Friday Bite 27 June 2025
Daddy Trump
“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes [on Iran earlier in the day] were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated… if peace does not come quickly, we will go after… other targets with precision, speed and skill.” Donald Trump, 22 June.
“The events this morning are outrageous and will have everlasting consequences,” Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, 22 June.
“[Any further attacks by the United States on the Islamic Republic will] result in irreparable damage.” Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, 22 June.
AND SO THE twelve-day war between Israel and Iran was brought to an end. Well, sort of. There was a brief breach of the ceasefire on Monday, some twenty-four hours after it had been instigated, which gave rise to an explosive post by President Trump on Truth Social. “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”, but in the space of time between the last Friday Bite and this the war between Israel and Iran ended.
AT ZERO HOURS, Saturday (ET), a large strike-force of B-2 bombers took off from the Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri bound for Iran – a journey of some 7,000 miles and eighteen hours duration. To maintain the element of surprise, other bombers flew west over the Pacific. As the air fleet entered Iranian airspace, a US submarine launched more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear site. At 3:10 am (Iran time) Sunday/6:40 pm ET Saturday, the first B-2 bomber dropped two MOPs (Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs) on the Fordow nuclear site. Twenty-five minutes later, all US planes were beyond Iranian airspace and on their way home. Not a single shot had been fired by Iranian aircraft or air defences on the ground.
More than seventy-five weapons were used in total including fourteen Bunker-buster bombs and one hundred and twenty-five aircraft took part.
By any standards the mission was an unqualified success. And President Trump took little time in informing the world what had happened. At 19:50 ET, Saturday, President Trump took to Truth Social to announce the successful attack on Iran’s nuclear bases, and that “peace must now follow”. Since then, the American president has practiced the delicate art of diplomacy in the all too familiar way with blunt social media posts, replete with capitals and exclamation marks.
On Tuesday, a preliminary report by the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) suggested that the bunker-buster bombs had succeeded only in pushing back Iran’s nuclear aspirations by a few months. Plus, Iran has claimed that it had removed the highly enriched uranium from Fordow (and presumably the other two sites) and taken the material to a secret underground nuclear facility.
It will take months before the true extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure can be ascertained but it’s hard to believe that the instruments of such devastation (MOPs) would have not achieved their ends. And moving highly enriched uranium (in gas form) is not a task to be done quickly and easily.
As for the rights and wrongs of the United States action, time will be the judge.
However, based on the astrology, I’m not sure Iran has finished with its payback. The missile attack on Qatar’s Al Udeid air base – the largest US base in the Middle East – which was seen as the response to the US strike, was conducted with a reserve rarely exhibited in a climate of war, Mr Trump declaring Iran had run its plans past the US before it struck, “They were very nice. They gave us warning… Is one o’clock Okay? I said, ‘It’s fine.’.”
I say, don’t be fooled.
If you remember in last week’s Bite, I set up a horary chart for the question: will the US join Israel in the war with Iran? I came to the conclusion that it would. I have to confess to a deep sense of satisfaction when a prediction is borne out – and on this occasion twenty-four hours later. I also suggested, the Yod configurations in play at the time and their involvement with the Saturn-Neptune conjunction would “lead to huge consequences that cannot be foreseen”. I’ll come back to this shortly, but first, Operation Midnight Hammer.
Before I even mention the presence of the Yod with Mars at the apex, which makes it the protagonist of the planetary group, the vehicle through which the combined effects of Pluto, Saturn and Neptune are filtered, the MC-IC axis (12 degrees Sagittarius-Gemini) is the Ascendant-Descendant axis of the United States. And whenever you get markers like these (key planets, points and degree areas in the horoscopes of the actors involved) it adds an extra layer of relevance to the event chart or any chart you may be examining.
The second Yod – Sun and Jupiter sextile Mars, each in turn inconjunct Pluto – also features the angular Mars but here the protagonist planet is Pluto, making transformation and elimination the focus for the combined “energies” of the Sun, Jupiter and Mars. The Sun and Jupiter are both conjunct the USA’s natal Venus-Jupiter conjunction.
