A new planet has been discovered by astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology that’s larger than Pluto. It must be exciting to discover a planet. I mentioned it in a prior post.

Astrologers are going to have some issues with using this planet in their practice. With UB313’s declination of about +/- 45 degrees (!), the planet will only pass through some of the typical zodiacal signs at nodal points +/- some number of threshold declination degrees. Will these nodal points themselves cycle through the zodiacal signs? Probably, but I don’t know right now at what periodicity or cyclical pattern that nodal movement might follow, and the nodal points are not the same as planetary location except for the briefest of time periods. I’m sure programmers of astrological software will include the planet in new versions shortly, but there are technical matters that I hope they consider, one of which is inclusion of all planets nodal points and apside line placements.

As an mental illustration, what movement would happen in the typical astrological chart if a ‘hypothetical’ planet is discovered that has an declination of +/- 90 degrees and its movement is to be viewed in a natal chart display? Let’s further stipulate that with this hypothetical there will be no nodal movement through zodiacal signs. In this case, planetary movement would appear solely digital! In other words, no movement on the standard astrological chart would occur over time until the planets orbital path passed through a line defined by its perpendicularity to the ecliptic plane and drawn through the Sun. Once that orbital path conjuncted the perpendicular line, either north or south of the Sun, then the chart symbol would “jump” to some point on the opposite side of the same chart, and remain there until it passed through the opposite solar side of the north-south line. This would mean that the traditional zodiacal assignment would only be accurate in sidereal for a small amount of time when the planet is near the nodes—the planet’s orbital intersection points with the ecliptic plane.

While the reported 45-degree inclination of 2003UB313 is less than 90-degrees, the same type of synthetic chart phenomenon would still occur, but less severely. Therefore, its my current thinking, that if any typical zodiac such as Western tropical or sidereal is applied to this planet throughout most of its travel on a 2-dimensional representation such as a typical natal chart, most of the time zodiacal assignment will be wrong for the new planet, and the best that could be said is that it would be a synthetic assignment without much basis in background star influence except for the briefest of periods when it’s near one of the two ecliptic intersection nodes. Continuing to use old technical methods of astrology with this new planet will hide its truth to all but a few astrologers, and the same might be said of Pluto, as well.

Here are some illustrations, courtesy of JPL’s java applet. You may click on any of the images to see a larger version.

This first graphic shows Saturn through 2003UB313 and their orbital paths with Saturn’s orbit closest to the Sun or central point. The Sun is represented with a red dot and with a yellow north line and z-axis anchor.

In this next graphic I’ve rotated the representation to show the ecliptic plane as if one was looking at a plate on a table with one’s horizontal view positioned at the table’s top edge. In this and the next grapic, the perspective causes the ecliptic plane to appear as a horizontal line. In this graphic Pluto’s orbital path also appears as a line, the angular difference between the two planes is one way of conceptualizing declination.

In this graphic I’ve rotated the perspective so that 2003UB313 orbital path and the ecliptic are both viewed as lines, and Pluto’s orbit is circular. The new planet’s steep declination versus all other planets’ paths is quite visible, and it appears close to 45 degrees as measured against the ecliptic plane.

It should now be easy to visually understand why the new planet will not travel through the typical background constellations or zodiac signs, except at the nodal points where it’s path intersects with the ecliptic plane. Shouldn’t this create a large interpretive error for astrologers who will say that it travels through each one of the ‘typical’ or popular zodiacal constellations?

Another interpretive point of consideration is that when 2003UB313 is at steep + or - declination, how will astrologers ever be able to honestly say it’s conjuncting one of the more inward planets? At this point of declination, + or - 45 degrees approximately, a conjunction with another planet of 0 declination would at best be a semi-square, which curiously would change its aspectual ease or difficulty, wouldn’t it? There’s a similar issue with Pluto, but it’s also not as pronounced as it will be with this new planet.

Following this reasoning, and making the assumption that half of 2003UB313’s stated orbital period is a close approximation, then traditional zodiacal effects such as traditional aspects to it would imply they will only occur for relatively short periods of time and at a mean bisected-cycle of approximately 278 years (557/2). Because of the typical elongation of the apside line axis relative to the nodal axis, and the faster planetary velocity at perigee than at apogee, this crude average approximation is no doubt off by some amount. Further, if considering that there is likely movement of nodal points through the zodiac, then for interpretation, researching any historical (or real time) effects during 2003UB313s conjunction to its nodes will have changing zodiacal interpretive qualities at each period of nodal intersection with each return.

