Musings: Political Potpourri

Vog does have its benefits, as I observed while driving west yesterday evening and beheld the sun — its fiery brilliance muted into a perfect rose-colored disk that could be viewed without blinking by the naked eye — slowly sinking into the sea.

And somewhere out over that same sea are an untold number of kolea. Adorned for weeks now in their tuxedo-like breeding finery, it seems they’ve now departed for their nesting grounds in Alaska. I noticed a number of them congregating on the neatly mowed lawns of an “agricultural” subdivision on Sunday, and by Monday they were gone. Although they’re generally pretty solitary and territorial birds, each sticking to its own little patch of grass, they apparently join forces for the long flight to their summer home.

Like so many other Hawaiian words, a quick Google search revealed their name has been co-opted by numerous resorts, vacation rentals and other properties that have absolutely no relationship to the birds. Perhaps, as the old saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Unless, of course, you’re GMO giant Monsanto, which is suing Dupont for allegedly infringing on its Roundup Ready patent. The same Bloomberg.com article reports that Monsanto spent $980 million on research and development last year alone, and Dupont — the number two guy in the industry — is expecting to sell $500 million worth of herbicide-resistant corn and soybean seeds this year. Now are you starting to get an idea of just how big and valuable this industry is?

Larry Geller over on Disappeared News has a good idea: chase out the GMO industry and plant a real cash crop. Seems California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said it’s time to have a public debate on legalizing and taxing marijuana, which could provide an important new tax revenue for that state. So why not us? Larry’s post includes a very short PSA by Juan Cole, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a former cop who speaks of “the horrors we have created in this war. The war on drugs is, has been and forever will be a dismal and abject failure.”

Got an email from Jeffrey Mikulina, formerly with the Hawaii Sierra Club and now with the Blue Planet Foundation, who was responding to yesterday’s post about Gov. Lingle criticizing Rep. Mina Morita for killing a proposal to ban new fossil-fueled electrical generating plants.

It seems he agrees with the guv’s position on the ban and still doesn’t “fully understand” why Mina took the stand she did. He directed me to the Booz Allen Hamilton report that indicates Hawaii could achieve a 70 percent clean energy goal with no new fossil-fuel plants and no imported biofuels. Mina reportedly had expressed a concern that a fossil fuel power plant ban could force the state to burn more biodiesel fuel, which she said is more expensive and has larger carbon footprint.

It seemed from Mina’s brief comments in the article that reported the governor’s annoyance that she was also objecting to the call for a ban right now. And after looking at the Booz Allen Hamilton report, it does appear that the scenarios for reaching that 70 goal — a cable to Oahu from the outer islands, more wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, hydro and electric vehicles and even aggressive efficiency measures — are so far off at this point as to fall into the realm of largely speculative.

Also got an email directing me to a cool site with shoreline study erosion maps. Kinda makes you think twice about buying that beachfront lot.

And another email about a meeting in Kilauea tonight to discuss a ditch system that was apparently created without a permit to divert water from Kalua`a Stream, which feeds Moloa`a Stream, into Kaloko reservoir. The loss of water has apparently hit Moloaa hard, as many folks there depend on wells. So what it’s looking like is a showdown between Moloaa residents, who want that water back, and about 20 users — some of them organic farmers — on the Kilauea Irrigation System, as well as the Mary Lucas Trust lands. There’s more in this report.

This scenario is yet another reminder that water is THE key issue. Without it, all our dreams of a sustainable Kauai, and even our reality of a non-sustainable one, will come to naught.

On that note, I wanted to provide an update on the efforts last Friday to have the default judgments against Andrew Cabebe and Kaiulani Huff set aside. They were both sued by Joe Brescia, who claimed their efforts to protect the iwi kupuna have cost him money — to the tune of $380,000. Judge Kathleen Watanabe wouldn’t allow them to rejoin the larger civil suit that is still ongoing against Jeff Chandler, Puanani Rogers and others. The best their attorneys could get was a stay on the judgment pending outcome of that trial, which will challenge some of the expenses Brescia claims he incurred as being part of the normal cost of building a house.

The judgment against Hanalei Fegerstrom was set aside because he wasn’t specifically named in the papers that were served against him. And a judgment against Nani Rogers was previously set aside because the process server claimed he’d served her on a day when she could prove she was in Japan.

