Kiwiblog

First we have some nice photos from the Auckland protest, equating Israel with Nazi Germany.

Oh a nice professional sign comparing Israel’s response to 10,000 rockets to Nazi death camps where Jews were gassed, and their possessions looted.

While this protester gets marks for his home made sign.

Ironically I suspect that if WWII was occuring today, they would be demanding Churchill be placed on trial, for an unacceptably high civilian death toll in Germany.

Anyway once again I am pleased to quote Chris Trotter. Chris explains why so many on the left support liberation movements:

A fairly substantial chunk of the New Zealand Left would echo Keith’s view. In part this is because a great many leftists see Israel as the primary instrument of “US imperialism” in the Middle East – making the Palestinian cause one of the World’s last great unresolved struggles for national liberation.

For leftists of Keith’s generation, people who came of age in the early-1960s, when the empires of the European powers were being challenged by a multitude of national liberation movements, the anti-colonial struggle was something to be supported wholeheartedly and unequivocally.

Even more exciting for these young leftists was the fact that most liberation movements espoused some variant of the socialist ideology, and many enjoyed the backing (overt or covert) of the Soviet Union and/or the Peoples Republic of China.

National liberation struggles and the socialist revolution seemed inextricably linked.

Hamas is anything but secular and quasi-socialist, and its dedication to the elimination not only of Israel, but of the entire Jewish people, is unequivocal. In the words of its own charter:

“The Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree.”

The last time people talked about the Jews in this way, they were wearing brown shirts and jackboots. And the fate they had planned for the Jewish people gave new meaning to the word “disproportionate”.

Which is why I find it so hard to respond with any degree of positivity to Keith Locke’s call for New Zealand to stand up and be counted among the outspoken opponents of what is happening in Gaza.

Were Hamas a secular and socialist organisation dedicated to the creation of a secular and socialist state of Palestine: a state where all those with an historical and/or religious attachment to the Holy Land; Jews and Arabs, the followers of Judaism, Islam and Christianity – all the people of the Book – could live together in peace and harmony; well, then I might feel differently.

But it isn’t.

There was twit-nit Catholic priest Gerard Burns daubing his blood over a peace monument, bizarro MP Keith Locke accusing Israel of war crimes, and sundry radio commentators giving full voice to anti-Semitic outrage.

All followed a simple maxim, straight out of Animal Farm: Israel wrong, Palestinians right.

Indeed.

Almost without exception, liberals accept that the Israelis are the baddies. They are the ones with the fighter planes, helicopter gunships and tanks tearing through the ghettoes of Gaza. As John Minto opined this past week they are the primary aggressor. Ipso facto, they are morally inferior.

The truth is considerably different. The Gaza Strip is a territory controlled by an Islamic fundamentalist faction that has sworn to wipe Israel from the planet. It has been doing its best by launching rockets at Jewish settlements, arming and directing suicide bombers, and ending the uneasy ceasefire.

Yep, they are delighted that they finally got Israel to respond.

The only problem is that Hamas are not freedom fighters. In fact, they are not even sane. They are religious fanatics. Fundamentalist nutters armed with guns, rocket-propelled grenades and rockets. Their idea of a Palestinian state is one that eradicates Israel. They emerged victors after a bloody civil war with the Fatah party in 2006 killing plenty of innocent civilians themselves and now consider that Hamas is the frontline in the fight against the infidel.

Yet these are the people that Minto, the Greens, the Catholic fringe and Kiwi liberals seek to embrace.

The UN has got it right (this time). They have called for both sides to stop fighting. But the Greens and Minto want Israel to unilaterally stop, and nothing to be done about the rocket attacks from Hamas.

This is not to suggest that Israeli actions over these past 60 years meet any antipodean morality test either. There have been inhumane actions and outrageous abuses. But not this time: not in Gaza in 2009. Israel is responding as any nation would were it under continual military harassment.

This is quite right. Israel bashers can’t tell the difference between the times when their actions have been outrageous, and legitimately responding to Hamas and their rocket attacks.

