Musings: Outrageous

A star fell as Koko and I stepped out the door this morning, reminding me of the old saying that where a star falls, the fish are biting, so today, it seems, that would be in the east. The stars that stayed put gave way to clouds as we walked, further darkening the dark, and when a strip of dawn appeared on the horizon, it illuminated the scalloped edge of a cloud that I knew soon would be dropping rain, and it did, but not on us.

As we walked, I was thinking about outrage, a musing prompted by a comment a reader left on the last post, wondering where mine was when I wrote about the seal killer's light penalty (I guess I just did a poor job of conveying it), as well as all the other outrageous things that passed through my consciousness just this past weekend alone. I’m talking about:

• The “foreign bands” of pornographers who are taking advantage of the extreme poverty in Peru to obtain children as young as 3, often for 34 cents or a quarter of a chicken, to sexually assault in videos sold to other extreme sickos.

• The heavily-armed Pittsburgh cops who used tear gas, stun grenades, smoke canisters and a Long Range Acoustic Device, which emits a piercing whistle, to disperse people exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly at the G20 summit.

And related to that, the 20 countries that control 80% of the world's resources.

• The revelation that the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, will need to be built over the next 20 years just to satisfy the demand from our flatscreen TVS, computers, game consoles and other electronics, thus making it that much harder to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• The way the U.S. has wasted $150 billion developing missile defense systems — the bread and butter of Kauai’s PMRF — since President Reagan first proposed “Star Wars” in the 1980s “Yet in 25 years the program has not produced a workable weapons system, something unprecedented even in the annals of the Pentagon's bloated budgets.”

• The General Accounting Office report that the ill-conceived 661-mile-long fence on the U.S.-Mexico border will cost $6.5 billion to maintain over the next 20 years and haas already been breached 3,363 times.

• News that Glenn Beck will make more than $23 million this year for peddling his brand of blather, which he bills as the “fusion between entertainment and enlightenment.”

• The declaration that “conspicuous consumption is definitely out,” because that means it once was, weirdly, “in."

• The ill-informed woman from LA who thinks she even has the right to weigh in on the vacation rental issue, much less criticize Barbara Robeson and Caren Diamond as “self-appointed civilian enforcers” while falsely insinuating they engaged in trespassing to gather their information about property owners breaking the law.

• People who called Ehren Watada a coward and traitor when he had the tremendous courage to stand by his convictions and refuse another tour of duty in Iraq.

• And, of course, that lying sack of shit Charles Vidinha, who claimed he was just trying to "scare" the monk seal he shot twice, (as if that’s a valid excuse) as well as his attorney Alexander Silvert — you can tell just by watching his eye movements on the video that he’s lying as he repeats Vidinha’s fantastic story — and KITV news, which tried to drum up sympathy for the monk seal killer by describing him as “an elderly Kauai paniolo” and saying: “Even though he said it was an accident, Charles Vidinha was immediately sent to prison.”

Kinda makes you wish for a return to ye old days of the public stocks, so we could heap all sorts of abuse and rotten veggies on the perps.

There’s still a lot that doesn’t add up with the story. If Vidinha was too broke to pay a fine, how did he come up with the $10,000 bond? You need keys to get through the gate to Pilaa, so was he working for Jimmy Pflueger, who owns most of that land? If so, does Jimmy generally arm his employees, and why? And what was that bit about preparing the beach for campers from Oahu? Are they running a little “private beach” tourism biz there?

The Advertiser, for some reason, didn’t allow comments on its article, but the Star-Bulletin story generated lots of outraged responses. My favorite:

One would think that firing 4 shots is more than just an accident. Too bad the seal wasn't packing.