The Capricorn Festival 2026

Topics (linked to paragraphs): Bombs away! Capricorn Riding the elephant The measure of the soul The lunations Current events Five years The elephant in the room Venezuela The riots in Iran Iran Nuclear madness Lights out Good and evil Minneapolis on ICE Writer’s block In conclusion

Greetings Everyone!

The holiday season has ended here in Italy and the working year has started. The holiday season typically runs from the first part of November through to January 6, the latter date being the day of the Epiphany. The days following the Epiphany date always bring a tinge of sadness, reminiscent of how we all used to feel when their summer vacation was finished and we had to go back to school. The air of festivity is replaced with the realities of work and the daily grind, as it is typically called. We tend to yearn for holidays and vacations, while at the same time not looking forward to the more rigorous demands of daily schedules. Yet, it need not be that way. If we enjoy our work (and school) and have a passion for it going back to work can be as much as a holiday is any real holiday. It is a bit strange, really. Most of us choose the type of work in which we would like to engage when we approach our final years of compulsory education, train for it and feel a sense of achievement when we are finally able to work along those lines. Then, after we achieve our position we are faced with the politics of work, which really amounts to the personalities of other people colliding with ours, or cooperating, depending on our karma and circumstance. Work becomes dreadful instead of joyful when we are constantly kept from doing what we love by the demands of other people and ‘the system’, as it were. And when the monetary compensation and hours of work do not give us any sense of reward, then returning to work becomes a burden. Thus, we yearn for our holidays every year.

Bombs away!: In all, we had a quiet holiday season here. We were invited out this year, which is a rarity. Commonly we invite people over during the holidays. The Christmas market here, as it eventuated had a pretty good turnout this year. And then toward the end we had a strong cold snap, so the Christmas lights here at the house will have to wait to be removed. I’m not complaining. Then, as the New Year started we got a piece of news in our fair city that happens periodically. Part of the city had to be evacuated so that a relic of World War II could be disarmed and removed. As it turns out, whenever there are excavations throughout this region they sometimes uncover bombs that had been dropped over our region that failed to explode. In one way it is very good they didn’t explode at the time. In another way it is both a danger and an inconvenience that they didn’t explode. This particular bomb was a thousand-pounder, located near the hospital, which posed an additional major headache. The immediate space around the bomb was cordoned off with the appropriate blast structures installed. A radius of around 600 meters from the drop site had to be evacuated. Fortunately we were just outside that area.

In the War Museum here, mention is made that there are somewhere around 2,000 of these unexploded bombs still remaining underground in this region. Italy was an occupied country by the Germans after certain point in World War II. Our house was commandeered as a Gestapo headquarters during that period. The mountains to the north of us were a natural barrier to the invading Americans later on. But as the Germans were forced to evacuate and as their bombers flew out, they dropped the loads of their bombs here in our city and points further north as they climbed up over the mountains in order to lighten their load. Then after the fact, the Americans bombed the railway lines, a main spur of which runs through the city, the main roads leading north, also which runs through the city and the bridges further north to stop the Germans from re-entering the north of Italy. For us these days, it is all a very interesting part of our history, but a reminder of the lasting effects of war and the problems that will face nations that have been bombed since then, such as Laos, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and now Gaza. It is actually a long list. War is one of the worst aspects of human activity, an aspect of gross material ambition, a bankers’ game which the materialistic forces of the world unleash on humanity at various times for various reasons – the primary reasons being financial crises and the lust for resources. These thoughts bring us to our current theme, Capricorn, the sign that can represent at the same time all that is best and all that is worst within humanity.^[2]

Capricorn: The sign Capricorn represents the mountaintop experience as well as the mountain beneath it. It represents the path to the summit – the synthesis of the signs preceding – and the experience of the mountaintop in the clear light of consciousness. As such, it represents the material aspect which underlies the mountain peak and all the experiences within the material realms that have led us to that point, and then the escape from the earthly realms thereafter. We have the following, quoted from an ancient law of healing:

“There is naught but energy, for God is Life. Two energies meet in man, but other five are present. For each is to be found a central point of contact. The conflict of these energies with forces and of forces twixt themselves produce the bodily ills of man. The conflict of the first and second persists for ages until the mountaintop is reached – the first great mountain top…”^[3]

The ‘first and second’ refer to the first two initiations for humanity (‘man’ in the quote), the ‘birth’ and the ‘baptism’ as they are allegorically told to us in the New Testament. The ‘first great mountain top’ is the Transfiguration, the first major initiation for humanity,^[4] which allows us first tentative contact with the Lives outside our solar system at the star Sirius. In that initiation we experience the esoteric Capricorn motto: “Lost am I in light supernal and on that light I turn my back.”^[5] Further, “Self and its attainment must be forgotten in service to others. From this there is no escape.”^[6] This latter quote contains the essence of the esoteric motto. Putting it in another context, “Must we not all be born again, baptised into the Spirit, and transfigured upon the mountain top of living experience?”^[7] Forgetting self and attainment is the most difficult obstacle for personalities, yet this is what is faced by us at the mountain top. In ages long past it was a particular failure for a certain segment of humanity, which is now being faced by the elites, oligarchs and nationalists in all nations. There is more we can say on this, but we will leave it for now. There is too much else to cover. But perhaps you might gather which group might be representative of that. Exceptionalist thinking is a by-product of long ages of evolution and must eventually be abandoned as one absorbs oneself in service.

Riding the elephant: We have looked at the shamatha diagram many times in these letters, wherein we see the rainbow bridge of light, the antahkarana, which forms the path of light which leads us to our ultimate liberation in Pisces. That bridge of light, that rainbow bridge begins with the completion of the antahkarana, which is the ultimate goal in Sagittarius. That is shown in the diagram with the completely pacified elephant (the lower, personal mind) laying beside the meditating monk at the base of the mountain. The experience in Capricorn (the monk riding the elephant outwards on the rainbow bridge) gives us access to the ‘supernal realms’. Without the completed antahkarana the ‘traveling outwards’ is not possible. In Aquarius the monk returns riding the elephant. Hence we have the building of the antahkarana constantly presented to us in the Alice Bailey material, and via other traditions in other works. The main work before us then in human evolution is the complete pacification of the lower so-called ‘monkey mind’ along with overcoming the mental inertia represented by the elephant in the diagram.

Because we are at a point of real crisis now in world affairs this light of the soul, the rainbow bridge, is being called forth in human affairs in a way we had not seen since the last World War. Little do most people realize what is at stake if humanity as a whole does not prevail over the materialistic forces that seek to keep us rattled, afraid and at odds with each other. And those forces are well advanced in their plans. We recall the quote above regarding the law of healing and the ‘conflict of these energies with forces and of forces twixt themselves’ because humanity as a whole, including the materialists is the macrocosm of each of us individually. Each one of us who overcomes the material pull of our lower nature and is able to give light to this world pushes the door closed on the furtherance of the materialists’ plans. Therein is our opportunity, to build a lighted world, where unity, community and cooperation prevails.

