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The crowd gathered on the Washington Mall at about noon, as seen from the Capitol Building.
At the Women’s March on Washington, Jan. 21
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Category Archives: Welcome
An Actual Tradition: 19 Years of the Planet Waves Annual
Each year at this time, I am busy creating the Planet Waves annual edition. It’s an Internet tradition but it’s also a tradition in my life. I also consider it an invention: a way to get you a solid, detailed and authentic astrology reading, with information that makes a difference in your life — astrology that you remember and come back to — for a very modest fee.
Jeremy J. Stone, 1935-2017
by Steven Aftergood
Republished from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Jeremy J. Stone, a pioneering arms control advocate who served as president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) from 1970 to 2000, passed away on January 1, 2017 at his home in Carlsbad, California.
Jeremy J. Stone; photo by Kzitelman via Wikimedia Commons
A mathematician by training, he turned to nuclear arms control in the early 1960s with a focus on preventing the development and deployment of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems due to their destabilizing potential.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed by the US and the USSR in 1972, was shaped in large part by Jeremy and his scientific colleagues, who collectively created the foundation for nuclear arms control in the last decades of the Cold War.
Jeremy jump-started the process of scientific exchange with China in the early 1970s. He was a prominent defender of dissident Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov, and he instituted new mechanisms for monitoring and upholding the human rights of scientists around the globe. He discovered and helped terminate a CIA program to open U.S. mail.
All of these episodes, and many more, were vividly and insightfully described in his 1999 memoir “Every Man Should Try: Adventures of a Public Interest Activist”.
Jeremy was a chess-player, on and off the chess board. He took a strategic approach to his work and his life. He did not drift. He was always on his way towards one goal or another. He might take you with him if you were lucky.
He was a scintillating conversationalist who could successfully engage even the most tongue-tied staffer or physicist. He had a sophisticated sense of humor which he wielded skillfully — perhaps following the example of his early Hudson Institute boss, the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn — to disarm opponents and to make his own ideas more palatable to skeptical or hostile audiences.
He was lucky in love, having been married for 58 years to BJ (Yannet) Stone, a brilliant, beautiful and kind mathematician , who passed away in 2015.
He was an exceptionally capable talent-spotter, and he could see the latent potential in people that they could scarcely imagine in themselves. At the Federation of American Scientists, he gathered a group of scruffy young individuals of no particular academic pedigree or obvious distinction and he shined his peculiar light on them until they bloomed. He presented them (us) with enormously difficult problems — ballistic missile defense, nuclear proliferation, global arms sales, government secrecy — and challenged them to tackle those problems in creative new ways.
Of course, he was not without flaws. His intuitive powers, which usually made him uncommonly perceptive, occasionally hardened prematurely into convictions that proved to be unfounded. In one particularly lamentable episode, he suggested mistakenly that MIT physicist Philip Morrison, a Manhattan Project veteran and FAS founder, had once spied for the Soviet Union. Making such a false allegation could have been an unforgivable offense. But Morrison, himself a person of awesome depth and distinction, forgave him, although with some sadness.
More typically, Jeremy was a profoundly generous and thoughtful person. His intelligence and problem-solving abilities were often directed to meeting the needs of others — not just friends or employees (he once directed poorly dressed staff to buy some new clothes at his expense), but also casual acquaintances, foreigners, children and strangers. He knew how to give a gift, and he usually anticipated exactly what gift a particular person wanted or needed.
Above all, Jeremy was an institution builder, turning the Federation of American Scientists into a public interest platform of significant influence.
“FAS is a legitimate and prestigious scientific association,” wrote Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a classified cable to the US Embassy in Japan in 1975. “Dr. Stone… is [a] highly regarded lobbyist on foreign policy and has wide contacts on the Hill. Embassy should have no reservations about facilitating his appointments in Japan,” Kissinger wrote.
By the time I showed up at FAS in 1989, the organization under Jeremy’s leadership had become a powerhouse of intelligent and effective advocacy in arms control and quite a few other areas. My own cohort included figures like John Pike, David Albright, Lora Lumpe, and the late Tom Longstreth, to name just a few. Wandering the halls of our Capitol Hill headquarters, I would sometimes run into Carl Sagan, former CIA director Bill Colby, Philip Morrison, Paul Nitze, former JFK aide Carl Kaysen, Ted Taylor, Dick Garwin, former Senator Alan Cranston, and you could never be sure who else. One day I literally collided with Hans Bethe in the hallway outside Jeremy’s office. (No particles were emitted.) Jeremy made all of that possible, providing a forum for scientists and others to participate in the national policy process and a strategic vision to guide them.
After leaving FAS, Jeremy pursued further adventures in conflict resolution as president of Catalytic Diplomacy, created a website in honor of his father, I.F. Stone, and advocated for independent journalism.
