Note: This post is both political and personal, with a sustained focus on the personal.
Political
More and more it strikes me re: the election fraud morass and how to rectify it, that all parties on “both sides” are involved in more or less clever lawfare, i.e., using laws against other laws to achieve a desired result. Who is supposed to make the laws, according to the Constitution? Answer: Congress, known as “the legislative branch.” And yet, — where did I hear this, and did I already blog on it? — it turns out that at this point in our checkered, bloated national history, all sorts of unelected bureaucrats make laws in their own agencies! So, how many laws total? How many more laws each day? As departments within agencies expand, so do the laws they feel entitled to set into motion.
But how many of these proliferating laws contradict each other? Who knows. Millions? And,they still say, “ignorance of the law is no excuse”??? So in any dispute, rather than come to blows, or work it out in person quickly or over time, those who can afford it hire expensive attorneys who are supposed to “know the law,” and how to get around any particular law, or use another law to defeat the first one, on and on.
What is this but lawfare?
For example I keep hearing about the two or three or many “paths to victory” that Trump could use to assure a win, despite the massive, multivarious fraud. Each “path” uses various laws to counter other laws. Many different versions of all this, and all sorts of experts and pundits have opinions.
It may be that in order to return to the Constitution, and its “Rule of Law,” as written and intended by its founders, we will need to slash government of all but the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. I.e., simply dismantle all the proliferating agencies, or at least, investigate them one at a time, to decide which, and how much of each, is worth keeping. But who will be in charge of doing that? And under what “authority”? Aspects of all three functions of our constitutional republic have now been exposed, especially during this traumatic year of 2020 vision, as corrupted — some up to, I hear, 90%, by bribery, blackmail, pay-for-play, kickbacks, pedophilia, and satanic ritual abuse.
Redpill 78 has an interesting take on a lot of what is going on now.
I say all this to make a larger point, namely, that our wondrously fertile human imagination, when focused and real-ized onto the natural world, creates all sorts of visible and invisible constructs which, in truth, need to be viewed as a scrim upon the natural order. Not necessary, but contingent. And furthermore, only more or less congruent with nature’s laws. And therefore, these constructs — whether they be institutions, or money, or traffic laws, or nations, or school systems, or various grammars and algorithms — are all subject to decay, corruption, eruption, revolution, evolution. “Not what the founder (God, the source, the universe) intended.” And yet, at least on this good earth, Nature bats last; though we all know this, we tend to give only lip service to her mysterious interwoven mysteries.
The above paragraph is preface to the story I will tell next.
Personal
Yesterday, as part of our Green Acres Village Jupiter/Saturn Solstice Celebration, we decided to go to the highest hill in the city of Bloomington, in hopes of getting a good view of the exceedingly rare and close Jupiter/Saturn conjunction before it set shortly after sunset. Plus we, or at least I, wanted to be there before the sun set, knowing that sunset was now at the most southernmost point in the sky; that after seeming to pause for a day or two, sunset will then proceed north for the next six months, until Summer Solstice, when it would set at its northernmost point and begin again to reverse direcfion.
So we got there in time to see the Sun set, a red ball slowly moving down from the horizon off to the west/southwest. I knew that the extremely rare (because very close) Jupiter/Saturn conjunction would be visible for awhile after the sun had set and dusk well advanced. But I hadn’t bothered to check, in 3D, just where it would be. I could have. I could have just said to myself: the Sun is at 0° Capricorn today (Winter Solstice), and the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction at 0° Aquarius today; therefore, since these two signs are next to each other, then exactly 30 degrees separate the two phenomena in question.
It’s easy enough to figure out what that would mean visually. Stand anywhere and imagine you are the center of a cross inside a circle, with four 90° angles in the cross. From the horizon to the zenith, no matter where you are standing, marks roughly 90°. 1/3 of 90° is 30°. Since Capricorn and Aquarius are right next to each other in the zodiac, and each sign has 30 degrees, then, estimating the ecliptic path that led to the sun setting there, I could have just, in my mind, easily estimated about where the double planet would appear in the darkening sky: namely 30° from where the Sun set, and I had heard, a bit more south (the ecliptic is a 23° wide latitudinal band).
In other words, I was doiing what I always do, looking at the Solstice sunset and the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in my mind, where see pictures of astrological charts.
But instead, I “went along with the crowd,” which somehow had figured that, since we knew the Jupiter/Saturn set pretty close to sunset, then they must be now located out of our sight, because behind the multistory building on the horizon, which just happens to be the Indiana University library! Perfect, I thought to myself. Human book learning obscures the view of the night sky. More scrim!
But it gets even better . . . At some point we gave up; it was cold out, we’d been standing there for a half hour, and just couldn’t find the long-promised Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. We figured the two planets must have set behind that enormous library building, so we would never see it. Okay, we got back in our cars and went home.
But then, amazingly enough, there they were! Right there as we got out of our cars! About 30° up (from where I knew would be the (now tree and houses obscured) horizon) in the now fairly dark sky! We all got to see them, though and a few others with failing eyesight, had to look binoculars! In our eagerness to go to a high point, we had gone on a wild goose chase to the top of a hill, with wrong assumptions in our minds about where they were supposed to appear in relation to the sunset.
I take full responsibility for this hilarious gaffe. As “the astrologer,” you’d think I would have figured it out! And I could have! But this just goes to show that my learning about the night sky has been largely through books: ephemerides and now, computerized outputs of what I used to have to figure out mathematically by hand. As an “astrologer,” I’m a human library, you might say, and whatever’s really “out there” is largely ignored by me, since what I do with the geometric patterns I find on the 2D plane of a chart, does not depend on knowing how to translate 2D into 3D, and the actual planets (and their relations to star patterns) in the night sky! Plus, as a product of “civilization,” I have spent no time out on a featureless desert, or on the wide ocean, where understanding celestial mechanics would be utterly essential to getting where you wanted to go. Nor have I had to worry about the actual dates of solstices and equinoxes, something ancient peoples did have to be concerned with, since they helped to calculate the seasons for planting and harvesting food.
Once again, my “knowledge base” is a part of the scrim that separates civilized humans from the natural world.
Oh well!
Here’s most of our little Green Acres pod, for a group photo on our Solstice Hill.
Then dinner, followed by one of Andreas’ amazing desserts:
