Astrology

Astrology.  Wow, didn't think I would be making a post about this.  But, I met this girl who mentioned it all the time.  I mean, ALL the time, &, well, you know how that goes.  It gets you wondering.

She said I was a Virgo, & that I can agree with even though I never really gave astrology even lip service.  I mean, I'm sort of a skeptic on most things.

Sure, I believe that Allen Dulles had JFK killed, but he was the boogie man anyway & besides, the House Select Committee on Assassinations ruled that Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy, Jim Garrison seemed to make fairly good points, & unless Magneto shot from the book depository that whole "Magic Bullet" theory sounds like, well, magic.

I never really believed in magic.  Slight of hand & illusions I totally believe in, but not magic.

That's really about it.  I mean, yeah, I believe in extraterrestrial life, but that's me just playing the odds.  There's a lot of shit out there & to gamble against it seems like I'd be just throwing my money away...long after I'm dead.

The long after I'm dead is sort of important to.  My belief in Little Green Men only goes so far.  Area 51?  Yeah, I believe that it is a secret military base, but that's about it.  Do I believe in the Area 51 Roswell Aliens?  Of course not.  But that's the playing the odds as well.

The 9-11 Conspiracy?  Not a chance.  What you are asking me there is to believe that the thousands of people that had to be involved to pull it off didn't leak a Goddamned thing to the press, to Wikileaks, to the American public.

Sorry, I'm not about to believe that.  Unless E. Howard Hunt comes out on his death bed & says he was one of the thousands of hobos that wired one of the twin towers with explosives without anyone noticing I'm going to continue to play the Bull Shit card on that one.

This is Hunt by the way.

And this is a book he wrote about spies, neat, huh?

I'm thinking that he was really this guy:

You know, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Cancer Man.

I'm not a Cancer.

I'm a Virgo.

My Zodiac sign is a Virgo & this girl I met said I was a "total Virgo."

I never believed that crap.  But she said that I was a Virgo because I was neat, analytical, & skeptical.  We all know I'm not any of those things. 

My mother would NEVER call me neat...but then she sort of wanted her house to be like a museum & even measured the inches of trinkets she put on the mantel to make sure they were all even.  She wanted the beds made with a military tuck & wanted the lines on the carpet from the vacuum cleaner to be straight as an arrow.

Mom would NEVER call me neat...normal people might.  At least if they saw where I lived.  If they saw the inside of my car on the other hand....

Skeptical?  OK, maybe there is a point there.  I might be a little skeptical & a little analytical, a little over-analytical.

I might be over-analytical enough to have met a woman that constantly referenced Astrology & felt the need to take the time to read about it & over-analyze it.

But hey, that's what this blog is all about, right?  I mean you are reading it because I over-analyze history, with a skeptical eye, try to bring it back to the present, or just rip the shit out of it & turn it into a joke.

Not that many people today understand the concept of "Joke."

Especially when it's political.

And we have Laura to thank for that, you know, the woman that said "write a blog about history for people that don't like history."

The blog thing, not the joke thing.  Well, not the "I don't understand humor thing" &...fuck it...moving on.

So, what the fuck is astrology, what the fuck is the zodiac & why the fuck does it matter?

Well, it matters because I listened to Shantel & thought "you might have a point; that does seem to match my personality."  Unless she, you know, talked to my parents.

And, if you are like me, you think of Astrology as that little section of the news paper, well, if you are like me, you think of it as the little section on The Onion & really not much more...until now.

So, you know, let's learn some shit!

What is astrology?  It's essentially divination, you know, that class that Harry Potter hated & no one took seriously despite the fact that the Professor was really sort of right most of the time.

Harry Potter really is a good place to start, because that shit was taken seriously in politics & Academia up to the Age of Enlightenment.

So you know, you could go to fucking Oxford & actually walk out with a degree in Astrology & people would legitimately take it seriously.

"Wait, you're an astrologist? You must be a learned man."

There was an actual market for it to.  There were jobs in the Astrology field.  Back in the day it was serious shit.  You could make a living off of Astrology, up until the 17th century & people would respect you.

It's not like, you know, education & political science is today.  It wasn't a major that people laughed at.  It wasn't a major you would NEVER find a job in.

