Pluto and its moons: Charon, Hydra and Nix.

When astrology reads history’s inclination through the stars, the planet Uranus, ruler of the 20-century long Aquarian Age in which we are gradually entering, stands for individual and/or collective revolutionary change if favorably aspected with other signs and planetary configurations. Uranus defines an era’s zeitgeist of freedom and responsibility or licentiousness and false entitlement if negatively aspected. Uranus represents either change toward reform or a descent into chaos. While Uranus and other planets perform their influential roles, they do so underpinned by astrology’s farthest flung planet with Astrology’s farthest perspective, its largest overview. Spring unexpectedly as it might out of Uranian slogans that guided Barack Obama into the White House, Change we can Believe in will become changes that are permanent according to Pluto’s transit of the sign Capricorn, defining a generational era depending on how they are colored by the ruler of human collective transformation.

Shakespeare wrote, “All the world is a stage and we are but the players.” If the bard of Stratford on Avon had been an astrologer, he might say instead, “All the planetary players over stand and often overstep to their own peril a stage that Pluto designs.” The “stage,” or better, the “age” is the thing. Today we stand upon Pluto’s “age” of Capricorn design, one of 12 ages made by the 12-to-30 year transit of Pluto through the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

Let us review the last 71 years of astrology-staged activity under Pluto.

Record cover of Olias of Sunhillow, painted by Roger Dean. This unique and inspiring work by Jon Anderson of the Rock band Yes has been reissued as a CD since 2009. If you want to get into my magical, mystical, musical heart space, check this out!

If our performing planets bombed during Pluto’s sojourn through Leo (1939-1957), they bombed atomically when Pluto made the Leo “sun” split its atom on the earth. If they got “bonged” during Pluto’s transit through Virgo (1957-1972), they did so psychedelically, as Virgo’s mass interests in mind-body health and discernment sought to expand mass consciousness in the 1960s and early 1970s. Pluto in Virgo gave birth to a collective awareness as well that health of the planet should be considered. A sense of collective ecological responsibility emerged for the first time across the world in green movements, green parties, conceiving at its closing curtain eco-message movies like Soylent Green, and rock operas like Olias of Sunhillow.

Pluto in Libra (1972-1983) put all planets on a razor’s edge egging on nations pitted in a Cold War nuclear arms race to find pause and reflection. Thus humanity moved collectively towards Détente and nuclear disarmament treaties. China made the first jump of its great leap forward out of ruinous Maoist cultural revolutionary chaos to an ordered, breathtaking, free-market transformation we see culminating today.

Pluto got dangerously Scorpionic (1983-1995). Regenerate or die, my world. Have that Cold War go hot or die with a whimper and a Berlin Wall falling.

Pluto shot its arrow of Sagittarius (1995-2008) and we all saw its prey falling down in boiling debris clouds as mass mind moved by Pluto to the darker side of Sagittarius potential: religious extremism, Moral Majorities, al-Qaeda shooting World Trade Center towers with hijacked jet arrows. God talking to presidents of the US and Iran. The Middle East leaders wax eschatological while unilateral American Crusaders in Iraq dodged the IEDs, because God told Bush to invade and he invaded. God told Ahmadinejad of Iran to ponder rubbing out Israel from the map of history. God told Netanyahu to pass along the message to Iran: Think Amalek, boobie. An allusion to divinely inspired genocide that bade the Hebrews unleash one of history’s most successful holocausts killing every last man, woman, child, chicken, cow and goat of the Amalekites. Well, as those of you who read your Bible know, Saul took the animals as reward, angering Yehovah, but that is another story.

Pluto had Doomsday postponed when it entered Capricorn in late 2008 a short time after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States on a Pluto-in-Sagittarian platform of sweeping change we can believe. (Uranus just digs that to no end!). However, belief needs the “meat” in Capricorn, sign of the Goat. The first thing Pluto did to get a planet’s goat was cast new mass moods to play with Uranus’ head, Saturn’s limits and funk up Jupiter’s avuncular.