The measure of the soul: It is a curious phenomenon in human existence that we must first experience all the joys and sorrows of the material realm before we can ascend to the so-called mountain top experience. At each stage along that path, again represented for us in the sum total of the shamatha diagram, there is some aspect of our material attachment against which we must prevail in order to attain the next step. But perhaps we can begin to recognize the progress we have made as humanity toward the goal of a lighted world in the following quote, regarding the growing awareness and expression of the soul of humanity:

“…The sense of responsibility is one of the first indications that the soul of the individual is awakened. The soul of humanity is also at this time awakening en masse, and hence the following indications:

1. The growth of societies, organisations and mass movements for the betterment of humanity everywhere.

2.The growing interest of the mass of the people in the common welfare…Today this interest has reached down to the depths of the social order and all classes are keenly alive and alert to the general, national, racial or international good. This is very well and a hopeful sign.

3. Humanitarian and philanthropic effort is at its height, alongside of the cruelties, hatreds and abnormalities which separativeness, overstressed national ideologies, aggressiveness and ambition have engendered in the life of all nations.

4. Education is rapidly becoming mass effort and the children of all nations from the highest to the lowest are being intellectually equipped as never before. The effort is, of course, largely to enable them to meet material and national conditions, to be of use to the State [meaning ‘promoting the general welfare’ of all people within the State] and no economic drag upon it. The general result is, however, in line with the divine plan and undoubtedly good.

5. The growing recognition by those in authority that the man in the street is becoming a factor in world affairs. He is reached on all sides by the press and the radio, and is today intelligent enough and interested enough to be making the attempt to form his own opinions and come to his own conclusions. This is embryonic as yet, but the indications of his effort are undoubtedly there; hence the press and radio control which is found in all countries in some form or another, for there can never be any permanent evasion of the hierarchical structure which underlies our planetary life. This control falls into two major categories:

• • • Financial control, as in the United States.
    • Government control, as in Europe and Great Britain.

The people are told just what is good for them; reservations and secret diplomacy colour the relation of the government to the masses, and the helplessness of the man in the street (in the face of authorities in the realm of politics, conditioning decisions such as war or peace, and theological impositions, as well as economic attitudes) is still pitiful, though not so great and so drastic as it was. The soul of humanity is awakening and the present situations may be regarded as temporary…In order to bring this about, and thus completely change the present world attitudes and wrong emphases, the drastic and catastrophic present planetary situation has been permitted.”^[8]

The last bolded points may seem contradictory to the awakening of the soul of humanity, lest we forget that it is most often suffering – especially witnessing the suffering of others these days – that brings people ‘closer to God’. That is, that suffering awakens awareness of and invokes the soul. That governments resist and try to set back this awakening of humanity is to be expected. But it is not so much governments who are provoking all the violence and unrest we see around us, but the vested interests who control the politicians in governments, with government leaders in many cases simply being mouthpieces for the vested interests. We scarcely know who those vested interests are these days, but they are however slowly being revealed. They would prefer not to be exposed, preferring to keep themselves and their family dynasties out of the public eye. Hence, we have the failure and resistance of successive administrations in the US to release the Epstein files, as but one example. Their selfish interests (though not in every case) is also to be recognized, at first resisted and then made irrelevant pursuant to the massed intentions of the public toward the greater good for all of humanity. It will take time for this to eventuate, as we might imagine.

Zionism, for instance, will take another century to resolve fully,^[9] though the current crisis is to be seen as a sort of ‘Stalingrad moment’, or ‘turning point for the USA’ in that battle. The first thing that must happen is for humanity to be made aware of the facts across the board. Nowhere is this more apparent now than in the UK and the US, and increasingly across the EU. It is precisely because the public has become aware that governments are clamping down on dissent, not acting in the interests of their public. In what is morally acceptable in terms of simple human dignity, the materialist interests now seek to control all media exposure and to single out and sideline or even persecute the most prominent truth-tellers in the public eye. Their efforts smack of desperation at their loss of control, along with their fears of being exposed for their corruption, crimes and perfidy.

We may well ask, returning to the quote, why the world situation has been permitted (and by whom) to come to this point? Well, firstly, we have permitted it, largely by passivity and ignorance of the matters at hand. That ignorance has been largely imposed by state actors as well. The truth has been kept from us, slowly revealed by a few intrepid souls who have risked looking beyond the veil of state secrecy, and the fewer still inside state apparatus who have called out the wrongdoing of their own governments. At great risk to themselves, they have often paid the ultimate price. But because they have done so their spiritual reward will be great. Israel, for example, has deliberately targeted and killed upwards of 300 Palestinian journalists in Gaza (in Arabic) since 7 October, with hundreds more there reporting interference in their trade by other means from the Israelis.

From the quote above, people who speak out and counter the official Washington and European establishment line are routinely sanctioned, lose their jobs and livelihoods or are ‘de-platformed’, ‘de-banked’ and silenced. Foreign officials like Francesca Albanese are a case in point. Jacques Baud and Scott Ritter are yet others, to name a few. These acts are meant to scare us in order to keep us compliant. But since when have we as humans ever accepted tyranny for very long? The threat is largely financial these days. In the UK and Europe if one speaks the truth and stands for justice against state policy, one risks being arrested and jailed, as we see in the UK and Germany, especially. Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Asa Winstanley are a few of the journalists who have been detained and faced charges for their journalism in the UK. George Galloway (love him or loath him) has been forced into self-exile with his family. And we should not forget Julian Assange, who was jailed in the UK for five years. The US is not squeaky clean in that regard, either. Freedom of speech is selective, according to the whims of the state. All of our cries of ‘Free speech!’ fall on deaf ears when it collides with the whims of the state. In such instances, the law is an ass, oft quoted from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Capricorn represents the elites in our society – the best, the worst and the ugly. They tell us what to believe and how to think and act, and then pay homage to the virtue they profess with their hypocrisy when it suits them. There will be a bit more to add at the end, but for now we move on to the lunations that have started what will be a momentous year.

The lunations: There is quite a bit to report regarding new and full moons for this letter. The full moon for Capricorn took place on 3 Jan 2026 at 10:03 UTC. The new moon took place on 18 Jan 2026 at 19:52 UTC (06:52 AEDT on the 20^th). That new moon is what will feature for this letter. The next full moon is 1 Feb 2026, just before the start of the Year of the Fire Horse (starting on 4 Feb at 04:01 CCT). The Four Pillars are based on the Chinese solar calendar, which begins usually on the 4^th of February – their li ch’un, or first day of spring. The lunar New Year this year is of particular interest, which begins on 17 Feb, which also happens to be a solar annular eclipse, square to Uranus. That eclipse also features the synodic conjunction of Saturn and Uranus at the Aries world view point. The lunar New Year always begins at the new moon of Aquarius. This Year of the Fire Horse will be full of dramatic changes in the world’s political and economic systems, covered in full in the coming Chinese New Year letter. The start of the lunar New Year will be followed two weeks later by the full moon for Pisces, a total lunar eclipse at the south node. With all the preceding in mind we move on to consider this new moon on 18 January.

