Donald’s Cabinet, Watched by Ants

From the Bohemian Grove to Little St. James.

Noam Chomsky, his wife Valeria Wasserman and Jeffrey Epstein in Harvard Square, in an undated photo released by the Department of Justice. This image comes up first under a search for “astrology” in the Epstein files.

Dear Friend and Reader:

I started writing a horoscope, but the astrology is just too much right now. It’s like trying to toast a marshmallow in the furnace of a steel mill.

That furnace is the hottest astrology in a generation and arguably of our lifetimes, and there’s a lot to talk about. Saturn aligns with Neptune in fire sign Aries on Friday and we are well into the Chiron-Eris pairing that happens in Aries in one month. In classical and ordinary astrology, Aries is the sign of war, and Ares is the god of war.

The astrology also describes the digital environment on fire. So today I’m here to write you a letter. I’ll share what I’m discerning about what I can only describe as a low point of American society, which in turn is affecting the consciousness of the whole world. And that of you and me.

The Preppers Started Arriving in 1620

Let’s not forget that plenty of people think this is all just fabulous — such as the ones secretly prepping for “the end.” The North American continent is populated with them, and it has been since Nov. 21, 1620, when the Mayflower arrived in the promised land. They were pilgrims. They thought the New World was to be the scene of the forthcoming Revelation. They were a little early.

It’s tempting to forget that the aforementioned furnace is more like the hellfire of a dimension being blown open giving everyone a look into the pit of the chummy, glad-handing, stylized politicians with their professional hair and makeup. They do things like ventilate gas from their lungs or rage for hours at a Senate committee for meekly trying to hold someone accountable for her actions as Attorney General of the United States.

Did you catch that show? It was a real pisser.

Some say we are in the time of the apocalypse. That is true, in the sense that the word means “revelation, disclosure.” One thing being disclosed right now is that Trump is preparing the country for what could be another 20 year war — this time with Iran. Two aircraft carrier battle groups, 12 warships including those with missile launching capacity, hundreds of fighter jets, and land bases activated — all as part of a massive weapons transfer into the region.

Note, early Thursday, Buckingham Palace confirmed that the former Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles III, had been arrested for his connection to Epstein allegations. This was the first very high level arrest in connection to the affair. It occurs just as the United States is lining up military assets for what could be a major assault on Iran.

Scene from a Bohemian Grove ritual, undated.

An Old Poem by Robert Bly

In an era comparable to our own but quaint by comparison, Robert Bly wrote a poem about the Bohemian Grove. I first encountered this nearly-forgotten poem in an advanced writing class. You may have heard of the Bohemian Grove — a real and mythical place where the billionaires would gather behind the scenes for their private meeting every year. There are many such places.

The poem is called “Johnson’s Cabinet Watched By Ants.” Johnson refers to Pres. Lyndon Johnson, who was sworn into office on Air Force One shortly after Pres. Kennedy was assassinated.

In 139 words including the title, the poet exposes the astounding hypocrisy of the Vietnam War. The writing is so descriptive, so beautiful and so easy to follow, I will present the original text rather than paraphrase. It may be easier to read out loud:

It is a clearing deep in a forest:
overhanging boughs make a low place.
Here the citizens we know during the day,
The ministers, the department heads,
Appear changed: the stockholders of
large steel companies
In small wooden shoes;
here are the generals dressed
as gamboling lambs.

These ordinarily powerful men were seen in meek and mild human garb, enjoying a little California relaxation.

Think of the Grove as a secluded Caribbean island, where they’ve been ferried by private jet from an exclusive airport in New Jersey. There’s fantastic weather, and all their friends are there. Presidents and professors and princes and their dates. There are always some new and interesting people.

Pretty young women were everywhere — Victoria’s Secret kinds of girls. In fact one of them was promised such a modeling gig and instead said she was captured and raped on the private jet, which Bill Clinton once borrowed.

Speaking of girls, we are not hearing much about boys and young men. There have been mentions in the past though this issue has gone silent. If history and the social world around politics mean anything, boys and young men were also taken captive. The topic has just been struck from the coverage, and I wonder why.

