The present invention provides methods and compositions for the treatment of DNA damage related disorders. One embodiment is a method for the inhibition of side effects associated with chemotherapeutic and radiotherapeutic agents using chloroquine compounds. Another embodiment is a method for treatment and/or prevention of lethal or sub-lethal radiation toxicities associated with terrorist acts or war.
Researchers in four countries will soon start a clinical trial of an unorthodox approach to the new coronavirus. They will test whether a century-old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease, can rev up the human immune system in a broad way, allowing it to better fight the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 and, perhaps, prevent infection with it altogether. The studies will be done in physicians and nurses, who are at higher risk of becoming infected with the respiratory disease than the general population, and in the elderly, who are at higher risk of serious illness if they become infected.
A team in the Netherlands will kick off the first of the trials this week. They will recruit 1000 health care workers in eight Dutch hospitals who will either receive the vaccine, called bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), or a placebo.
BCG contains a live, weakened strain of Mycobacterium bovis,a cousin of M. tuberculosis,the microbe that causes TB. (The vaccine is named after French microbiologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin, who developed it in the early 20th century.) The vaccine is given to children in their first year of life in most countries of the world, and is safe and cheap—but far from perfect: It prevents about 60% of TB cases in children on average, with large differences between countries.
Vaccines generally raise immune responses specific to a targeted pathogen, such as antibodies that bind and neutralize one type of virus but not others. But BCG may also increase the ability of the immune system to fight off pathogens other than the TB bacterium, according to clinical and observational studies published over several decades by Danish researchers Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, who live and work in Guinea-Bissau. They concluded the vaccine prevents about 30% of infections with any known pathogen, including viruses, in the first year after it’s given. The studies published in this field have been criticized for their methodology, however; a 2014 review ordered by the World Health Organization concluded that BCG appeared to lower overall mortality in children, but rated confidence in the findings as “very low.” A 2016 review was a bit more positive about BCG’s potential benefits but said randomized trials were needed.
Since then, the clinical evidence has strengthened and several groups have made important steps investigating how BCG may generally boost the immune system. Mihai Netea, an infectious disease specialist at Radboud University Medical Center, discovered that the vaccine may defy textbook knowledge of how immunity works.
When a pathogen enters the body, white blood cells of the “innate” arm of the immune system attack it first; they may handle up to 99% of infections. If these cells fail, they call in the “adaptive” immune system, and T cells and antibody-producing B cells start to divide to join the fight. Key to this is that certain T cells or antibodies are specific to the pathogen; their presence is amplified the most. Once the pathogen is eliminated, a small portion of these pathogen-specific cells transform into memory cells that speed up T cell and B cell production the next time the same pathogen attacks. Vaccines are based on this mechanism of immunity.
The innate immune system, composed of white blood cells such as macrophages, natural killer cells, and neutrophils, was supposed to have no such memory. But Netea’s team discovered that BCG, which can remain alive in the human skin for up to several months, triggers not only Mycobacterium-specific memory B and T cells, but also stimulates the innate blood cells for a prolonged period. “Trained immunity,” Netea and colleagues call it. In a randomized placebo-controlled study published in 2018, the team showed that BCG vaccination protects against experimental infection with a weakened form of the yellow fever virus, which is used as a vaccine.
Together with Evangelos Giamarellos from the University of Athens, Netea has set up a study in Greece to see whether BCG can increase resistance to infections overall in elderly people. He is planning to start a similar study in the Netherlands soon. The trial was designed before the new coronavirus emerged, but the pandemic may reveal BCG’s broad effects more clearly, Netea says.
For the health care worker study, Neeta teamed up with epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Bonten of UMC Utrecht. “There is a lot of enthusiasm to participate,” among the workers, Bonten says. The team decided not to use actual infection with coronavirus as the study outcome, but “unplanned absenteeism.” “We don’t have a large budget and it won’t be feasible to visit the sick professionals at home,” Bonten says. Looking at absenteeism has the advantage that any beneficial effects of the BCG vaccine on influenza and other infections may be captured as well, he says.