"Wait, you have a masters in secondary education?    What are you going to do with that?  Go to a school?  Teach history to kids?  Good luck with that, idiot, you should have majored in something useful, like Astrology."

The Indians (dots not feathers), the Chinese, the Mayans, & yes, the Europeans all had their own take on Astrology & all took it deadly seriously.  Deadly seriously.  They took it business degree seriously, not education degree seriously.

It started in Mesopotamia, which looked exactly like this:

That is, unless you believe in Indian, Mayan, or Chinese Astrology, then it was still the meaning of celestial bodies but, you know, completely different.

If you were an Indian Astrologist you thought Babylonian astrology was utter bullshit.

But in any case, it goes back 25,000 years to the cavemen.  They actually painted that shit on walls.  They carved it into bones.  They kept track of the movements in the sky.

They aren't keeping track of the night sky in this image, they are just making a fire...but I figured you needed another picture.

But it wasn't consistent.  The cult of the Cave Bear thought that what the Flintstones were tracking in the night sky was absolutely meaningless.

And the Zodiacs were totally different too.

NO THEY WEREN'T, I'M A LIBERTARIAN AND I SAW ZEITGEIST & THAT SHIT IS TOTALLY 100% ACCURATE!  THEY ALL USED EXACTLY THE SAME SIGNS & THERE WERE ONLY ALWAYS 12!!!!!

1) Aries

2) Ford Taurus

3) Gemini

4) Cancer

5) Leo

6) Virgo

7) Libra

8) Scorpio (of Simpsons fame)

9) Sagittarius

10) Capricorn (The Mini-series)

11) Aquarius

12) Pisces

 

The thing is that, back in the day, back when Astrology was a class & a major offered at predominate educational institutes the world over, there were a fuck-ton more than just 12 signs. 

You could see a fuck-ton more stars then & it was only over the ages & with the dawn of the Enlightenment that the WESTERN Zodiac was limited to only 12 signs, each for the month of the year & published daily in news papers written to be vague so it could apply to everyone.

STOP!

Is it night time?  Walk outside & take a look at the night sky.

If you live where I am, in Chicago, you can see exactly three stars. 

If you live in the country you can see a few thousand more.

Goddamned Light Pollution!

If you are out in the middle of the ocean, in that sweet spot where the curve of the Earth sort of hides all the light, you can see billions.

BILLIONS.  
                 I counted.
                      Took me an entire week of nonstop counting.

Don't forget that the Milky Way was so bright that the ancient people of this world used to build their roads sort of along it so all the stars could light your path at night.

There were that many fucking visible stars before technology.

And you think that there were only 12 Zodiac signs?  Seriously?

The ones that survived the great purge of the Enlightenment are the ones with the best mythology behind them...in the West.

Leo the Lion, for instance, used to be a snake...& a Lion...depending on which Western Mythology you associated with & then the meanings were completely different as well.

In another hundred years, Leo will be a turtle & look exactly like this:

And, after they redefined the constellation boundaries in the 1930s, there became exactly 13 Zodiac signs, according to the modern science of Astrology, but we only name 12 still.

We totally ignore Ophiuchus...because no one can pronounce it.

Fuck you Ptolemy!  We don't want your weird Zodiac sign!  There currently aren't enough months in the year!

Because back in the day, when the Romans were teaching Astrology, December was the 10th month & about 3 months long with its own singular sign.

It's sort of hard to have 12 Zodiac signs, one for each month of the year when the whole 12 month thing is a recent development.

December sort of just meant "winter."  No, actually it meant "ten," but you get the point, the months weren't the same....

And now we live under the whims of a solar calendar & for a long time it was a lunar calendar & are you starting to see the point?

Am I a Virgo?  

Yes, I've been a Virgo since the  Julian & Gregorian Calendars.  Pretty much since 1582 because, sure, September was the 9th month of the Julian calendar, but there were 13 months then...Occasionally, & there were a lot more months with only 29 days &...

                            Mercedonius?

What the fuck is that?

If you are Hindu, sure, with the modern age their astrology shrunk down to 12 as well, but, then, they do this weird thing with the moon & planetary orbits to do the horoscopes in the daily papers & not just the stars & have odd names that are about 10,000 years-old or only 5,000-3,000 years-old depending on which historian you believe.

