Update from JMG, recapping his Spring Equinox 'predictions', and ushering a new set of 'predictions' for the next 3 months:
Excerpts:
Those of my readers who missed the Aries ingress chart can find it here. Here’s my summary from that post:
“So that’s basically what we can expect in the three months to come: a generally successful period for Trump’s presidency, marred by loud public quarrels with Congress and the military; a major shift in Congress, out of which important new legislation comes, probably affecting the military; more giddy excess in the nation’s speculative markets; a turn away from economic globalism, leading to enduring tensions in international affairs, but driving a significant improvement in domestic economic conditions; and an executive branch increasingly lost in its own self-referential bubble, but not yet undone by that bad habit.
“You’ll notice that this ingress chart doesn’t predict the kind of future that most people like to insist we’re going to get any day now. The end of the world has no place in it, nor do any of the various leaps of technology, or consciousness, or the other forms of twinkle dust with which so many would-be prophets like to entertain their listeners. Neither does the all-consuming economic crash that so many people on the doomward end of the blogosphere so openly long for, and have been predicting with the maniacal regularity of broken cuckoo clocks for decades now."
“For that matter, this chart doesn’t predict that Trump will suddenly sprout a short black mustache, overthrow the Constitution, and impose the fascist police state that so many of his opponents like to pretend they’re fighting; nor does it predict that he will be impeached, or thrown out by a military coup. Do such things happen from time to time in history? Sure, but they’re fairly rare, all things considered, and signaled well in advance by an assortment of historical and astrological indicators.”
The major shift in Congress is the one detail that isn’t yet clear, though I have a clearer sense—which I’ll discuss below—about what that might have been predicting. Other than that, I think it’s fair to say I called it. The Trump administration has succeeded in enacting several core elements of its platform, and Trump himself appears to have pulled off a foreign policy coup in his negotiations with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un; his public approval ratings are at an all-time high; the loud public quarrels have certainly been in evidence, and so has the giddy excess in speculative markets; the turn away from economic globalism has been dramatic; and the predicted upturn in the domestic economy, though quieter, seems to be under way. As for the self-referential bubble, well, that prediction really was shooting fish in a barrel, wasn’t it?
...
An effective challenge to the Trump administration would start by figuring out why so many voters were so desperate for change that they were willing to vote for Donald Trump in order to get it. It would then offer them solid reasons to think that their situation will actually change for the better if they vote for an alternative. Such a challenge has yet to be mounted, either by the Democrats or the old guard of the GOP; slogans tattered with years of hard wear and well-rehearsed shrieks of outrage have taken the place of any more effective approach, and Trump’s approval ratings have climbed steadily as a result. The Democrats still have time to slap themselves awake and do something that won’t simply lead them on a march to defeat in 2020, but the window of opportunity is narrowing with each passing day.
...
To sum up, then, the next three months will see Trump a little less outspoken and a little less central to America’s collective conversation than he’s been of late. The trade wars now under way will continue, causing some disruptions in the supply of goods and services here in the US and some expansion in the supply of jobs. More of Trump’s agenda will get traction in Congress, and there’s the possibility of a significant shift in US drug laws and federal prison policies as a result. The economic news will be dominated by dramatic swings in stocks and other speculative vehicles, with some big winners (especially in tech industries and vaporware generally) and some big losers (especially in smokestack industries and ventures vulnerable to foreign trade barriers). Trump’s opponents will by and large devote their time to preaching to an assortment of Democratic choirs, Congress and several federal bureaucracies will pound their collective chests at each other like a couple of quarreling silverback gorillas, and the rest of the country will swelter through a difficult summer, caught between the grinding weight of too much debt and the maddening chatter of an increasingly self-referential media industry.
That is to say, business as usual. Three months from now, we’ll see how things turned out.