Although the study is randomized, participants will likely know if they got the vaccine instead of a placebo. BCG often causes a pustule at the injection site that may persist for months, usually resulting in a scar. But the researchers will be blinded to which arm of the study—vaccine or placebo—a person is in.
A research group at the University of Melbourne is setting up a BCG study among health care workers using the exact same protocol. Another research group at the University of Exeter will do a similar study in the elderly. And a team at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology last week announced that—inspired by Netea’s work—it will embark on a similar trial in elderly people and health workers with VPM1002, a genetically modified version of BCG that has not yet been approved for use against TB.
Eleanor Fish, an immunologist at the of the University of Toronto, says the vaccine probably won’t eliminate infections with the new coronavirus completely, but is likely to dampen its impact on individuals. Fish says she’d take the vaccine herself if she could get a hold of it, and even wonders whether it’s ethical to withhold its potential benefits from trial subjects in the placebo arm.
But Netea says the randomized design is critical: “Otherwise we would never know if this is good for people.” The team may have answers within a few months.
The deal is valued at $4.7 billion, Blackstone said in a statement Wednesday. It’s the first acquisition by Blackstone’s largest ever private equity fund. Silver Lake and Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund GIC Pte have been the majority owners since 2016. After the deal closes, Blackstone will own about 75% and GIC will still hold about 25% of Ancestry.com, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
New York-based Blackstone is flush with cash as investors continue to bet big on the firm amid the uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Executives have in recent months touted success in navigating the 2008 financial crisis to show that the business, which has $156 billion in dry powder, will be well positioned to benefit from the current upheavals.
Many of the firm’s recent investments have been in growth companies and businesses likely to benefit from shifts in consumer behavior. Last month, the group announced it was investing in Oatly AB — a plant-based drink that’s been rapidly growing in popularity — with partners including Oprah Winfrey. Blackstone also owns a majority stake in MagicLab, the owner of dating app Bumble.
Deal talks regarding Ancestry.com started a few months ago, when much of the world was still at home and looking for things to do, said the people with knowledge of discussions.
Based in Lehi, Utah, Ancestry.com has more than 3 million paying subscribers and more than 18 million people in its DNA network. It sells at-home DNA testing kits to customers, competing with 23andMe Inc.
Ancestry.com first went public in 2009, raising $100 million. It was taken private in 2012 in a $1.6 billion buyout led by private equity firm Permira, and on at least two occasions since has considered going public again, though it never got the valuation it was seeking.
Silver Lake and GIC acquired their majority stake four years ago in a deal that valued the company at $2.6 billion. Prior owners, including management, Permira and Spectrum Equity, currently have a minority interest in the business.
Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager with $564 billion in assets, is also focused on growing its life sciences group. It has spent more than $1 billion this year investing in drugs that target high cholesterol, kidney disease in children and devices for diabetes patients.
Early in 2020, the firm bought $11 billion of public equities and liquid debt as values sank and markets became more volatile. It also took stakes in companies including 21Vianet, a Chinese data center business, and a portfolio of Hollywood film studios.
This is really important information for EVERYONE to pay attention to. It is time for everyone to wake up because all of our lives are at stake, and it is not because of some virus . It is because of the manipulators behind the curtain:
Pam Barker | Director of TLB Europe Reloaded Project
It seems you can’t fix stupid. Nor puppet governments.
Here, we present 3 graphs and their sources to show, as clearly as anything can, that, yes, viruses are still seasonal – they still die off or lose potency in high humidity. And whatever else might be going on out there (pockets of flare-ups? sudden mass testing that picks up meaningless trace amounts of some coronavirus or other?), the danger has well and truly passed.
Your daily reminder that the virus has dwindled away to almost nothing. This graph shows daily triage calls for 19-69 year-olds. Note no uptick during the Hyde Park BLM protests or during the “major incident” on Bournemouth Beach. (Hat tip Alistair Haimes.)