Barack Obama’s popular call for Uranian change pitted itself against the ruler of the status quo (Saturn) in opposition. This Uranus (in mutable and dreamy we can “believy” Pisces) opposing Saturn (in mutable and sometimes fickle Virgo, the harvester of sweet or bitter lessons) is the astrological aspect defining Obama’s first term in office. The opposition was active in the final weeks of his campaign and glittering in night skies above the floodlights of Chicago’s Grant Park victory rally on the globally warmed autumnal election night on which he won the dream presidency (4 November).

The Uranus-Saturn opposition later re-engaged its bout of change wrestling opposition on Obama’s Inauguration Day, 20 January 2009, that at least on the surface and despite Saturn’s grapple, brought to America one of its greatest changes: an African American sworn in as President. Add to that a complete break with Saturnian status quo, breaking the East of the Rockies US birth bias. Obama is the first native-born US Westerner since Nixon; moreover, a native as far West as you can go and remain in a US state unless you were an Aleut hailing from Kiska, AK.

Say “HI” to the African American surfer dude from Honolulu Hawaii. What could be more Uranian “blow your mind” than that?

Yes, yes, I anticipate emails from Birthers in my Internet community who claim Obama waves a bogus Hawaiian birth certificate. Some distinctly racist John Bircher birthers wave their own spurious Internet-manufactured CGI induced evidence of Kenyan certificates with attachments of same soon to flood my inbox once again. Either way, Obama in office is a change in electing the usual Caucasian Wasps East-of-the-Rockies habit, is it not?

So why has Obama’s staged change drama often found itself awkwardly stumbling and progressing with difficulty on History’s odeum? Because history has redesigned the floorboards and moved the floodlights since Obama won his presidential audition. Pluto’s set design is no longer the Sagittarian one he was first familiar with during the campaign and for most of the years of his ambitious rise to prominence since November 1995. The play’s the thing on Pluto’s new stage and it ain’t set up no more for Sagittarian flights of aspiration. Shot your bolt, booby, when it comes to the ambitious can-thinking they can do the president and make the dream so. Why?

Because Pluto, history’s stage manager of civilization’s twelve step transformation plan through the signs of the Zodiac in every 248-year-long orbit, redesigned History’s stage after a 13-year transit of Sagittarius ending 28 November 2008, a few weeks after Obama’s election victory. Pluto’s collective unconscious powers to degenerate or regenerate civilization will henceforth direct history’s show in the theater marquee of Capricorn. The Capricorn season will last far longer than Obama’s standup political show of 4 to 8 years. It will not be over from the time of this blog’s posting in June 2010 for another 14 years. Pluto in 2024 will renovate history’s Bijou from down-to-business Capricorn to the electric blue colors of avant guard-yourself-everybody Aquarius.

The last time Pluto stage-managed History in a Capricorn theater was 1762 through 1777. Most notably running the “show” called the secular Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason. The closing act opened the American Revolution. The birth of America, and its Declaration of Independence is a “To Thee I Sing” musical comedy that inspired the direction of history coming full cycle at the end of the era of modern democracy as we knew it! Now we are back again on Capricorn’s Plutonian stage 248 years later. Are we ready to wager a new power shifting age?

What is listed on the program for this new generation-lasting epic?

An urgent need for a new age of Reason. A profound need for a new American Revolution.

Pluto guides Capricorn mass movements towards redefining political and economic structures. The power brokers are no longer politicians as 248 years ago but the captains of ambition and the kings of corporate industry. The “status” in status quo will pit the world’s people against a new aristocracy.

The new king George’s that do not hear the will of the people come to America not as royalty of blood but rich in profit royalty from the blood line of buck. The English “king” who is not listening to an angry American populace is a person like Tony Hayward, the British CEO of a multi-billion-dollar global conglomerate, British Petroleum. And if mad King George this time around is played by Tony Haywire and does not put a cork in his hole, the American people and president just might rise up in arms once again.

Power elites, like the last Pluto-in-Capricorn transit, will try to control an emergent desire for freedom, independence and popular democracy with suppressive conservatism. Only this time the struggle has taken on a global context. The challenge for democracy of nations this Pluto-in-Capricorn cycle will be a struggle for a workable global model for an emerging global civilization. It can degenerate into a global police state or between now and 2024 we may witness and directly engage in a regeneration of the American dream of democracy on a global scale.