The death of innocents in Gaza is regrettable it is sad and it is wrong. But all the more so for being orchestrated by Hamas, in pursuit of their despicable ends.

And this could all end is Hamas will agree to cease the rocket attacks.

The HoS reports:

Inmates in our most secure prison are accused of making fortunes from a highly organised drug ring run from behind bars, with at least one alleged to have become a millionaire.

Police documents claim the prisoners ran their methamphetamine importing and manufacturing ring from Auckland Maximum Security Prison at Paremoremo under the noses of – and sometimes with the assistance of – prison officers.

This is just staggering stuff, and shows what a joke prison is to some prisoners.

It also highlights again the unacceptably high level of corruption in the public prison service. Passing a law to terminate the private management of Auckland Remand Prison was one of the most stupid things ever done by any Government. You finally had a corruption-free prison.

Hamish McBrearty at Sports After Dark blogs on the protest against the Israeli tennis player. He says:

I don’t usually cover political events as it is my firm belief that sports should be apolitical. However, this particular protest is so intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt that I just have to point out a few things.

Veteran protestor John Minto and a few of his followers protested outside the ASB Tennis Centre in Auckland today, as is their right, and called for Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer to pull out of the tournament.

Minto had already indicated that his group, Global Peace and Justice would do so in this press release and a letter to Peer herself. The reason I find this protest so disgusting, apart from the hate in his press release, is that Peer is just a person going about her normal business. I can understand people protesting the 1981 Springbok Tour, as that team represented South Africa, was chosen along racial lines and gave some legitimacy to the regime, but Peer is a professional tennis player representing herself, she just happens to be Israeli. …

I’m not sure where these calls for a comprehensive boycott of Israel are coming from, but is he seriously suggesting that she should be unable to earn a living internationally based solely on where she was born?

The answer is yes.

From XKCD. Heh.

The Illinois House has voted 114-1 to impeach Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

He will now be tried in the State Senate, where 40 out of 59 Senators will have to vote to convict, to remove him from office.

Blagojevich’s choice for Obama’s Senate seat looks likely to enter the Senate shortly after the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the Governor’s appointment of Roland Burris was legal even without the Secretary of State certifying it.

The New Yorker has a fascinating report on how Burris has already set up a tombstone and memorial to himself. Yes, seriously.

So not only does he set up his own memorial and tombstone while alive, he even lists such important things such as being an exchange student.

The New Yorker article concludes, now he is about to become a Senator:

I think he should set up a Twitter on the monument and update it in real time.

Heh.

Fran O’Sullivan writes in today’s Herald, criticising Israel:

The reality is Israeli excesses helped pave the way for Hamas to become a power in the first place. Israel is not alone in facing provocations from “terrorists”. But the extent of its retaliation will simply empower its enemies further as Palestinians react against the loss of life. At the end of the day, the moral arguments used by both sides to promote their excesses will not have much currency.

Israel does often over-react but it is easy to criticise imperfect reactions from the “armchair” so to speak.  But when the Red Cross is concerned, we should be also:

Even the International Committee of the Red Cross says: “The Israeli military [has] failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”

That is not good.

What will matter is the consequences that result from the Gaza War. If Israel’s onslaught destabilises the Middle East further how much longer will it be able to count on the United States for unwavering support?

In this case though, there has been considerable support for Israel’s right to try and stop the rocket attacks. Russia and China have been muted – not just blaming Israel. The EU and most western states have been careful not to just blame Israel or call on them to stop unless Hamas will agree to stop also.

Even in Canada, the new Liberal (centre-left) party leader is taking a balanced view:

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says Israel is justified in taking military action to defend itself against attacks by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

“Canada has to support the right of a democratic country to defend itself,” he told reporters in Halifax on Thursday after speaking to a forum of business leaders on the economy.

“Israel has been attacked from Gaza, not just last year, but for almost 10 years. They evacuated from Gaza so there is no occupation in Gaza.”