ER Editor: Of course, these claims cannot be verified given the anonymous nature of the source. Yet, it all has a ring of truth. Trump’s revealed he’s using hydroxychloroquine prophylactically (kudos – was he dropping us a hint?), so why would doctors, such as those hired for an American president no less, not be giving the same advice to other notables? Anything else makes little sense.
Note how this person calls COVID-19 a ‘bioweapon’ in ‘unrelenting launches of the COVID-19 bioweapon’ and ‘coronavirus cluster explosions will be detonated’. We only hope that herd immunity may short-circuit his/her predictions. The hypothesis that ‘Covid-19’ is in fact a bioweapon is something we’ve published on at length.
********
Anonymous D.C. Insider Exposes Ultra-Secret Covid Conspiracy Inside the Beltway
STATE OF THE NATION
Submitted by an Anonymous D.C. Insider
Big Pharma and the WHO have known all along about the HCQ cure for COVID-19.
Everyone at the CDC, NIH and FDA knows that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is the silver bullet for the coronavirus.
They also know that, when combined with azithromycin and zinc, the 3-in-1 protocol provides the magic formula for almost anyone with coronavirus disease.
However, what Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and Robert Redfield are not telling anyone is that practically every VIP in Washington, D.C. is using HCQ prophylactically.
Everyone knows that Trump has been using it as a preventative as he publicly stated so on multiple occasions. But no one has revealed that virtually everyone inside the Beltway is also using it. That’s why they were all shown so often in groups with no masks and not adhering to the recommended social distancing guidelines during the regular coronavirus briefings. And, they did many of those dog and pony shows right in the middle of the Covid spikes during the first wave.
The real scandal here is that leading politicians, government officials, corporate CEOs and UN administrators all know about the efficacy of HCQ, and yet they have collaborated to deprive the American people of its use. All the while they, themselves, are secretly taking HCQ prophylactically.
When so many countries around the globe have used Hydroxychloroquine with great success, why is the U.S. fiercely resisting it?
Because the world’s most zealous vaccine salesman — Bill Gates — is determined to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market. Word on the street (K Street) is that Gates is also taking HCQ as a preventive.In fact, he has taken HCQ as a precautionary measure to avoid malaria for many years during his travels to the Third World nations that were subjected to his endless vaccine pitches and vaccination programs.
If Americans knew that India was successfully using HCQ nationwide, how would they react? New Delhi has even made the decision to make HCQ available as a prophylactic, so inexpensive is it.
“India is estimated to produce 70% of the world’s hydroxychloroquine, with Ipca Labs and Zydus Cadila the two largest producers of the drug in the country.[1]
Key government officials, medical authorities and elected representatives throughout the USA are aware of every single fact stated in this exposé. Nevertheless, they are pushing untested remedies and dangerous protocols that have actually killed many COVID-19 patients in all 50 states.
This situation is completely unacceptable. Especially when the leaders of the national coronavirus response are taking HCQ and other effective prophylactics to keep the coronavirus at bay. The same goes for many in the mainstream media; they will never tell anyone either that they’re taking HCQ. Nor will the Sultans of Silicon Valley or Wall Street banksters or Corporate America moguls ever let on to this “ultra-secret conspiracy”. Which is why the Hamptons Concert With Goldman CEO, ‘Chainsmokers’ Faces N.Y. Probe. Goldman Sachs Chairman of the Board David Solomon obviously felt immune to catching Covid even at a concert where he was the star of the show.
But what’s the real scandal here?
The HCQ-Azithromycin-Zinc protocol is being deliberately withheld from the American people so that a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine can be foisted on the country.
And, the proof of such a criminal conspiratorial plot: there will be never-ending seasonal Covid spikes, with each wave being bigger and more intense than the previous one. When those start to ebb, coronavirus cluster explosions will be detonated in the major metro areas, particularly the sanctuary cities.
Then, when the blue states have had enough, the Democrat governors will collude with their Democrat legislatures to mandate an annual Covid vaccination (just like California recently passed draconian legislation requiring yearly compliance with childhood vaccination schedules). The unrelenting launches of the COVID-19 bioweapon in conservative territory will eventually compel the Republican governors to do the same in the red states.