Global government, like it or not, is an irresistible destiny pushed by Pluto in the era of its Capricorn transit. It will happen. Try then to drop your horse-and-buggy brained illusions that the car of this future can run out of gas. Train your genius, your guts and perhaps even risk your lives to be a part of a global and hopefully peaceful revolution against a gathering CEOlygarchy that wants to King George you all under its corporate global empire.

You need a world government. Oh, yes you do! One for, of and by the people, not Korporate Kings.

A world parliament is your destiny. Postpone it, sabotage it, and hand your world to a corporate global dictatorship therefore. Then watch the relatively mild bloodshed of the American Revolution turn into the blood bath and chaos of Pluto’s return to Aquarius in 2024, where it once sharpened guillotine blades in the terror of the French Revolution.

Upon this Plutonian Capricorn stage comes blonde Uranus prancing out of the wings in its transit of Aries starting at the end of last month. The astrological “hero” of our play, performs impetuous Siegfried pitted against a status quo Fafner dragon for the bulk of a decade. Uranus launches rebellion, new thinking and very likely, very soon, will upset systemic norms in political, social and economic structures. Uranus in Aries storms the lair of Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto can consort with conservative dragons hoarding tradition and habitual dysfunction like a greedy treasure piled and padlocked in a cave of dogma against change.

Siegfried-Uranus will have at you with sudden and surprising slices and stabs with needful sword. The dragon of old-style capitalism will be wounded. There will be economic meltdowns, as soon as autumn this year as forecasted in detail in Predictions for 2010. The dragon will bleed the red russet blood of Gulf of Mexican oil.

Uranus will rebel and Pluto in Capricorn will first suppress then later in the near decade battle with change, submit to transform the architecture of politics and commerce on a collective level bringing death and rebirth to civilization’s many systems of power. The dragons fall. There will happen a death of nation states reborn into the global village.

Pluto wrestling with Uranian rebellion throughout the coming decade can be seismic. The planet is interconnected with the will, collective mind and unconscious, massed psychic forces of humanity.

The shifting of great cycles of time such as we are enduring years before 2012 — and far beyond it into the 2020s — will not only cathart upheavals in human consciousness but un-hinge in great paroxysms the sky’s climate in storms and earth’s lands and oceans in temblors.

This July will see visited over our skies one of the most powerful astrological configurations in many decades. Jupiter (ruler of higher minded expansion or self-indulgent, self-righteousness) continues to magnify with either-or influence, Uranus (change or chaos) to which it is conjoined in the early degrees of the sign of Aries (new beginnings, enterprises, or hasty rushes to disaster, war).

Saturn enters our stage on wings of Virgo to tarry for a two-year transit of Libra — the sign of balance or what is out of balance exposed. Saturn is in a cardinal sign now, like Uranus and Jupiter. Read therefore a dramatic test of leadership or lack thereof in history’s pending summer of crises and challenges.

Saturn (ruler of limits and reality checks) in July will return to its Obama-Administration-defining opposition with Uranus (Change versus Status Quo resistance). This time they no longer tug at each other in the theoretical, abstract, mutable signs of the Obama regime’s birth, Pisces and Virgo. Progressed to Cardinal signs Aries and Libra, they demand an end to dreaming and talking. Time to LEAD. This goes for all leadership cliques and aristocracies — political, business or religious.

LEAD. Otherwise suffer Pluto’s Capri-cornering the world into a trap of structural degeneration into Uranian chaos and Saturnian stalemates when the blows of crises come falling, starting in July, and pummel the world with economic, natural and seismic thrusts and rolls through the autumn of 2010.

Starting this summer we will see what mettle our leaders and the peoples of entire nations have. The tables in Pluto’s drama are turned for now against progress. They tilt to leaders and nations applying old-think and past solutions that do not solve our future’s unique and global problems. In early July, Uranus goes retrograde, retreating backwards from progressive change whilst Saturn’s status quo forces have advantage. Uranus will be retreating from change back in mid-August into the retrograde illusions where words trump action in the dreaminess of Pisces until December. Then collective urges for change move forward once again and keep moving forward out of Pisces back into enterprising Aries in March 2011, and will not look back, staying in Aries for nearly a decade hence until it enters Taurus for good in 2019.