The lunation figure for the Capricorn new moon this year features a hybrid bundle type of chart, which points to a particularly powerful focus in a singular direction. All of the planets except for Jupiter and Uranus are contained in the space of a trine, with Mars at the lagging edge and Uranus at the leading edge. The Saturn/Neptune conjunction forms the apex of the triangle. There is a stellium of the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Mars all within two degrees of each other, all trine to Uranus. The stellium and Uranus will strongly activate Donald Trump’s chart, and not in an easy manner. He will be facing particularly strong stresses. Jupiter stands alone as the leading planet in the chart (the first planet to rise) and has just completed the upper square to Trump’s natal Jupiter, meaning he will be extremely busy with matters at hand and particularly at home and with Europe. He is adamant about buying Greenland, but Denmark is unmoved. Money can’t buy him the love of Denmark. And the US already has a base there anyway, which has been there for decades. The chart for the US shows particular belligerence with a tendency to poor decision-making for the remainder of this quarter and into the next. We cannot discount anything in the immediate future because crisis points such as we are experiencing are as always, unpredictable – especially considering the United States at this juncture. With these points in mind we move on to the current events.

Current events: The following events have taken place since the start of this year:

• Seeking to boost his flagging ratings and to distract attention from other matters (you can probably guess what those ‘other matters’ might be), Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on ISIS cells in northwestern Nigeria. It was his Christmas gift to Nigeria (?). The ostensible reason for doing so was to protect Christians, keeping in mind Israeli Jews hate Christians and routinely abuse them in Israel, while Jolani’s gangs in Syria (which we now support) routinely persecute and sometimes kill Christians. There is hardly a peep about that in the mainstream media. We are not sending cruise missiles into Israel or Syria. Did we mention Nigeria has large reserves of oil? It is also rich in other resources.
• Zelenskyy met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago regarding peace proposals for Ukraine. It went nowhere, but it produced other results…
• The same day as the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting 91 drones launched from Ukraine targeted Putin’s residence in Novgorod (Valdai), under which there is a huge command bunker buried deeply underground. This was the third such strike against nuclear strategic assets against a nuclear superpower. Russia took their time, analysed the responses and sent a massive strike against Ukraine’s energy sector and its drone factories. The strike included an Oreshnik missile against a critical strategic facility close to Lvov. For those readers interested in the details of the missile there is a long technical analysis on it. More below…
• Yoel Alter was indicted in Mexico on child trafficking offenses. He is Israeli with dual Romanian citizenship, a leader of the Lev Tahor sect, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect which has branches in the US among several other nations. His arrest and indictment has international implications. Epstein and his ‘clientele’ were not the only child traffickers.
• The Israelis just signed a strategic agreement with Cyprus and Greece for control of the Eastern Mediterranean and its energy resources. It is really about countering Turkish expansion and influence. The Jews, Greece, Australia and Paris all share the same astrological signs, (Virgo and Capricorn) which will be noted further on here.
• Israel recognized the breakaway region of Somaliland as an independent state, the 2^nd nation to do so. Taiwan was first, even though Taiwan is not an independent nation. The UN does not recognize Somaliland. There is a rather balanced though pro-Israeli accounting of why Israel did so in the Suggested Viewing, below. As to why they did so, geography matters. This will serve to further destabilize the region. The day the recognition was announced the Samaroon tribe in the Awdal region of Somaliland were out in the streets in opposition to the recognition. Netanyahu is grasping at straws with these moves and is in a race against time to save himself. This is a developing story.
• ‘Project Sunrise’ has been unveiled for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip. The concept has been put forward by Kushner and Witcoff – two of the chief Trump real estate moguls – purportedly seeking to transform the Strip into a luxury resort. If it has not been clear by now, Trump and Co. are seeking real estate deals instead of peace. Problem is, nobody has asked the Palestinians what they think of this project.
• Alleged massive protests in Iran have broken out about the collapsing value of the Rial and high inflation. This suspiciously coincides with Netanyahu’s visit to the US. It is probably best to take these reports with a lump of salt. The videos on social media claiming large protests against the regime have been edited, with one even showing a police officer with two heads, seated on his motorcycle. The chart clearly showed the 12-Day War (only the event chart was shown in that post). However, there is rumbling of another coming war with Israel there. These reports may be preparatory to such a war, in order to stir uncertainty within Iran. True to form, the mainstream media parrots these videos as being true, without even a bother to fact check the claims. If you want to see something interesting, do a Google lens search on the BBC lede photo at the link and scroll through the results.
• Trump claimed a land strike had been executed in Venezuela. CNN claimed the CIA did it. A small port was the alleged target. There is no physical evidence of such a strike. It was a practice run, as it turns out.
• There have been major financial movements in the metals trading sector. Prices for gold and silver are on the rise, sharply, especially in Asia. And that will eventually flow on to the West. The reason for the sudden shift is not due to speculation, as people might suppose. The reason is due to selective scarcity, pushed mainly by China, Russia and a few other states. Western banks are also hoarding, the latter seeking to drive up the price for profit. The Chinese are hoarding for industrial sourcing.
• Trump bombed Venezuela and snatched Maduro from his residence. There was internal betrayal involved. We begin with this topic after a few preliminary statements, because the implications are far-reaching.
• China and Canada just signed large trade deals and cut tariffs. Mark Carney cited Trump’s tariffs as the main reason, saying Canada has to diversify from American trade. The relationship between the two nations is simpatico astrologically, with both nations having Taurus soul and Libra personality. The Sinophobes and trolls have rolled out in force in social media as a result. Canadians can expect the pressure from the US to be intense and unrelenting. I hear Canada’s tar sands resemble Venezuela’s oil…and there is a lot of it.

Five years: This letter is not so much a summary of the year just past, but of the past five years. The past five years of course started with the pandemic, which we now know was part of a wider agenda by several actors, including the WEF, which includes the Davos crowd, the military-industrial complex in the United States, with the largely Western world following in lockstep with the lockdowns. The end of the travel restrictions toward the end of 2021 were quickly followed by the sharp increase in bombardment of the Donbas region in Ukraine by Ukrainian forces, to which the Russians responded by invading eastern Ukraine at the start of 2022. Roughly 2 years after that the Palestinian breakout on October 7 happened in 2023 followed within 24 hours by the bombardment of the Gaza Strip by the IOF, resulting in the genocide there. Needless to say, the first half of this decade has not exactly been a walk in the park. And now we face another set of events.