Chuffed to death! At Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011, after Epstein was a convicted sex offender. From left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Sec. Lawrence Summers; Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and “covid pandemic” designer; and Boris Nikolic, the Gates Foundation’s science adviser.

Important, Wealthy People Everywhere

Everyone who comes to the island is very important. And anyone there was also allowed to think of himself or herself as important. Affairs of the world were being discussed: high finance, artificial intelligence projects, meddling with the 9/11 investigation, and plans for turning “health emergencies” into empire building opportunities. The food was excellent: there was “jerky” and “pasta” and “pizza,” whatever you think that means in a place where people are accustomed to $500 meals the rest of the time.

Bly, in his poem. reports that these people hanging out in the Grove have two different presentations; two different faces. His poem is set in 1967, when more than 50 American service members and thousands of Vietnamese people were being killed daily (over 20 years, an average of 300 to 400 Vietnamese died per day, minimum):

Tonight they burn the rice supplies;
tomorrow they lecture on Thoreau;
tonight they move around the trees;
Tomorrow they pick the twigs
from their clothes;
Tonight they throw the firebombs;
tomorrow they read
the Declaration of Independence;
tomorrow they are in church.

They sustain the hypocrisy so gracefully, feeling good about themselves — studying Thoreau and doing what they must for their businesses, like buying and selling flesh-piercing shrapnel bombs and napalm. The Grove is where the captains of industry would meet with the department heads making the requisitions. They were so close, they would pray and read the founding documents together.

Are you one of those people who wonders how they can live with themselves? Ah yes, well, Henry David helped with that, in his little book about life in the woods by Walden Pond:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

What soaring idealism; the boundless American optimism.

And yes, the unexpected success of blowing up villages, farms and schools. Isn’t life wonderful! And we all get to be here together. The food…it’s so quite good. Nobody has ever had such excellent “jerky.” There’s a lot more over in that other freezer — just ask Ghislaine, she knows where to find it.

The quaint old days — Peter Arnett with Vietnamese troops in 1965. He famously wrote, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” AP Photo via NY Times archives.

This Hypocrisy Has Always Existed…

…but it’s a matter of scale. And whether it comes to the surface. Meanwhile, at the time our poem was written, the American public was being fed chipper news every day by the eminently charming Robert McNamara, telling us how well Vietnam was going and how we need to protect freedom and our way of life and all that.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” Americans were told. That pithy line was written by Peter Arnett, whom we came to know as a CNN reporter covering the first Iraq massacre 25 years later.

Draft resistors who refused to murder people in Asia were held as criminals and traitors, and student protesters against the war were shot by the National Guard. Meantime, the managers and financiers of the war were reading the Declaration of Independence and attending banquets and bonfires.

The pro-war/anti-war argument of the Sixties was a ruse and served only to cover for the deeper crimes, just like today’s pro-Trump, anti-Trump argument. Who needs to be pro or anti? Trump’s name appears more times in the Epstein files than Harry Potter does in the Harry Potter series (a lot more — at least 38,000 times). But he had nothing to do with anything. It was all just a big coincidence. I have written before that I don’t think Trump was a customer. I think he was a business partner.

Sexual Sin Gets More Attention than Genocide

Consider that the sex scandal angle on Epstein Island is a ruse. Sexual sins always get more attention than war and genocide. Yes, all that depraved stuff happened, and it was horrendous. But it was entertainment and a plum for boring, too-rich and too-powerful sex-starved warmongers who could never get a date with any of the cute girls in high school or university. Finally, those pretty girls were everywhere.

And for the public, as it boils over, it offers the ultimate distraction.

What was really going on, in Bohemian Grove style, was planning the pandemic industry, plotting assorted overthrows, cooking up contracts and massive business deals, all the while dragging everyone into what the Russians call Kompromat: information that can be used as blackmail.

That’s how the whole thing was kept so silent for so long. What was actually happening was that a sleazy douche bag was running a human trafficking operation propped up by intelligence organizations and where, in essence, the world was being run. And of course, that’s just a “conspiracy theory” until you demand answers.

Epstein writing about ‘astrologists’ and other ‘perfectly honest and deluded people’ in a letter to Noam Chomsky on Sept. 10, 2015.

I Entered ‘Astrology’ Into the Search Bar

I’ve said a few times that this whole Epstein thing is not my story, that is, not my investigation. I’m just an astrologer and commentator on the digital environment which has given rise to it. (Little St. James as we know it was entirely a creature of the 21st century — the digital age. The files are digital copies of digital documents; it is one and the same as “the internet.”)

But just to see what came back, I typed “astrology” into the Dept. of Justice search engine of hell. Surprisingly, I got about 36 returns.

Funny enough, the first thing that came up when I first tapped was a photo of Noam Chomsky (shown above). He is the MIT professor and moral conscience of the American left. He’s seen hoofing at a brisk pace through Harvard Square with his wife and Jeffrey Epstein. Ah yes, Chomsky, the very spine of integrity and the soul of liberalism. Hanging out with a convicted child rapist.

Other results came up; three are various email references and Epstein saying that they had to take it easy on “astrologists” and other sincere zealots who don’t have a clue. A natal chart reading from Café Astrology got into the files; we don’t know who it belongs to. That I can discern, there is no record of an “astrologist” ever having set foot on the ground there.

I Read Him So You Don’t Have To. But You Still Can.

How Chomsky came up in a search for “astrology” I have no clue, but that’s digital space for you. But please let me ask you something personal. Have you ever read a Noam Chomsky book? I understand if you haven’t. I have, so you don’t have to (Turning the Tide, and The Culture of Terrorism). For decades, such books formed the basis of intellectual thought by anyone with serious liberal leanings.

Chomsky was always the guy who was going to expose and fix the hypocrisy and corruption of the same warmonger president-types that Epstein was besties with. You know, drain the proverbial swamp and expose the Iran-Contra scandal.

From careful reading over the years, I figured out he was crazy. By that, I mean the type who preaches truth and freedom and also believes certain people belong in concentration camps for their beliefs (anti-vaccine people) or their genetic lineage (Japanese-Americans). So maybe that explains why he fit the island culture so well. He truly was one of them.

From the New York Times, July 15, 1964. The Tonkin Gulf “Incident” was the following month, so the escalation had already begun. NY Times archive.

Why the World Does Not Get Better

One thing I’ve noticed in my nearly 62 years on Earth is that the world situation does not get better. Some individual lives get better but the world? Same as it’s been for a long time. If a poem written when I was three years old is directly relevant 59 years later, nothing has changed. Decade after decade, war after war, economic collapse after economic collapse.

As previously mentioned, Trump is moving military assets into place to wage war on Iran. (This has been planned for a long time.) These assets include two aircraft carrier battle groups, hundreds of attack planes, guided-missile ships and more, all scattered throughout West Asia. This happens over and over again.

The same people doing this are presented respectably as world leaders on the front of The New York Times allegedly trying to “end wars” and have “economic summits” and make business deals and sell each other boatloads of massive computer chips and all of that. If you stop for 10 seconds and stare at the page or the screen, it would occur to you: you’ve seen this thousands of times. The endless parade of faces, names and wars.

Behind the scenes, these people who are supposed to be the guardians of freedom and the economy and good, sound values are raping teenagers, eating “jerky” and cutting deals where they all come out winners and the rest of us come out losers.

That’s viciously hypocritical. And so too is any of us holding them as venerated leaders, moral paragons and incense-proffered icons who will save the world and lead us to a brighter future. That brighter future never happens; it’s just an ad. The world does not get better, because the people who own it have a different idea of “better,” which involves kidnapping children and then showing themselves in the media with a halo around their head.

Sunset over Love Canal, spring 2025, seen from Wheatfield Ave. and 100th St. This former neighborhood, built on a chemical dumpsite, was once home to 1,000 families and the location of two elementary schools. Its existence is the result of “better living through chemistry” and the corruption of the Niagara Falls School Board. Photo by Eric Francis.