Why does Pluto decide the summer, which way the rope tugs in the Uranian-Saturnian pull? Because it will be hovering in Capricorn EXACTLY 90 degrees above the Uranus-Saturn opposition through August. It will point its sword of Damocles hanging down from heaven as the vertical line of a grand inverted T Square of the Uranus and Saturn opposition.

Earthquakes are coming to the polity and the economy. They will ultimately expose systemic cancers in the structures that can no longer sustain our advancing civilization towards its new global model. We are already seeing the influence of this grand square in the bungling of national and corporate response to the ongoing and what could readily become the largest oil spill disaster in history.

We await hurricanes in the Gulf. So far, the hurricane season follows what I predicted for 2010: Hot but dry weather and generally without tropical storms in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. No storms so far at the time of this writing but that could change. A pulse of thunderstorms out of Western Africa crosses the tropical waters of the Atlantic two months early. Will they congeal and become the first major hurricane?

The season is young and it may harbor fewer hurricanes as I predicted last year. I foresaw only one dire supterstorm hitting land in the 2010 Hurricane Season. It would only take one “Hurricane Andrew” to bring hydrocarbon rains and oil-clogged storm surges on shore. May it not hit the Gulf; however, I think the storm I foresee will track to a landfall somewhere on the Eastern Texas-Western Louisiana coast. That might miss the oil slick even though it would devastate the thickest population of refineries and oil storage areas in North America; ergo, a possible cause for triple-digit a barrel costs this autumn subsequently ushering another world economic crisis.

Catch my 3-hour interview with George Noory on Coast to Coast AM, Wednesday, starting 11 pm Pacific time. This blog is but a taste of what we will cover about the upcoming and volatile summer of 2010.

Link to Coast to Coast AM for more details.

There will be earthquakes this summer, perhaps some of the greatest recorded by modern instruments. Prepare for them in Southern California, off the Oregon Coast. Brace for them in China and along the Himalayan mountain fringes and continental shelves of the Indian subcontinent. See a revolution suppressed in Iran coming up earthquakes. Watch for the continued creep of major temblors northward on the eastern half of the Pacific Ring of Fire from Chile all the way to Los Angeles.

Also, note the activity of planets. It is with shocking regularity that great earthquakes and tsunamis happen when Uranus is in square or opposition to other major planets and often in earth signs (signs of earthquakes). Observe the following list of great and devastating quakes of the 20th and 21st centuries. They are evidence that the ways of Uranus conjoining Jupiter, opposing Saturn while in its Grand T Square with Pluto are to be carefully watched and thus all should be prepared for seismic fireworks beginning sometime not long after the firework shows of the American Fourth of July Holiday:

Great Kanto (Tokyo) Quake, 1 September 1923, Magnitude 7.9
The Sun was in Virgo (Earth Sign, earthquakes) opposed Uranus in Pisces.

Honshu, Japan, 2 March 1933, Magnitude 8.4
Uranus was in Aries, as it is again.

Great Chilean Quake, 22 May 1960, magnitude 9.5
The most powerful quake ever recorded by instruments happened when the Sun just transited out of Taurus (earth sign, quakes) with a near square of Uranus in Leo.

Great Alaskan Quake, 27 March 1964 magnitude 9.3
Second largest quake ever seismically recorded happened when Uranus and Saturn were in opposing signs. This time switched from the present opposition with Saturn in Pisces and Uranus in Virgo (earth sign equals quakes!).

Tangshan, China, 27 July 1976, magnitude 7.5
Perhaps the greatest killer quake recorded in modern times with an unofficial death toll exceeding 600,000 souls. Earthquakes often happen around Full or New Moons. It was New Moon on the 27July 1976. Uranus was in Scorpio in an approximate square of Mars, Saturn and the Sun in Leo.

Sichuan, China, 12 May 2008, magnitude 7.9

Vast earth waves and mountain landslides leveled cities carrying off over 80,000 in Central China when Uranus and Saturn were in opposite signs (Pisces and Virgo).

