Up and at ’em. The drive of today’s Cancer Moon is mostly free and clear. It’s also fresh and new. Launch away! Cancer is a nurturing energy which needs to focus on home(land) and family concerns. It is emotional and intuitive, and it will carry us through the end of Thursday.

Between now and then we may see a power play or other catharsis around 9:42PM ET tonight, as the Moon makes its weekly challenge with Pluto. Thursday morning may present a wake-up call or upset to the status quo, as the Moon is challenged by Uranus at 7:24AM ET. Keep planting seeds related to your New Moon projects.

And now, the news.

As noted earlier, the nurturing Cancer Moon is a perfect time for Pope Francis to release his status quo-disrupting statements on climate change. And of course he would publish a major work with transiting Uranus opposing his natal Mars, which rule his 8th and 9th houses, respectively. This is a time for daring initiative, and I said as much back in December.

Did you know he has a degree in chemistry? A pope who is also a scientist — what a concept — and you’d think that all of the howling climate change deniers who are also politicians and avowed Catholics would know that about the leader of their church. Don’t they know how dumb they look when they say stuff like this? Here’s an interesting article about how the archbishop of Miami is planning to incorporate the pope’s encyclical into his sermons.  What do you think? Will things change?

Here is another past post about the pope and his horoscope. This one is pretty darn good, too. Read it  and you’ll appreciate my thoughts on journalism, two paragraphs down.

Themes of nurturing and security are also evident in the headlines buzzing about the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling on the Affordable Care Act. Will residents in states that did not create their own health care exchanges lose their federal tax credits and thus be unable to afford their health insurance premiums? If the ruling comes during the Cancer Moon, one would think that security would be preserved. But it does not solve the insurmountable challenge of delivering health care sustainably in a system that is driven by profit, as noted in this article about why some  hospitals mark up costs by 1000%.

Meanwhile, an update on a story that broke in the aftermath of the last Full Moon — the one about laid-off workers at Disneyworld whose jobs were handed over to temporary workers imported from India (but not before the laid-off workers were forced to train their replacements). After the story was published, a senator got involved. And yesterday, 35 Disney employees in New York and Burbank who were facing similar fates were told that their layoffs had been canceled. That’s good news!

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the power of investigative journalism. Now let’s consider that on the home page of the Washington Times, which is one of the two papers Justice Antonin Scalia says he reads (the other is the Wall Street Journal), there is absolutely no mention of this Disney story or the Affordable Care Act or Pope Francis. The top story at the moment is this: Green Berets’ Efforts to Take Down ISIS Undermined by Shoddy US Intelligence. Well, at least they are concerned with homeland security, as we would expect with a Moon in Cancer. Nothing about Pope Francis or those other two stories on the WSJ home page, either. The top story: “Greek Central Bank Sees ‘Uncontrollable Crisis’ If Talks Fail.” Another version of homeland security. “I just LOVE uncontrollable crises in banking!” said no one with Moon in Cancer ever.

Where do you get your news?

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the Sabian Symbols for that last Full Moon — “a topsy saucily asserting itself”. There was Caitlyn Jenner looking saucy on the cover of Vanity Fair. And yesterday, there was Rachel Dolezal on Today, asserting her identity as a black woman. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Ms. Dolezal (November 12, 1977 in Montana),  is a Scorpio with Moon in righteously opinionated Sagittarius. We don’t have a birth time, but my money says she was born with that Moon in close contact with visionary/illusionist Neptune, and it may well be under the bewildering spell of a Neptune transit now. She has Mars in regal Leo, of which astrologer Grant Lewi notes, “gets away with murder”.  Do you really want to argue with her? Uh-uh. And would you be surprised to see that rebel and eccentric Uranus is running wild in her chart?  Nope. Nor would you be surprised by a contact between Pluto and the Nodal Axis, suggesting a mother-daughter relationship that is quite the power struggle.

That Pluto-Node pattern is under stress from transiting Pluto through the rest of the year. Ms. Dolezal’s Saturn at 29 Leo just got hit by transiting Saturn at 29 Scorpio. That’s no surprise, either. We’d expect to see challenges to the ambitious reach she would have made about seven years ago, when she had her first Saturn return. A Saturn return can be experienced as a new lease on life. It appears to be about seven years ago that Ms. Dolezal began to alter her appearance, so much that others perceived her as African-American.

That pressure from transiting Saturn won’t subside until this fall, when Saturn makes it back to Sagittarius. In August, Ms. Dolezal’s older brother faces charges of child sexual abuse.

Kinda makes you stop and compare all of the trials and tribulations you have in your life right now. Would you really trade them with someone else?

Meanwhile….

I’m expecting plenty of cosmic breakthroughs between now and next week’s easy alignment between Jupiter and Uranus. Here’s one about

…a lost generation of monster stars that ushered light into the universe after the Big Bang and that jump-started the creation of the elements needed for planets and life before disappearing forever.

Cosmic indeed. Always good to end on a high note…