And I can only quote approvingly from Chris Trotter:

To the Israelis, however, a more persuasive precedent might well be found in their own history. After all, in ancient Judea, wasn’t it the Jews who found themselves in exactly the same position as present-day Palestinians: under the heel of a brutal army of occupation? Was not the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-73AD, and the second, far more destructive Jewish-Roman War of 132-35, the intifada of their time?

And what was the outcome of those revolts? Massive retaliation: countless deaths, towns destroyed, lands seized, and, in the wake of that final, cataclysmic defeat, the “ethnic cleansing” of Judea – the 1,900-year Jewish Diaspora.

“Impossibel!” you say. “Unthinkable!” Not really. What, after all, was the policy of the Allied Powers regarding the German speakers of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II – if not “ethnic cleansing”? The intractability of the problems caused by ethnic Germans living amongst Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Rumanians led to the wholesale uprooting of entire communities. Families which had lived in the same towns, farmed the same land, for hundreds of years were simply put on trains and “resettled” in the West. Under the auspices of the “Big Three” – the USA, the USSR and the British Empire – Eastern Europe was ruthlessly, and very effectively, “cleansed” of its German-speaking population.

The Germans, of course, had sent six million of Europe’s Jews in the opposite direction, to an altogether more permanent kind of “resettlement”.

And can anyone seriously doubt that, should Hamas “win”, their “final solution” would be any different?

The Herald reports that the Maori Party want a policy change to allow the Tino Rangatiratanga flag to be flown on the Auckland Harbour Bridge on Waitangi Day.

Dr Sharples said he would raise it with other ministers when MPs returned this month – despite John Key’s refusal to support such a step when he was leader of the Opposition.

“I want the flag up there,” Dr Sharples said. “I think it’s a symbol of the new direction this Government is taking by inviting the Maori Party to be part of it.”

It is a debate which has plagued politicians and the agency which decides which flags fly on the Harbour Bridge, and has divided public opinion.

The Transport Agency’s policy allows only the New Zealand flag to fly from the bridge, but Maori say flying the Tino Rangatiratanga flag would raise awareness of the part Maori play in the country.

I can’t say it is an issue that greatly concerns me either way.

However my pragmatic streak is telling me that in terms of keeping confidence and supply partners happy, I’d much rather allow a flag on a bridge one day a year, than have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more to MFAT and racing, just to make the Minister look like a breadwinner.

Even cheaper than the Families Commission!

Yay, 19 new iPredict stocks. They include (in brackets is the current probability or price according to the market):

1. Frank Bainimarama to lose position as Interim Prime Minister of Fiji in 2009 (39%)
2. Robert Mugabe to lose position as President of Zimbabwe in 2009 (63%)
3. Helen Clark to leave Parliament in 2009 (82%)
4. Michael Cullen to leave Parliament in 2009 (52%)
5. Jim Anderton to announce in 2009 he will not stand in next election (27%)
6. Phil Goff to be replaced as Labour leader in 2009 (11%)
7. Annette King to be replaced as Labour deputy leader in 2009 (27%)
8. Maori/National agreement to be terminated in 2009 (18%)
9. ACT/National agreement to be terminated in 2009 (7%)
10. Global temperatures to be warmer in 2009 than 2008 (76%)
11. Global temperatures in 2009 to be highest ever (13%)

I’ve already started trading. Fun, fun, fun.

A nifty we website to make it easy to donate and fundraise for charitable projects is givealittle.

The Evile family are the Mangere family that lost four children in a house fire.  Words can’t describe how difficult it must be to lose your house and four children.

You can donate through givealittle to help the Evile family rebuild their home.

The Waikato Times reports on a mother, Sam Stevens, who is angry a dog which bit her three year old son will not be put down. The son, Caine, was in hospital for three days.

Now normally I am 100% for putting down a dog that attacks a child. There are far too many mutilations and even deaths from vicious deaths. But in this case I think the authorities have it right:

Council spokeswoman Christine Watson said the biting incident had been voluntarily logged by the dog’s owner, who also offered the dog for destruction.