Sumatran Quake and Indian Ocean Tsunami, 26 December 2004, magnitude 9.1 to 9.3

The second largest quake in history recorded by seismograph caused a death toll mostly from its generated tsunami that unofficially killed over 300,000 people. Uranus and Pluto were at work again in a near grand T Square of a near Uranus in Pisces opposition with Mars in Virgo and Pluto in Sagittarius. It would seem that quakes do not always happen exactly on grand T-squares but within the approximate time and location of these.

Chilean Quake, 27 February 2010, magnitude 8.8
The seventh largest earthquake ever measured shook the coastline off Concepción unleashing a killer tsunami into four Chilean fishing ports. A more moderate tsunami raced across the Pacific Ocean requiring millions of people around the Pacific Rim to evacuate their shores. It happened the day before a Full Moon in Virgo squared Jupiter in Pisces. Uranus was also 23 degrees Pisces.

The 2010 Volcano Eruption Swarm
Significant volcanic eruptions have already hit this year in Cost Rica, Equator, and the South Pacific Vanuatu Island chain. The most notable eruption belched weeks of ash from an Icelandic volcano in April that grounded air traffic across Europe for weeks. Uranus and Saturn were in near opposition at that time.

Man-made Volcanic Eruptions of 2010
On the 121st anniversary of Hitler’s birthday the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and burned causing a human-induced and ongoing volcanic eruption of oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico. Guess what Uranus and Saturn were up to on Hitler’s birthday? They were within on degree of an EXACT opposition: Uranus 28 degrees Pisces. Saturn 29 degrees Virgo (an earth sign, as in volcanic).

I am sorry that my message today must be so long and so terrifying, but time is too short to parse these predictions out in the coming weeks. We must watch carefully and brace for Uranus in opposition to Saturn, for they are poised to up heave our summer hanging on Pluto’s grand square as catalyst.

The world of nature and climate must go to war against us because it cannot longer tolerate our locust-like growing host of wasteful consumers, progressing into the deepening mental static of global unconsciousness.

We are fast asleep and Mother Nature must shake us hard so that we can look anew beyond dreams and nightmares that define our sleep. The sleeper must mass awaken, demands Pluto, and perceive what it is to be human.

Death and resurrection is coming to what we once thought and habitually believed is truly of economic, social and spiritual value.

This summer begins a process that will last decades. We begin encountering what does not work and crumbles before our expectations of our leaders, our politics, our economic paradigms, and our social interactions. Our icons of belief stand on clay feet and come cracking down beginning this summer and throughout the 2020s and 2030s.

Putting it another way, humanity has been wearing masks of civilization and humanity at the cost of discovering their authentic humanity and civility of the heart. The coming times will suddenly knock our masks off many times. We will keep putting them back on again, and have them slapped off harder and harder until we wear naked our original face of true and otherwise hidden selves.

Let Uranus opposed Saturn Squared Pluto help you lose your mask so that you can see your “original face” — the one you had before you were born. The one you have now but have forgotten, even though there are meditation techniques I can share with you that could help you re-member, unite, with that original face you have ever-now and forever yours eternal.

Seek the original truth, solve the world’s problems with original genius and give birth to a new human civilization. The signs of summer will launch us.

The truth is that which works.

Gautama Buddha

Get to work! And Celebrate the human adventure.

John Hogue

(15 June 2010)

We are nearly half way through 2010 and as my eBooks posted from last year will detail, a more wild and transformative ride is coming for everyone in the latter half of 2010.

I just want to be clear that this first comment from Michael Mitrosky and my response is from September 2007. I’m encouraged that he feels, at least for himself, that I am that interpreter; however, I think we have nearly a half-century to wait and judge whether my work cuts the presaging muster as delineated in Century 3 Quatrain 94. (See the blog archives for Heirs to Nostradamus 1 and 2.). The body of John Mitrosky’s letter dwells on the Bush Administration. At that time, Bush and especially his Vice President — Cheney — were seriously contemplating and trying to somehow initiate a war with Iran. John Mitrosky is commenting about the following digital book I wrote in early 2007 about all the possible future US-Israeli-Iranian war scenarios. See in Nostradamus Iran. He specifically comments on an important and still active scenario for 2009, which along with the Israeli strike, is described in the chapter “Black Flags of Our Martyrs spreading West” as Iran’s martyr option.

