely different:

Have you ever had a random encounter or fleeting moment with a stranger that stuck with you?

The wording of this prompt was a bit odd! One responder had spotted that, changed the "that" to "who".

The prompt reminded me of that lovely old film "Brief Encounter", story of a random meeting of a man and woman at a railway station, and how they fell in love against their better judgment.

Life is filled with random encounters, or fleeting moments with strangers, that or who either stick with you or disappear into the wide blue yonder within minutes. I've had many experiences of each type over the years, too many for this post, most of them pleasant enough, some even memorable. The one unpleasant random encounter with a stranger I remember well, happened when I was in my early twenties, as I walked from a bus stop to the hotel where I was working. The hotel was a re-purposed old (17th century) mansion, some 200 yards from the main road across fields, but accessible by a narrow roadway. It was around 9.30 pm in wintertime, dark. I became aware of someone walking just to my right and a little behind me. As he passed me he invited me to please "touch him" in a place he was demonstrating in the, ahem, flesh. In other words, he begged me to feel his exhibited penis. I was a little shocked, but even more annoyed, replied, "Don't be so bloody silly!!" Increasing my speed to a near-jog, I turned to approach the hotel from across the field, a much shorter distance than taking the longer roadway. The fellow was probably quite harmless - but you never can tell.

And different again:


It’s the year 2113. A major museum is running an exhibition on life and culture as it was in 2013. You’re asked to write an introduction for the show’s brochure. What will it say?

What will it say? From my vantage point in 2014, I don't know - it'll be in Chinese.

Still Cycling... with ERIS

An announcement 9 years ago this week, by NASA:

July 29, 2005: "It's definitely bigger than Pluto." So says Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology who announced today the discovery of a new planet in the outer solar system.
The planet, which hasn't been officially named yet, was found by Brown and colleagues using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego. It is currently about 97 times farther from the sun than Earth, or 97 Astronomical Units....The planet's temporary name is 2003 UB313. A permanent name has been proposed by the discoverers to the International Astronomical Union, and they are awaiting the decision of this body before announcing the name. Stay tuned! (See HERE)

Hat-tip Cosmos News

We now know this dwarf planet as Eris.

I wasn't a Blog Lady in 2005, but my second and third posts when I opened this blog in 2006 touched on the demotion of Pluto, which was directly related to the discovery of Eris and other outer bodies.

By 2008 onward I got around to waxing, fairly non-lyrically, about Eris on a handful of occasions. Looking back:
Eris & Sedna or Eric & Sid? (2008);
and
Eris Cycles (2011).
The latter garnered some good comments at the time, and more than six and a half thousand hits over the years.

I hadn't thought much about Eris lately, before noticing the anniversary of the announcement of its discovery. Eris is such a slow-moving body, its 560-year orbit makes Pluto look like a Speedy Gonzalez. The outer planet ephemeris indicates that Eris now is at 23 Aries (tropical zodiac). Looking around for additional information worth adding here, I found:

Synodic Astrology - The Path of Eris & The Eris Synodic Cycles 2003 - 2016
Harmonic Cycles of Growth in Consciousness
by Nick Anthony Fiorenza

This astrologer uses sidereal placement which has Eris in the constellation of Pisces, but this doesn't detract from the information given for those of us who use tropical zodiac placements. I hope the astrologer will not object to my using a snip from part of his long and very interesting article. This, from at the section headed
Synodic Astrology: Eris & Uranus - 1927 - 2016

A new Uranus-Eris synodic cycle begins in Dec of 2016. The last Uranus-Eris synod occurred around 1927 in early sidereal Pisces on the Vernal Point.....................................
The correlation of global events and historical transitions surrounding the 1927 Uranus-Eris synod may be ideal for astrologers to explore in order to gain more insight into the astrological nature of Eris.

A few events occurring during this time were: In Global Communications - The first transatlantic commercial telephone service was established between New York and London. There were breakthroughs in radio and television, with television's first successful long-distance broadcast. These were technological shifts severing the limits of the past (a Uranian theme), ones that would then continue throughout the synodic cycle. The new technological developments also disrupted humanity's world perception regarding possibilities in time and space, fitting to Eris' nature, just as Eris' discovery disrupted humanity's world view, ultimately to embrace additional planets in Pluto's realm and the resultant need to redefine our astronomical classification of planets (forming the Dwarf Planet category).

These were also the days of Ford's Model A; Mae West, Duke Ellington, and Ernest Hemingway. However, shortly to follow was the Great US Stock Market Crash in 1929, which led to the Great Depression (fitting to the Vernal-Point-Diphda theme). Although originating in the US, the Depression spread to Europe and all other parts of the world causing severe political disarray. This also proved opportunistic for tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. World War II followed a decade later.