As part of the animal control investigation, two independent witnesses said they had seen the boy deliberately leave the house and harm the dog by squeezing its testicles.

Animal control staff believed the dog had acted in its own defence, and after assessing its behaviour and “completely clean record” they decided it did not need to be put down.

If you squeeze anyone’s testicles, the recipient is not going to react well – whether man or beast.

So maybe it is just a sad case of a kid not knowing what he was doing, but the story goes on:

The investigation also revealed the child had been involved in two previous incidents of alleged animal cruelty.

Maybe there has been a lesson learnt here, and possibly the mother should worry less about the dog, and more about teaching her kid not to abuse animals.

Daniel Finkelstein has a column in The Times (also appeared in Dom Post this morning) that is recommended reading.

It was strictly forbidden to have a notebook in Belsen, but my Aunt Ruth had one anyway. Just a little pocket diary – an appointment book with one of those tiny pencils. And in it, in the autumn of 1944, she noted that Anne Frank and Anne’s sister, Ruth’s schoolfriend Margot, had arrived in the concentration camp.

My mother and my aunt had been watching through the camp wire when the Franks arrived. Mum remembers it well, because they had been excited to spot girls they knew from the old days in Amsterdam. They had played in the same streets, been to the same schools and Ruth and Margot attended Hebrew classes together. The pair had once been pressed into service to act as bridesmaids, when a secretive Jewish wedding had taken place at the synagogue during their lesson time.

But Ruth and Margot did not grow up together. Because while Ruth and my mother lived, Margot and Anne never left Belsen. They died of typhus.

I am telling you this story because I want you to understand Israel. Not to agree with all it does, not to keep quiet when you want to protest against its actions, not to side with it always, merely to understand Israel.

There are two things about the tale that help to provide insight. The first is that all these things, the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth, they aren’t ancient history, and they aren’t fable. They happened to real people and they happened in our lifetime. Anne and Margot Frank were just children to my aunt and my mother; they weren’t icons, or symbols of anything.

The second is that world opinion weeps now for Anne Frank. But world opinion did not save her.

Indeed. Anne Frank is now some sort of mythical heroine, but to Daniel’s aunt, she was just a family friend. The Holocaust is not ancient history, but very very recent.

The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews.

And as people demand that Israel allow Hamas to keep firing 10,000 rockets at them, without responding, their conclusions seem quite sensible.

So when Israel is urged to respect world opinion and put its faith in the international community the point is rather being missed. The very idea of Israel is a rejection of this option. Israel only exists because Jews do not feel safe as the wards of world opinion. Zionism, that word that is so abused, so reviled, is founded on a determination that, at the end of the day, somehow the Jews will defend themselves and their fellow Jews from destruction. If world opinion was enough, there would be no Israel.

The poverty and the death and the despair among the Palestinians in Gaza moves me to tears. How can it not? Who can see pictures of children in a war zone or a slum street and not be angry and bewildered and driven to protest? And what is so appalling is that it is so unnecessary. For there can be peace and prosperity at the smallest of prices. The Palestinians need only say that they will allow Israel to exist in peace. They need only say this tiny thing, and mean it, and there is pretty much nothing they cannot have.

Yet they will not say it. And they will not mean it. For they do not want the Jews. Again and again – again and again – the Palestinians have been offered a nation state in a divided Palestine. And again and again they have turned the offer down, for it has always been more important to drive out the Jews than to have a Palestinian state. It is difficult sometimes to avoid the feeling that Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want to kill Jews because they hate Israel. They hate Israel because they want to kill Jews.

Many people will deny this, but I suggest you look at the terrible terrible anti-semitism taught to school children in various countries about Jews.

There cannot be peace until this changes. For Israel will not rely on airy guarantees and international gestures to defend it. At its very core, it will not. It will lay down its arms when the Jews are safe, but it will not do it until they are.