— An Anonymous D.C. Insider
SOTN Editor’s Note: The end result of this phase of OPERATION COVID-19 is the undeclared state of medical martial law. Next will begin the initial stages of the Orwellian takeover scheme COVID-1984, which has been greatly advanced via the staged race riots and growing buzz about an impending race war. However, only if the American people allow them to will these treasonous plans gain any meaningful traction.
Hunting dogs use more than their noses to find their way back to their owners hundreds or even thousands of feet away, researchers have found. Turns out, these four-legged navigators may sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a compass, scientists are now reporting.
This ability, called magnetoreception, is common in many animals, including some whale species, dolphins and sea turtles, among others. Now, a new study carried out in the Czech Republic and detailed in the journal eLife, suggests adding at least some hunting dogs to this list.
“This ‘sense’ is beyond our own human perception and it is, therefore, very hard to understand its meaning for animals,” study researcher Kateřina Benediktová, at Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, told Live Science. Benediktová is a graduate student in the lab of Hynek Burda, another study author.
This work builds on previous research by Benediktová and Burda, along with a team of scientists, who found that several breeds of dog preferred to poop with their body aligned along the magnetic north-south axis. The researchers speculated that behavior could help the dogs map their location relative to other spots, such as their starting point, they said in their study published in 2013 in the journal Frontiers in Zoology, as reported by Science magazine.
In the new study, Benediktová and her colleagues looked specifically at hunting dogs because this group of dogs has astonishing homing abilities that are not fully understood. They have been bred over generations to seek out game and if they don’t find any, they navigate back to their owners over long distances, often using novel routes back. How these dogs pinpoint their owner’s location in densely forested areas is perplexing.
Between September 2014 and December 2017, Benediktová’s team equipped 27 hunting dogs of 10 different breeds, including fox terriers and miniature dachshunds, with GPS trackers. These dogs were allowed to roam in forested areas away from buildings, roads and powerlines. Dogs ran individually and returned on their own. Trips took between 30 and 90 minutes. Owners hid close to the location where the dog was released. The GPS data, from a total of 622 excursions in 62 different locations in the Czech Republic, were then compiled and analyzed.
What researchers found was that the dogs mostly followed their own scent to take the same route back as they did on the outbound trek — a method called “tracking.” In 223 of the excursions, however, the dogs took a novel route back using a method referred to as “scouting.” The researchers looked more closely at the GPS data from these “scouting” treks to investigate how those dogs found their way back. A majority of the scouting dogs began their return with a short run along Earth‘s north-south axis. The researchers noticed that this “compass run” occurred regardless of the dog’s actual return direction.
“We propose that this [compass] run is instrumental for bringing the mental map into register with the magnetic compass and to establish the heading of the animal,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Those scouting dogs also returned faster to their owners than the dogs using the tracking method, in which they just came back the same way they went out.
“We were absolutely excited “when we found an unexpected magnetic behavior in the dogs’ scouting return strategy,” Benediktová said. “Hunting dogs roam over large distances. A human would most probably get lost without a compass and a map if roaming over comparable distances in unfamiliar forested areas. In addition, after the north-south compass run, dogs were able to run more directly to the owner.”
Kathleen Cullen, a neuroscience professor at The John Hopkins University who was not involved in the research, said the findings are exciting, “Overall, I think that the authors’ unexpected discovery that hunting dogs will often perform a ‘compass run’ before returning home is exciting — these results will certainly motivate further exploration of how exactly the mammalian brain encodes magnetic cues and then uses this information to achieve accurate navigation.”
Cullen added, “It is also interesting “that these results build on previous findings showing that other animals, such as migratory birds, also sense the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate back to their homes.”
When asked what motivated this study, Benediktová said that “the connection between navigation, homing and magnetoreception could be very close.” In addition, “its role in the orientation of dogs has not been studied as thoroughly as in migratory birds, turtles or subterranean mole rats.”