Remember, Uranus and Eris move quite slowly so their active orb lasts over a long period, and a synod merely marks the start of cycle which will then unfold over time—the Uranus-Eris cycle being about 89 years.

If a comparable pattern continues then, beginning in 2016, with a new US president about to enter the White House, we can only surmise how the 1927 pattern might unfold this time around. For sure there'll be bigger and ever more unintelligible (to the lay person) technological shifts, making those in the 1927 cycle look distinctly primitive by comparison. Our world view and maybe even our universe view, will be disrupted and re-aligned in some significant way. A new version of 1927's "crash" could turn out to be climatic rather than financial - maybe even both in concert - or maybe neither but something nobody has thought of yet. We must hope against hope that the rise of more monsters in human clothing, directing the world again into darkness, will not follow the previous cycle's pattern. This need not be the case. Cycles proceed in spiral fashion, each benefiting from that immediately preceding it. Let's hope we humans shall, this time, reap the benefit of hard experience from the previous cycle.

As stated in Eris Cycles (link above) "Whatever else we might consider astrology is all about, cycles are what drive the true astrology. Eris' cycles deserve a thought or two."

Past and Future Echoes

During the week we rented a DVD of the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. The title I recognised, but neither of us could recall ever having seen the film. It was written by, and starred, the then very youthful-looking Ben Affleck and Matt Damon; also with a leading role, Robin Williams.

It's an enjoyable movie. One piece of dialogue, spoken by Matt Damon as Will Hunting, stood out for me as foreshadowing events and atmospheres we, in 2014, recognise even more clearly than cinema-goers of 1997 would have done. First, a wee bit of background: Will Hunting, though not formally trained or highly educated is a natural genius in mathematics, has a photographic memory and extremely sharp powers of perception in all spheres - except in recognising the incongruity of his own situation. He had settled for a janitor's working class existence and mildly wild-boy lifestyle, until his talent was discovered by an MIT professor. In the scene from which this dialogue is taken, Hunting has attended an interview with officials of the NSA (we know them well - or at least, they know us!) arranged for him by the professor. His speech during the interview:

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm workin' at the N.S.A. and somebody puts a code on my desk, somethin' no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it, maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. And once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hidin'. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, I never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', 'Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area,' 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called 'cause they were out pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.

Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helpin' my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, of course, maybe they even took the liberty of hirin' an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walkin' to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the schrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorroids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.

So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure, fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

That dialogue was written around 17 years ago, by a couple of actor friends who, we now know, both have well-defined political views. Echoes of these were likely to be felt in this film. 17 years isn't a long time in the great scheme of things, so I shouldn't have been surprised to hear Will Hunting's speech, which seems, if anything, even more relevant today than in 1997. This isn't one of the better examples of fiction writers' involuntary prescience, a topic I've blogged about in the past, and one which continues to intrigue me.

A couple of sci-fi novels with very scary prescience are J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Burning World, written in 1962 and 1964 respectively. I haven't read them yet, but the saying "read 'em and weep" will follow any thought I might have of acquiring the books.

Here are some other examples, featured as part of of an archived 2006 post of mine, Accidental Prophets, re-aired in 2008:

James Michener seems to have had amazing foresight. Several of his novels featuring a particular country, in depth, were each followed some years later by the same countries coming into prominence on the world stage. In a long interview here: he said

"I think that some of us have a deep seated sensitive antennae about what is going to happen. And somebody the other day, a fine professor, made an introduction of me, which I had not thought about, but which I had thought about a great deal since. At that time, in the world, there were about a half dozen trouble spots: the Near East, the Jewish-Arab relationships, South Africa, revolution in Poland, the emergence of Japan, the absorption in the United States of two outlying territories like Hawaii and Alaska and four or five other things. And he pointed out that I had written full-length books about all these areas before they came into prominence. And I did! There they are. Look at the dates. Now this cannot be because I was exceptionally brilliant. I am not brilliant. I'm something else. I don't know what the word would be, but it isn't brilliant."

Nevil Shute, author of one of my favourites, A Town Like Alice, wrote a couple of novels which later seemed to have been prophetic. No Highway published in 1948 dealt with what might happen due to metal fatigue in aircraft. His ideas came close to fact with the Comet disasters of the 1950s. Another novel, What Happened to the Corbetts also published as Ordeal was written just before the start of WorldWar2. It tells how badly aerial bombing affected a town similar to Southampton, in the south of England, and how the bombing of civilians became a major part of the war. British people of a certain age will have no trouble recognising this as fact! On the Beach, a story of the world ending as a result of the explosion of atomic bombs, thankfully has not yet proved prophetic. It could still be "pending" however, should people forget the warning bells it rang! Shute also touched on a slightly supernatural theme in a novel called Round the Bend in which an aircraft mechanic becomes the mystical leader of a religious movement.

