This week is more MERCURY RETROGRADE but with less ancillary nonsense than last week. There is a rather abrupt transition on Tuesday, when the amplified effects on domestic life fade, then we get a day of Venus/Saturn followed by Jupiter going Station Direct. For a Royal Astrologer, this indicates a troublesome wife/mistress being punted resulting in proper attention to and administration of affairs of state. Unfortunately, that gig is taken but for the rest of the world, Jupiter going the proper way does herald a return to stability, prosperity, and sanity. Good Luck with that. The rest of the week is a fight between Normality and Wackiness. Normality should have the upper hand for a while.
Pisces: The Tower reversed – Anything and everything bad, painful, horrifying and/or devastating.
Aries: Page of Coins reversed – Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury, unfavorable news.
Taurus: The Magician reversed – Physician, Magus, mental disease, disgrace, disquiet.
Gemini: The Hierophant – Marriage, alliance, captivity, servitude, mercy and goodness, inspiration.
Cancer: The Hermit reversed – Prudence, circumspection, treason, dissimulation, roguery, corruption.
Leo: 5 of Coins – Material trouble, loss of heating love and lovers, concordance, affinities, not being invited to a party.
Virgo: 5 of Cups – It is a card of loss, but something remains over; three have been taken, but two are left; it is a card of inheritance, patrimony, transmission, but not corresponding to expectations.
Libra: 5 of Wands reversed – Litigation, disputes, trickery, contradiction, loss at games.
Scorpio: Queen of Cups – Perfection of womanly virtues, intelligence, gift of vision, success, happiness, pleasure, wisdom.
Sagittarius: 8 of Swords – Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny; also sickness.
Capricorn: The Fool – Folly, mania, extravagance, intoxication, delirium, frenzy, bewrayment.
Aquarius: 10 of Swords – Pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation.
😁
Well…. I guess I am chaste these days…
By choice?
Hmm, that’s a question. I have chosen to avoid most social arenas that might result in meeting a potential partner, and I have chosen not to try to salvage my most recent relationship so I guess on the whole the answer is yes.
Maybe I’m getting laid this week!
(Narrator: Probably not.)
Sagittarius: 8 of Swords – Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny; also sickness.
*pukes*
* Preemptively calls in sick all week *
And that feels like it should have been last week’s.
Virgo: 5 of Cups – It is a card of loss, but something remains over; three have been taken, but two are left; it is a card of inheritance, patrimony, transmission, but not corresponding to expectations.
I’m not sure what to make of that.
I just doubled my life insurance last week.
I’m guessing I die.
Falling off a train?
Well, as far as the “transmission” part goes, the 4L60E in the POS Envoy™ is about to go.
So maybe I got that going for me…
Inheritance?
Not going to get one.
I’ve been told too many times “you’re not getting a fucking dime” and “Bonnie’s grandkids are the equal to your kids” that I have to believe it by now.
I should have been a womanizing drunk and drug dealing convict like my dad. Maybe he would have liked me then.
Hung for a sheep?
Are you a distant cousin of mine? Got any Germans in your family?
Isn’t it the Scottish who are hung for sheep?
Five or six generations back, French, German, English and “Prussian”
Does a womanizing drunk convict have an inheritance to leave?
That’s a country song.
Don’t pay their debts when they die.
Nooz you can use
Since its start in World War II, Voice of America has been intended to serve as a demonstration of soft power that models how U.S.-style journalism can incorporate dissent and unfavorable facts squarely into reporting.
You don’t say.
1) another Trump incompetence moment. Same thing as his acting DHS Secretary during the first admin.
2) the ratchet only moves one way. A lawsuit the other way is instantly dismissed for lack of standing
3) this is the lead plaintiff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patsy_Widakuswara
She’s not even a fucking American and yet she’s employed by VOA and has been for years. Revoke and deport. She wants to live a shit hole country, send her back to Indonesia.
I hate to break it to you, lady, but you ARE the rich.
They never understand this till the invoice shows up.
This. It greatly bothers me that I have to pay for other kids’ shitty ‘education,’ and in general, how my generation doesn’t seem to care that high schools regularly “gradate” illiterates.
Why more isn’t being made of that, well I know good ‘n hard why. *That* not pissing my generation is completely due to its own ignorance.
The whole deal is everyone gets a little of something they want. As long as the competing interests are roughly balanced, the money will keep flowing because the voters will never sacrifice their sacred cows for someone else’s.
