Fractal by Barbara Lane.

Dear Friend and Reader:

We now have our first tangible result of full digital conditions: a Frankenstein monster of every vile or repressive political stance has been designated president-elect. A national Muslim registry? Really? Rounding up Mexicans?

This has been an exhausting year. It’s been agonizing enduring the attacks on women, on darker-skinned people, on Muslims, on veterans. It was enough that this got broadcast on TV and the internet month after month. Now it’s about to become national policy.

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Photo by Brendan McDermid.

Dear Friend and Reader:

The one item I don’t remember including in any of my election coverage is that this is all happening in the midst of the Uranus-Eris conjunction, so anything is possible. Maybe I mentioned it somewhere. Uranus is the god of ‘expect the unexpected’: developments, revolutions, upsets, inventions, breakthroughs. We got one of those this week. There will be others. The most important ones are in your consciousness.

Uranus-Eris — the conjunction of our era, which last happened in 1928 — is the environmental ground and atmosphere we’re now standing on and breathing.

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Hobo Supermans by Tim Davis. See larger version here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Last week the new edition of Chronogram came in. That’s the regional magazine I’ve written for every month since early 1996. Chronogram always has excellent covers which by design are unconnected to any specific article. But they are often timely comments. With one glance my jaw dropped: the artist had summed up the state of the nation in one image.

It’s called Hobo Supermans. The artist is Tim Davis.

What’s happening in this picture? It looks like the Supermans have given up. They’re homeless and unemployed. There are two of them, which is odd. And they’ve lit their fire on the train tracks, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a train could come careening at any moment. Maybe they think they can stop it with their bare hands when it does, which it will, sooner or later.

Since they’re obviously just regular guys in costumes, that probably won’t work too well.

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Orson Welles directs the broadcast of War of the Worlds on Oct. 30, 1938. Note the live orchestra; and in the tradition of radio, the actors are standing, which increases their performance level.

Dear Friend and Reader:

For his weekly program on Halloween eve of 1938, a young Orson Welles tried something new. For some months, his Mercury Theater on the Air had run on Columbia Broadcasting System (the CBS Radio Network) with a small listenership. On the evening of Oct. 30, they decided to try doing a science fiction program.

George Orson Welles in 1938, a few months before War of the Worlds. He was 21 years old. Photo by portrait master Carl Van Vetchen.

They had acquired the rights to a short novel written by the British sci-fi author H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. (Wells and Welles were both of English descent, both had George in their name, but they were not related.) That story, about an invasion from Mars, had been published 40 years earlier, in 1898. It was an old and well-known work at the time, read by many children and recreated in comic books.

Welles, however, thought the story made a boring script, so his writers updated it into a series of spot-news reports about an invasion from Mars that cut into a seemingly ordinary dance music program. This was a new technique at the time, the earliest version of the “breaking news” stripe at the bottom of the CNN screen: interrupting regular programming for something more important.

At the beginning of the program an announcer said clearly that the show would be a dramatization of the novel. Then at about 40 minutes, an announcer again said it was a dramatization, and then finally at the end Welles said it was a Halloween prank. But that did not matter; the genie was out of the bottle.

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Screen shot of NYTimes.com edition for Oct. 20, 2016.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Last night, Donald Trump said something that has become the lead story out of the third presidential debate: he might not accept the election results if he loses. All week long he’s been bleating about rigged elections — as if there’s some conspiracy between black people, The New York Times, Hillary Clinton, 50 state Boards of Election and the Electoral College.

Trump is right — voting is rigged, but in the direction opposite of what he’s saying. It’s stacked against minorities, who are blocked in many places by requirements for identification, distance to the polling location and the now-gutted Voter Rights Act.

And to think — this was before Twitter. Photo: Creative Commons.

It was most famously rigged during the 2000 election, when Al Gore won and George W. Bush took office. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

In case you missed last night’s impressive face-off between Trump and Chris Wallace of Fox News, here’s the now-famous exchange.

TRUMP: If you look — excuse me, Chris — if you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote — millions, this isn’t coming from me — this is coming from Pew Report and other places — millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.

So let me just give you one other thing. So I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people — tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s crooked — she’s — she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run.

And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged, because she should never…

WALLACE: But…

TRUMP: Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.

WALLACE: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country — in fact, one of the prides of this country — is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?

TRUMP: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?

Yes, just like a reality TV host would. Leave them hanging. That’s the whole problem with the Trump campaign: he thinks it’s a television hallucination.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re about 48 hours out from the big Full Moon conjunct Uranus-Eris. To recap, Uranus-Eris is the conjunction that’s the sign of our times, associated with electronic media revolutions. First a reminder: I’ll be hosting a community-wide, live edition of Planet Waves FM Friday at 9 pm as the wave is cresting. See this link for details.

One Uranus-Eris cycle ago, this is what the internet looked like.

The last time the Uranus-Eris conjunction happened was in 1927-1928, just at the dawn of the mass media age. Now it’s back, as the effects of the digital age are being seen for what they are: chaos in culture, confusion of self-concept, and a totally distorted relationship to body.

And overnight Saturday to Sunday, the Full Moon aligns to within a fraction of a degree of this rare conjunction.

The Sun and Moon personalize the effects of the distant, difficult-to-perceive conjunction, making it real to anyone who can see, hear or feel. We are witnessing the full-on effects of the digital age.

The digital realm has, among other things, induced a society-wide out-of-body experience. The internet is a synthetic astral plane. We were promised an “ascension” back in 2012 at the Mayan calendar turnover, and those predicting it were right. We ascended out of our bodies and into the datasphere. Human lives are now inseparable from the internet, or at least that’s how we live.

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Good Evening on Planet Waves:

I’m going to lay low this week and let my colleagues handle most writing duties today. I’m planning to prep our class on Saturday — It’s All in the Houses. We’ll email out another round of subscriber discount codes. Read more about the class here.

Astrologers’ heads are spinning thanks to Hillary Clinton’s constantly shifting birth time — and even NASA has gone a little loopy about zodiac signs. At least Saturday’s class on houses is straightforward. Photo of star trails over the “unorthodox” Aghia Foteini church in Arcadia, Greece, by Anthony Ayiomamitis.

If you’re trying to read a chart, the houses provide the context and the setting for the narrative. That’s why, as Patric Walker said, “It’s all in the houses.”

I am planning to resume my election coverage on Tuesday on Planet Waves FM with some astonishing information I discovered this week about Donald Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence.

More About Hillary Clinton’s Ambiguous Time of Birth

Below is a news item about the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s birth time, which was covered by The Wall Street Journal last week, and which then became a sensation in the astrology world. ISAR, the International Society for Astrological Research, could have handled this better by saying that they had a new clue about Clinton’s birth data rather than incorrectly claiming that they had “breaking news” double-accurate data.

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“In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.”
— Robert Anton Wilson

Dear Friend and Reader:

Here’s what I’ve been wondering all week: how can a presidential candidate tell the nation that he doesn’t pay federal taxes and nobody seems to care? There were many impressive moments in Monday’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but that took first prize.

The issue involved why Trump has not disclosed his income taxes, which is a basic though unofficial requirement of all presidential candidates in our era. Clinton said that in the few tax returns that had been disclosed over the decades (mainly in gambling license applications), Trump had paid no federal taxes, to which he responded by saying that means he’s a smart guy. He had many options; that was the answer he chose.

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