Seeing some correspondence between Michener and Shute, I searched around for other instances of novels which, without purporting to be science fiction, portray events which later came to pass in real life.

American author Morgan Robertson produced an early example in his story Futility. He told of a ship called Titan which sank in a way eerily similar to The Titanic, 14 years later. When this book was written there were no ships of such enormous size being built. Robertson also appeared to be crystal-gazing when he later(1914) wrote a book called Beyond the Spectrum. In this book, he described a war in the future, fought using aircraft which dropped "sun bombs" on their targets. These were powerful enough for a single bomb to destroy a city. When this book was written, aeroplanes were small, flimsy, and unreliable machines capable of carrying one person. Nuclear weapons were still unimagined. Robertson's war began in the month of December, as did the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the USA into WW2.

Michener was born 1907, Shute 1899 and Robertson 1861.

There are common sense explanations for the authors' apparent ability to see into the future, these men were not deliberately trying to predict events, as far as we know.

Michener didn't foresee actual events, but was drawn or inspired to write about countries which later came to prominence for one reason or another. He was widely travelled, highly intelligent, politically minded and had lived in all the countries he wrote about. Common sense would say that he was "putting two and two together", or using intuition.

Shute was a skilled aeronautical engineer as well as novelist. He had technical knowledge more than sufficient to foresee possible outcomes where the area of his expertise was involved. "An accident waiting to happen", in the case of metal fatigue, and some extrapolation of known facts in the case of aerial warfare ?

Robertson was the son of a ship's captain and spent some time as a cabin boy himself, so the sea was "in his blood", he had no doubt heard some tall tales from the old salts he must have encountered. These, with a little embroidery, might have helped him to invent his ship Titan. His "Beyond the Spectrum" published in 1914 is harder to explain.

Those are explanations for skeptics. Someone more open-minded, and sensitive to peculiar coincidences like these, might see a different explanation. Novelists and short story writers continually tap into vast resources of imagination. For hours at a time, their minds are "elsewhere", concentrating outside of the mundane. Isn't this akin to meditation? Could it be that as they concentrate so intently in realms of the imaginary, coloured with knowledge stored in their memory banks, they somehow inadvertently seep through a time barrier or into another dimension?

With oblique reference to the above, I read this week that plans are afoot to make a movie version of Harlan Ellison's 1965 award-winning short science fiction story, 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman. This should be interesting!

Harlan Ellison's story is set in a dystopian future where strict adherence to time regulation rules everything, including life and death. It's basically a satirical diatribe on social regimentation. In the story one Everett C. Marm, disguised as Harlequin rebels, albeit a whimsical rebellion, against the time regulations and the Master Timekeeper known as Ticktockman.

“Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees...down with the Ticktockman!”

“And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshipers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight.”

Let us hope that author Harlan Ellison had not tapped in to any future truth!

Future Tense

A couple of off the wall thoughts upon which to ponder - if one dares.

"The internet is a new lifeform that shows the first signs of intelligence". So says brain scientist and serial entrepreneur Jeff Stibel. He argues that the physical wiring of the internet is much like a rudimentary brain and some of the actions and interactions that take place on it are similar to the processes that we see in the brain.

I've thought before that we are actually computers originally constructed by some highly evolved beings aeons ago. This idea kind of feeds into that...kind of...

See the brief video at this link. I find the presenter's rather obsessive passion for his subject a tad scary though.

How long before we have our own version of "Hal" dictating to us?

AND

A comment beneath an article at Huffington Post at the weekend proved more interesting to me than the rather old news contained in the article about time travel. Part of comment from commenter "cp35":

...........General Relativity is as old as 1919 I think. You want something that is also old but that will probably be bigger news to those who don't know or understand Physics? Because light is indeed going at the speed of light (time stops completely at the speed of light), and light from the beginning of the Universe is still traveling, the past still exists in some time frame. Indeed, the future also already exists. And that is profoundly more mind blowing, because we experience the past as no longer there and the future as still having to come, but that is not really the case.

I suppose that seers and clairvoyants, through the ages, have always known this.

Postscript: I don't know, anymore, what there is to say about mass shootings, as yet another one blots the scene in the USA.

Minding Our Progress

Our great contemporary scientific geniuses are to be admired, one of these, Raymond Kurzweil about whom there's an archived post HERE - was mentioned in a piece at HuffPo's Science section this week, by Tanya Lewis: Mind Uploading' & Digital Immortality May Be Reality By 2045, Futurists Say. ...SNIPS:

NEW YORK — By 2045, humans will achieve digital immortality by uploading their minds to computers — or at least that's what some futurists believe. This notion formed the basis for the Global Futures 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference held here June 14-15................................
By 2045, "based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold," Kurzweil said...............................