The researchers also tried to rule out other explanations besides the compass run for how the dogs found their way back to their owners. GPS data from scouting dogs showed no significant performance difference between dogs of different sexes, and dogs navigated back equally well in both familiar and unfamiliar terrain. They also determined that the position of the sun had little influence on the dog’s navigation ability, because most days were overcast. Dogs probably weren’t using distant landmarks to navigate because researchers saw no significant difference in homing abilities of tall and short dogs even though short dogs would be less able to see through the dense foliage. And the team ruled out the possibility of dogs using scent to navigate home because only 10% of the runs had winds blowing in the direction from owner to dog and scouting runs were nearly 100 feet (30 meters) from outbound runs.
In WWI, dogs delivered messages while under fire and they helped locate wounded soldiers and carried first aid kits to be used in the field. The amazing abilities have long been a source of amazement and curiosity. For every generation, there is a heartwarming movie like “Lassie Come Home,” about a dog who can travel long distances. This current Czech study may provide a clue to dogs’ phenomenal abilities.
“The magnetic field,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “may provide dogs with a ‘universal’ reference frame, which is essential for long-distance navigation, and arguably, the most important component that is ‘missing’ from our current understanding of mammalian special behavior and cognition.”
Cullen cautioned that the study needs to be replicated to make a stronger case for the conclusions, but if it is verified, the findings “suggest that a neural strategy in which magnetoreception contributes to the brain’s ‘internal GPS’ is likely to be more common than previously thought.”
Last month, it was discovered that the COVID-19 death counts in nursing homes were greatly over-counted after the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) required 15,000 nursing homes to report COVID-19 detailed data retroactively and the data became scrambled. For example, the Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center in New Jersey, a 96-bed facility, had 753 COVID-19 deaths, the most in the US, but the nursing home itself only reported 16 COVID-19 deaths.
When the administrator of the Saugus Rehab and Nursing Center in Saugus, Massachusetts, heard that a new Medicare website reported her facility had 794 confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the second highest in the country — and 281 cases among staff, she gasped.
“Oh my God. Where are they getting those numbers from?” said Josephine Ajayi. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Those weren’t the numbers that her facility reported to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, under new rules from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), she said.
Ajayi said her 80-bed facility actually reported 45 residents have tested positive and five residents died, although the CMS website showed no Saugus deaths. About 19 staff members tested positive for the virus, and most have returned to work, she said.
Officials at skilled nursing facilities around the country said Monday they were shocked to see their data reported inaccurately — wildly so in some cases, as at the Saugus home — on the new CMS public website launched Thursday. The numbers are scaring families, harming their reputations, and in some cases are physically impossible, given the number of beds or staff in their facilities, they said.
CMS approved an interim final rule May 1 requiring more than 15,000 nursing homes receiving Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement to report COVID data by May 31, and weekly going forward.
The data fill 56 columns detailing COVID-19 infected residents, staff, testing, and equipment, going back to at least May 1. As of Thursday, CMS said 88% of the nursing homes in the country had reported. Going forward after a grace period ended June 7, they risk fines of $1,000 and up for every week they fail to update their data.
But in many cases, nursing home officials said their data were somehow scrambled, either because nursing home personnel reported in the wrong columns, or the numbers were loaded incorrectly somewhere between the CDC and CMS.
For example, Southern Pointe Living Center in Colbert, Oklahoma, with 95 beds, was reported to have had 339 residents die of COVID-19, yet no confirmed or suspected cases.
“We have not lost anyone nor have we had a [COVID-19] case in the building,” said a woman identifying herself as an assistant at Southern Pointe but who declined to give her full name. The day after CMS released the data, on Friday, she said someone from the CDC called the facility to ask if their numbers were correct as reported, “and we told them no.”
She added, “I don’t know how that happened but that is an error on their end.” As of Tuesday morning, the posted data had not been corrected.
“Insanely wrong”
MedPage Today first learned of the inaccuracies shortly after publishing an article Friday on the new public database. In that article was a list (since removed) of “outliers” — those with the highest numbers of cases and deaths among residents and staff — that included Dellridge Health and Rehabilitation Center in Paramus, New Jersey. The CMS data indicated it had the most COVID-19 deaths of any nursing home in the country at 753.
