Friday Bite 25 September 2026

Absolute Insanity

“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” Donald Trump, 21 September

“We have a right under the US Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government… [such a ban] would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.” CNN, 21 September

“Both China and the United States are leading nations in artificial intelligence. We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people.” Xi Jinping, 24 September

“Whoever wins AI, WINS!” Donald Trump, 24 September

SHORTLY AFTER I published last week’s Friday Bite, President Trump banned three news organizations – CNN, MS NOW and Politico – from the White House. On Monday, Politico filed a legal challenge against the order and as a result other networks, including Fox News, withdrew their journalists and camera crews from the White House. On Wednesday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order and told the White House to immediately restore pass credentials for the banned organizations. However, the administration continued to block the journalists until noon on Thursday. The timing of all this proved deeply embarrassing for the American president given that there was limited coverage of Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington.

It was another of those weeks when one shocking event followed another making it difficult to absorb the significance of them all.

• Sunday brought a second disastrous election result for Chancellor Merz with another region voting for Germany’s far-right AfD party.
• Sunday also produced an unequivocal win for Russia’s Unite Party. (Not sure this counts as a shocking development.)
• On Monday, the United Kingdom announced it would assist Saudi Arabia in its war with the Houthis, by providing air-to-air refuelling.
• On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham went to Washington to meet Donald Trump. (No royal invitations necessary: the meeting was cordial and uncontroversial.)
• On Thursday, Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an Open AI agent had hacked one of its government websites.
• Also on Thursday, President Xi Jinping arrived on a state visit to the United States. The event was suffused in amiability, the intention on both administrations’ parts to focus on cooperation as opposed to confrontation. To this end, protests over Tibet and Hong Kong were kept well away from the Chinese president’s view, the speeches were bland and instead of Chinese experts within the State Department and the national security council – people who understand China deeply – attending the state dinner, guests included billionaires and tech bros. There was no movement on AI safety cooperation.
• On Thursday, at the United Nations General Assembly, scores of delegates left the room when Prime Minister Netanyahu took the podium. In his fiery speech, Netanyahu defended Israel’s military action and attacked New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdami.
• And today, Iran said that it had told the Trump administration that it is willing to open the Strait of Hormuz in six days if the United States lifts sanctions on its oil exports, ends the war on all fronts – including Lebanon – and releases some of Iran’s frozen assets.

TOMORROW THERE WILL be a full moon in Aries, and it is a powerful full moon, thus its theme of closure and completion and ends-of-chapters will be in full flow. How wonderful would it be if this full moon were to preside over the end of the blockade of the Hormuz Strait and the beginning of the end of the war with Iran. However, common sense, recent history and the capriciousness of Donald Trump would say otherwise. At some point there will be a lunar eclipse or a full moon that places its signature on the end of this war, and it is certainly going to take a series of lunar steps to reach that point, but maybe this is not the final one. Nonetheless, this is a very significant full moon for the United States.

At the exact moment of the full moon, the angles of the chart set for Washington DC are those of its inception – the Declaration of Independence. We could interpret this as the current period having a great deal to do with the foundation of America and its constitution. The full moon falls at 3 degrees 37 minutes of Aries, thus flanking the United States MC-IC axis. And this full moon is sandwiched between Saturn and Neptune.

Neptune and Saturn have been tracing a path across America’s IC since the summer of 2025, and we have had plenty of evidence of the erosion of the nation’s founding principles – “all men are created equal with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness” – not least the actions of ICE and Trump’s mass deportation programme, which has seen armed federal agents carrying out operations at airports, outside suburban schools, hospitals and truck stops from Maine to Arizona.

Neptune was in Aries at the time of the American Civil war and it made a certain sense that the country would experience a similar division and breakdown of society and law and order this time round. The No-King protests have stopped and it would seem that many, if not most, Americans have become resigned to the fact that Trump is here to stay and that short of a democratic landslide at the midterms, nothing and no one is going to change the situation.

However, bit by bit, this administration is hoisting itself by its own petard.

Saturday’s full moon is not only flanking the US MC-IC axis but acting as the linchpin of a Kite configuration – Sun opposition Moon sextile Pluto and sextile Uranus, and a grand trine uniting the Sun, Pluto and Uranus. There is a second kite, this one with a Mars-Pluto opposition as its centre point and sextiling the Sun and Uranus. And there is yet another configuration – a Basket – which contains all the usual suspects – Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – and the Moon and Mars.

Rather than trying to find a neat little meaning for each of these configurations, simply recognize that with all these planets resonating at a similar degree, the equivalent of a mighty gong is being struck, reverberating across time and space and manifesting in a variety of significant events, not only for America.

We may not be privy to all the goings on in the global corridors of power, but we can see from the astrology, particularly the positions of the outer planets, that the decisions being made at this time are going to have huge ramifications for humanity. Whether we’re talking the development of AI, the Ukraine War, the situation in Iran and the Hormuz Strait, shifts are taking place, alliances are forming, betrayals committed and sacrifices made. And we shall look back at this time and see it for what it is, the consolidation of power in a handful of spheres of influence that has the capacity to wipe us out.

Friday Bite 18 September 2026

Recollections May Vary

“You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth – and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” Penelope Hegseth

“Secretary Hegseth has done an extraordinary job at the Department of War…This has literally been the most productive and successful and aggressive Congress… We’re confident American voters are going to remember that when they head to vote this fall.” Mike Johnson, House Speaker

“The Supreme Court has really let our Country down!… [some justices were] “totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America… These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,”. Donald Trump, 15 September

“Canada and Europe should secure our strategic autonomy through deep cooperation in the full range of strategic capabilities…Canada and Europe are each strong. Europe and Canada are stronger together … The objective is not self-sufficiency, it’s collective resilience… I am not proposing a third bloc in order to become a great-power rival, only with better manners… but a beacon for other democracies” Mark Carney, 16 September.

