Howdy everyone, welcome to Academia Obscura. I'm your host, Chris. I've got a great show for you today. I'm going to start out with the AstroCast summary from my good friend Victoria Martin covering the rest of September, as well as a couple of highlights for today and tomorrow. Then get into a brief recap of all the economic stuff and how that's progressing. I've done several podcasts on that recently, so I'm not going to go into the whole thing today or spend all of my time covering the economic beat, but I do want to give you some quick updates and my personal calls for where we're currently at on that timeline and then get into the angel bet. Last time I said I was going to start a series on angels, and I decided to start with the most famous one. Let's get into it. So Astrocast from Victoria Martin. She said when she was on the show previously, you can go ahead and subscribe to this on your own at her email address. Just send her a quick message. For a couple of things for September specifically, though. Coming up September 22nd, an equal balance between light and dark hours happens today. This inspires a quest for ideal harmony and summons courage as we move toward winter in the Norman Hemisphere. We have the autumnal equinox at 7.04 PM. That is the official pivot into winter on September 22nd. And then September 24th through 29th of the forecast. An active supernature comes via ESP or vivid dreams. Magical methods are big players and special fantasy features emerge. At her advice, extreme openness could trigger self-protection. Buffers can chill sensitivity. Call on partners to gain personal strength. Empathy on both sides is a plus. And special note, we've got the full moon conjunct Neptune during that period. And then a couple of things that fit into our economic angle going into tomorrow. Or today later, because it is Wednesday. I'm currently recording this at Wednesday, September 16th at 1.53 a.m. Central Standard Time. Couple of things to keep in mind. Wednesday, September 16th, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Thursday, CDT. Malicious strategy or political financial game plans contend with surprise elements. Her advice is use applied science or technology, both call for team participation. I'm gonna take her forecast a little bit different from where I'm seeing the tea leaves. And then going into Thursday, September 17th, her forecast all day. Here's a harmonic convergence phenomenon. The lack of challenging planet configurations augurs a positive experience today. Her advice says, however, there is always value in a worst case analysis. She has clearly been psychically on tune with the podcast for where this is going. There's a grand shrine of the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter on the 17th as well. Going into Friday, September 18th. An exam for current and future prospects is a method test. There's a push to consult experts or use valid sources. And her advice is summon your inner mentor, or recall what would a trusted teacher say. Avoid or tone down harsh criticism of self and others. Mercury opposed Saturn. That is where we're out the with the with our Astracast coming up. I will bring you this work starting off for for our next shows, just starting to start trying to start off with the weather report, as Victoria would say. All right. Brief recap of where the economy is since we last left off. I've been talking about a tail-in risk analysis for all the blinking lights that are lighting up for the U.S. and the global economy. You can go back to my first one on the podcast that's also on YouTube where I do the whole whiteboard for all the different things we're looking at. I said I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on that this week. I've been covering a lot lately. And Egonomic Doom saying is not the biggest hype getter online, and I'm respectful of that, but I do want to keep saying this because it's important for people to keep hearing it. Where we're at right now. Since last time's recording, there's been some major developments in the Middle East. The war in Iran has drastically intensified. Number one, the peace summit that was supposed to happen between Omen and Iran to discuss reopening the strait was called off, uh, partly at the behest of the Trump administration, who's still trying to use maximum pressure to get Iran to fold, which they went into previously, is not happening. Uh, but also by Saudi Arabia, because surprise fact, Saudi Arabia got routed. We now have the entire oil stream from Saudi Arabia literally cut off. Uh Saudi Ariba has already noticed that they are not fulfilling orders through some of the ports on the Red Sea, as they tested explicitly that they don't have the oil that can physically move. And the markets are just now starting to catch up to the fact that Saudi Arabia just got knocked offline. Sometime today, Wednesday or Thursday, um, I'm not exactly sure what time because Saudi Arabia is on the other side of the world and their business hours are separate. There's supposed to be some sort of announcement of how long they think it's going to take to fix this. The last time this pipeline got struck, it was only minor damage and they had it back up and running in about two to three days. However, some reports say that this time around, this looks much more extensive, and the pipeline could be down for five to six weeks. We're either looking for Saudi Arabia to confirm, yeah, hey guys, we'll have this up and running in no time, or them to stay quiet and pretty much just admit that this is going to be down for a while. That is causing oil to skyrocket. At the time of recording, it was hovering around at 108 a barrel of Brent Crude, spiking up to like 110. I'm personally seeing this getting up to 120 by the time we