Metaphors for the Epstein Files

First, a personal one. Every family has its secrets or its people with secrets. Every family has its bad actors. Nearly every person has some feeling that they are either a victim or have done something wrong; many among us are wracked in guilt, shame and fear. People carry a lot of guilt for the behavior of their ancestors.

There’s often the sense that we live next to a kind of repository of all the karma and the pain of past generations. In astrology this is called the 12th house. It contains all the unfinished business of our predecessors before us; and it contains everything we hide from ourselves. For some, the 12th is a little like a chemical waste dump. Everything stashed there is seemingly forgotten till it bubbles up into the schoolyard or the livingroom.

At the moment, we have a manifestation of a family secrets repository in mid-Capricorn, which I’m calling the Family Hunger Game. This cluster of planets could take a year to unpack in an advanced psychological astrology course. We are seeing it unpacked before our eyes. In the mix is a point called Ixion, which is about the total lack of a moral framework: unrepentant murder and rape which breed more war and violence (that is the story of Ixion).

Family Hunger Game pattern is marked in red.

Ixion is a symbol of a kind of person and a state of mind, and it was rampant on Epstein Island, which is papered over by the front page of The New York Times showing us these same respectable people “trying to do something good and fix the world.”

However, what I’m getting at is that there’s a deeply personal metaphor here for all that we have not talked about, all that is vexing us as individuals, and all that we ultimately cannot leave behind. We are seeing a representation of that belch out of the universe in the form of these documents and photos which have basically implicated everyone in power.

The defense mechanism is to say, “That’s about them. They’re all such vile people.”

Another response is to ask, “What part of this belongs to me?” Then let the question stand for a while. I’m not sure what the answer will be; perhaps some form of considering the unpleasant things about the world that you may have avoided or denied. People do a lot of giving malicious people a pass. They do a lot of withdrawing their attention, allegedly in self-preservation.

The Etruscans were a civilization located in Italy before the rise of the Roman empire. Men and women held equal status. Nearly nothing remains of their civilization. They were absorbed into Rome in 90 BCE.

The Fine Line of Awareness: Songs of Tyranny

I recognize that there is a fine line these days between “not withdrawing your awareness” and “being totally overwhelmed.” This is more than anyone asked for. And you’re reading the words of someone who has long written about fraud lawsuits and cleaning up chemical spills — and this has all pushed me to the edge.

But denial and pretending that there is a difference between “liberals” and “conservatives” won’t get us anywhere.

It’s helpful to ask questions and let them stand. I really don’t know if anyone knows what I mean when I say that. When you ask how things came to be this way, to say something like “capitalism” is an irrelevant answer. The question counts for more.

Let’s see how Bly ends his poem. The scene shifts from a church service of mass murderers to a scene in a forest somewhere, perhaps right off to the edge of a ritual at the Bohemian Grove. It seems like the critters are rising up in revolt. They at least have some common sense, and know a little about history. They are honest.

Ants are gathered around an old tree.
In a choir they sing,
in harsh and gravelly voices,
Old Etruscan songs on tyranny.
Toads nearby clap their small hands,
and join the fiery songs,
their five long toes trembling
in the soaked earth.

This is metaphor. Among other things, Bly is saying this scenario has been going on for a long, long time.

He mentions specifically the Etruscans, an advanced civilization that occupied parts of Italy in ancient days (starting around 900 BCE). Unlike in Greece and later Rome, Etruscan women held equal social status as men, participated in conversations, were athletes and made art, they maintained their names in marriage and appeared in public alongside men.

The Etruscans were people who, like us, were conquered over and over again. Next to nothing remains of their art, their language, their music, their buildings or their history.

And within the world of the poem, the only help is coming from ants and toads. Their toes tremble in the blood-soaked ground as they sing passionate and long-forgotten songs of resistance. Most of us would be embarrassed to do so.

Faithfully,

Tiny remnant of Etruscan civilization, which was called Tyrrhenian or Tyrsenian by the ancient Greeks. Photo and article on ThoughtCo.