Mind uploading~~~~The conference took a surreal turn when Martine Rothblatt — a lawyer, author and entrepreneur, and CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics Corp. — took the stage. Even the title of Rothblatt's talk was provocative: "The Purpose of Biotechnology is the End of Death."

Rothblatt introduced the concept of "mindclones" — digital versions of humans that can live forever. She described how the mind clones are created from a "mindfile," a sort of online repository of our personalities, which she argued humans already have (in the form of Facebook, for example). This mindfile would be run on "mindware," a kind of software for consciousness. "The first company that develops mindware will have [as much success as] a thousand Googles," Rothblatt said. But would such a mindclone be alive? Rothblatt thinks so. She cited one definition of life as a self-replicating code that maintains itself against disorder. Some critics have shunned what Rothblatt called "spooky Cartesian dualism," arguing that the mind must be embedded in biology. On the contrary, software and hardware are as good as wet ware, or biological materials, she argued. Rothblatt went on to discuss the implications of creating mindclones. Continuity of the self is one issue, because your persona would no longer inhabit just a biological body. Then, there are mind-clone civil rights, which would be the "cause célèbre" for the 21st century, Rothblatt said. Even mindclone procreation and reanimation after death were mentioned.

That's all very "skiffy". If predictions by would-be futurists from the past are anything to go by the date 2045, a mere 32 years ahead, will be found to have been decidedly optimistic. But in any case, is this the kind of thing the best and brightest scientific brains on the planet ought to be focusing on? How about lending a few genius-tinted thoughts to climate change, water shortages, new power sources? We need the best and brightest minds on these right now.

I'm the last one to criticise the human urge towards progress, but it does depend in which direction the progress would seem to be heading. A few with more fluent pens than mine have said something along those lines:

“Some upstarts always try to get closer to the source of creation by ascending to the source's level. The story of Icarus is of course a parable about the folly of such an effort. Get too close to the sun and your hubris will get you burned. Yet in the eyes of twenty-first-century capitalist culture, which worships at the twin altars of the individual and technology, Icarus had initiative. And his melted wings do not represent some deep character flaw; he just needed better beta testers.”
― Marcus Wohlsen, Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life.



“Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.



“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen.



“The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper.



“After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation.
Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.”
― Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito.



“It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

The Future Seen from the Past: Visions of Orwell, Huxley & Zamyatin

Writers are throwing the name Orwell around more than usual just now. There's an example at HuffPo this week: Orwell 2013 by Jeff Danziger. I've mentioned and featured George Orwell in posts a few times over the years myself - best example, with some astrology and several interesting comments is from April 2011, titled simply George Orwell.

(Illustration, titled Visions Of The Future Seen From The Past was
Posted by Wastedpapiers at scrapiteria.)




I don't feel like re-reading 1984, only to depress myself further, but did pick up my copy the other day and re-read Erich Fromm's "Afterword", written in 1961. There's a full transcript of it online HERE.

Mr. Fromm remarked on the marked difference in tone between post-medieval writings, when optimism reigned: "With the breakup of the medieval world, man's sense of strength, and his hope, not only for individual but for social perfection", and writings after World War I when what's now categorised as "speculative fiction" took a turn into the decidedly negative, now known as dystopian. Fromm mentions, as examples of post-medieval writings Thomas Moore's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, the German humanist Andreae's Christianopolis, and the latest of these Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888. There are differences in approach but all have positive, utopian, flavours (a utopia: is a community or society possessing highly desirable or perfect qualities).

The visions of dytopia, arising post 1918 are best seen in three books mentioned by Fromm: Orwell's 1984, the Russian author Zamyatin's We, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Snip

This new trilogy of what may be called the "negative utopias" of the middle of the twentieth century is the counterpoint to the trilogy of the positive utopias mentioned before, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The negative utopias express the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early utopias expressed the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man. There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the beginning of the industrial age, when in reality he did not possess the means for a world in which the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation, in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new science and of its application to technique and to production -- nevertheless man at the beginning of modern development was full of hope. Four hundred years later, when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was four hundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. It is the essential point of all the three negative utopias not only to describe the future toward which we are moving, but also to explain the historical paradox.

The three negative utopias differ from each other in detail and emphasis. Zamyatin's We, written in the twenties, has more features in common with 1984 than with Huxley's Brave New World. We and 1984 both depict the completely bureaucratized society, in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. This is brought about by a mixture of unlimited terror (in Zamyatin's book a brain operation is added eventually which changes man even physically) combined with ideological and psychological manipulation. In Huxley's work the main tool for turning man into an automaton is the application of hypnoid mass suggestion, which allows dispensing with terror. One can say that Zamyatin's and Orwell's examples resemble more the Stalinist and Nazi dictatorships, while Huxley's Brave New World is a picture of the development of the Western industrial world, provided it continues to follow the present trend without fundamental change..........................................