get through the rest of the trading day. With Saudi Arabia offline, here is where my financial forecast is at for this week and my personal calls. Number one, I've been saying for a while that Wall Street is just not catching up. Kevin Walsh is hiking rates today. It is Wednesday. There's a Fed meeting. He's hiking rates 25 basis points. He is number one, actually focusing on inflation because all the other economic indicators from unemployment to change CPI are obviously good. We've known that for months. But now that Treasury Secretary Bessant has been daring him to be independent, Warsh is going to finally raise the rates to show he's independent. And that's going to be the whole story. This is happening as the U.S. bond market is literally in a panic because rates are at 5% for the first time in a long time, which has catastrophic consequences for liquidity as well as the U.S. government deficit and financing. That's a whole other episode. I said, I'll do that later. Fun fact though, after the BOJ meeting, there's obviously going to be some selling in the bond market. Yields are going to rise. When rates go up, yields go up for bonds. And then the stock market does not like that either. However, then you've got the Bank of Japan going in the next day. The Bank of Japan, like I've said, has been having to try to figure out how to not destroy the yen with having to pay $110 for oil, that they have to import all of it through a strait that's now closed. Because Japan as an island just doesn't have oil. You know, just one of those things. Now that Japan finally has an inflation crisis on their hands, which is also erronic because for decades they had, well, not decades, but for years they had a deflation crisis, which is why they held interest rate rate for so long. My prediction is they are going to be forced to do a 50 basis point increase. They've been saying they're not going to do any increase because in Japan the government debt is at 240% of GDP, which is bonkers, but they got away with it because they had a 0% interest rate on their debt for so long. But and so Japan has to be super cautious because raising interest rates there and raising the government debt can literally bankrupt the government because of their death load. However, they're not really going to have choice. The yields on the Japanese government bonds are already up at 3%, with Warsh raising rates at the Fed. The token 25 basis point increase to match the Fed literally does nothing to the spread between the yen and the dollar. And they're just going to keep the capital flight flying out of Tokyo and collapsing the value of the yen. Once oil starts spiking, their literally only play is to defend the value of their currency. Otherwise, they are facing a population revolt because inflation is going just going to hit a doom spiral with oil being this expensive. Japan's not going to like it. They didn't really see Saudi Arabia getting shut down the day before their finance meeting, but they're going to have to raise rates. If they only do the token 25 basis point rate that they've been talking about, then the market's just going to clobber them because it's just going to signal that they don't have the stomach to do the economic move they need to do, which honestly they should be at 2% based off where everything is in their economy. Side argument. Again, I'm not getting into it. But they they have to show that they're willing to actually take the steps needed to defend the yen and defend the currency. If they do not, the markets will clobber them the next day and they will be forced to do another aggressive hike in October anyway. Only that time is going to be too late. And they're smart people. They know this. And they also know that the civil unrest from the inflation caused by this oil crisis will cripple the country long before the markets even do. This is my personal opinion. Once that happens, we've set the fuse on the detonator. It is then a 20 to 30 day delay for that fuse to blow up the liquidity markets in the U.S. bond market, thanks to the violent unwind of the yin carry trade and all of the unrealized losses sitting on bank balance sheets that all of a sudden have to be realized because held to maturity bonds now have to be liquidated to come up with cash. And all at the same time while stock futures start plummeting on for various other reasons. I said, went into that on a previous podcast. But yeah, stock market crash, bank run crash, yin carry trade. My personal read has this really blowing up and the meltdown starting on October 13th. Why October 13th? That's within the 20 to 30 day propagation window. That's how long it takes changes in the bond market and margin calls and stock trades and all that stuff to start settling and funneling through all the different layers of international finance. But also October 13th is the set window for that large chunk. If there's going to be a CS happening, it's probably going to be in that window starting around October 13th. Like I said, we will know if we're on that timeline if A, we get this series of rate hikes going, and B, we start seeing news stories and headlines about liquidity and possible contagion and banks talking about having to sell the bonds they were trying not to sell. That's where we're at. And like I said, that's my that's my read of the macroeconomic situation, and I am sticking with it. But I'm human. I can be wrong. And God, I hope I am. Because if this happens, uh Canada becoming an associate member of the EU is going to look back as prophetic. Yeah, also fun fact today, Canada announced that they are exploring an associate membership of the EU. Literally, in between Kevin Walsh speaking at the Fed raising rates and them raising rates of Tokyo, Mark Carney is going to be giving