And remember Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in the hope this withdrawl – without conditions – would be a sign of good faith and help the peace process. Instead it has just been used to launch rocket attacks closer to Israel.

Israel has made many mistakes. It has acted too aggressively on some occasions, has been too defensive on others. The country hasn’t always respected the human rights of its enemies as it should have done. What nation under such a threat would have avoided all errors?

But you know what? As Iran gets a nuclear weapon and so the potential for another Holocaust against the Jews and world opinion does nothing, I am not so sure that the errors of world opinion are so much to be preferred to the errors of Israel.

I agree that Israel has made mistakes. I’m not convinced that the land invasion into Gaza was a wize move. I defend their right to defend themselves, but what happens when they withdraw from Gaza and if they have not managed to stop the rocket attacks. It may even embolden Hamas.

Again decision making in these circumstances is often a matter of “least worst” rather than good or bad.

The NZ Herald has a list of the top ten tennis tantrums. This is a classic McEnroe above. It brings back great memories.

Around half an hour ago, Barack Obama was officially declared President-Elect, with the completion of the final stage of the election. They were:

1. November – general election to elect state delegates to Electoral College
2. December – Electoral College delegates meet in every state capital and cast votes
3. January – House and Senate meet in joint session to certify and count the votes, presided over by the Vice-President

No electoral college members changed their vote from the ticket they were elected on (it is not uncommon for one or two to do this) so the final count was as expected 365 for Obama and Biden and 173 for McCain and Palin.

A few minutes ago I saw the headline “Drinking age back on MPs’ agenda“.

My initial reaction was a flurry of swear words directed towards the Government as I read “The National Government will look again at raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 20 this year”.

But luckily I carried on reading the article before I fired off venom, and it is not quite what the headline and first sentence suggest:

The Sale and Supply of Liquor and Liquor Enforcement Bill was introduced by the former Labour Government last August and has been picked up without change by the new Government. It is due to have its first reading when Parliament resumes and will then go to a select committee for public submissions.

Although the bill does not refer to the drinking age, Mr Power said he was sure there would be submissions asking for the age to be raised.

“You can’t have a discussion about the sale and supply of liquor without the drinking age being factored in,” he said.

So it is not the Government saying it wants to raise the drinking age, just the Minister saying that as we consider this bill, people will want to debate the age issue also. Power goes on to say:

Mr Power said he himself voted to keep the age at 18 because he believed the drinking age should not be dealt with in isolation.

“I sat on the select committee that heard submissions, and two things struck me,” he said.

“First, when the police came before that committee they said that in 51 per cent of cases [of under-age drinking] the last drink had been taken at home. That has stuck in my mind.

Simon gets to the nub of the issue – it is one of supply, not age of purchase.

The problem is not 19 year olds having a drink in a pub. It is 14 year olds getting wasted at parties. And the way to deal with that is to make it an offence to supply alcohol to minors in an irresponsible manner.

Criminalising every 18 and 19 year old in NZ (or the 95% who like to have a drink) would be a retrograde step.

However it looks like it may be an issue again, so might be time to reassemble the Keep it 18 campaign team!

Stuff reports:

Love is … trying to elope to Africa with your sweetheart for a wedding under the burning sun – when you are still at primary school.

That was the quest of two children aged six and seven who had thought of almost everything – right down to suntan lotion, sunglasses and the five-year-old sister of the bride-to-be, who was brought along to “witness” their nuptials on the other side of the world.

With their suitcases on wheels and sandwiches of chicken paste and processed cheese, the trio – sensibly bundled up against the minus-six temperature in their homeland – travelled from Langenhagen, near Hanover, in Germany, in their bid to reach the airport more than 50 kilometres away.

It was barely light on New Year’s Day when, fuelled by passion and a documentary they had seen about the wildlife of Kenya the night before, the lovebirds and the witness set out on mission impossible. They had no passports, no tickets and no idea really where Africa was.