As far as I know, no astrological program graphically plots all planets’ nodal points, or apse line, but then I don’t have any of the latest and greatest commercial programs. Most do plot the Moon’s nodes and some plot the associated focal point of Lilith. Perhaps Astrolabe’s NOVA did plot these phenomenon, but I never had access to that program to play with, it was too expensive for me at a time way back when, when I was actively interested in such things :(. It’s an area for astrological software improvement, I think.

One way this might be addressed is with a more refined 2-dimensional chart that has circles within the typical circular placement of zodiacal sign. The inner (or outer) added circles would have different zodiacal assignments than the traditional ones, this added group of signs would be defined by the background star patterns on the plane defined by the new planet’s orbit.

There may be other valid symbolic ways of approaching this issue.

This would be preferable to the 2-dimensional visual representation that outer planets orbits “mix it up” either zodiacally or by intersecting with other inner planets’ orbits such as Pluto currently does with Neptune, or which will be much more pronounced now with 2003UB313 in the typical and traditional astrological chart wheel. Astronomer Mike Brown has an image of such a “mixing it up” phenomenon when its viewed in two dimensions from above (or below?). Where the orbital lines appear to cross might give a false idea of the planet’s astrological energies.

In this last graphic, when viewed from a particular angle, it can still be seen that the outer planet orbits do not intersect.

I don’t watch much TV, but this evening I sat down to dinner and decided to see what was on MSNBC. Their top story? It was about a kid who had jumped into a net at some stadium. Wow. Big news, leading story, must be important. Right?

Why not cover the Cindy Sheehan peace protest in Crawford Texas, where President Bush is said to be vacationing while troops die in Iraq? Why not cover the 600 truckers in Florida who are protesting high fuel prices?

There are other much more important stories that happened today in the United States, but a kid jumping into a stadium and captured by a net is more important?

after watching this broadcast for a few minutes where they continued with talking heads analyzing the kid in the net, I switched the channel. Well, here’s my news for today, MSNBC, you just lost me as a satellite subscriber, if you can’t bring me the top stories of the day, you’re going to have to pay me to pipe your propaganda into my TV.

Is 2003UB313 the transneptunian Apollo? Or Admetos, Kronos, or Vulcanos? It’s orbital period most closely matches Apollo.

That guess is based upon the orbital period as defined by Astrolog’s calculation routines of about 577 years. In contrast Kronos is about 510 years, and Admetos about 614.

UB313 is reported to have an orbital period of 557 years.

However, if one goes by Brown’s quote, “… is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus,” then I’d have to modify my guess to Admetos, Hades, Kronos, or Vulcanos.

Admetos (614 years) Hades (360 years) Kronos (521 years) Vulcanos (663 years) http://finblake.home.mindspring.com/tnpdata.htm

We can probably eliminate Hades, since the orbital period is so far from the observations of 2005UB313, as too is the mean distance. The mean distances of Admetos, Kronos, or Vulcanos are the most likely candidates, if the new name is to correlate to any of Witte and Sieggrun’s transneptuninan hypotheticals.

Therefore, we’re left with Admetos, Kronos, or Vulcanos.

Isn’t there a lot of volcanic activity lately?

I just read a future prediction regarding the collapse of civilization, apparently written by the same oil-industry analyst Jan Lundberg who formerly wrote the Lundberg Letter, “the bible of the oil industry.”

Be forewarned it is a dark, disturbing read in the beginning. The end of civilization as we know it is accompanied by a huge population die off, and how that may play out as a result of the end of oil is explored. However, I have to remember while reading it that this is just one person’s sight-into-the-future.

“The fall of the U.S. may be the swiftest empire collapse in world history. It is obvious that the U.S. population and the nation’s infrastructure is heavily petroleum dependent. The U.S. peaked in oil production (extraction) in 1971. The world may be peaking now, as some evidence indicates, or in a few short years. As a severe energy shortage is on tap as soon as the gap between supply and demand is felt by the market, and the Earth gives noticeably less oil than just recently, there will be a cascade of impacts on the economy and people’s lives.”