I love how it’s akways someone richer who should pay the tax. Notice how Bernie used to rail against the millionaires and billionaires. Today it’s only the billionaires.
To be fair, thanks to inflation, yesterday’s millionaires are today’s billionaires.
Gemini: The Hierophant – Marriage, alliance, captivity, servitude, mercy and goodness, inspiration.
I’m not getting married as far as I know.
Although for any man, marriage is synonymous with captivity and servitude.
Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Casualties
As missiles and drones curtail energy production across the Persian Gulf, analysts warn that water, not oil, may be the resource most at risk in the energy-rich but arid region.
On Sunday, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging one of its desalination plants. Earlier, Iran said a U.S. airstrike had damaged an Iranian plant.
Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities could not sustain their current populations.
In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.
Those plants probably cause global warming. If they were a good idea California would have them.
California will build one just as soon as they finish up the last minor details of their high speed rail system. You know, punch list items like grading, bedding, and laying track.
RO desalination is energy intensive and quite spendy. I can see why the arabs can afford it.
Newsome not so much.
Surely you jest? This many years and $$$ into the project, their only punch list item should be to pick the color of the replacement seat back doilies worn out already by heavy use by passengers.
Passengers? Why would there be passengers? It’s a rail project. Rail projects are ways to steal land and money, I don’t understand where passengers come in?
What happened to the pan-Arab love I’ve heard so much about? Surely they wouldn’t attack each other.
Persians aren’t Arabs?
Earlier, Iran said a U.S. airstrike damaged an Iranian desalination plant. Abbas Araghchi, the country’s foreign minister, said the strike on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz had cut into the water supply for 30 villages. He warned that in doing so “the U.S. set this precedent, not Iran.”
Many Gulf desalination plants are physically integrated with power stations as co‑generation facilities, meaning attacks on electrical infrastructure could also hinder water production. Even where plants are connected to national grids with backup supply routes, disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems, said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
I thought all those people lived in mud huts and rode around on camels.
As warming oceans increase the likelihood and intensity of cyclones in the Arabian Sea and raise the chances of landfall on the Arabian Peninsula, storm surge and extreme rainfall could overwhelm drainage systems and damage coastal desalination.
The plants themselves contribute to the problem. Desalination is energy-intensive, with plants worldwide producing between 500 and 850 million tons of carbon emissions annually, approaching the roughly 880 million tons emitted by the entire global aviation industry.
The byproduct of desalination, highly concentrated brine, is typically discharged back into the ocean, where it can harm seafloor habitats and coral reefs, while intake systems can trap and kill fish larvae, plankton and other organisms at the base of the marine food web.
As climate change intensifies droughts, disrupts rainfall patterns and fuels wildfires, desalination is expected to expand in many parts of the world.
I KNEW IT!
Material trouble, loss of heating love and lovers, concordance, affinities, not being invited to a party.
Loss of heating love and lovers? Huh? I’ll just guess it is sufficiently shitty.
“When a man and a fireplace love each other…”
Sounds sooty.
What you did there Chafed…. it was seen.
I like it.
“ Cancer: The Hermit reversed – Prudence, circumspection, treason, dissimulation, roguery, corruption.”
Roguery and corruption sounds promising.
I’m never sure which side of these things I’ll land on.
How it feels to have nukes right now.
https://x.com/i/status/2030660357019103645
The question is: we see Fat Man, where does he keep Little Boy?
In his pants! I’ll be here all week.
Or, how it feels to own twenty-five million slaves.
Speaking of which – I get my bonus this week and my tax accountant will tell me if I get to keep any of it.
The supremacy of the status quo clause
A federal appeals court this week sided with a lower judge’s ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to end temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., issued the 2-1 ruling on Friday.
“The government’s failure to meet its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm alone justifies denying emergency relief that would upend the status quo and increase uncertainty while this appeal proceeds,” the court said.
No government decision may ever be reversed for any reason. No “temporary” program may ever be allowed to expire.
*Unless Trump or his goons made it.
Why do I feel confident that one could point to several violent crimes committed by Haitian immigrants in the last few months, which should be more than sufficient to show “irreparable harm” in keeping them here.
“They commit crimes at lower rates than Americans.”
/Democrats, and Reason Magazine
Welp, Monocle is back to showing every comment as a new/blue comment in Safari on my iPad.
That is all. Carry on.