In spite of this difference there is one basic question common to the three negative utopias, The question is a philosophical, anthropological and psychological one, and perhaps also a religious one. It is: can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love -- that is to say, can man forget that he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one? It must be noted that the three authors do not take the simple position of psychological relativism which is common to so many social scientists today; they do not start out with the assumption that there is no such thing as human nature; that there is no such thing as qualities essential to man; and that man is born as nothing but a blank sheet of paper on which any given society writes its text. They do assume that man has an intense striving for love, for justice, for truth, for solidarity, and in this respect they are quite different from the relativists. In fact, they affirm the strength and intensity of these human strivings by the description of the very means they present as being necessary to destroy them. In Zamyatin's We a brain operation similar to lobotomy is necessary to get rid of the human demands of human nature. In Huxley's Brave New World artificial biological selection and drugs are necessary, and in Orwell's 1984 it is the completely unlimited use of torture and brainwashing. None of the three authors can be accused of the thought that the destruction of the humanity within man is easy. Yet all three arrive at the same conclusion: that it is possible, with means and techniques which are common knowledge today.

Whereas it's easy to see how, from where we are now in 2013, a dystopia similar to those envisioned by the authors above could quite easily emerge, in light of the last paragraph quoted, there may be hope still that the better parts of our human nature might prevail. These could be obliterated only by deliberate and concerted effort. Equally, though, it'd be only through determined and concerted effort, and constant watchfulness on a level we have not yet attained, that certainty of retaining the better parts of our humanity would prevail.

LOOKING AHEAD

The illustration below appears on the cover of an old Pathfinder Town Journal, dated December 1953 - I picked it up in an antique shop on our travels some years back.



59 years ago, when the magazine was published, topics were much the same as we find in magazines and on the internet today, but many steps back: the atom bomb, elections, new car models, black and white TVs, cookie recipes, winter weather and more. No astrology column. There's a paragraph in a piece titled Looking Ahead asking : "What will the US be like in 1963?" John E. Haines, VP of Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. predicted that in 10 years from 1953:

Planes will fly round the world non-stop in less than 18 hours.

Rockets will reach the moon.

Residential air conditioning will be as commonplace as automatic heating is today.

Houses will be built of plastics.

Not bad! I wonder, did anyone see the hippie culture coming? It took over more or less where the "Beat Generation" left off, a year or so later than 1963 though. Did anyone predict it? I suspect not.

Now....what might the USA be like 10 years from now? That'll be 2022/3, putting us into the shallow end of sci-fi or dystopian territory, take your pick! I say shallow end because, really, ten year spans don't always see major differences occur on a national level - on a personal level, yes, certainly! Just for fun - let's haul out the ol' crystal ball. There's more than enough doomladen commentary and fiction around already, better to go for a somewhat brighter version of 2022/3.

The USA has, for 5 years, had benefit of a very efficiently run national system of health care, with state of the art hospitals and clinics available to all, financed by a reasonable level of contribution by all citizens and residents, at a rate according to their earnings level.

A simply administered cure for some types of cancer has been discovered.

A completely biodegradable material invented to take the place of plastics in most applications.

The US Constitution, after years of struggle, updated and amended in two areas: corporate personhood rescinded, and the Second Amendment re-written and clarified.

All US military occupation abroad terminated in 2021, surplus weaponry still being destroyed and materials re-cycled. Currently in process of finalising nuclear arms agreements worldwide. A small but efficient military force remains in place in the US. The majority of military personnel are employed in a range of capacities updating, re-building and extending a variety of public transit networks, nation-wide, and running them efficiently on behalf of the government.

Well.....I can dream!

PATTERNING THE FUTURE

Speculative fiction writer William Gibson, in his novel Pattern Recognition, wrote :

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition”.

Pattern recognition is something astrologers use, too, when attempting to predict the future. Future configurations of the planets, similar to configurations which have occurred years, decades or centuries before, small patterns and huge ones, are basic ingredients of astrological prediction.

We humans have inbuilt patterns: habits, species-wide; one of them is a fascination with the future, yearning to know what it might hold for us.

In 1987 a then sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, better known now for his Scientology thing, threw down a challenge to other sci-fi authors and some scientists to write letters to the people of 2012, setting out ideas and predictions of how life in that future world might be. 2012 then lay 25 years ahead. Their now 25-year-old thoughts are interesting, some were off mark, some, whose authors more clearly understood pattern recognition, have proved to be reasonably accurate.