That number is “insanely wrong,” Jonathan Mechaly, Dellridge’s marketing director, wrote in a frantic email. “We are a 90-bed center and have had less than 20 deaths!! How do you report such inaccurate numbers?”
After a download of the data, a quick sort of the columns easily reveals extreme totals in various categories. But no one called those nursing homes before the data were released to doublecheck, for example, when 100-bed Smith Village in Chicago was shown to have 1,105 confirmed COVID-19 cases among residents and 955 confirmed COVID-19 cases among staff, the most in the country.
“We apparently misread the instructions, which were not very clear,” Yahaira Ramirez, Smith Village’s director of clinical operations told MedPage Today. The facility has had only 38 positive cases among residents and 14 deaths, and among staff, 37 positive or suspected cases but no deaths, she said. But instead of showing up as a total, those numbers somehow appeared as if there were additional cases every day in May. No one caught the error.
It would have been helpful if someone from either agency had at least checked on the highest outliers before publishing, Ramirez said. “We’ve been trying to abide by a lot of the guidelines (from) CMS and CDC, but it’s been challenging. You talk to different people and you get a different answer. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised that they haven’t reached out.”
Asked why there appeared to be so many errors in the data, a CMS spokesman emailed this response:
“As with any new reporting program, there can be data submission errors in the beginning. In an effort to be transparent, CMS made the data collected by the CDC public as quickly as possible balancing transparency and speed against the potential of initial data errors.”
“CMS is advising nursing homes when their submitted data has not passed certain quality checks so they can review the CDC submission instructions and their data submission for accuracy. As CMS continues to analyze the data going forward we expect fewer errors as nursing home staff get used to these requirements and CMS has more time to quality check the data.”
Asked why CMS, at the very least, did not contact the highest outliers, for whom such large numbers of COVID-19 cases or deaths were highly unlikely because of their size, the spokesman did not respond.
It’s also true that CMS Administrator Seema Verma, in announcing the database’s launch, told reporters on a phone call that it would probably include inaccurate data.
The full article is here: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86967
According to the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize laureate, you know what would end the economic slump in 18 months? Aliens.
Paul Krugman probably feels like an alien himself these days, considering Washington is completely ignoring his unwavering arguments for more fiscal stimulus as President Obama and Congressional Republicans try to out-deficit-reduce each other. So maybe that’s why Krugman has aliens on the brain.
While talking off the cuff on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program (Zakaria is also a TIME Magazine contributor), Krugman conjectured about what would happen if aliens landed on earth and attacked us.
“If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” Krugman says, referencing an episode of The Twilight Show in which an alien threat was manufactured to bring about world peace.
While Krugman is obviously using the idea as a provocative thought experiment, there’s a serious argument behind it, which boils down to the government gaining the incentive to raise taxes so it could build war-fighting materials, much like the U.S. did during World War II when tax rates were astronomical. The war was the single biggest factor in finally helping the U.S. dig out of the Great Depression, largely because it generated jobs and exports.
But the way most people seem to feel these days, aliens have been in Washington for some time. They just don’t appear to be helping matters much.
Astrology can be a controversial subject, with fervent followers and equally fervent detractors. As an astrologer, you quickly get used to people dismissing your subject out of hand. After all, it’s all made up nonsense, right? And there are 13 signs, anyway, not 12. And it’s ridiculous to claim that planets millions or even billions of miles away are causing us to act in a certain way. And they say the sun is a planet when it isn’t. And they say our fate is predetermined, with no free will. And they tell you the earth is at the center of the universe. And anyway the signs don’t even line up with where they used to be. And I’m a Leo but I hate drama. And I’m married to a Gemini and they say that Leo and Gemini aren’t a good match. And why in the world would one twelfth of the whole world’s population be going to have a bad day next Thursday?