The major events just mentioned seem to have followed roughly a two-year sequence, which brings us up to 2026, our present year. In terms of what we might expect, the conflict in Ukraine will continue as it has for the past almost 4 years now until exhaustion and the capitulation of the West and Ukraine ends it. In terms of the genocide in Gaza, still ongoing by the way, that too will continue until either humanity as a whole or The Resistance brings it to an end. The Israelis will not stop. 2025 saw the first year of the Trump administration, which has done anything except make America great again or bring peace, and on the whole has made the world more unsettled and restive. As to whatever else might happen this year, the situation appears to be approaching an economic crisis of large proportion, which would happen swiftly if Iran is attacked.

The elephant in the room: I have been asked on several occasions why I think the wider world has not stepped in to end the genocide in Gaza. Further to that the same can be asked about the conflict in Ukraine. There is no one easy answer to the questions, as to why the world is not stepped in. There are many reasons for it, the primary one being that both Ukraine and Israel have been extensions of Washington and NATO powers. We will not go into Ukraine here just yet, but there are some things to say about that a little later in this piece. As to Palestine, we want ‘the world’ to do something, but we could also ask why are we as individuals not doing enough, if anything? There is an unfortunate sense of powerlessness that has pervaded much of the public. The primary answer is, to confront Israel and force a stop to the genocide requires going up also against the United States. Israel is a direct extension and outpost of the US and the three main European powers – the UK, France and Germany. The threat from those nations should someone try to intervene would be both military and financial. Until very recently none of the other world powers felt strong enough to do anything and the wider world was either beholden to the US financially or not united.

It has also been only recently that the Western military and financial power, once thought to be all-powerful, has been greatly weakened since the start of this century. Nations one by one are starting to push back against threats of economic sanctions and military force. The police action in Ukraine has exhausted the West militarily and financially. The United States, once the world’s hegemon, is now revealed to be increasingly a regional power, capable militarily of only short, cinematic attacks like we just saw in Venezuela, but unable to fight a war lasting more than a month, like we have seen in Yemen and in the 12-Day War. And even there in the Western Hemisphere, the United States is not all-powerful. Resistance is growing in the Caribbean region, and both China and Russia have been making inroads into South America.

In addition to the power of the military and finance, based in the SWIFT system, the Western public over the years has been lulled into a sense of relative ease and safety and has been soundly conditioned by the legacy media outlets along certain lines of belief. We have been fed a copious amount of misinformation regarding certain nations, nations which we need not mention here. They are all too familiar to us now. But perhaps the biggest factor that has kept us in the West from delving into the realities of how the world has functioned since World War II has been the emphasis on idealism across the West. Especially to note is the propaganda, as we should really call it, that our ideals are the best for the world. That is now being shown to be a weakness instead of a strength. There are so many people across the West who feel that we are in some grand ideological struggle for the soul of humanity, when in reality what we are facing is a struggle for security and sovereignty by certain nations – again which we need not name, as we know them well – against the imperialism and professed exceptionalism expressed by certain members of Western nations.

Added to the preceding we have the exceptionalist belief by the elites in the West, a significant number of whom are Jewish – yes we can say that – who believe the world is theirs for the taking and that they know best how the world should be run. All our Western grand ideals of freedom, democracy, human rights, are being shown to be simply conveniences, loudly parroted by our media, lulling us into a sense of our supposed correctness. It is high time that we as the general public look squarely at facts on the ground for what they are instead of what we feel or think they should ideally be. Having grown up in the West, it has taken me some years to see past the propaganda and conditioning, and in so doing to come to an appreciation of what other nations are facing as well as our own situation. Idealism is a legacy from the 6^th ray, rapidly passing out, being gradually replaced by common sense and the growing sense of our common humanity with all nations. The wider world has rejected the idea that kidnapping of Maduro was ‘the right thing to do’, for instance. The recognition is that the US acted in its own self-interest in that attack, and that it was a grab for resources. This is but one example of vice paying its tribute to virtue.

Venezuela: We begin our investigations into current events with this topic, since it coincided with the full moon. I posted an analysis of the mundane aspects of the kidnapping of Maduro which you can see at this link. We will not be covering that here. What is more important to our investigations are what this actually means to humanity. We begin our understanding of this with the following statement: Trump did the world a huge service by invading Venezuela, in that he laid the Empire bare. Awareness is the first step toward resolving injustices, such as has just been committed against Venezuela. The United States, in this context Washington and Wall Street, has a long history of such practices and can no longer hide behind its professed high ideals as it pursues its imperial ambitions. These imperial ambitions are what Washington likes to call ‘American interests’. People who have been watching and analysing Washington’s ambitions over the years have long known that Washington sees the United States as an empire. Since World War II especially it has sought to become, and was for time, the world’s sole hegemon. That is no longer the case. Hence we see its efforts toward retaining or more accurately regaining that hegemony. Venezuela was a part of that.

The West as a whole has long offered its tribute of hypocrisy to hide behind its professed ideals. With the snatching of Maduro the entire world including some Western nations see the situation for what it is – the United States as a bully, especially through economic and occasional military power. There is a video in the Suggested Viewing (below) by Col. McGregor that lays this out very simply. As best I can see, the video is authentic, meaning it is not AI generated. The man makes some very good points. Since 1971, when the US went off the gold standard and began financialising virtually everything via fiat currency, the living standards in the West have deteriorated to the point where they are now. This financial capitalism, otherwise known as neoliberal capitalism, has seen certain crisis points, notably boom and bust cycles and increased military spending by the US in an effort to maintain its dominance. All of that has been turned on its head with the recent actions of the Trump administration, realizing that Trump is not the architect of those actions. He is not a strategic thinker, nor does he actually run the show. And we cannot lay the blame at Trump’s feet solely. These are policies that have long been in place in key Western establishments – the United States, the UK, France and Germany to be explicit. The British played a large part in the evolution of our current situation also, with the collapse of its empire at the start of the two World Wars and then its financial offshore Empire which has gone to hide a colossal amount of corporate, national and personal perfidy in crime, keeping it from the public eye. And that brings us back to Venezuela.

As Trump in his unrecognized act of service stated, Venezuela was about seizing the oil and resources in that nation. It had nothing so much to do with Maduro. There were many hidden reasons why Venezuela was on the menu as well. If we want to get right to the heart of the reason why Trump authorized the kidnapping of Maduro, it was to give his ratings a bump upwards in the midst of his domestic woes. Other than that, the US wanted to see regime change in Venezuela. But that too has been turned on its head, because the chavista government remains in place. He now says he runs the country, meaning Venezuela, but Washington is a long way from that. And in a typical miscalculation on the part of the Washington establishment, the oil that they claim to have secured is not the prize that it once appeared or was made out to be.