It seems Brescia’s actions fall squarely in the category of a SLAPP suit. As Kaiulani noted: “He wants to ruin us and squash us like bugs.”

Musings: Mud Slinging and Sound Bites

It was just getting light enough to navigate the rocks and ruts on the mountain trail when Koko and I went walking this morning. The thick haze had diminished a bit, allowing the mountains to emerge for a breath of fresh air, and Venus was shining in the east.

As I walked and Koko raced, scampered, sniffed, marked, chewed and did all the other things that bring her delight, the sun announced its presence by first gilding the clouds — and a heart shaped puka within them — in hot pink. Next came long, broad beams of blue light that shot upwards and pierced the heavens, then a smear of brilliant yellow and orange that cast Makaleha’s summit in purple hues.

By that time I was high enough to see the rosy path the cloud-encased sun blazed on the silvery sea, and it was silent, save for singing birds, the rush of a stream way down in the valley and Koko’s panting as she whooshed past me, immersed in the sheer joy of running.

When we returned, two men who work at the end of the road were standing by the gate and we exchanged greetings and smiles.

“Ahh, the grabber,” exclaimed one, in reference to Koko’s role in a pig dog pack. And he didn’t seem to mind at all when she left muddy paw prints on his jeans.

Upon being confronted in this legislative session with the irrefutable evidence that she is a lame duck who recklessly squandered any political capital she may have had on the Superferry, Gov. Lingle has come out swinging — and slinging mud at Kauai’s own Rep. Mina Morita. As AP reports:

Lingle also identified Rep. Hermina Morita, D-Hanalei-Kapaa, as the lawmaker who killed a proposal to ban new fossil-fueled electrical generating plants. Morita did so at the behest of Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, the governor claimed.

"Everyone thought it was the right way to go," Lingle said. "Because one person in the Legislature (and) one special interest was able to stop this ban."

Those of us who know Mina recognize the guv’s words as pure trash talk. Mina is the least likely of all politicians to cater to special interests, especially KIUC. I can’t help but wonder if the guv’s attack has anything to do with Mina’s strong ethical stance against Lingle etc.’s smarmy dealings in the Superferry.

Mina sees right through Linda, and she’s not into playing her games:

And Morita said Lingle's ire was misplaced because a ban on new fossil fuel plants could force the state to burn more biodiesel fuel, which she said is more expensive and has larger carbon footprint.

"They were proposing an entire ban now," Morita said. "It's not something you need this year, unless you want a sound bite. And I don't operate by sound bites."

Now why should Lingle be crying this year that the Lege didn't do her bidding when last year it bent over backwards in a special session to give her and her HSF cronies exactly what they wanted? And since when has the guv been a greenie, anyway?

In fact, Lingle’s true Republican colors can be seen with her stated intention to veto a tax hike for those earning more than $150,000 per year. When you figure the state’s per capita income is just $28,287, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask those earning more than five times that amount to pay a little extra.

Unless, of course, you’re just looking to bank a few sound bites for a future GOP race.

Now that the swine flu has maybe-but-not-officially hit Hawaii, the Advertiser is racing to do what the mass media do best: create mass hysteria. In today’s on-line edition it has no less than five stories and a “what you need to know” special report replete with an alarmingly-colored world map.

Meanwhile, the state is stockpiling what is erroneously called “anti-flu medicine.” In fact, Tamiflu and the other anti-virals don’t actually cure the flu, they simply ease its symptoms. But hey, things are lookin’ good for the drug companies. You can’t buy this kind of advertising.

Not often mentioned in the swine flu media feeding frenzy is the fact that some 13,000 people in the U.S. have died so far this year from seasonal flu, compared to just one of swine flu. But because regular flu hasn’t been hyped, you weren’t worried about it, now were you?

Remember the last time we were threatened with a swine flu epidemic, and the government was hyping a “shot of protection”?

Maybe all this flu talk will encourage people to exercise some common sense and courtesy by staying home when they’re sick and washing their hands so they don’t spread their germs of any kind to others. Or, maybe not. That kind of stuff just doesn't make for a very sexy sound bite.

