This new concept car from Japan is powered by fuel cells with hydrogen created real time from water. Thus, it can run for as long as it has water as a fuel source. The hydrogen does not need to be made in advance and stored in the car.

Update: Jonathan Lundell in the comments whacks me upside the head with the Second Law of Thermodynamics stick, and SlashDot agrees.

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SFist has a growing photo gallery.

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So sayeth the wacko fringe in Israel (while furtively munching on smuggled pistachios, no doubt)

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So says, not a Marxist, but a financial analyst at a large institution, who also opines that British banks are acting like street thugs.

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Stilt walkers, Marin Arts festival. (click for full-sized)

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From Socialist Unity

Respect Member of Parliament and vice-president of the Stop the War Coalition George Galloway has written to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and London Mayor Boris Johnson calling for a swift inquiry into the policing of yesterdays Stop the War protest in Westminster .

“The policing of the event was way over the top,” says Galloway. “The primary cause is the profoundly undemocratic decision to ban a peaceful protest from going down Whitehall – so that George W Bush would not be embarrassed: our rights are shredded to save the face of a foreign potentate.

The policeman’s steel baton cracking against the heads of peaceful protesters and coming after Parliament voted to lock people up for 42 days without charge should be a further wake-up call. The attack on our civil liberties is not a subject for highbrow, lawyerly debate. It is a serious assault on our freedoms, something that will lead large numbers of people in the very near future to wonder how it happened. By then it will be too late. The time to raise the alarm is now.”

The current assault on civil rights in Britain is at least as onerous as what the neocons have done here in the States. Yes, Parliament really did just vote to lock up British subjects for 42 days without charges. London police under their new right wing mayor no doubt feel more emboldened to crack skulls of protesters.

Galloway’s courageous stand should be supported by all.

Violence against peace demonstrators

Indymedia.uk photos

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Mac Uaid reports from the Campaign Against Climate Change conference in Britain

A strongly represented view was that what we do is more important than how we label ourselves and that it’s entirely possible for socialists to develop theory and activities on climate change without changing how they view themselves. Again Derek and Alan dissented from this reminding the audience that the impact of climate change on the world’s population obliges socialist to rethink all their basic ideas inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I’m with Derek and Alan. Socialism needs (like capitalism constantly does) to reinvent itself to deal with a fast-changing world. “Marx said it, I believe it, that settles it” ain’t gonna play, or attract converts, or help stop global warming. How would a socialist world stop global warming. That’s what needs to be thought out and explained in specific terms. Not, “the workers will run the factories” and then all will be happiness and light with global warming magically disappeared.

Stopping global warming will require huge amounts of money and support from major governments and corporations. Socialists need to formulate a specific plan as to how this can happen without predatory capitalism being involved, and then make it something the average citizen agrees with and wants to get involved with. And that indeed means rethinking all their basic ideas.

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Alex Lockwood has a Climate Change Media Quiz with this photo as the “non-commercial break”.

Sample question:
4. Multiple Choice: What percentage of the Republican members of Congress in the US have rejected the climate science that human activity is changing the planet’s climate?

A) 26% B) 49% C) 74%

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