The Flying Shotgun

This new Robo Cop UAV capable of taking out individuals is the sort of thing that makes me wonder why so few people in the United States aren't outraged at the amount of money that goes into killing people and blowing things up. They usually palm off a story in the press such as in this case it will be used to target pirates on the East Coast of Africa but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the fastest emerging divide is between government and the people. Yesterday's friend is tomorrow's enemy.

I first read this over at Wired and was accused of dreaming up this potential scenario but a comment below that from a former military member responded how much closer to reality it is.

Larger Than Earth Sunspots Harbour Potential X Class Flares

Those are Texas-sized bubbles of plasma rising and falling like water boiling on top of a hot stove. Looks like a bit of Van Gogh to me. Via The Watchers 

Cassini & The Sun King

The Cassini spacecraft takes one of its last good looks at Iapetus, a Saturnian moon that I've been researching here along with Saturnalian worship by elites for a while.

This view looks toward the south pole of Iapetus (1,471 kilometers, or 914 miles across), and lit terrain seen here is in the southern latitudes of the trailing hemisphere. There is only one other planned viewing opportunity of Iapetus left in Cassini's Solstice Mission, in March 2015.

See PIA11690 to learn more about the color anomaly on Iapetus. See PIA08404 to learn more about that moon's equatorial ridge that is hard to accept as natural.

The image below the painting was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 7, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 863,000 kilometers (536,000 miles) from Iapetus and at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 98 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.

I'm over Saturnalia now but it was a trip finding out it's more than just a pretty face. It's worthwhile digging into the JPL (Jack Parsons/Jet Propulsion) Laboratories' founder and his Aleister Crowley connections.

It's unfortunate that the bad boys get all the attention. I'd like to have had the time to give Venus and Jupiter more attention.

In 1669 Giovanni Cassini moved to France and through a grant from Louis XIV of France helped to set up the Paris Observatory, which opened in 1671; Cassini would remain the director of the observatory for the rest of his career until his death in 1712. In 1673 he became a French citizen. For the remaining forty-one years of his life Cassini served as astronomer/astrologer to Louis XIV ("The Sun King"); serving the expected dual role yet focusing the overwhelming majority of his time on astronomy rather than the astrology he had studied so much in his youth.

During this time, Cassini's method of determining longitude was used to measure the size of France accurately for the first time. The country turned out to be considerably smaller than expected, and the king quipped that Cassini had taken more of his kingdom from him than he had won in all his wars. Cassini went blind in 1711.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.