Under obvious pressure from Chinese authorities, the Nepalese government has given the security forces guarding their side of Mount Everest free reign in dealing with any protests.

If this keeps up, China may wrest the coveted Most Unloved Nation crown from the US. The Tibet demonstrations, the Olympic Torch protest, the Zimbabwe arms shipment, China has been receiving a lot of unfavorable attention lately, most of it quite justified. They appear as pigheaded and contemptuous of world opinion as the White House..

If Bush wants the crown back, he’ll need to do something spectacular, like attack Iran.

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A true smart thermostat would be a plug-and-play device. You’d hook it up, enter your Wi-Fi key, give it a preferred temperature range, and then forget it’s there. The thermostat would come with a few low-cost motion sensors that you mount in different zones of your home or office (these are dumb devices that tell the thermostat what zones are occupied). You’d hook these up and forget about them, too.

This thermostat, unlike others, would be able to see the future. It would poll the weather service to fetch weather data and know what outdoor temperatures will be, hour by hour, for the next several days as well as general conditions (sunny or cloudy, dry or wet, etc). With this information, it could do things like keep the heat off on a morning when it’ll be warm or sunny later in the day, or cool the house down early in the morning (during off peak rates) in advance of an especially hot day to reduce peak usage.

None of this is expensive or difficult to install. Think of the huge amounts power that could be saved by smart thermostats. Conservation remains the best way to save energy.

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Clinton only up by +3 in latest Zogby poll. It wasn’t that long ago she had a double-digit lead.

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Socialist Unity in Britain wonders, as do many of us, about the steadily diminishing numbers at antiwar protests given that the majority of the populace opposes the war. They hope unions might somehow revitalize the movement, but I’m doubtful unions have the clout or the willingness to do so in mass numbers, especially in the US.

The key reason why attendances at marches are down and why the health of the anti-war movement overall has taken a sharp downward dip is because there is no domestic organising focus for the anti-war movement. The war is still there, but we have no way at the moment to really hit back at it.

There’s no draft and returning body bags are carefully kept out of public view. So, the immediacy of the war now isn’t like it was during Vietnam. Also, mass demonstrations no longer have much effect. They’ve been done so often that the mainstream media barely considers them news anymore. And if it doesn’t have mass impact, then you’ve not accomplished much except make protesters feel good and (don’t overlook this, it can be a major reason groups organize protests) recruit for your organization.

If you want a protest to be huge in size, then you have to organize within the public at large, not just within Left enclaves. Few, if any, groups are doing this. Which is another reason the protests are getting smaller. The Left base is finding them to be routine while no outreach is happening within the larger population.

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A new refinery in Germany will make biofuel from leftover wood, straw, weeds, and curdled milk rejected by processing plants. Thus, this next-gen biofuel will not use foodcrops or land formerly used to grow food, a huge step forward.

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