But, that Libertarian conspiracy theory bull shit movie was right, their 12 signs of the Zodiac are roughly the same as our 12 are...at least they have been since Alexander the Great.

Before that, well, we already talked about how Leo went from a snake to a lion & that's pretty impressive given that one is a reptile & the other is a mammal.  

Mammals have nipples. 

Reptiles might too, I'm not sure.

In Chinese astrology there is wood, fire, earth, metal, & water.

That sort of blows the shit out of the claim that all Astrology is the same & has something to do with Jesus & Isis & a vast inter-governmental conspiracy that goes all the way back to when the Death Star destroyed the Twin Towers when E. Howard Hunt was dressed like a bum.

Full circle...& you thought I was just ranting.  Yeah, I've watched that pseudo-documentary too.

In fact the Chinese also take into account the year you were born in their astrology.

I'm a goat.

When I was a kid my elementary school teacher said the Chinese thought I was a rat.

That really doesn't fit my personality.

BUT NOT A SNITCH!!!!!

I just like to hear Pacino yell...& Sam Jackson.  They are sort of the same actor aren't they, or at least we like them for the same reasons.

Nope, not a snitch.

I can hear something & take it to the grave...unless, you know, unless it's funny.  If it's funny, everyone is hearing that shit.

The Chinese Zodiac ranges from rat to pig & looks exactly like this:

Catholics & Muslims denied the whole astrology thing because they didn't believe that the will of God could be predicted in advance.

John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced it because his ass was certain that everything was per-determined & astrology was sort of the academic proof of that.  But then, he thought you were going to heaven if you were rich because wealth meant that God favored you in the present & that meant that you could do any horrible shit you wanted to, & still go to heaven, because God already determined that he would let you in & made you act like an asshole.

If you were poor you were fucked.

So Astrology sort of had a huge come back when he took off & that's why it's alive again.

Only, by then, well, the calendar changed & we only had 12 to work with.

Even then, however, it was inconsistent.  It is still inconsistent.  Astrologers don't agree with how their science works & one culture still is totally different than the other.  

Chinese, Mayan, Hindu, Western?

Well, we can fuck the Mayans, the Christians sort of destroyed their astronomical Astrological writings & we're still here after the world ended in 2012 aren't we?  Yeah, that's what happens when you judge evidence from only half the text.

So what's the point?

There is no point this time.  

If you want to take something away from all of this it's read the Onion's horoscopes.  Trust in the Onion.  Their Horoscope is ALWAYS 100% accurate,  or, at least, it's as accurate as all the others.  Or maybe as scientific as all the others.

I'll leave you with this:

The Boston Tea Party

Pause for cheese:

This absolutely wonderful person I know wanted me to write a blog about the "Dark Ages."  It's sort of a complex issue & I'd already covered it in the past.  I mean, it's over a 1,000 years long, it has a high & a low & a middle & besides, I already sort of covered it when I talked a little about Beer, a little when we talked about the Devil Book, A little when we talked about Cathars, we touched on it, briefly when we spoke about Drunks, we rambled about it in our conversation about Sluts & Pasties, & a bit more when we spoke about Islam.

Still, it's a BIG topic.

There is a love story I sort of wanted to add in, one about a princess & a prince.  They had met through their parents & exchanged love letters, falling completely in love without ever seeing one another.

She was young & he sent her the best troubadour in the land to sing her romantic songs on the long voyage to his kingdom.

Except the troubadour had caught the plague & they both died horrible deaths.  Very horrible deaths.  They never met.  She died on her way to marry him.

So, you know, super romantic.

But I don't think I could write an entire post on that story.

So I asked for something a little more refined.

I got the "Boston Tea Party."

Well, that I can work with.

There are a LOT of views on the Boston Tea Party

It gave the name of a certain American political party.

You know, the "TEA Party" that band of crazy right wing extremists. That share a lot of the same views as that other band of crazy right wing extremists that have a slightly lower I.Q.

I know what you're thinking:

Who could have a lower IQ than the TEA Party Republicans?

Oh come on, you really have to ask that question?

         Think about it.

                       I know you'll get it.
                               Got the answer yet?