Were you to have used astrology to help you choose the moment to embark on this mission, midnight on 21/22 June could hardly have been bettered. However, the devil’s in the detail. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction, currently hovering over the US IC, and involved in both Yod configurations, is a double-edged sword. While its presence may invite the realization of a dream (in this case to render Iran toothless in nuclear terms) it also invites loss, betrayal and broken dreams. There are unknown consequences to this act.
Perhaps more significantly, the Saturn-Neptune conjunction is associated with the ends of regimes and the ends of eras. Again, while we may think this is a sign that the end of the Mullahs is near, it could equally point to the end of the Netanyahu regime or the Trump regime. This is a point I raised in regard to the Cancer Ingress chart for Israel, which, of course, occurred within the same time-frame as the attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.
So, I hope my instincts that there is more to come in the way of Iranian terrorist and missile strikes are wrong, and instead the war with Iran is over and a new Middle East order is set to emerge, but July’s astrology is anything but rainbows and unicorns. Plus, the Ingress charts I referred to in my video, have three months in which to fully reveal the transformational potential of these yods. Plus, the time period they cover ends with a solar eclipse opposing the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. Buckle up!
TRUMP DADDY refers to the NATO meeting which took place on Monday. It was a truncated event, shrunk from two full days to one morning in deference to President Trump’s short attention span. European leaders were at pains to please the American president, thanking him for the Iranian attack and praising him for bringing about a ceasefire. By all accounts, the meeting went well and NATO lives to fight another day. At one point, NATO secretary-general, Mark Rutte referred to Trump’s comment that Iran and Israel were behaving like two kids in a school yard that had a “big fight”. “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get them to stop.”
AND FINALLY, THE eldest son by a former marriage of Norway’s Crown princess was today charged on several counts including rape, sexual assault and bodily harm. The charges come after months of investigation which involved a “double-digit” number of alleged victims. I will take a closer look at the Norwegian royal family’s charts at a future date, but Uranus’s presence on the country’s midheaven is certainly where we can point the finger for now.
The times in which we live…
Friday Bite 20 June 2025
Will he? Won’t he?
“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail,
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
‘I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,’ March 16, 2003, US Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press.
‘My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources … What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,‘ February 5, 2003 Colin Powell, US secretary of state addressing the UN Security Council, and describing purported evidence of Iraqi WMDs.
“There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend[s] to be the difficult ones.” – Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence 12 February, 2002.
“Bomb Fordo and be done with it.” 18 June, 2025 – John Bolton, former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump
WHEN LAST WEEK’S Friday Bite was published, Israel had just struck Iran. Since then, missiles and drones have been traded daily. The damage inflicted on Iran – Israel has killed 21 of its 22 senior military figures and 10 of its 12 nuclear scientists – is enough to compromise Iran’s ability to fight back with equal force, but it comes at a time when the country is already diminished by the ineffectiveness of its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Israel has maintained its strike on Iran is pre-emptive and aimed at destroying its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon so that it cannot fulfil its vow to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. However, without the use of “bunker buster” bombs to penetrate kilometres deep into the earth where the most critical nuclear enrichment facility is located (Fordo), such an aim would appear unachievable. If Israel is to succeed in rendering Iran toothless, it needs the bunker buster bombs, which it does not have, but the United States does.
Without going into the long, long saga of relations between Iran and the United States, recent diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions ended in failure with the result that President Trump is considering sending the United States Air Force and its MOPs (Massive Ordnance Penetrators) to join Israel in its mission to end the Iranian threat.
While Donald Trump is said to have approved attack plans on Iran, he has not made a decision as to whether to deploy its MOPs or formally join Israel’s air campaign. He has given peace a chance for two more weeks. To that end, European leaders are meeting with Iran’s counterpart in Geneva today.
I am going to cut to the chase and look to the astrology to shed light on the big question: will the US join Israel in its war against Israel. I wrote those words at 15:40 this afternoon. Here is the horoscope of that moment.