Musings: Perilous Times

It was an eerily diminished world that Koko and I went walking in this cool morning. The haze — or vog, if you will — was thick, obliterating Waialeale and Haupu and reducing Makaleha to a hulking outline. Great clumps of mist clung to the pastures and drifted up and out onto the road, and the sun rose wan and faintly orange, as if it couldn’t quite muster the energy to make its presence fully known.

This is very un-Kauai-like, remarked my neighbor Andy, whom I met along the road. It seems like someplace else, like someplace I’ve seen somewhere on the mainland.

Yes, I said, someplace where there was a big forest fire burning.

But the air smelled of spider lilies and citrus blossoms, not smoke, and there was no sense of panic or impending disaster in the air, the kind of vibe that gets the adrenalin pumping and prompts people to act.

Right now, we’re acting as if all is well and no worries, even as coastal waters rise and parts of Maui, Molokai, Oahu and the Big Island remain in drought conditions. Rainfall on Waialeale is only 86 percent of normal so far this year, with most of the other gages around the island similarly in the below-normal range.

Water has been on my mind ever since Friday, when I ran into scientist Carl Berg, who is involved in various water quality monitoring projects. He mentioned that as a result of decreased rainfall and stream flows, as well as rising sea levels, salt water was coming all the way up to the Hanalei Bridge now. It’s just a matter of time, he said, until salinity will adversely affect taro production in Hanalei Valley.

So maybe they need to be scouting out dryland taro plots, I said. But Carl noted that climate forecasts indicate continuing low rainfall amounts for the Hawaiian Islands, with much of the year’s total expected to occur in several major events. What that means is that water use will increase, as crops that can now get by largely on rainfall will need to be irrigated. Not to mention all the hotel and vacation rental lawns that get watered to keep them looking lush and lovely for the visitors.

Later that afternoon I took advantage of the warm, sunny weather to go to Makaleha, where I was expecting rushing water and deep swimming holes. I was wrong. The water was shockingly low, more like fall than spring. Yet construction is under way on two big storage tanks there that will hold pull even more water from that stream.

Carl said he’s noticed a distinct complacency, if not outright ignorance, among Kauai folks about the water situation. “I go to these meetings about agriculture and sustainability and everyone says, ‘oh Kauai is the wettest spot on Earth,’” Carl had told me. “Well, not any more.”

Meanwhile, he said, other cities around the nation are encouraging their residents to build personal catchment systems to capture rainfall for garden and other uses, but Hawaii is lagging behind.

Similarly, California launched a major initiative to determine how sea level rise will impact its coastline, with the idea that this information will be used to assess new construction and transportation projects and help residents figure out what they must do to deal with the floods, erosion and other effects expected from rising sea levels. As Reuters reported :

Hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars of Golden State infrastructure and property would be at risk if ocean levels rose 55 inches by the end of the century, as computer models suggest, according to the report.

Roads, schools, hospitals, sewage plants and power plants may have to be relocated. More than 330 hazardous waste sites are at risk from floods.

It’s the kind of information that would be useful before sinking more money into a coastal bike path, road projects at Nawiliwili and other expensive local infrastructure, much less waiving coastal setback requirements for lavish homes.

And in Alaska, as CNN reports, flooding blamed on climate change is forcing the coastal Eskimo village of Newtok to move inland — and the same fate is likely to befall others:

The village, home to indigenous Yup'ik Eskimos, is the first of possibly scores of threatened Alaskan communities that could be abandoned.

Warming temperatures are melting coastal ice shelves and frozen sub-soils, which act as natural barriers to protect the village against summer deluges from ocean storm surges.

"We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now," said Stanley Tom, a Yup'ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council.

The article reports that the effects of climate change are likely to affect indigenous people most dramatically.

But in Hawaii, which is deeply vulnerable to both the effects of drought and sea level rise, the subject has been pretty much met with a total denial or one big yawn, save for one bill— introduced by Kauai Rep. Mina Morita and others — to create an economic development task force charged with ensuring Hawaii "is energy and food self-sufficient and sustainable to the maximum extent feasible, and help Hawaii's natural resources and humankind adapt and be resilient to the inevitable challenges brought on by climate change."