That happened to me and I found a new version that needs to be installed manually. 4.9.8.
https://gitlab.com/glibertarians/forumProject/-/tree/master
(IIRC it will update automatically from then on as the update link is specified in the header)
I did that a few days ago, and it worked until I opened this post. I’ve hit the update button and it says no updates available.
I’ll let Slummy chip in, then.
Everything works great since I updated to the latest.
Ah, I see I am on 4.9.5, not 4.9.8.
Got 4.9.8 and the all new/blue thing seems to have resolved.
Yep, likely related to that last update but that should be it – I ripped out the code that reimplemented the new comment highlighting since the site started doing that again. Apologies for the trouble.
Next planned updates are just visual tweaks (button placement, etc).
I’m on Monocle 4.9.8, iPadOS 17.7.10 (latest my old iPad 10.1 will support, apparently), Safari. Monocle & Userscripts both vanished overnight. Re-installed, worked until I moved to different tab, then returned. Haven’t been able to get any of it working since. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My guess is some os/safari ‘out of date’ issue, in which case, no biggie, I can live without. I did like what I saw, though 😉
Huh, sorry to hear that. Monocle relies on Userscripts so if they’ve abandoned you your options are limited. I don’t think you even can load old versions of App Store things.
Userscripts re-installed and hasn’t disappeared (yet?)
I’ll keep an eye on it, probably do a hard restart, see what happens.
I’ll let you know if anything useful comes of it, but no worries if it’s intractable. I’ll replace the iPad eventually 😉
Crisis
Donald Trump predicted the destruction not just of college sports but the entire US collegiate system unless the industry is fixed quickly – something some sports leaders who joined him Friday at a White House summit agreed could only happen by raising more money to pay players.
Trump suggested he would write an “all-encompassing” executive order within a week in hopes it would spark action from Congress. He said he expected the order to trigger a lawsuit that could put the issue back in front of the court system that approved industry-changing payments to players for their name, image and likeness.
That new system has left many schools drowning in red ink, while rules governing their payments to players are only slowly taking hold.
“The whole educational system is going to go out of business because of this,” Trump explained, when asked why he was devoting time to college sports with the war in Iran and other issues dominating the headlines.
Stand back and watch it burn.
I like the honesty of saying Congress will only act after the courts have completely fucked everything up.
I don’t understand why this requires any federal involvement. If the program doesn’t make financial sense for a school then cut it or drop down a division.
Because it’s all a grifting sham. Everyone employed by it from the overpaid coaches to the admin are benefiting from it. Keep writing those checks.
Raise more money? I wonder what they mean by ‘raise’.
I wonder where Democrats stand on this issue because putting it “in front of the court system” just means “give the Dems what they want”.
To be fair, the “system” such as it is, is completely broken.
The altruistic “student athlete” fantasy has been on life support for a while and throwing more money at them will hopefully just kill it faster.
I agree with you for the big sports. Universities are merely the farm system for the pro leagues.
The minor sports student athletes still better be students since there is no potential of a pot of athletic gold at the end of school.
Maybe they can find “patrons”. There is no reason they should be tied to colleges other than that’s how it’s been done for decades.
ditto to db: Especially NFL and NBA and there’s absolutely no hiding it. I respect the kids who just say “[Inert whatever] High School” when they introduce players and they say outta what system (school!) they came out of.
MLB seems to do a ‘pretty good’ job with their system. Helps that high school+1yr age kids aren’t in the Bigs. Or exceptionally rarely. “Rocks for Jocks” is a joke I heard from here about a geology major and their popularity with athlete students.
I can’t wait to hear Elizabeth Warren’s solution.
Surely she has heap big ideas.
“Leo: 5 of Coins – Material trouble, loss of heating love and lovers, concordance, affinities, not being invited to a party.”
Nope, nope, nope, nope, yep (but I hate parties. Too noisy and I generally don’t know anybody there).
Why do I feel confident that one could point to several violent crimes committed by Haitian immigrants in the last few months, which should be more than sufficient to show “irreparable harm” in keeping them here.
In P Brooks-topia making a grotesque mockery of the laws and judicial system would constitute “irreparable harm”.
Haha, I crack myself up.
You would have to get rid of a lot more people than the Haitians, most of whom were born here.
The issue is “Can irreparable harm be shown from allowing Haitians to stay here who are otherwise not eligible to be here”.
An affirmative answer would appear to be trivially easy to support.
Assuming, of course, an honest judge is hearing the case.