I am not an expert at horary, but I know enough to be able to establish that this is an “on” chart, and therefore worthy of our consideration. Twenty-five degrees of Libra rises. Venus, the ruler, is placed in the seventh house of partners and “open enemies”. Venus is making no major aspect to any other planet, therefore it acts in a random, unintegrated fashion. The Moon, however, is in Aries (a Mars-ruled sign) and forming an applying sextile to the Sun, the ruler of the tenth house (aims and objectives), which is situated in the ninth house of foreign interests. With the two luminaries in aspect, and in harmony, plus the Moon in the Mars-ruled sign of Aries, I believe this delivers a big yes. Plus, Mars, the planet of war, is inconjunct Pluto, on the one hand, and the Saturn-Neptune conjunction on the other, thereby becoming the focal point of a Yod configuration.
The verdict of the horary: the USA will join Israel in its war against Iran.
What, however, is even more fascinating is the presence of Pluto on the IC, which forms part of two Yod configurations, which I will explore shortly. Plus, the Ascendant-Descendant axis is within a couple of degrees of Israel’s natal Ascendant-Descendant axis, and the Mid-heaven is Israel’s Moon. Furthermore, Jupiter at two degrees of Cancer is conjunct the USA’s natal Venus-Jupiter conjunction, which just happens to be located in the seventh house of partners and “open enemies”. That the horary chart connects to planets and points in both Israel’s and the USA’s natal chart gives even greater authenticity.
It may not have escaped notice that we are within hours of the summer solstice, the point of the year at which the Sun appears to stand still in the heavens for three days. At 23:43 Friday night on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States (03:43 on Saturday morning in the UK and 12:43 Sydney time) the Sun will arrive at zero degrees of Cancer, one of the four cardinal signs, and one of four points of the year that a chart can be erected for the capital of a country in order to see the omens for the coming quarter.
Pluto is rising in America’s ingress chart, which suggests that the next three months are going to be transformation-in-a-bottle for the country. That Pluto is inconjunct the Sun-Jupiter conjunction, on the one hand, and Mars (in the seventh house of partners and “open enemies”) on the other, indicates conflict (Mars) and great force (Sun-Jupiter) are part of the transformation process. In this configuration, Pluto is the protagonist, and therefore the planet whose influence is superior. The experience/events that the Yod represents are funnelled through Pluto, while Pluto’s properties of elimination, reformation and death and rebirth are at the heart of the matter.
A Yod, also referred to as a Finger of Fate, is an interesting configuration because it is made up of one sextile and two inconjunctions – a mix of conflict and resolution.
But there is not just one Yod but two. The second configuration also involves Pluto, this time in sextile to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, both of which are inconjunct Mars, the planet of war.
Some of you may also have noticed that these two Yods form part of a larger configuration, which I have indicated by dotted lines in the horary chart. Rather than pick apart the additional formation, planet by planet, simply take away the understanding that when planets and points are on the same degrees, yet different signs, they are resonating with each other and generating a huge “vibration” and therefore presiding over significant events.
It is hard not to see the coming period as one of turmoil for the United States, even though the Yods portend resolution, while not a happy ending as such.
However, these same configurations are present for all countries in the world. They’re just going to fall in different parts of a horoscope. So, there is no place in the world that won’t go through some upheaval and chaos, albeit for different reasons, in the near future. What will make events even more significant for any one country, of course, is if any of those planets contained in the Yods fall on the angles.
Since I am nearing the deadline for this Friday Bite, I don’t have enough time to go into detail about the above charts but I have discussed all three summer solstice horoscopes in my video, which is due to go up on Saturday (21st June) at 17:00 UK time. Nor have I had time to explore the midpoint combinations, which are most revealing. For instance, Reinhold Ebertin (Combination of Stellar Influences) interprets Pluto at the midpoint of the Sun and Mars as:
Fanaticism… unscrupulous procedure… violence (war).
What is significant about the Israeli Ingress chart is the rising Sun-Jupiter conjunction, which is part of one Yod and squared by the Neptune-Saturn conjunction. That the attack on Iran was given the name of Operation Rising Lion is emblazoned on that rising Sun-Jupiter conjunction. That it will lead to huge consequences that cannot be foreseen is another feature of this configuration.
As for the United Kingdom, with Pluto on the Midheaven, not only might the nation be drawn into the conflict, albeit tangentially, but major events surrounding the country’s leadership, which involve both the government and the monarchy, look to be in the pipeline.
You know what I’m going to say. We live in interesting times…