The whole article is a good read -
Time Capsule Predictions 1987.

Here are just a few lines from some of the entries:

ISAAC ASIMOV
Assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much.

GREGORY BENFORD
Oil is running out, but shale-extracted oil is getting cheaper. The real shortage in much of the world is…water.......Most Americans are barely literate, think in images rather than symbols, and think the future is something that will happen to somebody else…just as today…......Bases on the moon, an expedition to Mars…all done. But the big news will be some problematical evidence for intelligent life elsewhere.

ALGIS BUDRYS
The most socially approved-of individuals will constitute a narrowly focused aristocracy, and will be at the mercy of dull functionaries and secretive rebels who actually perform the day-to-day maintenance of society. Social regimentation will then have become so deft that most people will regard any other social milieu as pitiable.

SHELDON GLASHOW
Japan will be the central economic power in the world, owning or controlling a significant part of European and American industries......The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps. Most automobiles and heavy machinery will be manufactured in Japanese owned planets located in America. Yet, agriculture and higher education will be our most successful exports..........

FREDERIK POHL
All the evidence of what is going on in the world today leads to the conclusion that none of these good things are going to happen, because our country, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world (and, I have always thought, the best) is bankrupting itself to recruit and train terrorists in Latin America, give arms to terrorists all over the world, develop and employ fleets, armies and weapons systems which have no purpose except to pound any country which disagrees with us into submission. Since, unfortunately for us, the people who disagree with us have terrorists, fleets, armies and weapons systems of their own, the most plausible future scenario is all-out nuclear war.

ORSON SCOTT CARD Americans will see the collapse of Imperial America, the Pax Americana, as having ended with our loss of national will and national selflessness in the 1970s. Worldwide economic collapse will have cost America its dominant world role; but it will not result in Russian hegemony; their economy is too dependent on the world economy to maintain an irresistible military force. A new world order will emerge from famine, disease, and social dislocation: the re-tribalization of Africa, the destruction of the illusion of Islamic unity, the struggle between aristocracy and proletariat in Latin America—without the financial support of the industrialized nations, the old order will be gone. The changes will be as great as those emerging from the fall of Rome, with new power centers emerging wherever stability and security are established. The homogeneity of Israel will probably allow it to survive; Mexico and Japan may change rulers, but they will still be strong. If America is to recover, we must stop pretending to be what we were in 1950, and reorder our values away from pursuit of privilege.

JACK WILLIAMSON If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.

What might a batch of today's writers and scientists predict for the year 2037 - 25 years from now? Included in their assessments, for sure, would be climate problems, water shortage, consequent food shortages, limits on use of electric power and oil-based fuels. Technological progress will have slowed due to already mentioned issues. The economy? Who knows?!

Using a little astrology: Pluto planet of transformation will have been transiting Aquarius, sign of the rebel, since 2025. Transformation, Pluto-style occurs only after an often painful purging of all that has outlived its usefulness. Pluto's previous transit of Capricorn would have left behind much that was in need of a good purge! At some point between now and 2037, probably soon after 2025, the population of several countries will be roused to outright rebellion against systems then in place...."the purging effect". By 2037 the worst should be over, with problems still to be faced - but with hope and fresh enthusiasm.

Views of 2100 & The Future ~ with Cayce, Heinlein, Tennessee Williams and William Stafford

Raiding my Book of Predictions for ideas I randomly opened it at the last page of a section on Edgar Cayce. The last paragraph goes like this:

A believer in reincarnation, Cayce had a dream in 1936 in which he saw himself reborn in 2100AD in Nebraska, which by then will be on the west coast of the US. In this vision he was trying to convince a group of scientists that he had lived some 200 years before. In order to collect evidence of his former life, he flew east in a cigar-shaped metal airship to an island where workmen were clearing rubble and rebuilding a city. When he asked where he was, a worker replied that he was in the former city of New York on Manhattan Island.

Edgar Cayce made numerous predictions which didn't materialise at the time expected -though I guess which may still be in the wings awaiting a more accurate cue. However, the above was simply a dream, but an interesting one to think about.

Coincidentally, speaking of 2100, I'm at present reading, rather slowly, Revolt in 2100 by Robert Heinlein. It's part of a trilogy Future History. In the novella If This Goes On... ,which forms the main part of this book of three stories, the scene is set in 2100 in what was the USA. The author describes the country as being ruled by an absolute theocracy, one with all the advantages of hi-tech, married to the worst of mediaeval regimentation and cruelty. If anyone suspects that kind of thing "can't happen here", I'd say, "don't be too sure!"
As the book's title indicates, a revolt is in the works. Heinlein's science fiction view of life in 2100 is scarcely better than that in Edgar Cayce's dream.