A nonzero number of ilelgal hatians will commit murder.
If they were not here, there would be zero murders by illegal haitians.
You cannot repair a murder.
I regard that as irreperable harm.
I do not care if irreparable harm is demonstrated or not. All foreigners, including refugees, are here on sufferance and may be ejected at any time for any reason including no reason at all. Citizenship has privileges.
Taurus: The Magician reversed – Physician, Magus, mental disease, disgrace, disquiet.
—-
That was the first half of *last* week. Everything’s always “reversed.” Huh. Things took a shockingly, also predictably, good turn on Thursday, which I took off work in advance. From that appt I got another with a Med psych this month for Rx. I’ve got another sesh with the first chick, kinda to make it look good for the other dude. (My $275 bill was corrected (by me after much phone calls) as I’m indeed still on Medicaid. I’m absolutely against its expansion, but at least for me, they’ve done good. I also live in Carmel. ymmv.)
On one of those drives I got a text and saw at a light that it was from that standardized testing place I contracted with in ’24. I applied on indeed but the company quickly called me to talk about starting dates and such. Last time we did fourth grade English essays from Missouri. I’ll find out soon what this one will be.
Now I kinda know what I’m doing at now-work, the last two days have been pretty slick. (Got a ~$7 tip yesterday…) My last day at the gas station is March 21 and the contract starts April 9 ~ June 21. It’ll likely be shorter than that, I reckon. In my office /closet nook of my room, I still have post-its I wrote to myself to help with the rubric, etc. So. I just gotta clean my desk and my office is already there. Mon-Fri 830-4? That feels like dreamscapey. I like these fortunes better when I can reverse the already reversed reversal. Pretty nice. Mom’s making food and Bro’s family is coming over for early dinner.
Everything’s comin’ up Milouse, here. Fuck you Taurus. Or. Fuck me further, whatever’s workin’ out best.
That didn’t look that long as I typed it. Fuck you, Taurus.
He was also taken aback when told the Supreme Court in 2021, by a 9-0 ruling in a case called NCAA v Alston, had set things in motion to create the system now seen by many as in peril.
“So, the Supreme Court was responsible for this? Gee, that’s surprising,” Trump said.
What a shocker.
https://x.com/abc/status/2030584712763199755
“Her native SF”
Revoke and deport. She made her choice.
I was watching “international baseball” the last couple days (I didn’t even know there was such a thing) and the nationalities there are just as fast and loose as in any other international tournament.
The “British” team was mostly from the Bahamas, for example.
It is rather absurd, ain’t it?
Biggest peeve w all of ’em: We’re not ‘fighting’ the Soviets. The best players have fucking contracts. Were I their employer, I wouldn’t let them play for another team (or ride motorcycles) out of risk. Were I a player, I’d only play if I thought it’d help my post-career resume. I’d also be a great interview /resource for reporters for the same reason.
Wearing a dress the color of the PRC’s flag was a not very subtle FU at the US. I wonder which of her handlers told her to wear that.
Her mom, the car.
Gotta earn that Chicom money or auntie and uncle will end up in labor camp.
Catching up a little. I see lots of crocodile tears from the Iranians about power and water system damage.
Tough shit.
I swear, Garmin Engineers have never driven a car.
Someone decided that the best place to put a camera for the navigator/dashcam was directly below the mounting point to hold the device in the car. They did not provide a software option to rotate the display 180 degrees, meaning the commercially available dashboard mounts all obstruct the camera.
Sure if you had a windshield that was from a 1980s or earlier car, you could use a windshield mount for the five days until the suction cup gives way. Having a modern car, my windshield is somehow five miles long, meaning there is nowhere to attach the device to it that lets me use it while also not blocking my view of the road.
Yay 3D printers!
I’m working on tweaking a mount that connects the device to the dashboard without impinging on the camera’s absurdly wide field of view. I think I’ve got the finalized design.
Apparently NY union leaders can grift off solar energy too.
The idea that solar is abundant energy is, of course, a joke.
Since when does New York get sunlight?
One of the unions is running ads during the tennis tournament about the need for union labor to install a bunch of solar as part of Kathy Hochul’s “energy abundance” plan. I’ve seen it three times already during this one match.
Indian Wells? Diving in and out of that.
Kathy is all over the place on this stuff. That prick Cuomo passed this problem to her and I have seen evidence that she knows it’s all bullshit. But the commies control her party and the state’s largest city so she is in a bit a pickle now.