Musings: Human Folly

The sky had no color, save for fringing, swirling, streaking grey, when Koko and I went out walking this morning. The light was vague and the street showed proof of an earlier light rain that would return before we reached home, making me glad I’d brought an umbrella, although I never mind a bit of watering.

Ran into Farmer Jerry along the road and we got to talking about how we were glad that little-big things could make us happy, like rain, which fell delightfully much of yesterday morning. As Jerry noted, you can irrigate crops all you want, but there’s nothing they like more than rain.

Somehow we got on the topic of the massive Kukuiula project, and I shared a report from a friend in the trades that A&B is in a heavy push to finish its golf course clubhous and a few really huge mansions have already been built.

“That was some of the better ag land on the island,” Jerry noted.

Now it’s going to be growing luxury homes and golf courses and shopping centers.

And that got me thinking about Walter Lewis’ commentary in The Garden Island the other day on the new vacation rental the mayor intends to sign, and the legislation that preceded it:

According to the 2006 Bill 2204, some 45 percent of residential units constructed between 1990 and 2000 were for seasonal rental use and from 2000 to 2005 the percentage for the transient-vacation-rental market was 52 percent, far exceeding units built for local families to rent or to own. Many of these new units were built in the non-VDA zone.

So if those kinds of uses aren’t going to be allowed anymore, just how do county officials intend to feed the construction industry?

One thing is clear: if Mufi Hannemann is elected, he’ll be pushing hard for development — as well as trying to entice private investors to bring back the Superferry, which shows he’s not the sharpest tool in the box. As Civil Beat reports today — you can buy a one-day pass to the site, which will give you a lot more value than spending the equivalent at TGI or Starvertiser — Mufi is getting a lot of his funding from donors in construction, banking, architecture and the like, while Neil Abercrombie’s campaign money is coming from small businesses, professors, attorneys and national PACS.

Andy Parx had a helpful wrap up on the Kauai campaign filing reports, which shows newcomer Nadine Nakamura as a top fundraiser. Meanwhile, Bernard Carvalho has amassed a whopping quarter-million even though he’s running essentially uncontested. Just goes to show that some folks love to throw good money after bad.

While we’re on the topic of human folly, here’s a link to a report from BBC about a study that shows genetically modified plants are indeed becoming established in the wild, and some GMO strains are even cross-breeding with one another:

This is thought to be the first time that communities of GM plants have been identified growing in the wild in the US.

Similar findings have been made in Canada, while in Japan, a study in 2008 found substantial amounts of transgenic rape - a close relative of canola - around port areas where GM varieties had been imported.

What surprised the Arkansas team was how ubiquitous the GM varieties were in the wild.

"We found the highest densities of plants near agricultural fields and along major freeways," Professor Sagers told BBC News.
"But we were also finding plants in the middle of nowhere - and there's a lot of nowhere in North Dakota."

So what do you suppose might be growing here on Kauai? Not, of course, that anyone is going to look.... Ain't no way of putting that genie back in the bottle.

Finally, this marks the week, 65 years ago, that the U.S. dropped the big ones on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 220,000 people outright, and Democracy Now! has some compelling pieces that include the stories of survivors and journalist George Weller, who went to great lengths to report the story, only to see his articles killed by military censors.