Although not mentioned in the linked quote above, Lundberg’s particular views of a hydrogen ‘economy’ are curious, in the article’s English use he/she put the quotes around hydrogen as well as economy. She/he appears to completely discount any future for hydrogen as an energy source or storage medium.

There are promising developments in the direct conversion of sunlight and water into hydrogen without the use of “generated” electricity in the process. Older processes such as the electrolytic separation of hydrogen and oxygen using anodes and cathodes that many of us saw demonstrated in science classes and which were powered by wall-outlet electricity are being pointed to by detractors as a reason why solar hydrogen is not economic. Often, the phrase “solar hydrogen” is framed to mean photo-voltaic cells that produce electricity that in turn powers anode-cathode separation processes, and which isn’t as efficient as it could be: remember, baby-steps are taken first, walking and running come later. Newer technologies surpass these prior limitations, but detractors point to older processes as proof for why they will never work.

In other words, solar hydrogen without a carbon cycle is just around the corner.

Fossil-fuel free solar hydrogen has already been produced in small quantities. From Australia we learn about their solar hydrogen contributions, a conceptual solar cell that produces hydrogen directly from sunlight and pure water. “This is potentially huge, with a market the size of all the existing markets for coal, oil and gas combined,” says Professor Janusz Nowotny, who with Professor Chris Sorrell is leading a solar hydrogen research project at the University of NSW Centre for Materials and Energy Conversion. Lundberg fails to mention these types of solar hydrogen.

It is clear to me that our current society is economically rewarding mostly corporations; therefore, an ‘economy’ based upon hydrogen would likely be a continuation of the same exploitation by corporate entities whose bottom line (money) reigns supreme over ‘all other considerations’. In the years that I’ve been alive, it appears that social welfare concerns such as environmentalism have been minimized by energy corporations and corporate welfare is increasingly legislated over the course of many more years. Lundberg reminded me of stories I’ve read elsewhere about how General Motors destroyed the electric trolley services that many cities had earlier in the 20th century, which was an obvious benefit for the petroleum and automotive industries.

What Lundberg is describing is one phenomenon of corporatism, how environmentally sounder technologies were forced out of existence by the greedy corporate machine. Cut-throat competition that forces mom & pop businesses to close is another manifestation of concentration of capital, the dangers of which are well known to historians.

The obscene pay of many CEOs is a different kind of corporatist phenomenon that is a sickness in our society today, it is one which increases the financial stress on all the rest of us. This is a market-distorting, relative-pay disparity problem versus the lowest paid worker, and is an abnormal concentration of capital: one of the reasons Will Durant, author of the acclaimed Story of Civilization series, teaches us that prior great civilizations historically fail. In the corporatist system, the CEOs want us to believe they deserve this financial welfare: in the same system the poor and even the middle class don’t deserve much, and whatever they do manage to earn will be a laborious task that is also of primary benefit to the overall corporatist system.

How just is it that poor people must now often work two full-time minimum-wage jobs just to pay their bills? There sure isn’t much time for the working-poor to be politically active after cooking their food and doing their laundry and working their jobs, they certainly don’t have money left over to contribute to political campaigns. In contrast, the pay of CEOs grants them ample leisure time if they so desire, and generous campaign contributions are routine in their pay-to-play political action system. Today this is all part of the corporatist system.

I digressed a bit. A question that Lundberg’s article brings to mind: Would it ultimately be good if the greedy’s support structure were removed from under them?

If Lundberg’s scenario comes to pass, it will be a painful transition, one that will be just as hard on the poor as the wealthy, but the society that might emerge from the chaos he/she describes promises survivors much more fulfilling lives.

***

To provide a little balance to the chaotic, dire scenario of Jan Lundberg, the Houston Chronicle published “Boring fact is oil not soon tapped out” by Scott Tinker, apparently the state geologist of Texas. (Via Peak Oil News)

“If there is an important peak of oil, it actually occurred in the early 1980s when oil consumption as a percentage of total global energy topped out just shy of 50 percent” and which he claims is now at 40%. The energy transition trend is consistent and well underway.

Hydrogen isn’t directly mentioned in this article, but at least it isn’t disparaged as in Lundberg’s article. I’m reminded of an old saying that goes something like, “It’s not what they’re telling you that’s most important, what they’re not saying is.”

