A 10th Planet?!

It seems there is life beyond Pluto..........

A US astronomer said Friday he had discovered a 10th planet in the outer reaches of the solar system that could force scientists to redraw the astronomical map.

If confirmed, the discovery by Mike Brown of the respected California Institute of Technology would be the first of a planet since Pluto was identified in 1930 and shatter the notion that nine planets circle the sun.

"Get out your pens. Start rewriting textbooks today," said Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy, announcing what he called "the 10th planet of the solar system," one that is larger than Pluto.

"It’s the farthest object ever discovered to orbit around the sun," Brown said in a conference call of the planet that is covered in methane ice and lies nearly 15 billion kilometers [nine billion miles] from Earth.

"I’d say it’s probably one and a half times the size of Pluto," he said from CalTech, based in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, referring to what until now has been the most distant planet in Earth’s solar system.


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Saturn in Cancer: Muzzling the Muppets

Saturn in Cancer has historically been a time of restrictions and limitations put on women and children. Our present time is no exception as children's lives are under attack by military recruiters making unwelcome and unsolicited telephone calls to their homes as though they are their friends, and now, the takeover of children's public television programming which began blossoming about 30 years ago........

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The Bush administration wants to force public broadcasting to toe the Republican line

Ken Tomlinson may be America's most accomplished propagandist. He got his start as an intern for Fulton Lewis Jr., who ruled right-wing radio when Rush Limbaugh was still in diapers. In the early 1980s, Tomlinson ran Voice of America, promoting the policies of Ronald Reagan to the rest of the world. As editor in chief of Reader's Digest in the early 1990s, he published the most reliably reactionary magazine in the country. Now, as President Bush's handpicked chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Tomlinson is in a position to spread the Republican message to Sesame Street.

As head of the board that doles out $400 million in federal funds for public broadcasting, Tomlinson is actually required by law to provide PBS and NPR with "maximum protection from extraneous influence and control" by meddling politicians. But in recent months, Tomlinson himself has been the one trying to alter PBS programming. A close friend of Karl Rove since they worked together overseeing Voice of America, he hired a right-wing consultant to secretly monitor Bill Moyers for signs of "liberal bias." He collaborated with the White House to hire two "ombudsmen" to keep an eye on Frontline and All Things Considered. And after President Bush was re-elected in November, Tomlinson warned a gathering of PBS executives that the country had moved to the right -- and that their programming should reflect that.

Welcome to a new era in the battle over public broadcasting. Instead of simply threatening to cut federal funding for PBS -- as Nixon, Reagan and Newt Gingrich did -- the Bush administration has taken a new approach. Far from standing as a firewall against outside political pressure, Tomlinson is trying to force PBS to toe the Republican line, turning the network into a taxpayer-funded facsimile of Fox News. The GOP coup scored a major victory in late June, when the CPB board quietly confirmed Patricia Harrison -- a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee -- as its new president.

The full story from RollingStone.com

Astrologer Sues NASA Over Probe

I can recall watching the blockbuster movie "Independence Day" (I like Will Smith's acting) and feeling especially squeamish when they jammed pointed missiles and jet fighters up into the cervix-like opening of The Mother Ship (the alien). I was reminded of how men designed weapons of war and cars...and they like to make them long, hard and fast. That came back to me with the news that NASA, which is basically ALOT of men, planned to inject a probe into a comet in space. It resembled, once again, the thrusting of a penis into a vagina and the forced injection of sperm. I try not to think about these things much, but alas, the symbolism is very clear.

Just as a young boy (and some men) doesn't stop to pause and think about the consequences of sexual intercourse and how it can change his entire future, so it seems with space exploration. NASA appears to not care about what happens to the universe, the planets, the other celestial bodies...It just wants to control space.

In astrology, natal (birth) charts and transit/progressed (current) charts are calculated by mapping the sky out there, so to speak. The mapping is able to be done because through years of trhe science of astronomy (which has historically included astrology), we have tracked the movement of these planets to the second.

NASA appears to not care if it upsets any balance or throws off the orbits of any planets for astronomy and astrology mean nothing to it. One astrologer, however, is taking it seriously adn she is doign something. The BBC News report is below. It hope she can make some headway. The men at NASA need to know that aiming their probes at planets, comets and asteroids and injecting them with what becomes their space garbage, has long-term consequences.........

You know I always wondered about creating a movie called "Liberation Day" and having a huge phallic "Father" ship. There could be lots of round/circular fighters who surround it and shoot lasers etc at it until WHOMP, it simply bends in half, drooping down like a massive flaccid penis, and then it explodes. I do not think men would like that movie. They would walk out of the theater holdig their crotch and feeling hostile....don't ya think?


From BBC News:

"A Russian astrologer is suing Nasa for crashing a probe into a comet, claiming it has distorted her horoscope.

Marina Bai is seeking $300m (�170m) in damages, saying the probe's impact on Comet Tempel 1 violated her 'life and spiritual values'.

She had tried to have a Moscow court prevent the experiment from taking place but her action was rejected.

Nasa smashed the washing machine-sized 'impactor' into the comet at a distance of 133m km from Earth on Monday.

'Interference'

'It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit and associated ephemera will change after the explosion, which interferes with my practice of astrology and deforms my horoscope,' Ms Bai told the Izvestia daily newspaper.

Nasa scientists hope the experiment will reveal new information on the Solar System's original make-up and perhaps even how life on Earth emerged.

Ms Bai, from Moscow, said the Tempel 1 comet held an important place in her family history, as her grandfather wooed her grandmother by showing her the comet.

Her lawyer, Alexander Molokhov, said the case was based on solid legal ground, since Nasa has an office in Russia, located in the premises of the US embassy in Moscow. "