“The two children were determined to tie the knot under the African sun after seeing a nature documentary together,” said police spokesman Holger Jureczko in Hanover. The pair, identified only as Mika and Anna-Lena, “are very much in love and decided to get married in Africa, where it is warm, taking with them as a witness Anna-Lena’s little sister, aged five”.

The idea for the romantic trip began when Mika told the two girls about his holiday in Italy while their families celebrated New Year’s Eve together. As the adults drank champagne, Mika and Anna-Lena watched the lions cavorting on the Serengeti and hatched their plan.

As the first dawn of 2009 broke, and while their parents slept, they left their house and walked a kilometre up the road to a tram stop, from where they travelled to Hanover’s central station. Waiting for a train to the airport, they attracted the attention of a guard, who contacted police.

That’s adorable. I bet you as they get older that story wil be told time and time again to embarrass them. Bringing the sister as a witness was good planning.

The Herald reports that the Government is going to look at lowering the drink drive limit – maybe from 0.8 grams per litre to 0.5.

Before they go too far down the track, they should look at the accident statistics. Very very few crashes have a druver at just below the 0.8 limit. In fact not that many have them justover it either. Many or most are totally trollied and 50% over or double or more over the limit.

So a lowering of the limit may result in few benefits, but lead to many more convictions.

Despite a halving of the road toll in the past 20 years, which is mainly attributed to the campaign against drink-driving, police figures show that the number of people being caught for drink-driving has risen in the past five years – up from 25,133 in 2003 to 34,700 in the first 11 months of last year – after being stable for 15 years.

That shows then that you have a problem with people obeying even the current limit. So lowering the limit will create more criminals, but not greatly lower the road toll.

Many of the crashes are younger drivers also who already have an even lower limit of 0.3.

I think it is nice to be abl to go out with a partner to a good restaurant, dine for three to four hours, and enjoy a bottle of good wine between you during that time. You can do that legally at a 0.8 limit but not on a 0.5 limit.

If the statistics showed lots of crashes caused by people with bllod alcohol between 0.5 and 0.8, I’ be in favour of dropping it. But they don’t.

Not surprisingly Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn thinks Israel is the source of all evil, and he has found someone who argues that Israel is guilty of war crimes (this is the same Israel that phones people up in advance of bombing any nearby buildings). So who is the person I/S places great reliance on:

Unfortunately for them, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories – begs to differ:…

Who to believe? Random ranters, or an internationally renowned human rights expert, tasked by the UN with monitoring the implementation of international law in the area? Tough question…

Citing the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories as an internationally renowned human rights expert would make you think he was some sort of Sir Kenneth Keith (who is internationally renowned).

But this is the UN Human Rights Council at work. Arguably the most hypocritical disgusting apparatus at the UN. So when they appoint a “special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories” they actually appoint the biggest Israel hater they can find anywhere.

The rapporteur is Richard Falk. And what do we know about Mr Falk:

1. He supported the Iranian revolution and attacked Jimmy Carter for labeling the Ayatollah Khomeini a religious fanatic. His love for Iran is shown with thsi quote “Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country”
2. He is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist
3. He argues that Vietnam war protesters were entitled to bomb facilities in the US as a form of protest
4. It is no surprise then that he supports suicide bombings as a valid method of struggle.
5. Compares Israel to Nazi Germany

So Mr Falk is a huge champion of human rights – the right to suicide bomb, and the right of that nice peaceful human rights loving Ayatollah.

His views should be given the same respect as, well what I/S calls the sewer.

A reader sent me this article from the New Yorker:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material.

That sounds about right. You would learn as little as possible with the bad teachers – maybe half what you should, while the great teachers inspired you to go beyond the curriculum and learn for its own sake.

That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

This is very much in accordance with the NZ research recently referred to.

And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

I’d rather use that money to pay good teachers more.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

And not everyone can be a great teacher. But indeed we all know from our own experience that there are some people just not suited to be a teacher. So encouraging them out of teaching (by keeping their pay lower than their collegues) and replacing them even with average teachers will have a massive effect,

I am loving the car stero having a bluetooth connection to the phone. I can use the phone to change the radio channel and volume, but more usefully incoming calls automatically rout through the stereo and get automatically answered.