Venezuelan oil has the consistency of tar, it is difficult to extract as well as expensive, and actually poses a threat to the oil fracking operations within the US itself, because flooding the market with that oil would lower the price of oil worldwide, to the point where fracking would no longer be viable. But the Venezuelan oil industry’s infrastructure would need extensive repairs over years to even come close to full production. In other words, seizing that oil and flooding the oil market, which is already in a glut, would seriously negatively impact the American oil industry. Further to that, the major oil companies in the US have told Trump that they are not going into Venezuela anytime soon, if at all, due to security concerns, lack of stability in that country, and the costs involved, which over the coming years would amount to over $180 billion in an effort to restore the Venezuelan oil industry. And then on top of that, the Chinese have contracts worth of tens of billions of dollars with the Venezuelans, which if the Americans try to take over would land the American oil companies and Washington in lawsuits for years on end through every international court imaginable. The Chinese have already threatened such.

The American military and many Americans are seeing the Venezuela operation as a great tactical feat and are a bit giddy about it. But that in itself is nothing really to celebrate. The blowback from that operation will not be long in coming. Delcy Rodriguez, the acting President of Venezuela now, is very experienced in dealing with Americans, is loyal to the Bolivarian revolution, and is a patriotic Venezuelan. She will not be moved by any of Trump’s threats. And if the US tries to remove her, Washington is in for the surprise of their lives. They would have to occupy Venezuela to install a US friendly government, which would meet with stiff resistance from an armed and angry Venezuelan public. There are now very large demonstrations in Venezuela (for example) for the return of Maduro, or at the very least his release from US custody. As noted in the blog post, linked above, Venezuela is in for confusion and uncertainty for at least another year. But as for regime change in that beleaguered nation, it would be a serious miscalculation on the part of the Washington establishment to believe that Venezuela would just roll over. Washington has been trying since the beginning of this century to pull Venezuela back into the US orbit and thus far has failed. The first domino in their plans has yet to fall, which Washington hopes would weaken Cuba.

The main reason for Washington’s difficulties with herding Venezuela back into the fold is because of the will of the people remaining in Venezuela for maintaining the Bolivarian ideal. As to the ex-pats living in Miami and other parts of the world, those are largely the top 5% who were living in relative luxury in Venezuela when Chavez took over the country. The celebrations presented to us of Venezuelans that we saw on social media with the kidnapping of Maduro were not in Venezuela. I have fact-checked them. There is a useful free tool for doing so. No doubt there were probably some small celebrations within that nation, but for the largest part, the people of Venezuela are very angry at the United States. And another effect of Maduro’s kidnapping has been that it has galvanized the streets – the common people – across Latin and South America against the United States. For now, we wait and see what the Trump administration’s next moves will be. Then there was the other major event that coincided with the full moon – the riots in Iran.

The riots in Iran: This other event that roughly coincided with the full moon this month was linked to Maduro’s kidnapping astrologically. It was an interesting event to watch unfold regarding the transits to Iran’s current chart. The conditions for war were shown clearly in the 12-Day War. There are no such indicators now. That doesn’t mean there will not be an overt attack on Iran, but if so it will not be so catastrophic and would definitely not result in regime change. What showed with these protests and consequent very violent riots was indicated by a Mars transit square to Iran’s Pluto, which showed the actual cause – subterfuge, treachery, gangsters and gang leaders, the intention to provoke havoc in the populace, espionage and so on. There was also the mass media psy-op in the West grossly inflating casualty numbers and misrepresenting the protests themselves.

Iran: There is much to this which needs to be parsed. Before we do we really need to talk about Iran. I wrote the linked article almost 8 years ago now during the first Trump administration. The article is in two parts and is dated now, especially regarding Syria, but the basics give us an idea about the realities in that nation. Regarding Syria, Assad basically gave up, which is why Syria fell, but that is another story. And at the time of that writing the connections between both Russia and China with Iran were much more tentative. The main point of linking that article here is about the society itself and why it will likely never fall to the Zionists or to the US. The Iran we are told exists with its repression and mistreatment of women is a far cry from the reality.

Firstly these protests erupted on the same day as Netanyahu’s visit to Trump at Mara Lago. The two events are not coincidental. Once information began to emerge about the true causes of the protests which had since turned into riots, two causes were evident: firstly there were protests against the collapse of the Iranian currency and a sharp rise in inflation (currently around 45%). The cause of this is twofold – for fiscal policy on the part of the present government and currency manipulation in Dubai. People in Iran are finding it very difficult to live as a result and the government is hamstrung, partly due to sanctions and partly due to the manipulations of currencies by foreign actors. Secondly, there were paid agitators, which is easy to do once a currency collapses. We know well that both the United States and Israel want to see regime change in Iran. The US can print money ad infinitum – which may in the end cause America’s downfall – but which means that they can pour money into covert operations within any state and pay off people to engage in these protests. That is exactly what has happened in Iran. In addition, there are, or have been, sleeper cells of Mossad agents within Iran itself. These have all been coordinated through social media posts and phone apps like WhatsApp.

Once the cat was out of the bag regarding the foreign influence Iran shut down the internet. Elon Musk then began activating Starlink stations within Iran. The Iranians cut the normal internet within Iran to stop the infiltration of foreign influencers. But Starlink is a bypass from the internet, which has been used to great extent in Ukraine. That allowed the foreign actors to continue their agitation within Iran, which by then had become quite violent, peaking on the 9^th of this month. However, the Iranians and the Russians are working very closely now regarding security issues and Iran has installed Russian jamming equipment within Iran, rendering the Starlink installations useless. Now those installations are being hunted down and the owners of them taken in for questioning, as it were. In addition, most of the rioters are generation Z, fitting a pattern that has arisen in several nations as of late. Younger people are more easily swayed by ideology, hence making them easy targets for such infiltration. They are also more media savvy. However, since the Starlink installations had been jammed the protests and the riots stopped. Those have been replaced by huge pro-government demonstrations across Iran, which the Western media is loath to admit.

The aim with these riots all along has been to destabilize the country of Iran to the point where a military intervention becomes much easier. Those rioters were not some ‘rag-tag network of activists’ as claimed in The Gray Lady. They were trained, formed and backed by the CIA and Mossad. Along that line, Kurdish militants in the west of Iran were coaxed into inciting an insurrection, which was quickly put down. As matters stand in Iran at the moment, it looks as if the efforts at destabilization of the country have failed. Some 800 of those ‘rag-tag activists’ have been rounded up and face public hangings, from which the Iranians told Trump they would refrain if he promised not to attack Iran. Thus far, the attack most comments were saying was immanent has been at least pushed back. At the same time, Washington and the Israelis know their window of time for an attack on Iran is very short. There are reports of very heavy Western military build-ups in the region. The only thing lacking thus far are the carrier strike groups that are usually present when such an attack takes place. For their part, the Iranians have stated that any attack by either the US or Israel will provoke heavy retaliation against all American bases in the region and Israel itself – a regional war that would be all-out and last for months, closing the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians know quite well that the US and Israel are very closely linked and share both goals and intelligence. There is even talk out of Iran now of a pre-emptive attack against Israel, as reported in the Israeli press. So, we wait and see, meditating for peace but at the same time preparing for the worst. That brings us to the attack on Putin’s residence, the third ‘coincidence’ with the last full moon, and one that was afr more dangerous.

