The Legendary Jeff Beck

Commonly called Red-Hot Poker, Kniphofia Northiae is found in South Africa, the centre of diversity for the genus. However, the genus is more broadly distributed throughout continental Africa. Species can also be found in Madagascar and Yemen.

A photo from Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology shows the size of a neural interface — which when implanted on the surface of the brain — enables thoughts to move a computer cursor. Cuba and China have agreed to launch a biotechnology venture to develop neurotechnology products in China.

In case you’re hopeful about the November elections, take a look at
this forecast map

From the New York Times, George Will reviews Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen. You can purchase the book here

Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early - very early - church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a “Christian nation.”

This irritates Brooke Allen, an author and critic who has distilled her annoyance into “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.” It is a wonderfully high’spirited and informative polemic that, as polemics often do, occasionally goes too far. Her thesis is that the six most important founders - Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton - subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. That doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting: it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.

Read more here

Abdul Rahim insists he’s an apolitical student who fled a strict father. But he’s fallen into a black hole in the war on terror in which first the Taliban and then the United States imprisoned him as an enemy of the state. Arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2000, Rahim says al-Qaida leaders burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he “confessed” to spying for the United States.

U.S. forces took the young Kurd from Syria into custody in January 2002 after the Taliban fled his prison. Accusing him of being an al-Qaida terrorist, U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours, he says. He’s been held ever since as an enemy combatant.

Rahim’s story is one of several emerging from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as defense lawyers make bids to free their clients while the Bush administration tries to use a new law to lock them out of federal courts.

After the Supreme Court overturned President Bush’s plans for commissions to try detainees, Bush obtained a new law from Congress barring federal courts from hearing appeals for release by any alien “properly detained as an enemy combatant.” The Justice Department told district and appellate judges this week they no longer have jurisdiction to hear dozens of such pending cases.

A court fight over that is certain.

Calling the move to strip jurisdiction “a direct attack on our constitutional structure,” Federal Public Defender Steven T. Wax in Portland, Ore., said, “We will litigate that as hard as we can in whatever forum we can find, because they are wrong.”

Other detainees whose lawyers filed new evidence in U.S. District Court motions this month include:

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HEMINGWAY‘S FIRST NOVEL TURNS 80

PENTAGON WORRIED ABOUT SILENT SUBMARINE

PENTAGON URGED TO MONITOR MENTAL HEALTH OF TROOPS

PENTAGON URGES MORE RELEVANT R&D SPENDING All that Star War spending landed them……back to the basics.

BUSH TO MEET IRAQI GENERALS So he can NOT listen to them some more

WOMAN CLAIMS SHE FOUND FINGER IN SUBWAY FOOD Here we go again

CALIFORNIA SHIPPING INMATES OUT OF STATE

COURT LIMITS U.S. AUTHORITY IN CASINOS

This short film titled Iraq, the Real Story, from Sean Smith, a Guardian Limited award winning war photographer is good. I love the music. It shows what our troops are up against in training the Iraqi troops to “stand up so we can stand down.”
Give a look and listen here.

There’s facts, and then there’s Sean Hannity’s take on Gore’s efforts and Global Warming:

“It’s so overtly political, it’s so overtly full of scare tactics… I just think the man has gone over the edge…. You know, in science, all we have are facts.” Ok, who stole this man’s brain???

WASHINGTON — The world — especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil — will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts.

But the prediction of a future of nasty extreme weather also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season.

In a preview of a major international multiyear report on climate change that comes out next year, a study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research details what nine of the world’s top computer models predict for the lurching of climate at its most extreme.

Read more at the Sun Sentinel