Homo sapiens are a strange lot, move a rat's tail and Venus blocks the Sun

We homo sapiens are a strange lot aren't we. No one blinks when ten thousands of civilians are slaughtered with guns, bombs and mortar attacks. A couple of hundred die in a gas attack and the world calls it monstrous and suddenly some countries happily switch to the punishing mode under the motto: 'let us stop the killing with gas by bombing them'. Did anyone, anyone, actually come up with a plan to stop the bloodshed? Or am I too naive and is that not the intent. And whatever happened to learning from history or from past mistakes? Those with their fingers at the button should realise by now that you can't bomb a country into democracy. At least the UK Parliament put a stop to it for now.
With many great thinkers and philosophers contemplating if the democratic system has passed its expiry date, let me remind you all that the UK's vote is the second time in a year that a national Parliament has stopped (at least for some time), what seemed to be an multi-national given. The first time was when the Cyprus parliament voted down the first full bail-in proposal that all Cypriots should pass on part of their savings to save the banks and the country. My respect to those Parliaments who vote using their common sense and not their political agendas.

Those who want to understand the Middle East, see attached summary by KN Al-Sabah published this week in the FT:

Now over to something completely different. This is a headline from Wednesday in the New York Times:
"Researcher Controls Another Person’s Brain Over the Internet".

Que????
Yes indeed. Researchers at the University of Washington have successfully connected two human brains over the internet. One researcher moved the hand of the other researcher by just thinking about it whilst their brains were, via EEG's, connected to each other through the internet. It's the first time they experimented from human to human, but it worked before between rats and it worked from a human to a rat (a human moved the rat's tail just by thinking about it, the article doesn't say what the rat's retaliation was...). Read the full article here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/researcher-controls-another-persons-brain-over-the-internet/?smid=tw-share&_r=0
I'm sure this can lead to wonderful applications that can dramatically improve the life of paralysed patients but would I want my brain to be connected, let alone controlled, by someone else's brain? No thank you. My thoughts are purely my own. This world is getting crazy.

Whilst listening to the news this week I couldn't help thinking about a song from The Machines back in the eighties. The Machines were a Belgian band (don't worry they sing in English). The song that I've been humming all week is: 'I See the Lies in Your Eyes' (only the title is relevant as it is actually a love song).

And now we need something beautiful to offset these dark thoughts. How about a picture of a Venus eclipse of the Sun? Courtesy of NASA we have this amazing photo with the Sun imaged in three colours of ultraviolet light by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, with the black circle being Venus. Enjoy it as the next Venusian solar eclipse will occur in 2117.