Nuclear madness: The attack on Putin’s residence with 91 drones has been tracked back to Ukraine. The targeting for those drones, however, came from the United States. Some of those drones were shot down, with the rest being downed by electronic warfare. Those drones that were not destroyed were dismantled and the targeting modules removed. Since then, they have been analysed, which has shown US involvement conclusively. One of those modules was presented to the American military attaché in Moscow. The Russians know full well what all this means. This latest attack comes after two other attacks on Russia’s strategic nuclear sites, the other two being the strike on the Russian over-the-horizon radar which is used to detect incoming missiles, and the other being the spider’s web attack on the strategic bomber fleet, which was hailed as some sort of great tactical feat by the Ukrainians. Taken together, the message from the Western powers appears to be, “watch your back. We can touch you anywhere at any time.” Alastair Cook has given the following analysis of what this really means. He starts, regarding the attacks themselves:

“They were nothing. Neither the strategic bomber fleet nor the early warning radars nor the bunker in the compound have anything to do with what’s happening in Ukraine. These are all to do about a nuclear war. And what is the message therefore the CIA’s sending? We don’t quite know what the message is. And I don’t think in Moscow they are sure one hundred percent, but it seems to be saying, “You know, if you’re going to push back against us, Moscow, if you’re going to push back about Iran, about Venezuela or anything else, we can take you out. We can hit your strategic bombers. We can hit your radars and we can hit your command center. We’re just giving you a little sample to see that you understand this.” And I think this is a very worrying message.

And I think the sentiment in Moscow that’s coming out – and I’ve seen this very clearly – is that it is finished. Negotiations are off the page. There is no point in having negotiations with Trump. It is just not believable. This can completely appoint. We just now have to continue our path without negotiations. Continue doing what we were going to do in terms of Ukraine and more widely prepare against whatever it is that the Americans are thinking about. And they realize, you know, the articles in the New York Times in these last days have spell this out – that this was greenlighted by Trump, the attacks on the refineries, on the shipping and as a means of increasing leverage on Putin. It was all spelled out in the New York Times. Now what their purpose was in putting it out there is another difficult question to answer. But nevertheless it’s been done and no one has pulled back from. In fact they’ve confirmed it. And Russia has handed over the flight circuit board of one of the drones showing exactly what is the telemetry and the detail that was put into it by the operators to attack Valdai [the command center]. So there is no doubt…”

So the strikes were part of a larger context. There are several things of note. Firstly, each of the strikes occurred during negotiations, while eyes were on the negotiations instead of preparations on the ground. We have seen this consistently over the past few years. The negotiations in Istanbul in 2022 caused the Russians to withdraw from the outskirts of Kiev. Russian goodwill in that action resulted in the peace terms that had been agreed upon to be thrown in the trash. In other theaters, General Soleimani was assassinated on a diplomatic mission on the anniversary date of the kidnapping of Maduro. Hezbollah chief Nasrallah was assassinated during negotiations. The strike on Doha was executed during negotiations. Negotiations with Zelenskyy at Mar-a-Lago are yet another example. In each case the leaders involved were in place for negotiations at the time of their assassinations except for the latter. What people may not realize is that if Putin had been assassinated then the consequences for Western governments would have been dire. Russia would have had to declare war on the offending power. Threatening and attempting to inflict strategic defeat on a nuclear power is not a trifling matter. There was also an attempt on Putin’s helicopter when he was flying into the Donbas an earlier date. The Russian response to the most recent attempt on Putin duly came, but it was not acknowledged as such in the Western press.

Lights out: On the night of January 8 the Russians launched a massive retaliatory strike on infrastructure around Kiev and other cities that has left major Ukrainian cities in the dark, without power, without water and without heat. The temperature this time a year typically ranges well below zero and mayors in Ukraine are telling their citizens to find other accommodation where there is heat at least. But more than that, we had the strike of the single Oreshnik missile in far western Ukraine at what is now thought to be (or have been) a large aircraft repair and drone manufacturing plant on the border with Poland. Further to that, the strike so close to Poland’s border sent a clear message to the EU and especially to the Poles – a corollary to the warning that the US strikes in Russia were meant to convey. As a result, we now hear that the leaders of the four largest economic powers in the EU – the UK, France, Germany and Italy – are calling for dialogue with Russia, whereas in the past they had cut communications. Message received, as it seems.

Whether or not these events are connected, a couple of days after the Oreshnik strike, Trump has declared himself the leader of Venezuela (in his dreams, perhaps), has threatened to send troops to seize Greenland, with a few EU states sending troops to Greenland, ostensibly to stop him, and with Trump declaring the only curb to his aggression is his own lack of a sense of morality. The United States, as a consequence is now seen by the wider world including the West as a rogue state. We have entered what we see so often with the fall of empires, in that the Empire starts thrashing about and acting in a sense of might-makes-right. And that brings us to the now overt fascism that we see in the United States.

Good and evil: Trump had threatened to bomb Iran if protesters were killed in the Iranian riots. But in fact, there are now riots and demonstrations in the United States regarding the murder of the young mother of three in Minneapolis, Renee Good. And she was white, American-born and an active Christian – characteristics the MAGA and conservative movements in the US like to harp on about. The ICE agent who killed her fled the scene thereafter and is allegedly in hospital recovering from internal bleeding. Perhaps he was in an incident as he fled, because there is nothing in the video of the shooting to suggest he was injured in any way. To the public, the belief has arisen that the government has the man in hiding somewhere. The Trump administration across the board has sought to gaslight the American public regarding the murder of this young woman, though. It seems the only thing they know how to do is to double down when they know they are wrong. The killing has sharply divided the public, with MAGA supporters saying she deserved it, calling her a domestic terrorist, which only further enrages anyone with a conscience. Perhaps ‘murder’ is too strong a word. Or was he killing a provocative assassination meant for something else? We will come to that.

Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act if the still ongoing protests (which are largely peaceful by the way) do not stop. That would set a very dangerous precedent and really would be a bridge too far. Trump had threatened to invoke the Act during his first term during the George Floyd riots, again in Minneapolis. The killing of Renee Good provoked huge protests across the United States. The Insurrection Act has been invoked many times since its passage in 1807. The latest time was in 1992 in response to the Los Angeles riots. Bush Sr. was president at the time. The Pentagon has ordered the readiness of 1,500 troops to be sent to Minneapolis (archived) should Trump order it. In truth, those troops are trained in arctic fighting and may in fact be sent to Greenland instead. The Mayor of Minneapolis, Frey, has stated the Trump is baiting the city in order to justify sending in the troops. This is all theatre to bolster the MAGA base for the midterms.

Minneapolis on ICE: I was speaking with a friend of mine from Australia the other day whose family were immigrants to Australia from Italy. During the conversation the topic of the riots and protests in Minneapolis came up and this person recounted that what was happening in Minneapolis bore a striking resemblance to Mussolini’s Blackshirts during Italy’s fascist era. Mussolini himself was Italy’s last dictator. But in the years of his rise he sent his militias – the Blackshirts – throughout Italy to strike fear among dissenters and to unify the country under fascist rule, a society riven by civil conflict as a result of the hardships caused by WWI. Hitler much admired Mussolini. The Blackshirts were the model for the Hitler’s Brownshirts. Mussolini was the first, but certainly not the last, fascist dictator. People at the time of his rise thought him to be a fool, a buffoon. They soon found out differently. If you choose to watch the video in Suggested Viewing there are many interesting if not alarming similarities to what we are seeing now in the United States with the present administration with Italy a century ago. Italians who survived those times and their children remember that period well. And it carries a warning for today: Beware of any government that promises law and order amidst troubling times and domestic discord and promises at the same time to return the nation to its ‘former glory’.

ICE agents resemble military troops – body armor, lack of any identification, masked faces. Most of them are recruits from the MAGA movement. Most of their activity has been along the southern border of the US, but they are also sent into Democrat political strongholds, which often house safe sites for immigrants. However, the part of this that is scarcely mentioned is that most of the undocumented immigrants are employed doing jobs most Americans refuse to do – agriculture, health care, food service, cleaning and so on. The administration has deported over 100,000 since Trump came to office. Most of the detainees have committed no crimes and the remaining ones have often committed only minor offences. But there is one industry that is booming because of the sharp increase in ICE – the private prison industry. There are a few videos of ICE agents going around – true as far as I can tell – where those agents are stopping people for no reason, use abusive language with people and behave much like the Israelis do with the Palestinians. In fact, many of these ICE troops receive training by the security forces in Israel.

There is a confluence of phenomena taking place in the US since the start of this decade – the sharp rise in AI, rising unrest in the US due to financial woes, the attempt at social control we saw in the West with the pandemic along with the tracking and tracing via telephones, the rise of ICE, censorship, deliberate inflaming of divisions among the public, the targeting of specific groups (‘right’ and ‘left’) and immigrants and so on. This is not by accident. There appears to be an agenda at work, and we currently see it focused on Minneapolis. But it is going on across the US and in Western Europe. In 1953 it was noted that the latent fascism and the capitalist (corporate) forces in the US were posing a hindrance to world peace.^[10] Looking back in history the militarization of ICE, manned by disaffected younger men primarily, along with the increasing rhetoric from factions in Washington and certain oligarchs, what we are watching evokes an uneasy resemblance (and perhaps remembrance) to the rise of fascism in the first half of the last century. And there are familiar conditions present, and all at once now. It is a warning to us. If you watch videos posted of ICE agents it is apparent that there is a sense of impunity, which is dangerous to any society. All public officials should be subject to the laws of the land. And now we see that their training time has been cut in half. The agency works under a budget of $170 billion. That is more than most nations spend on their national defence.

In a recent media Q&A at the White House a journalist asked some reasonable questions of Karoline Leavitt, who proceeded to state the following:

“So, you’re a biased reporter with a leftwing opinion. Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You’re posing in this room as a journalist and it’s so clear by the premise of your question and you and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist. You shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat but you’re pretending like you’re a journalist but you’re a left-wing activist and the question that you just raised and your answer proves your bias. You should be reporting on the facts. You should be reporting on the cases. Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens who ICE is trying to remove from this country? I bet you don’t. I bet you didn’t even read up on those stories. I bet you never even read about Lake and Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray or all of the innocent Americans who were killed at the hands of illegal aliens in this country [23 convictions last year, out of almost 17,000 homicides nationwide for 2024 for the entire populace]. And the brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our communities safer. And shame on people like you in the media who have a crooked view and have a biased view and pretend like you’re a real honest journalist.”

This is one very defensive administration. Her ‘answer’ was to attack first and not answer the question. It is a typical Trump legal tactic learned from Roy Cohn. It was also a dog whistle to the MAGA base in an election year. We will see increasing use of it by this administration as the year progresses. Vance and others in the administration tried to cast the incident as Renee Good trying to run the officer over, when the video evidence is clear she was trying to leave the scene. They also tried to cast her as some part of an imagined left-wing ideology. Looking at the comments under one of Vance’s statements about Good shows the sorts of opinions toward which Leavitt’s diatribe, above, are aimed. For anyone who is interested, there is a useful site where one can trawl through all the statistics for alien criminal activity in the US. Leavitt could stand to read through it.

Just be aware and be clear (for Americans) that incidents like these and the tactics ICE are using are more or less deliberate provocations, aimed at striking fear and outrage in the populace. Be aware of what ICE can and cannot do. They are not a police force, but some of them are acting like armed militias. Without a valid warrant ICE cannot enter private homes or private work spaces without permission, conduct searches without permission or use deadly force solely to prevent escape. If you or someone you know is ever caught up in a situation with ICE the best advice is to stay calm, state your rights if they try to cross the line and require a warrant if they try to enter private premises. The one thing we want to avoid in the US now is rioting. As the Iranians have learned (and many other states) riots are fomented to destabilize nations, which more often than not are used as the excuse to introduce repressive measures. There is one more point to add prior to ending this letter.

Writer’s block: Having lived in Adelaide for almost 20 years I feel compelled to make the following comments. In what followed in the aftermath of the Bondi massacre the Adelaide Writers’ Week has been cancelled. Writers’ Week is a long-established festival in Adelaide to showcase writers from around the world, typically held in February and March. It forms part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts and is held in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial garden where local and international writers gather and have “Meet the Author” sessions, readings and lectures. I remember it well from my time living in Australia. The first Adelaide Writers Week was held in 1960 and it is the longest running writers’ festival in Australia. A couple of years after I left Australia the Festival began to incorporate graphic novels and comics, dedicated as a one-day program.

The current kerfuffle, thought to be the result of serious pressure as a reaction to the Bondi shooting, actually goes back a few years. In 2023 three Ukrainian authors withdrew from the Festival owing to the inclusion of a Palestinian American author Susan Abulhawa, who had shared a tweet from Putin which included the words “DeNazify Ukraine.” Three large sponsors subsequently withdrew from the Festival. Such festivals are always subject to politics, even though freedom of speech also means the freedom to debate things one doesn’t like hearing. But just because one doesn’t like what one hears, that doesn’t mean that people should withdraw or be banned. Here in recent years, people’s skin has become quite thin, in a matter speaking, along with the fact that we are all being fed a large amount of misinformation via legacy and social medias.