a speech at Strasbourg to the European Parliament right after Ursula Vanderland's State of the European Union speech, going over what an associate membership between Canada and Europe looks like and why they're doing this. No one stateside fully understands the full political ramifications of this. They all think it's a cheap bargaining stunt to try to get out of Donald Trump's tariffs. Just like this U.S. politicians misunderstand Iran and think it's all about money and economics when to Iran this war is an existential struggle for survival. They misunderstand the entire play Mark Carney is doing. Donald Trump has basically shown Canada that the U.S. is an unpredictable partner that is an existential national security crisis to Canada. Trump's threats on Greenland, Trump's threats to make Canada the 51st state, Trump's renaming of the Lake of Ontario. Also, it's reported that the reason the USMCA talks broke down was because the U.S. wanted it written into the treaty that the U.S. gets a veto on any free trade agreement Canada signs with any other country. And that is why talks broke down. And so Mark Carney's like, the US has lost its mind, and we are tired of being in an abusive captive relationship to this country. Mark Carney's pivot to being an associate member of the EU. It's going to take a decade. They're going to have to build a whole lot of shipyards and pipes and ships to literally lock up Canadian gas and critical minerals into the EU supply chain by treaty, as well as lay new data center cables and do joint AI ventures. This is the most serious threat to American economic security that has existed in at least the last two generations. And right now everyone thinks it's a joke. Because the crux of the North American security model is that number one, we don't have to really secure our northern border at all. And we get a whole bunch of cheap trade from them because of it. And all of Canada's natural resources just flow to us. And because we're geographically closer and a much bigger economy, we get to pay rock bottom prices for it, for all of Canada's natural resources. And Canada's basically flipping that script on us. They're going to be treaty bound as European, and we're going to have to bid and pay sky high for what's left. And if we try to negotiate or play hardball again like we've done in the past and gotten good deals, then there's something going to say, okay, we're just going to keep trading with Europe. Y'all can have nothing. It is a massive geopolitical ongoal that Donald Trump has condemned the entire next 50 or more years of this country to paying more for natural resources, as well as straight up losing access to a decent chunk of them. All while climate change is warming the Arctic, and Canada is going to be building a giant fleet of icebreakers to go and handle these shipping lanes over to Europe. Like I said, there's a whole episode I want to do later on, probably around the end of October, when Mark Carney has already announced that he is signing the treaty with the uh European Union on the framework agreement for this. This is moving lightning fast. Like I said, tomorrow Mark Carney addresses the European Parliament to lay out his vision for an associate membership of Canada into the European Union. End of October, they're signing the legal documents making it final. But once Mark Carney and Ursula Vonderland sign that framework at the end of October, it is locked in. And Canada is legally on the track to becoming an associate member of the European Union. And those minerals are no longer American minerals when it comes to Canada's trade with the United States. And nobody is pricing that in. Come October, there's going to be another market freakout once they actually read the framework agreements that have been leaked. And it's not going to be pretty. But that is a perfect October surprise, which hint-handed was specifically coordinated to land right before the U.S. midterm elections. Because Mark Carney and Ursula Vanderlen are just trying to embarrass Trump because he has done nothing for the past two years and the previous four years of his last term, pissing the whole world off. This is just them getting the last laugh on him in the last election of his life that matters. Hey, but hey, what goes around comes around. Karma's a bitch, y'all. Okay. Now, pivoting to our main story today, talking about angels. And I wanted to start with what is probably the most famous angel out there. Lucifer. Definitely the most famous angel. However, did you know that Lucifer is just another way of saying Jesus? Stay with me. First, uh starting off, turn to Isaiah chapter 14, verse 12. If you grew up in church, you know this verse. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? How art thou cut down to the ground which didst weaken the nations? Lucifer, right there in black and white. Case closed, they tell you. That's his name. But don't stop at verse twelve. Go back to verse four, where the whole chapter tells you exactly what you're reading. That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased, the golden city ceased? A proverb against the king of Babylon, not a fallen angel, a man, a real king, and the text says so in its own opening line. Keep reading because it gets more specific. Verse 16 That they see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms? People staring at a corpse, asking if this is really the man. And verse 15, yet thou shalt be brought down to hell to the size of the pit. In the Hebrew that word is Sheol, the grave, where every king eventually goes. This is a funeral mockery for a dead tyrant dressed in the most cosmic language Isaiah could reach for. So where did the name Lucifer come from? Not from the Hebrew. The Hebrew phrase is Helel ben shekar, shining one, son of the dawn, a title for the morning star, Venus. 