JOHN MITROSKY.
You, Mr. John Hogue are the present heir to Nostradamus. There are 3 important reasons for my conclusion: (1) you are open-minded; (2) you lack arrogance and conceit; and finally, (3) you focus on why Nostradamus is important today. This third point is the crux of the matter. You rightly show that Nostradamus’ description of a war between the West/Israel and terrorists backed by Iran is the heart of Nostradamus’ message for us today. It is a double-edged sword. You reveal the stupidity of attacking Iran on the one hand, but on the other hand, it would not surprise me if right-wing Neo-Con think tanks were using your e-book on Iran to justify attacking now, before Iran takes over Iraq completely, or obtains nuclear weapons. My own feeling is that Iran will continue to try to dominate Iraq, but she will never attack first in an overt manner. Iran wants to play the martyr’s role. Iran wants to be seen in the Arab world as retaliating for aggression perpetrated against her, not starting aggression. If the West/Israel falls into this trap, then Nostradamus’ outline for the saddest, WMD, MAD war will surely come to pass. You spell out the consequences as Nostradamus saw them. You have the power and responsibility to promote your e-book to those in the West/Israel who might start this war. You must try to get them to listen!

MY REPLY
A strange opportunity has been granted to me by the information revolution. I know that all factions in the current world war of international terrorism vs. counter-terrorism read my work. From Langley Virginia to Islamabad, from Jerusalem to Teheran, from Washington DC to Moscow, my observations about Nostradamus and prophecy are read and examined.

When I discovered that those working for President Bush and bin Laden read my work, it brought a sobering responsibility. There are also many good people around the world either working quietly inside their regimes to make changes for the better who read my work and the work of others. I’m trying to submit between the lines solutions to a number of prophetically anticipated crises, or at least, dispense to those on opposite sides of an issue reasons perhaps why we all are programmed to stagger unconsciously from one crisis to the next.

I promise you, John, that I will go on with this work to effect some small part of a more positive future destiny coming for the human race. There is so much to write about that coming new human being. At this stage of the work my writing is dominated with what is wrong or about to go wrong with human destiny and why. In the next two years [2007-2009] as the global crisis of civilization sustainability becomes at last a mainstream concern, my writing will shift more and more to offer solutions to the syndrome of conditioning that has turned human beings into functional robots that repeat the tragedies of history.

Soon, I will provide a permanent bulletin linked on the sidebar of every page of my web site that will speak of Osho’s fascinating prophecy from 1982 called The Noah’s Ark of Consciousness. This article will be the first comprehensive invitation to try techniques from the science of self-observation that I have practiced since 1980. If I have insight, if there is anything that deserves your kind endorsement as an heir of Nostradamus, it was born out of practicing these meditation techniques.”

***

UPDATE–MAY 2009:
It is mid-May 2009, one year and eight months have passed since I wrote my reply. The mainstream mindset is coming around about recognizing many varied dimensions of crises about sustaining our civilization into an ever more ominous looking second decade of the 21st century. We have a new president that at least in words might soon follow them with deeds that change the human course in history for the better.

I have not been able to set up my Noah’s Ark of Consciousness page until more financial support can pay for it. Nevertheless, on this blog page I have planned a number of new prophecies series coming for the rest of 2009. These will look deeper into the mechanics of predictability that prevent human beings from growing into their full potential and enjoying a golden future. I am feverishly building a stock of 50 articles for posting through the rest of spring to the summer. Many of them speak at length about this coming new humanity and how we can give birth to it right here, right now. I need the stock of articles so I can direct my attention to writing my next digital book on the future of Barack Obama.

Thank you all for reading my work.

UPDATE—4 January 2010:
Those articles are written. Many will be posted in the coming months, as they are more pertinent now than back in May. Presidents in Hawaii “vacate” in vacation. People suffer without health care whilst US Congress enjoys a couple weeks of “Vacat”-tion before getting back to the lobbyist—sorry, I mean the “people’s”—work. Read more about what will happen next in Predictions for 2010.