The bright side of Tinker’s perspective, if it can correctly be considered bright, is that our New World Order corporatist society will keep ticking along, and he believes “investment” will be required. One question I have for Tinker is how will our corporatist society treat the poor if they don’t have money to “invest”?

I hope I helped to fill in a couple of blanks with this short rant, but please remember that my crystal ball is likely broken.

Yesterday, the same day of the Michael Jackson acquittal, mentioned by Progressive Ink, another bit of supreme court news regarding the juror selection system was published by the LA Times.

I remember the last several times I was called for jury duty: I spent most of the time sitting and waiting, reading a book, filling out questionnaire forms, thinking . . . and more waiting. One of my thoughts was how we’re told by the courthouse that it’s our duty as citizens to sit on juries, and how constitutionally important the citizen jury is to the freedom we have.

Rarely have I been allowed to actually sit as a juror in a trial.

Once, while waiting in the courthouse, I imagined how the courts might have been back in the early days of this country, and further thought that a jury summons back then probably meant you’d get to sit on a trial. Today, that is not so. Potential jurors are examined, questioned, prodded, and probed, by private attorneys and the courthouse. After this, one might be asked to sit as a juror; but more than likely one is, in my experience, dismissed. In many ways, the current juror selection system reminds me more of a classroom examination and summary judgement against the potential juror in the preponderance of times I’ve experienced it, than the citizen’s executing of a solemn duty to a fellow citizen & the community by actually sitting as a juror to hear a trial.

What happens to all the information the courthouse and the private attorneys have collected on citizens called to sit on juries, but who rarely do get to sit on an actual case? Is the potential juror’s data safe and secure? Is it recognized as the property of the source citizen? Or has that data been usurped for another’s use and eventual profit? Has it been placed in a database somewhere? Has that data been aggregated?

While I don’t have the answers to the above questions, I do remember being examined by attorneys several times after being summoned by the courthouse to show up for jury service. The people sitting at the attorney’s table would scribble on their legal pads after I gave my answers to the questions asked by another attorney. What is done with that data they recorded? Had I refused to answer their questions, what courthouse-sanctioned punishment could I have expected?

The larger point I intend is that instead of sitting on a jury, which is a U.S. citizen’s duty, today one is forced to divulge personal and private information to a system that may not protect that data adequately. How does the requirement of citizens to be examined before sitting on a trial impact each citizen’s and potential juror’s privacy?

Has a citizen’s solemn duty to an accused citizen been transformed into another lie The Rulers tell citizens to collect and exploit their personal information?

Perhaps juror selection should be entirely random. At least that way, a citizen’s time is not taxed by the state in an off-the-books transaction.

The files that appear to have changed in WordPress version 1.5.1.2 from 1.5.1.1 are:

\wp-content\themes\default\header.php \wp-includes\functions.php \wp-includes\template-functions-category.php \wp-includes\template-functions-general.php \wp-includes\version.php

Please note that the above is not an official WordPress list. It was made using the win32 program WinMerge, from zip downloads of WordPress versions that I have saved.

SA wrote on Progressive Ink: “It’s no small secret that the ancients who came up with the patriarchal doctrine of Original Sin being passed along by the seed of our biological fathers . . .” Presumably, this “secret” is not actually written in the biblical texts as a literal. Does the writer of this quote care to further explain?

I’ve believed for many years now that the story of Adam and Eve being ‘cast out’ from the Garden of Eden likely happened because they procreated, but the biblical stories only imply this at best; “imply” might even be to strong of a word to use. To make this leap required connecting a dot that doesn’t seem to be explicitly connected in the King James biblical translation. The primary ‘missing dot’ I saw is that the stories subsequent to the expulsion include their children, Cain and Able.

SA is the first other person whose thoughts I’ve read that confirms this belief of mine. It also brings to my mind, first and foremost, that being ‘cast out’ from Eden was simply a metaphorical reference to a population boom, which, as some of us may understand, is quite out-of-control in our current earthly civilization. Weren’t there other biblical stories of occasional famines?

Population booms and famines are a complementary historical cycle of earthly life, one not confined solely to humans. The first act leading to a population bubble, like sets of falling dominos, sets in motion serieses of causes and effects, culminating in an eventual extinction, often due to the food supply becoming scarce, but not necessarily limited only to extinction by famine. For the deeply devout, eschatology becomes the point of focus of this natural cause and effect.