400 years after Christ, a scholar named Jerome translates this into Latin for what becomes the official Bible of the Western Church. Now, let me tell you who Jerome was, because it matters. This isn't some obscure monk. Jerome lived around 340 to 420 AD, and he did something almost nobody in the Western Church was doing at the time. He went back to the actual Hebrew. Most Christian scholars worked off Greek translations secondhand. Jerome learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, moved to Bethlehem, and spent decades translating the entire Old Testament from the original language. His Bible, the Vulgate, became the standard text of Western Christianity for the next thousand years. He was rigorous. He was trying to get it right, and for the word shining one, in good conscience, he reached for the plain Latin word for the morning star, Lucifer, light bearer, not a name, a description. The same word you'd use for a torch, a lamp, or the planet Venus rising before dawn. Now, hold on to that, and turn with me to 2 Peter 1, verse 19. We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto ye do well that ye take heed as unto a light that shineth in the dark place until the day dawn, and the daystar arise in your hearts. Daystar. In the Latin behind that phrase it's the same word. Lucifer, rising in your hearts. Peter is talking about Christ. Keep turning all the way to the last chapter of the last book, Revelation 22, verse 16. And here it's Jesus speaking in his own voice. I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David and the bright and morning star. The bright and morning star, Jesus himself claiming that title. So if the word means brightness and it's used for Jesus twice and for a dead king once, how did the whole world end up certain it's the devil's name? Now, before I lay out the case, I want to be fair to the men who built this because they weren't lying to you. They had a real problem to solve. If God is good and God made everything, where does evil come from? You can't just say God made evil. That breaks the whole system. You need a story where something was created good, chose wrongly, and became the source of evil on its own. That's not a small technical gap. That's the hole at the center of the whole theology. And somebody had to fill it. So the church fathers went looking through scripture for a shape that fit, and they found it. Isaiah 14 has a being cast down from heaven for pride. Ezekiel 28 has a cherub, blameless, then corrupted, then cast out of the presence of God. Luke 10 has Jesus himself saying, I saw Satan fall. Put those three together and you get exactly what the theology needed. An angel created good who chose pride and fell, and that became the devil. Given what they had to work with, no comparative Semitic scholarship, no ancient text to sell them Isaiah was quoting old myths about the morning star, no historical method to separate a taunt against Babylon from a taunt against Tyre, from a first century statement about demons. This was about as good a synthesis as anyone could have built. It's not stupidity. It's the best available answer to a real question assembled with the tools they had. But it's still an assembly. Let's prosecute it properly. Let's take a look at what they actually stabled together to build the case, and then let's look at what they left out. Exhibit one Ezekiel chapter twenty eight verse twelve tells you exactly who this is about, same as Idea did. Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God, thou sealest up the sum full of wisdom and perfect in beauty, the king of Tyre, named a real Phoenician ruler, not Babylon, a different city, a completely different century. Verse 13. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God, every precious stone was thy covering, the Sardis, Topez, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle and gold. Verse 14. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have set thee so. Thou wast upon the holy mountain of God, thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Verse 15. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created till iniquity was found in thee. Verse 17, Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness, I will cast thee to the ground. Beautiful language. Eden, cherub, stones of fire, a fall from splendor, and it's addressed to the king of Tyre by name, the same way Isaiah 14 was addressed to the king of Babylon, by name. Two prophets, two kings, two cities, doing the exact same thing, mocking a proud ruler and the biggest, most cosmic imagery available. That was the style. That was how you was insulted a king in that world. But centuries later, church teachers looked at Ezekiel 28 and decided it was too grand to be about a man. So they took it off the king of Tyre and gave it to Satan instead. Exhibit 2. Luke chapter 10, verse 17. And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name. His followers just got back from ministry, celebrating the demons, obeyed them. And that is exactly when Jesus says, verse 18, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven, right there, in the room in that moment. Not a memory of a war before Genesis, a present tense response to what his disciples just told him. And he keeps going. Verse 19. Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing by any means hurt you. Verse 20. Notwithstanding in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven. Read all verses together, and it's obvious. This is Jesus talking about authority his disciples now carry, happening in real time. It is not a flashback to a primordial fall. So that's three separate texts, three different kings and moments, stitched into one continuous biography. But here's what should really stop you. There's another fall story in the Bible, an older one, and it's actually named directly, twice in the New Testament, in a way Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 never are. Exhibit 3. Genesis chapter 6, verse 1. And it came to pass when man began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them. Verse 2, that the sons of God saw the daughters of man, that they were fair, that they took them wives of all which they chose. Verse 3. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that also he is flesh. Yet his days shall be hundred and twenty years. Verse 4. There were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. Four verses, strange, brief, almost thrown away in the text. But by the time of Jesus, Jewish tradition had expanded that seed into a massive story found in the Book of Enoch. Two hundred angels called watchers, led by figures named Shemehiza and Azazel, come down, take human wives, and teach forbidden knowledge, weapons, sorcery, and cosmetics. Their children become giants who ravage the earth, and God floods the world partly to clean up what they made. And the watchers themselves are bound in chains of darkness to await judgment. Different sin completely, not pride, corruption of humanity through forbidden knowledge and unlawful union. Read every line of it, none of it, not one verse, says anything about a prideful angel falling from grace. Now watch this. Turn to Second Peter chapter two verse four. For if God spared not the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved into judgment. Change of dark darkness. That's the watchers, not Isaiah, not Ezekiel. And Jude six, and the angels which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day. Same story again. And Jude goes even further, quoting the book of Enoch directly a few verses later as prophecy. So here's the actual scorecard. The fall story everyone knows, the Proud Angel Cast Down, is built from a funeral song about Babylon, a funeral song about Tyre, and a first century statement about demons submitting to seventy disciples. None of those three texts name a fallen angel even once. Meanwhile, the fall story that is directly named, twice in letters sitting in every Christian New Testament right now, the Watchers mostly got left behind, partly because the Book of Enoch itself didn't make it into most Bibles. It only survived as Scripture in one place, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, where it's canon to this day. That composite got repeated for a thousand years until it simply felt like Scripture. English translators capitalized the Latin common noun into a proper noun in their Bibles. And then Milton in Paradise Lost gave the whole assembled story a face and a voice vivid enough that most people who've opened the Bible still believe it's what Scripture actually says. In 1667, twelve centuries after the church fathers started stitching the stories together. The version everyone knows didn't even exist yet for over a thousand years. And if none of that is in your Bible, where did people actually get the story they think they know? Turn all the way outside the Bible, six centuries after Christ, to the Quran. Surah 15, verse 28. And when your Lord said to the angels, I will create a human being out of clay from an altered black mud. Verse 29, and when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of my created soul, then fall down to him in prostration. So the angels prostrated, all of them entirely. Verse 31, except Iblis. He refused to be with those who prostrated. The text just told you the whole scene. God creates, God breathes his own soul into the creation, God commands the bow, every single angel obeys, except one. Now, Surah 7 picks up the exchange. Allah said, What prevented you from prostrating when I commanded you? Satan said, I am better than him, you created me from fire and created him from clay. Verse 13, Allah said, Descend from paradise, for it is not for you to be arrogant therein, so get out. Indeed, you are of the debased. Reprieve me until the day they are resurrected. Indeed, you are of those reprieved. Verse sixteen. Because you have put me in error, I will surely sit and wait for them on your straight path. seventeen, then I will come to them from before them and from behind them and on their right and on their left, and you will not find most of them grateful to you. A declared war. And honestly, there's a whole side conversation in Islam about whether or not this is even an angel or just a djinn. Whole episode on that later. But in his own words, before he even leaves the room, nowhere, not in Isaiah, not in Ezekiel, not in Luke, does the Bible's falling figure ever say anything like that? The adversary role you've been taught your whole life, hunting humanity from every side, only exists once, cleanly, in the Quran. I'm not telling you Christianity copied Islam. Islam comes six centuries after Christ. There's no influence running backward in time. What I'm telling you is simpler. If you want the whole story, one being, one motive, in his own words, cast down and vowing revenge, in a single place, that place exists. It's just not the book you were handed. And his name isn't Lucifer. The prideful angel story didn't come from the disciples, didn't come from Paul, it isn't in the Torah, the prophets, or the Gospels. Lucifer isn't the devil's name. It's a description of light. Depending on the page, it points at a dead king or it points at Jesus. So the next time someone hands you Isaiah 14 12 like it's a mugshot of Satan, hand them verse 4 right back. Same word, one story. Say it plain. Lucifer is just another way of saying Jesus. Alright, that's my show. Thank you all for listening. I'll be back next week. Have a good night.