That's right, the good old Libertarians.  You know, these guys:

Anyway, they seem to agree on a few key points.  In fact, aside from dope, prostitution, & war, they seem to agree on a hell of a lot of key points.  You know, that everything should be owned, that only the rich should see a doctor, or go to school, or use roads.

BUT (big but there, all capitals) they do agree with one thing:

They both hate taxes.

Well, to be fair, liberals hate taxes too.

In fact, everyone hates taxes.  Including the "tax hungry liberals."

And so did the founding fathers.

The thing is, they think the Boston Tea Party was about taxes.

"No taxation!"

The colonists screamed as they threw the tea overboard.  In fact, that was the slogan for the entire revolution.  We were going to fight & die because the British were taxing us & we thought taxes were wrong.

We wanted to make a country where everyone was free from taxes, government, & we all worshiped Ayn Rand.

Wait, really?

Of course not.

Once more conservatives & Libertarians got their history entirely wrong.  That tends to happen when you have two parties that all failed History 101.

"History is sooooooo boring, I want pot & prostitutes."

                               "No taxes!"

                                                            "Government sucks!"

The real bumper-sticker our founding fathers were slapping to their horses asses  looked almost exactly like this:

Wow!  Time out Greenbay!  Wait a minute!  Something looks a little off there.  The slogan seems a little longer.

What the fuck is up with all this "without representation" bull shit?

That's a fact, that's what's up with it.  The original slogan was:

No taxation Without Representation

 Like I said, both modern American liberals & our Founding Fathers hated taxes as much as you do, but, unlike conservatives & Libertarians, they understood that shit costs money.

That's sort of the point of taxation, to pay for shit that a nation, a country, & a state need in order to function within itself & on a greater global scale.  

Take the TEA Party, they are venomously pro-war, but they don't want the tax dollars to pay for it, so they just sort of put that shit on the national credit card & because of it we have that enormous debt.

The Libertarians are anti-war & don't believe in taxes either, but it's not just wars that taxes pay for.  I mean, we've all seen that ever-popular Libertarian meme.

It's the assumption that, without government, people will just start paying the millions of dollars to build & maintain the things that the government funded.  And, it is sort of true, if you want the street that you live on to have one of these.

And, if that's the case, the moment you turn off your street & onto another you encounter another one of these:

I guess you get the picture?

And if you don't, remember, the government does more than just build wars & go to roads.


What?  Yeah, um, moving along...

I hate taxes, I hate tolls more, they back up the traffic, they cost a fuck-ton & are usually managed by trolls that you can only vanquish through the help of Billy Goat Gruff.

The point that I am trying to make is simply that the call was "No taxation without representation."

It was all about the representation.  It was all about government, not taxes.  No one was calling for an end to taxation, we were smarter than we are now.  The American Revolution was a product of the Age of Enlightment.

Unlike today, which modern historians call the Age of Stupid.

It's even been talked about in verse:

So, what about the Boston Tea Party?

It all started with this thing called The French Indian War...The French & Indians both lost.

Or, if you are of the European persuasion, it's called the Seven Years War.

It looked exactly like this:

It also put America in a bit of a pickle.   I mean, here you were, trying to tend your farm, make a business, make a living, raise a family, kill the Indians so the white man can take over, enslave the Brotha's from Africa & suddenly, because of colonization, the entire world was at war...again.

There have actually been a bit more than just two World Wars.

If you were living in America, this latest World War sucked...but oh the possibilities...depending on who won.

It literally looked exactly like this:

You see, on one hand the French were sort of right in the middle of the British colonies & what made it worse is that they had made a fuck ton of those non-aggression & non-settlement pacts with the native Americans who, if you were a colonist, you wanted to kill.

Those damn French Frogs, where do they get off being so God-damned kind & diplomatic?

Now it would suck if the French took the opportunity to seize control of the British colonies in America...but on the other-hand, it would be fucking awesome if Britain could pilfer the French colonies in America.  That was all pretty much untouched land used nearly exclusively for trapping.

And it had lots of Natives to rape & murder, so, you know, Bonus!

On one had, you didn't want to antagonize the French, I mean, we might look at them as cheese-eating surrender monkeys today, but back in the day they were bad ass.  Capital BAD ASS.