On my street this week
First responders across the street from my house Monday night, Jan. 2. The building on fire was further down the block, on the other side of the street. Photo by Amanda Painter
By Amanda Painter
Monday evening I was doing my little workout in my apartment after work and was almost done. I noticed lights and sirens going by; glanced out a window or two; went back to working out. I live near the fire station, so lights and sirens drive by very regularly. But then I realized that these lights and sirens were not continuing onward — they seemed to be hanging out nearby.
Flex
The most tangible definition of elasticity is the ability of a material object to resume its shape after having been stretched, compressed, twisted or otherwise distorted. Something of the same property taken to the metaphorical level might be called adaptability.
If there is anything to how the more symbolically personal planets are moving this week, it would not be surprising if the subject of resilience were coming up for you about now.
The so-called “personal planets” are those which move around the zodiac quickly enough to complete many cycles in one typical human lifetime. Foremost among them are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars. Those objects, taken together, are the go-to astrological reference points that can most likely be said to correspond with your inner life.
This week, the only two planets between Earth and the Sun (Mercury and Venus) appear to be moving in opposite directions, with the Sun’s emblem of consciousness in between. Venus, for its part, left Aquarius behind and progressed to Pisces through the front door shortly before 3 am EDT (07:46:38 UTC) this morning.
Mercury, in the meantime, is regressing (or retrograding) in the other direction. It will leave Capricorn behind to re-enter Sagittarius via the proverbial back door shortly before 9:17 am (14:16:55 UTC) tomorrow.
Imagine your own consciousness in the place of what is now the Capricorn Sun. Think of your mind (represented by Mercury) somehow slipping back to 2016 (as perhaps evinced by still writing “2016” on correspondence and checks). Then, envision Venus (plausibly corresponding to both qualitative and quantitative considerations) plunging on ahead to engage with new business. Doing so, you can very well imagine being pulled both ways — at least within yourself.
If the proposed allegory currently being enacted by the Sun, Mercury and Venus speaks to your experience right now, there are two things to keep in mind. First, the practice of stretching (or being stretched) does have an upside, in that the experience can function to make you more limber and supple than before. The idea, of course, is not to overdo it.
Pre-order the 2017 Planet Waves Annual, The Book of Your Life, to lock in our special early pricing. Read more here or go straight to the purchase page.
Another piece of the situation is to be present with other attributes that make you more flexible. Foremost among those characteristics might be a sense of humor.
There are a lot of stridently earnest and serious people in the world right now. No doubt most of them have good reason. Nonetheless, there is also no shortage of ardent folks at this time, and providing a little balance to that will almost certainly result in a reciprocal enhancement of your ability to be flexible.
Speaking of which, there’s one final and most important thing to iterate about what the Sun, Mercury and Venus are doing this week: the manifestations in your life will implicitly tend to occur within you because of these planets’ position in the solar system relative to Earth. The same will likely be true of nearly anybody else. That’s a good situation if only because you have far more power to make changes within than without.
Simply being present to the need to be supple on the inside will give you a choice about what to display of your inner life to the world. The same awareness will empower you to understand and appropriately support others who are not as conscious (or conscientious) as you are. With such an informed orientation, you could very well make this the week that makes this year live up to the promise of its newness.
Offered In Service
Return to the Great Mystery
Dear Eric,
I agree with your analysis and thoughts about what is fueling the social rupturing we are seeing today. I am an amateur student of history and there is a deep underlying pattern that I have seen that holds true for most of humanity’s experiments in social living, at least as we know of it in recorded history (and this is key – “recorded” history).
Thou Art Divine, by new 1lluminati
Somehow, somewhere, human beings made a shift in their perceptions. Before the shift they were a part of a whole. They were part of nature, part of the Great Mystery, so to speak.
Indigenous people still hold this way of seeing themselves so we know that it did exist at one time. At some point — and scholars disagree on when, exactly, this happened — humans (which are Souls in a body let us not forget) stepped out of Unity consciousness and moved into duality consciousness. This in itself was not a problem so long as the social order/mythos accepted both sides of any duality as having equal power and merit.
Where we began to come unstuck was when someone somewhere decided to start seeing duality in hierarchical terms so that values were ascribed to one side or another of any polarity whereby one half of the whole was seen as superior and the other inferior while at the same time one set of polarities was considered “us” and the other belonged to “the other” thereby separating ourselves from a collective whole.
To the Soul or Spirit which comes from a Unified field of Divine Wholeness, this new paradigm is terribly confusing to be sure but since human beings incarnate with amnesia it has taken us a very long time to evolve our own abilities for self-reflection to see this conundrum and wonder about it.
Instead we were hurtled along through thousands of years of history where societies organized themselves on more deeply entrenched structures of hierarchical power (often called Patriarchy) where the social ordering of power and distribution of resources mirrored the way we perceived our world.