Actually, neither I nor any astrologer I have ever dealt with has said or believes these kinds of things, all of which are based on fundamental misunderstandings of what astrology is and what it claims to do. I make no effort to convince anyone that astrology can be a useful psychological and spiritual tool; that’s up to each of us to discern for ourselves. If you’re cautiously interested in astrology, though, but have been put off by some of these myths and misunderstandings, here’s a rundown of the top five astrology myths – debunked. Understanding where astrologers are coming from may help you better decide whether this is something you’d like to pursue or not.
1 – There are 13 Signs, not 12 and I’m Now an Ophiuchus Not a Scorpio!
No, there aren’t, and no, you’re not. This myth periodically resurfaces and is usually attributed to NASA having ‘discovered’ a new constellation and thereby created or discovered a new zodiac sign. The last time this did the rounds on social media was only a couple of weeks ago.
NASA have not discovered a new constellation, or a new zodiac sign. Astrology signs are NOT, repeat NOT, the same as astronomical constellations. Ophiuchus is a very large constellation which has been visible for thousands of years. It does sit between the astronomical constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius, but that does not mean it was missed out of the zodiac – did you know that there are actually 88 officially recognized constellations in the night sky? It’s not like astrologers just accidentally missed out Ophiuchus, silly astrologers! For this myth to make any sense at all, NASA would had to have discovered 76 new ‘zodiac signs’ and rewritten the history of astrology altogether. Which they, um, didn’t.
Astrology signs, zodiac signs, sun signs – call them what you will – are effectively units of measurement which were named after a selection of constellation, but have nothing more concrete than that to do with the constellations of the same name. Each astrology sign measures 30 degrees of the ecliptic. We may say that Mars is currently at 12 degrees Leo – but this is just a shorthand, symbolic way of saying that Mars is currently at 132 degrees of the ecliptic. The signs could really have been named anything, they’re just measuring/marking these twelve 30 degree sectors. The ‘discovery’ (not) of a new astronomical constellation is therefore completely irrelevant.
2 – The Astrology Signs Don’t Match Up with the Constellations Anyway
This is actually true – but the corresponding assertion that ‘therefore astrology is nonsense’ has no basis. The truth behind this misunderstanding is quite complex. It’s partly to do with the fact we covered above, that astrology signs are NOT the same as constellations. It’s also to do with something called the precession of the equinoxes. This is an astronomical phenomena which has been known since at least 300BC. When the sun rises on the morning of the vernal equinox in March each year, astrologers say that this marks 0 degrees Aries, and the start of an astrological new year. This is the point from which we start to count those 30 degree sectors in the sky. Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, the sun would indeed have risen at this time in front of the astronomical constellation called Aries.
However, due to a wobble in the earth’s axis (the precession of the equinoxes), the point at which the sun rises on the vernal equinox gradually shifts, over the course of 25,800 years, against the background of different astronomical constellations. In this modern age, when the sun rises on the vernal equinox, it is against the backdrop of the astronomical constellation of Pisces, not Aries. Here’s a short video explaining how it works:
What does this tell us about astrology? Nothing much. Because, remember, the astrological signs are shorthand for those 30 degree sectors around the ecliptic. These sectors always begin at the point of the vernal equinox, with the first 30 degree named Aries, the second 30 degrees named Taurus, and so on. That the vernal equinox now takes place aligned with the astronomical constellation of Pisces is interesting, but not broadly relevant.
Then only way the precession of the equinoxes is relevant to astrology is in the concept of astrological ‘ages’. Because the vernal equinox point is now against the backdrop of Pisces, we say we are in the astrological age of Pisces. Thousands of years ago, it was the astrological age of Aries. At some point, it will become the much talked-about astrological age of Aquarius – but astrologers cannot agree on when this will happen, or if it has already happened, because it depends on where you define the boundaries of the astronomical constellations. In his book World Horoscopes, respected astrological researcher Nick Campion lists six pages worth of suggested dates collated from the research of other astrologers, ranging from as long ago as 1447 through 2012 to as far ahead as 3597! Besides, not all astrologers even agree that astrological ‘ages’ are a thing, so….