They, the French, sort of are the reason Europe isn't Muslim today & they were the, well, the panzer-tank nation of Europe at the time.  Today it's the UK & Germany, but, really, until the 20th Century, the slogan was:

 "Don't fuck with the French."

Still, that was a ton of land & even if the British had no real hope of beating the French army, we knew that the British navy was near invincible.  The British had one bad ass navy, resupplying the American colonies would have been nearly impossible for the French.

So we begged the British to bring the war home.  We literally did, we sent ambassadors to our masters in England & begged them & begged them, & begged them to finally bring the Seven Years War to the colonies in America...& then Re-name it the French & Indian War...which the French & Indians both lost.

"Please, please, please, please, please bring the blood-bath to the Americas Mr. English Master sir.  We want that land, we want to kill more Indians, we want to manifest destiny!  We want to make an independent nation from sea to shining sea!"

Get it? Because America was like totally England's lapdog then.  Times sure have changed haven't they Mr. Tony Blair?  Moving on....

And finally our British masters said:

"Fucking OK, now shut up, go home, & kill, kill, kill!"

Wait a minute, timeout Greenbay, I thought this was about the Boston Tea Party?

Yeah, cool your jets, when have I ever gotten straight to the point?

Anyway, when the war was over, the British American colonies looked like this:

That's a LOT of fucking new land to farm, settle, & rape & murder Indians in isn't it?

BUT, there was an issue that we are sort of familiar with.  It was a war that gained all that land & like the conservatives & Libertarians today, the colonists didn't understand that people had to pay for wars.  I mean, that shit costs money, especially over-seas wars....& then there was the occupation & that costs money too & well, we didn't entirely understand that.

The British did.  They understood the fuck out of it.

So the British looked at the colonies & said:

"Here's all that land you wanted, now you have to pay for it."

And the colonies looked at the British & said:

"No, that was YOUR war that we begged you to let us get involved in, you are paying for it."

And the British said:

"You're our fucking lapdog.  Bad lapdog!  Bad lapdog!"

So they did this thing where they started to levy more taxes on the colonies in America.

 And then there was the matter of the Indians that were pissed that we were breaking the treaty they made with the French, & even more pissed that the colonists were breaking the treaty the British made with them after the war.

So the English had to keep soldiers stationed in America to protect the colonists from the Natives, even more than they had to before.

And we were sort of being assholes about it.

So our British masters said:

"You are paying for that shit too."

Pause.  Rewind:

Colonies are really intended to supply the colonizers with raw materials that they could then turn into finished goods at home, employing more of the people still living in the mother nation, which they can then export abroad & back to the colony thus improving the economy...at home.

At least that's how the French & Spanish were playing the game.  It's also how the English were playing it, in colonies like Ireland & India.

In the America's however, England took a far lighter hand.  They didn't oppress the American colonies like they did the other colonies, mainly because the colonists were white & Protestant.

They sort of let the America's develop as much as they wanted with no interference, they didn't even try to oppress us, & it wasn't long until Boston started to compete, economically, with London.

And the British were fine with it.

Even the Founding Fathers admitted that never, in the history of the world, was a colony treated as well, as equal, as the American colonies were.  We had rights that the Irish could only dream of.

So why the Boston Tea Party?

Well, because we were treated so well, that's why.

You see, we were actually really cool with the British taxing us...when they taxed us the same way that they taxed the subjects in England.

It was only when they started taxing us different, when they started to make the colonists pay for the war (that we begged them to let us get involved in) that we took issue with the taxation.

Hence the slogan:

That was the key.  In England, the subjects had a say in who taxed them, sort of, kind of...Well, they had a LOT more of a say in who taxed them than we did.

Logistically, at the time, representation in the House of Commons wouldn't have worked.  By the time the colonial reps got their marching orders from America, the situation would have moved on.  If England waited for those orders, things would move at a snail's pace & the government wouldn't function.

Remember, the Wright Brothers hadn't been born yet, the Nazis hadn't invented the jet yet, we had to travel by wind & the Gulf Stream.  Getting information as important as a vote from the colonies to England would take a fuck-long time.

So we largely didn't bitch & moan.  We understood that, logistically speaking, representation was a cluster-fuck & thus, so long as we were taxed the same as the British subjects were, we were content to consider their representation as our representation.

Which leads us back to the French & Indian War...the one the French & Indian's both lost.