I notice, in searching for information about the rest of the Future History trilogy, that the author has been way off in his timing. Sci-fi authors have found this problem tricky for decades, even the best of 'em! Originally written in the 1950s, Heinlein outlined a world, in around 2000 AD, where space travel had been fully mastered, with the US being a leading power in a systemwide imperialism embracing all habitable planets. Highly optimisitic and several centuries too soon!

Apropos nothing in particular I'll throw in that by January 2100 Uranus the rebellious planet will be in mid-Aries, at around the same point it'll be in early in 2016. There are 90 years between now and then, few, if any who are on Earth now will still be around. Even my husband's two great-grandchildren born in January and June this year will, at best, be in their final years.

The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
~Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending, 1957

I've just discovered William Stafford, an American poet born in Kansas, and love his honest-to-goodness plain style of poetry. No pretentious fluffy flights of fancy, but the ability to use words as triggers so that the reader creates their own flight. He was born on 17 January 1914, with 4 personal planets in Capricorn, between 20 and 29 degrees, and Uranus in Aquarius at 6 degrees, tagging along with the Capricorn stellium. Uranus never just tags along though! The rebel planet manifested in Mr. Stafford via his pacifist stance during World War 2.

With The Future and 2100 in mind, here's one of Mr. Stafford's poems:

Security by William Stafford


Tomorrow will have an island. Before night
I always find it. Then on to the next island.
These places hidden in the day separate
and come forward if you beckon.
But you have to know they are there before they exist.

Some time there will be a tomorrow without any island.
So far, I haven’t let that happen, but after
I’m gone others may become faithless and careless.
Before them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,
and without any hope they will stare at the horizon.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:
to be a discoverer you hold close whatever
you find, and after a while you decide
what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,
you turn to the open sea and let go.

The Future Verdict ~ Ada Cambridge

Ada Cambridge - not one of poetry's most familiar names, but a prolific poet and novelist of late 19th early 20th century. She was born in Norfolk, England into a fairly well-to do and deeply religious family, married a minister of the Church of England, Rev. George Frederick Cross. They emigrated to Australia soon afterwards. As a clergyman's wife in the Australian Bush, in those days, life was hard. They moved home frequently. Several of her children died in childhood, or later. There's an interesting piece, her obituary, re-printed from the Sydney Morning Herald of July 1926.

In spite of all her duties, her griefs and travails, Ada Cambridge still found time to write. Though a dutiful wife, she developed many misgivings about religion, and about married life, some of which eventually spilled out into her poetry as Unspoken Thoughts, much to the distress of her husband.

After her husband's death she returned to England for a time, but eventually went back to Australia and her remaining family. She died in 1926.

Born on 21 November 1844, with Sun in late Scorpio (emotional and intuitive), Mercury in early Sagittarius. Jupiter, ruler of Sagittarius was in harmonious trine to Sun from Pisces. This blend of Jupter/Sagittarius/Pisces reflects well her connection to religion and long-distance travel - both connect strongly to Jupiter and Sagittarius. With no time of birth known, Moon's exact position isn't clear, but it'd be in Aries and more than likely opposing Mars and/or Venus in Libra: a reflection, perhaps, of her unspoken discontent.

Her poem, below, isn't one of her unspoken thoughts, but it's one which uncannily echoes the spoken and unspoken thoughts of many today:

The Future Verdict
by Ada Cambridge

How will our unborn children scoff at us
In the good years to come —
The happier years to come —
For that, like driven sheep, we yielded thus,
Before the shearers dumb!

I know the words their wiser lips will say; —
“These men had gained the light,
These women knew the right;
They had their chance and let it slip away.
They did not when they might.

“They were the first to hear the gospel preached,
And to believe therein —
Yet they remained in sin;
They saw the Promised Land they might have reached,
And dared not enter in.

“They might have won their freedom, had they tried;
No savage laws forbade —
For them the way was made.
“They might have had the joys for which they cried;
And yet they shrank, afraid.

“Afraid to face an honourable shame,
The most they had to pay —
Of what the world would say —
Not of the martyr's portion, rack and flame.
Great God! what fools were they!”

And oh! could we look backward from those years
When we have ceased to be,
This wasted chance to see,
Should we not also cry, with bitter tears,
“Alas! what fools were we!”

"Bring gloom down to the minimum..."

On this date in 2007, I posted a few thoughts after having read astrologer Bill Herbst's then current newsletter. It concerned potential outcomes of astrological configurations due between 2009 and 2012. I've found that Mr Herbst's pieces are always clear and informative. By the time I reached the end of this one, however, I felt depressed. Even more so, because Mr Herbst's conclusions about the coming years matched, broadly, those of several other astrologers. Since 2007 more gloomy voices have joined the chorus of doom.

Is there no alternative interpretation to the configurations which are the basis of these forecasts though? Mr. Herbst pointed out that current times, before and after 2010, will offer a long-needed chance for us to right our wrongs and clean up our messes. But isn't there something even more hopeful? Isn't there another view of the whole scenario? Could it be likened to one of those optical illusion illustrations which contain two quite different pictures, provided that the eye and mind are correctly focused to see them both? (In the example, right, you can see either the head of an old woman or that of a young, elegant woman.)

Bearing in mind that predictions have not always proved to be reliable, couldn't this mean that there might have been alternative interpretations of certain planetary configurations? Because similar astrological configurations in the past resulted in dark outcomes, it does not necessarily follow that comparable scenarios will happen when a similar astrological configuration appears. Other elements have changed in the intervening period, external elements, unconnected with astrology, but connected with the way man lives, thinks, and deals with events. Any time Uranus is involved in a configuration, as in this case, can any astrologer be sure of his forecast? The future could have in store something as yet indescribable, and impossible for us to understand, let alone to foresee.....that's the flavour of Uranus.

In any case, some positive thinking can't hurt! Some say that the communal mind is a powerful entity. Some say that it is possible to attract towards us what we hold in our mind's eye. If there is any chance at all that this is true, ought we not to be holding a brighter vision of the coming years in our minds? I'm addressing myself here, too, I hasten to add!

I'm not naive enough to think that the communal mind could hold back the power of nature and the elements. It might, though, have strength enough to ensure the move into key positions of those individuals who would deal with challenging situations in the best possible way. In the United States there will be mid-term elections held in November; in the UK there will be a general election this spring. Opportunities to elect individuals with compassion, skill and insight enough to rescue from any disaster the seeds of a new and better scenario. With the wrong people in places of power, should the worst happen, I can well imagine that any gloomy forecasts of astrologers we've read already will seem very mild compared to the reality !

A lot of positive thinking now might do a temendous amount of good later....and it costs nothing.

Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene. (Johnny Mercer)

Future, Future Everywhere & H.G. Wells

This week several unconnected items with a common theme: The Future have lined up for my attention. George Friedman's current book "The Next Hundred Years" (Monday's post), the movie "Knowing" (Thursday's post), blog friend Robert Phoenix's piece about a possible New World Order. Then, on Thursday evening, what should appear on TCM but the classic movie from 1936 "Things to Come". The film is based on H.G. Wells' novel "The Shape of Things To Come". The author's ideas of how the world might develop during the hundred years from 1936 to 2036 haven't, so far, come to pass exactly as presented, but there is evidence of sharp insight to be found, watching from our 2009 perspective.


It's odd how these things clustered together this week, unplanned, unlooked for.

In my "Knowing" post I mentioned that Virgo seemed an unlikely sign to bring forth sci-fi, horror and fantasy novelists, or movie directors in those genres(Alex Proyas for example). Then I recalled that Stephen King was born 21 September, with Sun in Virgo. H.G. Wells was also born 21 September. Interesting!

A quick look at Wells' chart to see what else might link to the subjects which most fascinated him, as a writer. Born 21 September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, England. Chart set for 12 noon. Astrotheme and Astrodatabank both give 4.30pm as time of birth and Aquarius rising. Astrodatabank states that this is a rectified time. I feel it's just a teeny bit too convenient, and feel wary of it. I prefer to look at a 12 noon chart, which offers more than enough information for my purposes.



Sun and Mercury in Virgo - Virgo is ruled by Mercury, so writing is second nature to most people with this sign emphasised in their charts. Wells' Moon would have been in Aquarius whatever time of day he was born - here's the first clue as to his avid interest in all things future. Aquarius' modern ruler Uranus is conjunct Mars - symbolically adding energy and further emphasis to all that Uranus signifies: new technology, future development, the unexpected, change. Saturn and Venus are conjunct in Scorpio, and in harmonious trine with Mars/Uranus. Saturn in trine with its symbolic opposite, Uranus, carries a hint that H.G. Wells, though fascinated by future potentialities, had fairly rigid attitudes, believed in structure rather than randomness. This would blend well with his Sun/Mercury in discerning nitpicking Virgo. He was actually a bit of an enigma, certainly a different animal from the much later Aquarius-hippie stereotype. More evidence of Wells' stability and general common sense comes from a Grand Trine in Earth linking Jupiter, Pluto and Sun/Mercury.


Two H.G. Wells' novels, "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds" were the first "grown-up" books I read. In those days I probably didn't fully appreciate everything the books contain, but was still absolutely fascinated by them. It turns out that H.G. Wells was a socialist and a pacifist - a guy after my own heart. How could I not enjoy his ideas?