This year, on 8 January, also closely coinciding with the last full moon, the Adelaide Festival board announced that the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah’s appearance at the Festival had been cancelled. This followed upon a request from the Jewish Community Council of South Australia due to concerns over cultural sensitivity, in reaction to the Bondi Beach shooting. This author had been frequently criticized by the Israelis. The board’s decision was supported by the state PM, provoking a sudden and strong backlash from the writers and the public to the decision. By 13 January, 180 participants along with six of seven board members and the Festival director had withdrawn or resigned. On 13 January the event was completely cancelled, with the new Festival board announced later that day, led by former chair Judy Potter. The director who resigned, Louise Adler stated that she would not be a party to silencing writers. She had the following to say:

“The Adelaide Festival board’s decision – despite my strongest opposition – to disinvite the Australian Palestinian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from Adelaide Writers Week weakens freedom of speech and is a harbinger of a less free nation, where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t”

Adler is on the Jewish Council of Australia’s advisory committee and is the daughter of Holocaust survivors adding that Randa Abdel-Fattah’s appearance being cancelled after pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists, bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians. These things are important to note because it reflects the feelings of the general populace essentially across the world. She went on to say:

“The increase in the extreme and repressive efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists to stifle even the mildest criticism has had a chilling effect on free speech and democratic institutions.”

Here’s why this matters: In their attempts to stifle dissent, suppress opinions about what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza, the West Bank and abroad, along with criticisms of their foreign influence in Western governments, and with the growing realization of the overarching control especially the media by Jewish oligarchs – yes, we can say that – such actions foster growing and rightful resentment and resistance amongst the public, even in the Jewish community, against the infringements on their rights as citizens to voice their honest concerns. We won’t go into the fact that many of these politicians toe such a line so as to push through hate speech laws and the like are funded by such Zionist and Israeli lobbies. AIPAC is the prime example in the United States, although there are hundreds of such organizations scattered across that nation. And now the younger generation is increasingly questioning such influence and calling for such organizations to be required to register as foreign agents. I could use a crude vernacular description here but basically the Zionists are spoiling their own goals and the entire Jewish community along with them. Well, public pressure matters and does produce results.

In a stunning about-face (archived) the acting president of the Festival committee, Julian Hobba issued an apology to Randa Abdel-Fattah and invited her to the 2027 Writers’ Week. Apology accepted, but the South Australian PM Malinauskas now has to go wash the egg from his face and answer to the lobbyists as to why Abdel-Fattah was reinstated. Sadly, the 2026 Writers’ Week will remain cancelled. Greens leader Sarah Hanson-Young added, “This has been a stuff-up of huge magnitude, an absolute debacle, and it has cost us jobs, the reputation of our arts industry, and has had implications far beyond our state border,” Ya’ think? This is but one example of what putting curbs on free speech does. We saw this also with complaints and forced legislation from other vocal minority groups in the recent past, like we saw with the entire ‘woke’ phenomenon and the pandemic. People with an active common sense will balk about having their thoughts and opinions censored. An active and lively public debate – without violent recourse – is indicative of a healthy society. And states cannot legislate to people who to like and dislike. The Zionist lobbies across the world are setting the stage for their own demise by playing the victim and cowing governments. And the public are aware of it now, are resentful and are starting to push back.

In conclusion, and as a preview to the next couple letters, we will take a closer look at Greenland (it’s largely for ego and distraction that Trump is going on about it), an emerging reshuffle in NATO and the EU, two emerging trade blocs, a political reshuffle in the Middle East/North Africa region and the coming financial reshuffle. We are experiencing the end of an era right now and change is often messy as we shuffle off into the Aquarian age. The US is exhibiting a type of fever at the moment. Mention was made previously here of the ‘Jewish problem’ taking another century to resolve – but that doesn’t mean it will take long to remove Zionism. That is well underway. And if there is a war with Iran, then we will see some very rapid developments along that line. The Iranians have told Washington and Tel Aviv specifically that if either or both attack Iran then it will be all-out war. We hold the thought it doesn’t come to that. The Western powers clearly mis-underestimate Iran’s capabilities (using “W” Bush-speak), which are formidable. They also said the Strait of Hormuz would be closed immediately for months. That would bring on a financial shock to the West for which we are wholly unprepared. So, we are at a critical juncture here, which requires more intensive meditations for peace.

Capricorn is the sign in the zodiac relating to culminations, past which further effort along a chosen line proves fruitless. From that point a new cycle of effort is inaugurated, instead of building upon the old. Capricorn represents crystallization on the one hand and the shattering of the crystallized structure on the other, from whence a comprehensive vision is seen – the ‘light supernal’. In this world cycle we have reached a point of culmination in the West in the final months of the astrological tear 2025. Now we are witnessing and living through a period of the shattering of that old order, upon which the best of the old will be carried into new initiatives. That shattering of the old order will take a few years yet. It is much needed in Europe and the US, the latter in its earlier days having been a European transplant while still retaining the old imperialist mind-set to this day. It is the old mind-set that is being broken, while the society – its people – remain. None of this is to be feared. In fact, it is all part of cycles that we have all experienced together in other lives for ages, literally. Having almost passed the Stage of the Forerunner, where to now? Well, that is up to us. But from this point of shattering, momentum must be maintained. The Light must be encouraged, invoked to do its work. The stone that has kept us in the cave of materialism is beginning to be rolled away, and the first glimpses of light are being seen. What we see inside the cave is disturbing at first, but the Light gives us encouragement. Let that encouragement be nourished and prove to be a force impelling us toward a fresh vision for our world. And let our work proceed undismayed by the din and smoke that surrounds us in these days.

These letters are sent as a service. If you wish to be added to or deleted from the mailing list, let me know. Feel free to pass these along, but do so without charge or alteration.

Picture credits:

1. François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678), Maxim 218 ↑
2. Bailey, Alice A., Esoteric Astrology (1951) New York, NY, Lucis Publishing, p. 169 ↑
3. Bailey, Esoteric Healing, p. 582 ↑
4. Bailey, The Rays and the Initiations, p. 316 ↑
5. Bailey, A Treatise on White Magic, p. 441 ↑
6. Bailey, From Bethlehem to Calvary, p. 54 ↑
7. Ibid , p. 11 ↑
8. Bailey, Education in the New Age (1954) pp. 105 – 107 ↑
9. Bailey, The Destiny of the Nations, p. 34 ↑
10. Bailey, Esoteric Healing, p. 662 ↑