It’s not a perfect bill, because the panel is to be staffed with a lot of the administrative duds who currently have their heads in the sand.

But it’s a start, and at least some folks in the Lege recognize that the climate changes are already starting — and that portends perilous times for the Islands.

Musings: Small Miracles

Sometimes when you most need it, life gives you those windows of beauty and joy, like yesterday afternoon, when I was headed home from the North Shore and really wanted to jump in the water, but it was raining all the way. I pulled into the parking lot, anyway, and just then the rain stopped, leaving a rainbow, which arced over me the entire time I was swimming, and when Koko and I had returned to the car, only then did the rain start up again.

And this morning, when Koko and I went walking and I was already preoccupied with unhelpful thoughts and the clouds were dense and gray, holding little promise of a sky show or color, and then I turned and saw a surrealistic patch of sun-washed green and realized it was the slopes of Waialeale, sandwiched in between the silvery pile ups at the mountain’s summit and base.

Small miracles, both, and they completely transformed my attitude, much like the press release in my inbox from Rep. Mele Carroll’s office announcing that a bill requiring two-thirds approval of the Lege to sell any of the so-called “ceded lands" passed in conference committee.

It’s a compromise, but given the difficulty of achieving that kind of majority, at least it will help forestall the continued erosion of the Hawaiian nation’s land base until its claims can be resolved.

Still unresolved is Joe Brescia’s civil suit against a number of defendants, whom he claims cost him serious money when they objected to the house he’s building on a burial ground at Naue. Ka`iulani Huff and Andrew Cabebe will be in court this morning, seeking a reversal of the $380,000 default judgments leveled against each of them when they failed to answer the complaint.

Speaking of courts, I was over at Babylon yesterday morning and heard that Judge Randal Valenciano has imposed a dress code on female attorneys, requiring them to wear jackets and appropriate shoes. His rationale? As he told the attorneys, he was so busy looking at them and thinking of how poorly dressed they were he couldn’t focus on their arguments.

The complexities surrounding the argument for alternative fuels was highlighted in The New York Times, which yesterday ran an article on how on how military contractor Lockheed Martin is pursuing wave power technology.

Lockheed and a few other companies are pursuing ocean thermal energy conversion, which uses the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its chilly depths to generate electricity.

Experts say that the balmy waters off Hawaii and Puerto Rico, as well as near United States military bases on islands like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or Guam in the Pacific, would be good sites for developing this type of energy.

Those “balmy waters” also happen to be near major military installations, and as the article further reports:

The Navy is also interested in the technology and in the next few months plans to award a contract to explore it, according to Whit DeLoach, a spokesman for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. As of last year, he said, the Navy had spent slightly more than $1 million to research the technology for Diego Garcia.

And perhaps you didn’t know that Gov. Lingle already announced a partnership between Lockheed and the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan to build a test plant in the Islands.

While the energy would be “free,” the Hawaii test plant, which the article says is “still far smaller than commercial scale” would cost $150 million to $250 million.

Then there’s the potential environmental impact. I worry about such things when the Navy is involved, because it has such a poor record in these issues and is nearly impossible to rein in.

First, there’s the visual blight of offshore platforms. Then there’s the process itself:

A huge amount of cold water would have to be pumped up from the depths. If that water, which is rich in nutrients, is discharged into a different part of the ocean, it could confuse fish and alter the balance of the ecosystem.

Mr. Varley of Lockheed also said that the warm water must be siphoned in slowly enough so that fish could swim away.

“We’ll have to put up screens, of course, on the intakes of the warm water so we don’t suck in marine mammals,” he said.

It seems like there really is no miracle source of clean, cheap, risk-free energy — except conservation. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, a kilowatt saved is a kilowatt earned.

Meanwhile, it looks like Hawaii has earned some unexpected benefits from Mexico’s swine flu misfortune, with tourism officials saying the islands have picked up half the rebookings from folks rethinking a vacation south of the border.

The news comes as the Lege is talking about throwing another $10 million at the Hawaii Tourism Authority to try and attract visitors who can’t afford to take a vacation, anyway.

And that gave me an idea. A friend who lives in Hanalei said he is repeatedly approached by tourists seeking marijuana. So why don’t we give it to them? We give them shark feeding tours and zip lining and mai tais at the hotel pool and beach front massages and helicopter tours and everything their little hearts’ desire — expect Maui Wowie, Kauai Electric and Kona Gold.

Just think how much money the state could generate if it dropped its Puritanical attitude and made akamai paka readily available to folks who would fly great distances for the chance to partake. If Constitutionally mandated programs like OHA and Hawaiian Homes are supposed to be financially independent, why not HTA?

I know it’s a long shot, because it makes too much sense. But hey, miracles can happen.

Latest Snag in GMO Taro

Here's a link to the article I wrote on the latest snag in the GMO taro debate — one that has a few people chortling.

Musings: Sleepwalking

Arriving home late last night after a stimulating conversation about the role/purpose/origin of evil/darkness/fear — one of my favorite, but so rarely discussed, topics — I was too wired to sleep, so Koko and I followed the orange crescent moon as it sunk toward to its resting place in the mountains.

And just as it slipped into a gap between Wailaleale and Makaleha, the star-packed sky let one of its inhabitants fall. We returned home then, cold and more-wide awake than ever. Well, not Koko. She snuggled up against me for warmth and promptly fell into the deep luxurious sleep that dominates a dog’s life.

The county planning commission must have been fast asleep yesterday. Otherwise, how could they possibly have thought it was in anyone’s interest but the developer’s to give him a three-year extension on the Coco Palms permits? Not only did their action reward bad behavior and defy logic — what’s the likelihood a developer is gonna spend money on fix-up stuff in bad times when he didn’t do it in good? — but now he has something of value to sell, rather than just a ramshackle collection of buildings growing a seriously creepy colony of mold.

Also seriously creepy is the news that G&R is leasing Dow Agro-Sciences some 3,400 acres of land to grow seed crops of corn, soybean and sunflowers. Now let’s put this in context, something that neither The Garden Island nor The Advertiser nor the Star-Bulletin did in its coverage, which apparently derived from a telephone press conference with Dow.

Right now, there’s only about 4,000 acres of seed crops being grown in the entire state.

So that means Kauai will rocket to the forefront of this industry and be firmly ensconced in the enviable position as GMO capital of the state. Wow, lucky us.

In making the announcement, G&R’s Alan Kennett uses all the familiar ploys to gain sympathy for its decision. The huge losses it’s facing. Costly cesspool construction for its camp houses — half occupied by retirees. Jobs (but just don’t mention Kauai folks will get all the low-paying, toxic ones, while the good-paying gigs will be filled by people drawn from out of state.) And, of course, the clinchers:

We’re going to be keeping the Westside of Kaua‘i green.”

“The alternative is to grow concrete and put hotels up.”

Heck, you could also spray paint the landscape green, but would that necessarily be desirable? As for the hotels, yeah, right. Don’t you think if that was a viable option G&R would’ve jumped on it a long time ago?

All three papers dutifully repeated some version of Dow’s platitudes:

We are committed to the Kauai community and will continue the good land stewardship that Gay & Robinson has demonstrated over the past decades," said Adolph Helm, Mycogen Seeds' project leader on Molokai.

Only one, the Bulletin, bothered to get another point of view:

Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff, who opposes genetically modified crops, said the trend is alarming.

"We continue to have a need for locally grown, sustainable crops to feed our population," said Achitoff. "Instead of doing that, we're filling the acreage with crops that don't feed anybody in Hawaii."

Hello!

But hey, take heart. They won’t be doing any biopharm crops. And you know that’s true, because they said so. And their say-so is the only thing we have to go on in these matters, seeing as how the state has been so lulled into a somnambulant condition by the seed industry dollar dollar signs it won’t lift a finger to regulate or oversee this industry.

Meanwhile, G&R’s decision to lease to Dow pretty much spells an end to another one of its ill-advised ventures: Pacific West Energy’s ethanol project. You know, the other plan to keep Kauai’s Westside green, whose developers applied for a permit to burn coal in the plant — just until the sugar part of the process came on line, of course.

I knew that project, which was slated to be on line last year, was a boondoggle when I first reported on it three years ago. Why? Because Pacific West is not an energy company, it’s a group of investors — with developer Bill Maloney and his family foremost among them — looking to take advantage of state and federal tax credits.