“Laughable!” Donald Trump, 16 September

SO MUCH TO dissect. What to focus upon?

Here are my picks of the week:

• 13 September: A ferry capsized in the Java Sea. Six people drowned, 107 were rescued and 130 remain missing. It is the fifth of several water-related tragedies that have occurred since the lunar eclipse in Pisces on 28 August.
• 15 September: A village of 350 residents voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest over the government’s decision to move 1250 male asylum seekers into disused military accommodation nearby. The vote may have been symbolic, but it got the message across. And it appears the Great Crested Newts may have come to the rescue, given they are a local protected species. (Yay Newts!) We can expect a return to this story in roughly a month when the Venus-Pluto square that was presiding over the week’s astrology returns. There will be protests.
• 16 September: The European Parliament invited Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to become an associate member of the European Union. He accepted the following day. I have had a brief look at all the charts involved, and although I think the offer is of great merit, with Pluto on the IC squaring a rising Venus at the time – and Venus is also held in a Yod configuration with Uranus and Neptune – bureaucratic issues and a whole raft of other problems will frustrate the future of this association. That doesn’t mean it can’t ever come into being though. More that there will be other challenges and changes, not least in regard to the USA’s role in NATO and its relationship with Canada. Let’s see where we are two years from now.
• 16 September. The Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s request to restrict voting by mail before the midterm elections. This was in response to an executive order signed by the President on April 1 (Venus square Pluto). We can expect not to have heard the last of it.
• 17 September. House speaker Mike Johnson cancelled a vote and sent members home one day early for the midterm recess. They will not return until 9 November. Earlier, Republican Representative Thomas Massie had taken to the House to read his bill regarding the impeachment of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The two incidents seem not unconnected.
• Since early this week extracts from Charles’s Spencer’s tribute to his beloved sister, Diana, Swan Song, have been appearing in the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Unheard of in royal history, King Charles made a comment. In words to the effect of ‘recollections may vary’, he said, “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”. In his book, due out next Tuesday, Spencer accused the then prince of sounding “giddily elated” when informing him of his sister’s death – a state of being he assumed was related to the prospect of his now being free to marry Camilla Parker Bowles. Adding insult to injury, on a separate occasion. Prince Charles commented that Diana “would soon be forgotten”.

THIS MIGHT BE a storm in a teacup. Except it’s not. It’s a big deal, especially coming at a time like this when the monarchy is trying to cleave onto as much respect as it can. The Harry and Meghan years have eroded faith, virtue and value in the monarchy. The couple have separately and individually trashed it, and now they’re back. To his credit, the King has striven to counteract the trend and even some of those who thought he had as much charisma as a fruit bun, have acknowledged his triumphs – his recent tour of the US in April was one such stellar success. But now we are forced to think back twenty-nine years to when Diana tragically died and her ex-husband was villain-of-the-day.

I, however, remember things rather differently. In the hours after Diana was killed in the accident in the Alma Tunnel, Charles personally organized an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight to fly him and her two sisters to Paris and then bring Diana home. He was visibly shaken – grey in colour – hardly “giddily elated”. It was a duty, for sure, but one borne in dignity and care for the mother of his two boys and the woman he had married.

We must know that Charles Spencer was devastated by his sister’s death, and we all certainly know how he felt about the manner of his sister’s death. “Of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.”

Charles Spencer was the youngest of five children – three sisters and a brother who died shortly after birth. The family was not a happy one. His father Johnny had a violent temper and the children were all witnesses to his physical and verbal attacks on their mother. They later divorced. Charles was sent to prep school at eight-years of age, which he describes in his own memoir as a “culture of cruelty… of hopelessness and abandonment… with violent beatings and sexual abuse. Diana for her part, although loving boarding school, nonetheless grew up feeling abandoned and unaddressed. It was Diana who took her brother under her wing, mothered him in fact, and they retained a close bond throughout life, even with the occasional spot of permafrost.

I’m not going to spend too long on the synastry between Charles Spencer and Diana, but what is particularly sweet and binding is the fact that her Venus (24 Taurus) is his Sun (29 Taurus) and his Venus (5 Cancer) is her Sun-Mercury midpoint. They were babes in the wood and grew up to be complicated – emotionally complicated – people who had their hearts repeatedly broken, and did the same to others.

What is interesting about the synastry between King Charles and his ex-brother-in law is Saturn-shaped. The King has his natal Saturn at 5 degrees of Virgo while Charles Spencer has his at 5 degrees of Pisces. At this point in time, Uranus in the early degrees of Gemini, is squaring them both. And when Uranus meets Saturn, there are shifts, even those that have taken 29 years to move and bring up buried stories, resentments and jealousies. And where is Diana in all this? Her difficult Mars-Pluto conjunction at 5 degrees of Virgo, which was being squared by Pluto at the time of her death and the focus for a solar eclipse within hours of the accident, was also in play.

This is a tragedy told in three separate lives, in three separate ways united by a common theme – the ineluctability of fate and the coming together of events at a single point in time. Once again, we see degree areas – spheres of influences – being triggered and resounding across time.

Next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death, and there will be many documentaries and books to emerge that will tell the tale anew. And it will surely rake up yet more heartache for her family and those who knew and loved her. To my mind, her death is as raw as ever and I think about her a lot. But I’m going to leave you with her brother’s final words in his eulogy at Westminster Abbey on 6 September, 1997.

I would like to end by thanking God for the small mercies he has shown us at this dreadful time. For taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her private life. Above all we give thanks for the life of a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds.”