The Secret Sauce

I had a friend who was very busty. I suggested that an old-fashioned solution like a corset might work better to get her the degree of support she needed. She went to a specialist to try to find a solution because she really had huge breasts and it was an issue. To my amusement, the specialist also recommended a corset as a means to get the support she needed.

True story: She had paid me a few bucks to cast her astrological chart and I concluded that an old fashioned form of support, like a corset, would be a good idea based on the aspects in her chart. This is part of why it amused me that when she got a second opinion from a specialist in such things, the specialist recommended the exact same thing I had recommended based on her Natal Chart.

I chose to leave that detail out of that anecdote because it's basically asking people to not take me seriously.

Years and years ago, there was some TV show that revolved around some kids in high school and, I guess, their families. In one episode, one of them got a reputation for being able to predict who would win the (high school?) football games that everyone was betting on.

For much of the episode, his reputation grows and grows because of his track record for ALWAYS being RIGHT. And then someone asks him how he has attained this 100 percent PERFECT track record (that people are using to lay bets with cash money).

So he talks for a few minutes about studying the stats and comparing their win rates and blah blah blah and the person is suitably impressed. Then they asked "But what if all their stats are equally good? What do you use for a tie-breaker?"

And he says "I pick the team whose HELMET I like better."

Yeah, that was the END of everyone using his picks to LAY MONEY on bets.

As noted elsewhere, at some point I decided I was not going to drink my own koolaid and give advice based on "the stars say so." There are TWO problems with claiming "The STARS tell me this."

First, it's a form of claiming "This is NOT my opinion." when it TOTALLY IS your OPINION. The wisdom of advice from astrologers is no wiser than the astrologer giving it. It's a form of acting like the astrologer isn't, themselves, erudite and trusted when, in fact, they are.

I think this is one of the reasons a lot of people object to astrology: It's asking for advice like you might get from a professional therapist or couples counselor or life coach from someone with no formal credentials qualifying them for any of that AND they also wash their hands of personal responsibility by suggesting "This is not MY opinion, NO. The STARS tell me this."

I have given my opinion elsewhere on the likely origin for that practice which boils down to "At one time, astrologers were more educated than the kings who took their advice. This was an uncomfortable, inconvenient reality and they BOTH needed plausible deniability."

It was a quick and dirty answer to a thorny social issue at a time when there were fewer people and the world was different. It's a much WORSE answer now for a long list of reasons.

The second issue is modern astrology jumped the shark and became divorced from reality, so I think these days astrological advice is more than ever "Just your opinion, man!" There's inadequate hard data backing up that advice.

This means both that the astrologer can't really defend their advice because it's based on a long history of growing more and more hypotheses on less and less reality AND it means the astrologer has no means to course correct. It's really just THEIR OPINION, they deny that and have no means to find their own blind spots and check hard data of some sort.

One of the things I found myself doing was giving relationship advice based on being paid to cast charts. My wisdom concerning relationship advice was rooted primarily in years of sorting my own personal problems, reading up on the problem space, doing therapy, etc.

I kind of HATE writing things like The Genevieve Files. I do it with a feeling of having no choice and a gun to my head because this is what people seem to MOST want/need from me.

But I am vastly more comfortable writing The Genevieve Files and TELLING people "This is MY OPINION and is based in part on sorting my problems and in part on an intense relationship I had with a troubled Trans youth for nine months more than a decade ago." than with saying "The STARS tell me so."

If you don't like what I'm saying, you are more than welcome to go find a different source that you feel comes from someone with better credentials. I don't care AT ALL. I ONLY write it to limit how much people hassle me because they NEED such info.

It is absolutely NOT something I care to promote, get known for, etc. I would MUCH rather promote my efforts to do community development work, tell people how to eat better and talk about housing issues.

If I had the means to do so, I would love to create a pilot project based on the research that has, so far, gone into Project: SRO, start a line of healthy foods and start a clothing line. That's just not something I CAN do right now, so I do what I CAN do and that's WRITE about things that interest me and explain what years of research suggests to me is probably a better answer.

Returning to the topic of astrology, these days the human race has the MEANS to collect the data, improve on the mental models that kind of worked for astrologers a few hundred years ago -- but quit working at some point because life for humans changed -- and firm up the relationship between astrology and reality.

One area that could be revisited with an open mind and some better mental models is RULERSHIPS. Why is that?

Because astrology existed LONG before we had telescopes, so astrologers worked with what they could see with the naked eye. AND they thought the planets were "stars" as well, not planets.

Venus was traditionally called The Morning Star.

So two things grew out of that:

One is that no one talks about Earth being in the chart. We talk like it isn't in the chart AT ALL when it totally is, so it was never assigned rulership.

The second is that as new planets were discovered, they were kind of shoe-horned in on top of existing lists of information instead of people rethinking the ENTIRE thing and starting fresh.

I have a lot of no doubt cockamamie ideas about rulerships -- or did at one time. I hope to dig up such memories and write a post with my ideas at some point.

Don't just STEAL those ideas. If you want to use them, COOL.

But get DATA and CHECK if it makes ANY FUCKING SENSE or if I really am just higher than a kite on life and spouting nonsense because I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and a National Merit Scholarship winner, so CLEARLY I'm a SMARTY PANTS and perhaps overly in love with my own ideas.

If you think it's a better mental model based on superior logic, I'm FLATTERED. But then get DATA. Don't just run with MY OPINIONS.

Because it's just my opionion, man!

And I'm just some random internet stranger with enough time to BITCH about what I don't like about astrology. I'm NOT someone collecting data from hundreds or thousands of people to see if any of these ideas ACTUALLY fit reality -- which is something we have the power to CHECK to some degree these days instead of taking the word of folks who lived thousands of years ago and wrote down what made sense to them BEFORE telescopes existed, at a time when humans had no idea the outer planets existed and thought the other ones were "wandering stars."