Being ‘cast out’ of Eden, when understood literally, means something else entirely than what the missing-dot message delineated above suggests, bringing to mind thoughts of “punishment” when restricted to this singular story concept. As a lesson taught to a potentially procreative couple in the distant past by an omnipotent, the literal interpretation of punishment and resulting guilt for failure to obey is quite strong among some believers.

Some people that I’ve discussed this story with suggested that Eve’s eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge at the urging of the serpent is a metaphor within a metaphor, instigated by yet another metaphor. This tends to result in an obfuscated original-intent meaning, open to many interpretations. Are any ‘missing dots’ explicitly connected in other religious or surviving historical texts regarding any procreative reason for the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve?

Regardless, what we appear to have ended up with for a number of millennia is a cycle of hierarchical command and control punishments, for all but the luckiest, meted out generously by humans in various societal hierarchies. Punishments are even executed when other people’s non-harmful-to-another behaviors are not to their liking.

When one is punished, that lesson ultimately teaches how to punish.

Adam Shostack points out that ChoicePoint has framed an issue as something other than what it is. However, I focus on what may be a different aspect of the ChoicePoint reframing than that which Adam observes.

If the CEO of ChoicePoint, Derek Smith, espouses the theory that society is better off if “everyone can check the background of anyone else”, then he hasn’t achieved much else other than to enrich his own pocket at others’ expense. In the last reports I read, ChoicePoint was not opening up its database further, but rather, in response to the data-theft issues, restricting access to fewer organizations.

This action of ChoicePoint means his publicly stated vision is further from realization, not closer. Perhaps his vision of a freely transparent society is just another sales pitch he is using mostly to his own and ChoicePoint’s benefit.

Doesn’t Mr. Smith believe in the Fourth Amendment? Does he believe in capitalism? Does he believe in the property rights of others?

Perhaps Mr. Smith firstly believes in corporatism, then secondly believes only in capitalism when it’s his corporate property in need of rights. Perhaps that’s why he claims to believe regulation, not capitalism, is the fix for consumers whose data is sold as the property of ChoicePoint. This logic would be hilarious if it wasn’t so corporopathically twisted with respect to the Fourth Amendment rights of the people.

I wrote more of my thoughts about this in the comments of a prior posting about ChoicePoint. In summary, the information in ChoicePoint’s database should be recognized as ‘the property’ of each citizen it represents. When ChoicePoint sells data about anyone, that citizen should get a royalty. This would be equitable capitalism instead of corporatism.

The rationale that government regulation is the answer to the past and continuing corporate theft of citizens’ Fourth Amendment property and calling it ChoicePoint’s own, speaks loudly to the corporate welfare state that years of graft have brought us.

That the corporate seizure of people’s data is apparently legal, indicts corporatism as a defining element of the corporate welfare scam. Perhaps we need a new word to refer to some of the corporations and executives of the world: corporopathic. They unreasonably seize from all the people, pay themselves outrageous bounty; in response the corporate media has the audacity to claim that others have stolen from them!
That’s the essential framing of the issue now in creation for Choicepoint.

These are my results from the Belief-O-Matic quiz at Beliefnet, hat tip to Spirit Blooms.

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Mahayana Buddhism (95%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (91%)
4. New Age (90%)
5. Liberal Quakers (79%) (read more . . . )

There was a time in my life many years ago when I wanted to be a mechanic, but for a variety of complex reasons, that dream was never realized to its full extent. I spent most of my late teenage years taking cars apart, and usually putting them back together: I loved it. I even had a mobile mechanic business for a short while in later years, but couldn’t make it profitable enough to live in the rising real estate of Southern California, and that’s when the “love” of working on cars passed. I remember this one guy who’d called me, asking for an over the phone quote for something specific. After giving him the quote, in oblivion he asked, “Will you do it for $5.00 less than ______ down the street?” There’s a definite downside to empathy, and I was already near the end of that business endeavor. Anyway, I still work on my own vehicles exclusively, but now that’s quite infrequent.

Coldforged.org tells us a story of his recent car troubles, which inspired this short and generalized post you’re now reading.

Why won’t a car start?
(Please keep in mind my explanation is inherently simplified) (read more . . . )