Looked like this:

The British said that since it was our fight, we begged them to get involved, it was on us to pay for it & house the soldiers that were protecting our white Protestant asses. 

And the taxes were gentle, VERY gentle.

It still didn't go over well.

We thought that we deserved the exact same rights as any British citizen, including voting for the people that voted to tax us. 

Had the British levied the taxes across the board, this never would have happened.

They looked at us as subjects, we looked at ourselves as "citizens" which at the time was as revolutionary as "comrade"  is today.

And, to add to the misunderstanding, we were ONLY paying taxes for the war in America.  The War in Europe costs a fuck-ton more money & those taxes were only paid by the people actually living in England...& Ireland...& all the other colonies...save the American ones.

So, by their perspective, why the fuck would we complain?

Did we want to get taxed even more?

Well, yeah, we did.  The Founding Fathers would have actually been OK with it, so long as the taxes we were paying here were the same as the people with representation were paying.  They wouldn't have bitched about that...even though it was more.

The new taxes told us, however, that we were subjects & subjects WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

 Key word there:  Representation.

It all sort of lead to this.  Listen to what old Johnny bitches about:

You hear that word "Illegal," as in "Illegal taxes."  It's important because it sort of shows the mindset; there were "legal" taxes & there were "Illegal" taxes.  Legal taxes were voted on by representatives, Illegal taxes were levied on the people WITHOUT representation.

Now pay attention here, there's something else noteworthy, this was BEFORE the Declaration of Independence, before the British surrender at Yorktown, before the Constitutional Convention.

All you anti-government Libertarians that think the very US Government is "UN-Constitutional" should note that, before the shooting even started,  we set up a fucking government.  But then, the Constitution is sort of how the government works, & the anti-government people are the same people that forget the "without representation" part of the slogan & often act like this when you tell them actual history & facts:

So the British started lightly taxing us differently than they did the people actually living in England & didn't understand that we'd have been fine with paying the higher taxes that the British citizens paid, so long as they were the same as the people with actual representation &...

...who could blame them, that shit is pretty fucked up logic.

Who wants to pay higher taxes?

People who put principles & the Rights of Man before profit.

Not that it wasn't partly about profit.

You see that dude up there?  That's John Hancock, he's the dude that gave us that wonderful expression:

"Put your John Hancock right there." 

He was also a Founding Father...but you probably recognize this picture more:

Or, if you are from Chicago, you know him as this:

Which actually has a better view than the Sears Tower & if you call it the Willis Tower you can go fuck yourself.

Anyway, he sort of had a shit-ton of money invested in Tea &, well, & smuggling so the new taxes on tea & how the British were playing it didn't really help his massive pocket book any.

You see, even with the Tea Tax, tea, the British staple, was cheaper here in America than it was in England.  The British, in an attempt to pacify the American colonists, made a deal with the British East Indian Company to exclusively supply the American colonies with tea, at a lower rate than in England, so they could add a small tax to pay for the French & Indian War...

...Which the French & Indians both lost...

But, the taxes weren't the same & it pissed off Hancock who was making a ton of money by smuggling in illegal tea, so both the American proletariat & the American Upper-Class were pissed for slightly different reasons.

But the same rhetoric. 

So they banded together & dressed as Indians (who lost the French & Indian War) so that no one would recognize them, & refused to let the tea be unloaded from the ships.

And when it became clear that the tea was going to get unloaded, they threw it into the bay in Boston.

Salt Water Tea.

Had we paid more for the tea, & paid the higher taxes that they were in England, the Boston Tea Party would have never happened.  The American colonists would have been fine with it because the tax would have had some form of representation & John Hancock would have been fine with it because he would have continued to make money off of his cheaper illegal tea.

Remember:

But, unfortunately, we have forgotten the "WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" part & as a result knuckle-dragging ape-men have turned a protest about Representation into a protest about taxation.  Forgetting that the entire situation would have been avoided if the Founding Fathers actually paid higher taxes.

So American History was re-written to conform to the anti-tax crowd.

Because they refuse to open a book.

And now we have the TEA Party, who agree with the Libertarian Party that all taxation is evil & against the traditions of the Founding Fathers & blah..blah..blah...

I'll leave you with this: