Musings: Disturbing

It's been a week of disturbing news.....

Jake Delaplane — the former first deputy prosecutor distinguished by his secret tape recordings, bungled prosecution of Councilman Tim Bynum, failure to meet the charter-specified requirements for his job and fierce loyalty to boss-lady Shaylene Iseri-Carvalho — has applied to become a Kauai police officer.

The U.S. government is indiscriminately stockpiling vast quantities of personal data on Americans, including phone records, emails and Internet use, with the National Security Administration National Security Agency "obtaining direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US Internet giants,” the Guardian reports. What's more, it's been going on for years, Democracy Now! reports. And it's not just Verizon customers, everybody is being targeted.

The Kauai Planning Department revealed to the County Council that its entire office virtually shuts down for two months each year to process the 600 or so vacation rental renewals that arrive primarily in July. Yet the Finance Department somehow manages to process more than 70,000 motor vehicle renewals annually without falling apart.

Genes “can pass not only from a [genetically] altered plant to its natural brother, but to less close relatives in the wild,” reports The New York Times. That's why scientists worry about GMO wheat transferring to wild grasses, creating herbicide resistant varieties that will require more potent chemicals to control.  Problem is, it's tough to keep the altered stuff contained, which should be of interest to those of us living in the GMO experimental zones. Monsanto's experimental GMO wheat, which was tested in Hawaii, was mysteriously found growing on an Oregon farm recently. David E. Ervin, an environmental management professor at Portland State University in Oregon, urges caution: 

"All bets are off when you start introducing new kinds of crops. That we haven’t had any serious events to this point doesn’t mean we won’t have significant risk of them occurring in the future.”

Trash isn't just collecting in the great garbage patches floating on the surface of the sea, but also on the deep sea floor, where [i]t's completely changing the natural environment, in a way that we don't know what it's going to do," said Susan von Thun, a study co-author and senior research technician at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Monterey, Calif., in a report on LiveScience.com.

And the planning department gave us visual affirmation of the proliferation of vacation rentals on the rural, isolated North Shore. Approved TVRs are depicted in red — the purple is the visitor destination area in Princeville, where resort uses are supposed to go. Click on the map to enlarge:

Btw, thanks, Planning Director Mike Dahilig, for acknowledging that you are aware of the significant community and environmental impacts imposed by these TVRs.