Also it has voice dialling so I can say “Call Name” and it will call them – you don’t have to set anything up, and no cables.

Well just as cool a bluetooth product is EC Key. It turns your mobile phone into your key – no buttons needed or anything – just unlocks the door or opens the building doors as you approach within a few metres. I can see this becoming a near default in future.

An excellent editorial from the Dom Post:

But Hamas’ leaders and those who unquestioningly side with them overlook a simple fact when they deplore Israel’s assault on Gaza, The Dominion Post writes. Hamas, an organisation that is committed to the destruction of Israel, provoked the Israeli attacks and it has it within its power to stop them. All it has to do is stop firing rockets into Israeli territory.

Yes. Ask yourself this. If Israel stops it air strikes, will Hamas stop its rocket attacks? No – it will carry on. But if Hamas stopped rocket attacks, would Israel stop its strikes – absolutely.

In the past eight years 16 Israelis have been killed by rockets launched from within the strip. Israel’s response – air attacks and now a ground assault – is disproportionate. But what is Israel supposed to do? Would its critics prefer it to send a rocket back every time one landed in its territory? No other sovereign nation would tolerate a neighbour indiscriminately targeting its citizens, and anyone who thinks a people who pledged “never again” after the Holocaust would do so, has rocks in their head.

As David Cohen (currently in Israel) points out, there have been more than 9400 documented rocket attacks in the past five years, and in the last year almost 10 a day.

Hopelessly outgunned militarily, Hamas cannot hope to defeat Israel in a conventional war, but it can compete in a public relations battle for hearts and minds. The Israeli attacks are producing images of dead and wounded Palestinians that damage Israel’s international reputation.

They also serve as rallying posters for future Hamas foot soldiers.

That the strategy has cost hundreds of Palestinians their lives and condemned Gaza’s population of 1.5 million to even greater hardship does not appear to concern Hamas’ leaders.

In a column published in yesterday’s Dominion Post, Fania Oz-Salzberger, professor of modern Israel studies at Monash University in Melbourne, likened Hamas’ behaviour to that of a “poor and traumatised” man who sits with his daughter on his lap taking pot shots at a neighbour’s house packed with women and children.

That is a great analogy. And yes it is a deliberate strategy of Hamas to try and maximise civilian casualaties on both sides. Meanwhile as Whale Oil points out, Israel is going so far to minimise civilian deaths it is actually ringing neighbours of targets and giving them time to evacuate. This is why of 600 destroyed targets, there have been less than 100 civilian deaths (and around 400 non civilians). Israel is meant to have made more than 9,000 warning calls.

None of this justifies the wrongs done to Palestinians dispossessed of their ancestral lands, the unconscionable conditions in which millions of Palestinians live, or the excesses of the Israeli military. As Professor Oz-Salzberger writes: “Gazans are worse off than Israelis in every single way.”

Palestinians have reason for being poor and traumatised and bitter and vengeful.

But one simple fact remains. If Hamas’ leaders really want to end the suffering caused by the Israeli attacks they can do so.

All they have to do is stop firing rockets into Israeli territory, acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist and start negotiating.

The problems with Hamas go beyond Israel. They recently voted to bring back crucifixion as a punishment. Now think about how many pages have been devoted to the US water boarding, and how the middle east media have almost totally failed to cover this vote to legalise this most barbaric way to kill someone.

And for those who think all these problems would disappear if Israel was wiped out, reflect on this fromMr Cohen again:

While the military campaign by the Israelis is against the Hamas death-cultists who are sworn to Israel’s destruction, there is no denying it is also aimed at sending a severe message to the Islamist group’s Iranian sponsors, whose to-do list of countries to eliminate after they’re done with the Zionist entity even includes New Zealand.

Yes, follow the link. Ths is not just a war about a border.