Since there is a quantum entanglement between thoughts and matter, we have solidified this social world into something that is now so restrictive, domineering, aggressive and materially-oriented that we stand on the brink of our own destruction; and — to circle back to your article — the Soul in us is angry about this because we KNOW somewhere deep down inside that we could create something totally different from what we have going on here.
I think humanity sits on the brink of a major revolution and I’m not sure we’ll survive, but some of us will, no doubt. Humanity, in my opinion, must now change the way it thinks, literally, about reality. We can no longer see things in dualistic terms, especially hierarchical dualistic terms for this path has reached its apotheosis and it was a spectacular success that is doomed to fail.
Because when we ignore the whole, when we devalue the “other,” whatever that may be, when we separate out ourselves from the whole we succumb to the illusion that we are separate and somehow can thus be better than the other by virtue of our beliefs, our power or our politics…and none of that is true. We MUST switch our way of thinking from “either/or” to “both/and” in every way possible if we are to survive.
Anger, as you point out, is a key to unlocking this process because if we explore anger and why it is vibrating in our field of experience, we usually discover that somewhere a boundary has been violated. A breach of trust has occurred.
Pre-order the 2017 Planet Waves Annual, The Book of Your Life, to lock in our special early pricing. Read more here or go straight to the purchase page.
Something that the deep soul within us knows that something has been transgressed and we are now out of balance with the wholeness (even a dualistic wholeness) that is our birthright. The violation then triggers a natural response; fear. In my own personal work and witnessing the emotional healing work of others what nearly always happens when you peel back anger is you find fear.
And when you look at what the fear is about it usually comes down to either fear of death or fear of rejection/abandonment — which is a kind of death. These are the deep, primordial regions of the root chakra which have been under such extreme pressure most recently…our very embodiment and reason to be here in a physical form comes into question when it becomes so damned hard to just be here. This is not why we wanted to incarnate here; yet it seems to be the structure we’ve all been collaborating on for a rather long time.
The thing is, WE, over the centuries have created this polarized mess we now find ourselves in, and the truth is WE are the only ones who can fix this. We are the solution we are seeking. It has to come from a change in how we think and perceive the world. We have to choose now to consciously tear down the artificial structures that are false paradigms and come to a way of seeing the polarized wholeness of all things. De-powering the power structures that we’ve put in place are the key and that begins with our own relationship to power.
“Power-over” is no longer an acceptable path of action, “Power-with” is how we save ourselves and the planet. I think young people, especially those who have been fortunate to grow up with strong mothers and/or sensitive fathers are here to help show the way. The old, crusty Capricornian way of consolidating power and controlling it at the expense of others is being plowed apart by Pluto. The new seeds of ways of living more consciously are now being planted in those fresh furrows…they are the seeds of our future way of living together. Some of those seeds have already sprouted and are flourishing. Others feel the calling to plant in their own communities and simply not comply with the old ways any longer.
The refusal to participate in hierarchical duality, in bullying, in patriarchy is the only way forward now. We’ve backed ourselves into a corner in a world of excruciatingly high contrast societies so we can see just how messed up this way is…and now we get a front row seat to how we will dismantle it and build something (hopefully) anew.
Thanks for all the serious and good work you are doing to contribute to this process. I have been a long-time reader of your work and am appreciating the quality of questioning and observing that has been coming thru lately.
Since I know how much you appreciate the power of communication, the media and advertising, I’d like to call your attention (if you’ve not seen it yet) to a wonderful bit of news that was recently on the CBS program called 60 Minutes about how an advertising agency helped a nation (Colombia) heal several generations of war.
They literally used Light to heal and change the issue and bring about Peace. You can see the story here and read more side stories too. This is an example of holistic thinking and new approaches to old problems that will move us forward in positive ways. Here is the link…enjoy!
yours in spirit,
Sally
About All This Anger and Control Drama
Dear Friend and Reader:
Tonight’s edition of Planet Waves looks at the spiritual growth process of the United States, following Pluto transits through the primary U.S. horoscope (the Sibly chart). We’re getting near the end of the year, and I have not done a “this is what 2017 looks like” piece yet — I’m planning to have that for you next week.
I’ll keep this letter short; I have a couple of thoughts to share with you, as we descend into the political vortex.
The negativity of the vortex we’re looking at will be tempting to slip into. There is so much loose fear flying around that it’s not easy to avoid. The planet is heating up, though it would seem that the social temperature is dropping rapidly. The big chill of fear is upon us. There are many sources of fear, though one of the ones hidden in the background, particularly affecting young people, is rooted in lack of experience in the physical world.
There seems to be this profound anxiety about going off-script that’s taking hold, mingled with palpable urgency to stay in control at all times.
The Planet Waves 18th Anniversary
SINCE TODAY is the 18th anniversary of Planet Waves, I was poking around super old issues in the Wayback Machine. It’s kind of amazing how far I got establishing content in the PW webspace even after just a month or two on the gig.
Here is something silly I’ve found — http://planetwaves.net/Y3K.html