John Hogue

(04 January 2010)

President Barack Obama’s first 100 Days: hope frustration and impatience placated:

PREDICTION
“Obama’s campaign promises did pledge immediate action, and I predict his first 100 days will initiate legislation unprecedented in its scope and revolutionary thrust. The launch of a new ship of state is easier than captaining said vessel through the uncharted seas of [the new age of] the Aquarian Water Bearer. Obama’s power of oratory and charm will have to win back the heart of his frustrated and impatient wife [the American electorate] more than once because change will come far slower than anyone wants.”

ASSESSMENT
Change did come far slower after the historic speed of Obama’s first legislative marathons in the first 100 days. Today, more than ever, the president has to use his power of oratory to placate growing frustrations about the banking industry dragging their feet on reform, while AIG pays off million-dollar bonuses with bailout money. Auto giant GM downsizes in bankruptcy and the Clunkers for Cash program begins Obama’s grand vision of replacing gas guzzlers with fuel efficient cars, but the devil of change is in the details, and money infused by Congress for the program was bungled. Also, green ire is up. The replacement cars are deemed too little on the improved mileage and perhaps will be too late in putting a dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

Congress is in recess with no Health Care legislation passed. Obama coaches patience one moment, gets money for the clunker program just before legislators went on a month vacation. Before he too goes on holiday to the Grand Canyon Obamabluster in a speech outright threatened to push Republican legislator opposition aside if in September when Congress reconvenes they drag their feet on health care reform. By the way, it has a new name. Health Care Reform is euphemistically called “health insurance” reform these days.

The economy has stopped its free fall but the reforms Obama promised, such as lassoing the excesses of Wall Street speculation and investment bank abuses have not been even initiated. The people are growing impatient. Obama’s poll numbers for the first time began to fall in July. Is his honeymoon with the electorate over?

U.S. Unemployment at 10 percent

PREDICTION
“The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimates unemployment will reach 9 percent. I predict it will be 10 percent.”

ASSESSMENT
I wrote the above at the end of 2008. We are currently at 9.4 percent in August 2009 and though unemployment is growing slower (just 240,000 lost their jobs), it ain’t “just” and though slowing, unemployment is still growing. To actually be in a true economic recovery we will need in two years to create jobs for 15 million people. This number covers the currently unemployed along with those of the younger generations coming into the work force as part of the US population growth curve.

Move forward, don’t look back:

PREDICTION
“Obama’s new slogan for the first 100 days in office will be in essence: Move not to the Right. Move not to the Left. Move forward, America!”

ASSESSMENT
To the relief of the right and surprise of the left, the first 100 days had Obama decidedly uninterested in taking revenge, or supporting investigations into supposed abuses of the Bush administration. Obama even used the slogan, “Moving forward,” as his intent and so far, all attempts by the left leaning members of Congress to rattle skeletons from the Bush years out of the closet, such as Vice President Cheney’s purported CIA terrorist hit squad plan, does not go forward with Obama’s blessings or political pull. He will continue moving forward, beyond the Bush Years and leave vengeance far behind for the greater good of change.

More storms for Hawaii in 2009?

PREDICTION
“Blue Hawaii, watch the storms of 2009. The ocean winds, they are a changin’. The recent flooding rains, winds and power outages sending the island of Oahu into darkness for a few days are a taste of climate changes descending in 2009 and beyond.”

ASSESSMENT
In Predictions for 2008, I forecast more stormy weather was in Hawaii’s destiny as climate change sped up and that this would continues for decades to come. The year ended with storms that knocked power out in Oahu (during Obama’s post presidential election vacation that time). Then comes the hurricane season in 2009 five months after I wrote the above. Already three tropical storms (the last two of them a weakening Hurricane-turned tropical storms Lana and Felicia) advance west from the eastern pacific in the island chain’s path. This is not a rare fluke. This is your future Hawaii, for every hurricane season for the next 36 years. You may become the next Florida coast, as the western coast of Mexico becomes your western coast of Africa where hurricains spun your way are born.

There is a whole lot of 2009 left to live through. Come see what is coming:

Predictions for 2009

John Hogue

(08 August 2009)