#1680: Nina Gryphon & Chris Brennan

To hard to believe, there are actually people out there who genuinely believe in astrology. Plenty, in fact, and we cannot hope to cover every practitioner here, even though they all deserve entries. The present entry concerns a group that suffered sufficiently bad karma (since being publicly outed as an astrologer is objectively bad for you even if you don’t realize it yourself) to be featured in the news prior to the 2012 election after having participated on a panel at some astrology convention in New Orleans, where they decided that Obama was going to win the election. Yeah, they got that one right. We are not impressed.

-       Nina Gryphon is an astrologist and corporate lawyer who offers “expert astrological consultation” to the Chicago area. Apparently it was her study of the Aries ingress – the time when the Sun enters the sign of Aries – that clinched the prediction for her.

-       Denver-based Chris Brennan, however, while asserting – apparently without irony – that the charts told him Obama were entering into “peak periods of eminence” that would remain “consistent throughout the election” (whereas Romney’s seemed “to falter a few weeks before the election”), he admitted that Obama may face trouble after the election, since “the ingress of Saturn into Scorpio may trouble him.” He also hedged the conclusion a bit, since we “should all be aware of the Mercury retrograde that will occur on election day.”

The sad thing is that they apparently think they are helping, and that their predictions can assist people in decision making. It’s actually pretty scary if you think about it.

Diagnosis: These people are allowed to vote (although, since the movements of distant balls of rocks or gas determine the outcomes anyways, one wonders whether and why they would bother). That should probably concern you.