Henry Curtis, director of Life of the Land, was also wise to Maloney from the start, sending out a press release in 2006 under the email heading “Hawai’i Ethanol: Upsetting Facts" – that proclaimed: "Ethanol Production is a Scam.” He had estimated it would take 4.18 pounds of fuel to generate 1 gallon of ethanol. As I reported:

‘The idea of using fossil fuels to create renewable energy and then calling that green is kind of an oxymoron,” [Curtis said.]

Maloney, contacted on his cellular phone in Washington state, says he was a bit taken aback by Curtis’ suse of the word "scam." Although he acknowledges that LOL based its computations on data contained in Maui Ethanol’s [the company's prior name] permit application, Maloney says the overall picture "is more complicated" than LOL’s figures suggest.

"We put in an application for the boiler to be fired by coal because that’s the worst case scenario,"’ Maloney explains. "It’s really a coal-biomass plant. In the long run, we’ll be using sugar cane to produce ethanol, and this is certainly what we want to work toward."

Instead, now that the price of oil has plunged and the ethanol market has collapsed, so have all G&R’s and Maloney’s dreams of producing 12 million gallons of ethanol and enough steam and electricity to run itself and G&R’s sugar mill, while still returning 140 kilowatts of electricity to Kaua’i’s grid and making piles of money along the way.

Now G&R is dragging the entire island into its latest money-making dream-turned-environmental nightmare: GMO crops all over the westside.

Wake up!

Musings: GMOs, Swine Flu and Torture

It’s been my experience that the hour just before dawn is not the darkest, but the coldest, and the thermometer in my house read just 60 degrees when Koko and I slipped out for our walk this morning. Last night’s golden sliver of a moon had long since set, but Venus and Jupiter were still holding forth in a star-choked canopy that was starting to smolder smoky coral in the east.

We were just returning as the sun began to rise, tinting the streaky clouds pink and adorning the clear summit of Waialeale with rose-colored shafts of light. There was nothing to be said but wow, and mahalo ke Akua, with the birds adding their own exuberant refrain.

I had to get cracking on a story due today — and now, happily, filed — about growing genetically modified crops in wildlife refuges. It’s an issue that has implications for our own local debate, as about 40 percent of the state’s taro crop is grown in the Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge, according to the feds. I’ll post a link to the story when it’s published on Wednesday.

It’s always interesting to see the “official” responses that my GMO stories get. The pro side loves to accuse the anti side of distorting facts — indeed, that’s the most common criticism leveled at them, aside from engaging in fear-based rhetoric.

So I was amused to read the response to my recent story on GM crops in Hawaii from Alicia Maluafiti, director of the biotech industry’s Hawaii Crop Improvement Assn., in which she — you guessed it — distorted facts and engaged in fear-based rhetoric.

And an unidentified official/scientist from CTAHR, whose name and position were deleted from the email that was forwarded to me, criticized me for trotting out “the same old tired concerns.” So what, you gotta keep coming up with new concerns when the old ones still haven’t been addressed?

Science may (or may not) be objective, but that doesn’t mean scientists always are. How else to explain the quote — "All this violin playing about the reefs dying is just eco-terrorism.” — by Ricky Grigg in yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser article on the dismal state of Hawaii’s reefs? Grigg also claimed that most of the damage was from natural causes, such as storms and waves, and that the outer reefs are “healthy as a horse.” Hmm. Perhaps he was referring to the four-legged skeleton I saw in a Kapahi pasture the other day.

I suppose all the other scientists could be wrong, and Grigg alone is right. Just as it’s probably only a coincidence that he so often works with developers in preparing EIS documents that assert coastal projects will have no impact on nearshore waters.

Of course, the reporter dutifully reported Grigg’s self-serving nonsense, because that’s supposed to prove he’s an objective journalist.

Talked to farmer Jerry, and he noted that Kauai Producers, which I wrote about in Saturday’s post, was involved with the farmer’s cooperative at Wailua Houselots, the first ag park created by the state. Jerry was interested to see how the company’s shift into a general wholesaler paralleled the Houselots’ shift out of agriculture and into residential development. It’s all part of a trend that began in the 1930s.

