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I see that the energy review suggests outlawing "standby" buttons on consumer electricals. Good thing too. Because if they're there, as they are in nearly all cases in my little hovel, they are going to get used. I don't know if they really drain as much electricity as they say, but am prepared enough to believe so and feel guilty about having them, however convenient they are when watching "Science Shack" on the TV at 3am to help me sleep (I mean - there's no point really if you have to get out of bed again and wake yourself up to switch the whole thing off, not for the uberlazy like me anyway).

But my TV and Hi-Fi are only a few years old, so they're going to last long after "peak oil" by the looks of it. So I was thinking, what would make it easier for me to do my duty and turn the bloody things off properly.

With computers you can actually turn them right off and still have them turned on remotely if they are on a network using fantastic sounding little things called "magic packets". The network listens passively (yes, I believe it does take a tiny amount of charge, but from the onboard battery rather than the mains if I understand it correctly) and when a magic packet arrives addressed for that particular gizmo it knows to turn the machine on just as surely as if you were pressing the button yourself.

So, for those of us who will have TV and other gadgets with standby buttons on for a good while yet whether they are outlawed or not, could we not have some kind of power plug that works with something similar to these "magic packets". One remote control could do for the whole house with different numbered plugs. Power the thing off at the wall and still be able to roll over in the morning and turn it all back on again without getting out off bed?

Anyone any good with a soldering iron want to have a go at it? Or point me to one someone made earlier?

Over at ConservativeHome they're spinning the line that "Green Taxes" such as those that might be recommended by the Gummer-Goldssmith review might hit the poorest hardest:

Green action mustn't punish the poor. Green taxation - like the congestion charge and VAT on domestic flights - can fall most heavily on the poorest.

Zac Goldsmith: Green taxes
must not appear to be the rich
telling the poor what
they cannot have!

According to our figures I think they need to look either at who would be most affected, or who they are calling the poorest. It would of course not surprise any of us to find that they don't really count the really poorest as poor, just the "lower middle classes" from whom they want some votes. But, if they do mean the lowest rungs of the British wealth ladder, then according to the line that Chris Huhne, Green Lib Dems and other have been pushing it is not in fact these people who would be most affected.

33% of households do not have access to a car. Most of these are the least well off households. If money from the congestion charge puts more into public transport these people gain. Similarly I very much doubt that the very poorest, if they travel terribly far at all, travel by air, internally or overseas. These are the "National Express" customers if anything. It would cost me more in time, money and effort to get to a cheap flight airport before flying as it would be to get a coach service to my destination. And on overseas flights, it is the well off and moderately well off who can afford to take multiple breaks a year. The European city weekend break several times a year is not the stuff of the Housing Benefit claimant (unless he's also an MEP I suppose).

However, they are right about one thing, yet fail to address it. Green taxes will hurt the poor the most if the poor are always driven to living on "marginal land". For it is they who, as well as having to keep up their housing costs, will have to commute because housing prices near where they work or socialize are unaffordable to them. Only Land Value Tax, as I wrote in one of my first ever blog posts, can change that and give people a real choice as to whether to live closer to work or commute with the attendant higher travel costs that green taxation will bring.

The Tories therefore, like all the other main parties including the Lib Dems, signally fail to address the biggest environmental tax issue of all - the taxation of location values.

Naim Zidane, reported the Telegraph last week, is a 70 year old Palestinian who all his life has worked in a vineyard owned by the Italian priests at the West Bank Salesian monastery of Cremisan, near Beit Jala, not far from Bethlehem. They've been working together as a community for 120 years. But soon, it appears, the Israeli security barrier will drag this last West Bank vineyard into the Israeli side of the wall, just as they have ripped away the livelihoods of thousands of other West Bank Palestinians with the closing off of many olive groves over the past few years.

Meanwhile, last night, they once again attacked civilian infrastructure in another sovereign state, Lebanon, closing Beirut airport with rocket attacks, in reprisals against a geurilla organization, Hezbollah, sponsored and many say, I gather, controlled by a third, Syria, for kidnapping two Israeli military personnel. And in the past few days seventy Palestinians and one Israeli, including, as always, mostly civilians, and with them lots of children, have been killed in Israeli incursions into the largest concentration camp on the planet, the Gaza strip, also, it seems, because some of their fellow "countrymen" if Palestine can be called, yet, a country, kidnapped an Israeli soldier who was, presumably, on his way to maim and kill more Palestinians.

I really hesitate to post about Israel. If I am lucky my visitor numbers will rise. But probably at the expense of abuse that seems to be meted out against anyone who says anything negative about Israel. I'm a pacifist. And I understand that things have been difficult, shall we say, in that part of the world for several decades. I believe, I think, in a two state solution, not because I support Israel - if Israel hadn't carved itself out of the desert in the first half of the twentieth century I certainly wouldn't be creating it now. But it exists, and as a pragmatist, I believe there are a whole load of peace-loving Israelis, who arrived there and brought their families up there, hoping for some kind of peaceful co-existence with those who also viewed that land as part of their history and we should work for that peaceful co-existence.

But can you imagine the uproar there would have been if, say, the US military had gone about searching for those two of their soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who were kidnapped by allegedly al-Qaeda linked insurgents in Iraq, by killing civilians and bombing civilian infrastructure there? Like the battle of Falluja? Despite all my misgivings about the US government's lack of respect for the rule of law, I cannot for the life of me see why Israel gets away with these things, almost unremarked upon.

Our seeming collective myopia disgusts me - note to any hardcore Zionists about to yell at me - not Israel per se, but us, who seem to let this violence trickle through in the inside pages of newspapers and down in the bottom half of the news hour, with hardly a mention, either to condemn, or to discuss solutions. Maybe this latest attack on the civilian infrastructure of a country that in recent years, despite the upheavals caused by the death of President Rafik Hariri a while back, has been getting itself back on its feet, will refocus attention on what's going on in the area.

Punishment attacks are the weapons of a desperate regime. They are disgusting. Against the rule of law. People who support, as I do, a two state solution (though I have to say with deep, deep misgivings about the carving out of settlements whenever it suits them leaving the West Bank looking like a land strafed with bomb craters like the Somme battlefield) will eventually lose sympathy and wonder what it is we actually support - which ones are the murdering terrorists. Because terrorism is exactly what's been going on in Gaza; state sponsored terrorism, and state sponsored theft as in the case of Naim Zidane's employers' vineyard.

And I for one am losing patience with it. Whatever the hurdles, whatever the attitudes of those they feel are ranged against them, Israel can be the "better man" in its response, respecting the rule of law. When I was young, I just about remember Entebbe - we were I think in Kenya at the time. We thought the surgical precision of Israeli special forces when they wanted to be was second to none in the world. Maybe that was naive (I was only seven I think and soldierly antics were exciting, not threatening), but it seems to me they have become little more than the terrorists they condemn. And if we lose patience with the situation, if we give up hoping for a peaceful, adult, settlement, then I would imagine that Israel's death throes could be as bloody as its birth-pangs. And we will not care, because we'll have grown used to the bloodshed, and really have stopped trying to work out who are the good guys or not.