3 – Astrologers Believe that Planets Somehow Cause Things to Happen on Earth
Nope. We don’t. No astrologer I’ve ever dealt with believes that there is a cause and effect at play here. The astrologer’s creed is ‘as above, so below’. Astrology is a symbolic language, above all else, and the basic concept is that the dance of the planets (and yes, we do know that neither the Sun nor the Moon are actually planets) and the complex angles they create between one another symbolically REFLECTS the prevailing energy on earth.
In other words, astrology works on the principle that there is a relationship between celestial events and events on earth, but it is not a cause and effect relationship. Nothing to do with gravity or electromagnetism or any other physical effect.
4 – Astrology Claims to Predict the Future (Thereby Negating Free Will)
No, it doesn’t. Astrology cannot predict the future, because each of us has free will and can shape our own future. However, because we can predict the exact movements of the planets, which are believed to reflect the energies co-occurring at time on earth, we can and do try to predict what kinds of energies might be at play at any given point in the future.
My old astrology tutor used to liken it to a weather forecast. We can tell you whether it’s likely to be raining in the middle of next week. But whether you choose to hunker down at home, swearing and brooding, or whether you choose to go out and dance in the rain – that is free will. That is up to you.
But what about horoscopes, telling you that next Thursday you will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger? Of course, it’s not realistic to say that one twelfth of all humanity will experience the same thing on any given day – which is why sun sign horoscopes, as entertaining as they may be, are of extremely limited use. They’re popular, and if well written with proper astrological insight they can sometimes be revealing, but typically only for people whose sun sign is very strong and who were also born in roughly the middle of that sun sign period (because of the way most horoscopes are calculated). Horoscopes are popular, which is why astrologers keep writing them, but no astrologer I know would pretend that they are 100% accurate for everyone, or anything more than a well-meant generalization.
5 – Astrology is Only About Sun Signs – But I Don’t Feel Like a Gemini
No, no, no. Astrology does not classify the whole of humanity into twelve classes which define your whole life. At the time you were born, every planet was somewhere in the sky above you. Depending on the date and time and place of your birth, we create a map of the planetary locations for that time and place. This is your birth chart. Your birth chart has every planet in it, somewhere. And for a proper astrology reading, the birth chart as a whole must be considered, and the nuanced interplay of dozens of different positions, angles and movements must be carefully synthesized and interpreted.
The sun is indeed considered to be a powerful part of a birth chart, but far from the only part. The Ascendant is also important – the sign rising in the east at the moment of your birth. So is the midheaven – the sign directly overhead. So are the positions of the moon and all of the other planets, and in particular the angles they form between one another. In many charts, the sun is in the end not even the most dominant or powerful force in a chart; in many others, its importance is heavily mitigated by other factors.
If you’re ‘a Gemini’, that just means that the sun was in Gemini when you were born. If you don’t think you act or feel or behave like ‘a typical Gemini’, you’re probably right, and there are umpteen potential reasons for that, depending which other factors are stronger in your individual chart.
It’s for this reason, by the way, that all of the ‘Gemini goes well with Virgo but not with Leo’ stuff in relationship guides must be taken with an enormous pinch of salt. Because we are all unique, diverse individuals, each with our own blessings and faults, the truth is that any sun sign may go well with any other sun sign – or not. Human relationships are far too complex to be reduced to sun signs. Relationship astrology – synastry – can do a good job of analyzing a given relationship and finding ways to help it thrive, but that is done via detailed comparison of both individuals’ whole birth charts, and of the astrological factors affecting both of them in that time period.
If you feel that astrology doesn’t resonate with you, then of course that’s fine, nobody compels you to find it interesting or useful. However, I hope to have at least cleared up some of the most common reasons people give for dismissing astrology; it is a far more complex and nuanced art than most of its detractors understand, and it does not actually make most of the claims for which its critics so despise it.
About the author:
Nikki Harper is a spiritualist writer, astrologer, and Wake Up World’s editor.