Perhaps it will take a swine flu pandemic to jolt Kauai into getting serious about solving its farming predicament. If the Mexican borders are closed, who is going to harvest all of the U.S. produce, not to mention what Mexico grows itself? Hey, maybe the anti-immigration guys could be tapped to fill the void. After a few hours of stoop labor, I imagine they’d soften their views.

They're akin to the armchair warriors who are so eager to send someone else’s kids off to die, and those who liken the torture Americans dished out to college fraternity hazing, or remain unconvinced that water boarding, sleep deprivation, prolonged solitary confinement and beatings are torture at all. Think they might change their tunes if they were on the receiving end?

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that the CIA never got around to assessing whether its harsh interrogation methods even worked, despite calls to do so as early as 2003.

The Defense Department, Justice Department and CIA "all insisted on sticking with their original policies and were not open to revisiting them, even as the damage of these policies became apparent," said John B. Bellinger III, who was legal advisor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, referring to burgeoning international outrage.

And The New Yorker had a fascinating article on America’s domestic torture: the prolonged solitary confinement of tens of thousands inmates in U.S. prisons. Not only does such treatment cause severe psychological damage in many inmates, it makes it more difficult for them to function once they get released. As the author notes:

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction.

Sounds like a great approach — if your goal is not rehabilitation, but ensuring a steady supply of meat for the ravenous prison complex.

Musings: Good, Bad and No Planning

The still blackness of a starry, new moon night had given way to an expanse of blue flushed with pink when Koko and I went walking this morning. Aside from bird song, and the inevitable crowing, it was so quiet I could hear the wind sighing in the very tops of the ironwood trees, and so chilly I made my sweatshirt sleeves long to double as mittens.

The dawn was awash in a shimmer of gold and pink, and a wedge of fleecy clouds had just parked itself on the summit of Waialeale, when we ran into my neighbor Andy, walking his dog Momi. We talked about family and shared some good laughs; truly, there’s no better start to the day than a lovely sunrise and laughter. I told him that land use attorney and author George Cooper had sent me an email, expressing wonderment that our mutual friend, Jimmy Nishida, is now the planning commission chair:

The reason I came to Kauai was he was in a lab I was leader of for a UH environmental course. We became friends from that lab. For his lab work I helped him research the environmental impact of Princeville, as I recall, then we came to Kauai and spoke about PV to classes at KCC and high schools. That eventually led to all the organizing work we did on Kauai and bodysurfing Brennecke's when it was still good there. In those years the Planning Cmn of course was a big enemy. And now Jimmy's running that show! Although: what does the PC have to do now since I guess no one's developing anything?

Well, as Andy noted, these down times are when all the developers come in with their projects because everybody’s crying, we need jobs, and they get their approvals and time it so their projects start at the beginning of the upswing, so they do well, and then everybody’s crying, how come we have all this development? That’s how planning’s done on Kauai. It’s no planning.

I revised my morning plans to take advantage of the good clothesline weather and followed the path of the sun shining on the sea down to the Laundromat, where I ran into my friend Jim, who is Native Hawaiian. He’d been reading a book by John Schofield, who in 1873 was sent on a secret mission to explore the strategic potential of a U.S. presence in the Hawaiian Islands. That led him to recommend America establish a naval port at Pearl Harbor, and he was later memorialized by having his name attached to Schofield Barracks.

Anyway, as Jim recounted, Schofield wrote that if America could just get in and “Christianize and civilize the natives,” it could make a nice little place for itself in the Islands. So that’s what they did, my friend said, “but we’re still not civilized enough for the haoles. I made one little shelter when I was fishing at Wailua and they called the police, saying I was one eyesore in their little community. Do they have any idea what’s it like to be called an eyesore when you’re just fishing the way we always used to?”

Fishing has been much on my mind lately — to the point of sapping most of my creativity and time from blogging — since I’m writing a very long piece on Hawaii’s fisheries. So Chris Pala’s piece in the current Honolulu Weekly caught my eye. It details the sorry state of the world’s fisheries, according to studies done by Daniel Pauly, who Pala describes as “perhaps the world’s most influential fisheries scientist.”

It seems not only are we catching more fish, but smaller ones, and as stocks are depleted, we move on to different species. And while we’re becoming more aware of it, this unceasing exploitation has been going on for a very long time. He reports:

Unfortunately, virtually all of the world’s fishing activity has been restricted by the effectiveness of the gear, not because people understood that if you take too much fish today, you won’t have any tomorrow. There are some exceptions, such as some Pacific islands like Hawai‘i and Palau prior to European contact, but not many.

“We have basically never fished sustainably and there’s no evidence the industry is about to start,” Pauly explains. “The world’s fishing fleet is twice the size it needs to be to catch the current amount of fish and a lot of countries are still spending their taxpayers’ money to increase their fleets.”

Pauly sees economics, rather than a change in consciousness, as ultimately turning the tide:

Inevitably, the price of fuel will rise for good. Boats that must tow big nets behind them for long distances, like trawlers and shrimpers, consume huge amounts of fuel and operated deep in the red last year because of the spike in fuel prices. When the prices go back up, even massive subsidies will not save trawlers that are exploiting depleted fish stocks.

“The fishing industry lobby is very powerful, but at some point the taxpayers are going to say ‘enough,’” says Pauly. “What will remain are small coastal fishers employing traps, lines and set nets, which are much more energy-efficient.”

Hmmmm. Yet another reminder that small, localized economic activities make a lot of sense. But it seems we're still stuck in the global trade mode, whether it's food or tourism, rather than planning for community-based economic development.

That message came around again when I headed over to an interview this morning with Pearl Nonaka, whose family owns Kauai Producers Ltd. The business started out as a farmer’s cooperative, and she recalled how in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kauai farmers were growing so much produce, they were shipping it over to Oahu.

Now the situation is reversed, and they get no local produce. Instead, it comes from Oahu and elsewhere. And why? “The kids didn’t want to farm because the work was too hard,” she said. “So they went off and got other jobs and the farmers divided up their land and sold it and probably made more money.”

She sees some farmers still trying to make it, struggling to grow corn in the old cane fields without any water, faced with competition from backyard growers who sell at the sunshine markets, unhindered by insurance and other costs borne by commercial farmers.

“I don’t think people realize how difficult it is for them,” she said.

If times get tighter, and fuel costs get higher, will farming also go the small, localized way that Pauly foresees for fishing? It seems likely. But even having that option depends on good planning so we have some land and water left for farming. And people will need to be either willing to get their own hands dirty — or show more respect for the labors of the farmers and fishers.

Musings: Tis Sad

“Earth honored,” read a headline in The Garden Island today.

Yes, yesterday was Earth Day, the annual reminder of just how out of whack modern society has gotten.

Tis very sad to think that we actually need to designate a day to remind us to honor the earth, source of all that is and all that allows us to be — and worse, that so many even then fail to give our marvelous planet with all its remarkable ecosystems a thought, much less do anything to show their appreciation.

Considering how much the earth does for us, and the fact that Earth Day doesn’t cost us any money because no one is paid to take it off, doncha think we could celebrate it a little more often than just one measly day each year?

Tis also sad that another little piece of Kauai’s charm has been destroyed. The weekly “garbage dump kanikapila” at the Hanalei transfer station has been eliminated by the county, in what is seen as direct retribution for Uncle Bernard’s candid comments in last week’s Kauai People.

No more kupuna showing up to strum ukulele and share a little kaukau, some of it cooked on a grill donated by actor Beau Bridges, who has a home on the North Shore. No more laughter, no more community building, no more nuttin’.

The county could have come out smelling like a rose on this one by honoring Uncle Bernard for his obvious dedication and hard work. Instead, unable to handle any criticism, even when it’s warranted, it clamped down. And as the news spread through the coconut wireless, it was invariably followed by the refrain, “fucking county.”

As one friend noted: “Yup, ya gotta pound down all those fucking nails.”

Meanwhile, even though a few who left comments on yesterday’s post tried to skirt the issue of holding Bush officials accountable for torture by focusing on whether Mumia Abu-Jamal is, indeed, a political prisoner, evidence continues to mount that top Administration officials approved those evil acts. As Democracy Now! reports today:

More details have been revealed on high-level Bush administration involvement in authorizing torture. According to a timeline in the newly declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top White House officials approved torture methods, including waterboarding, as early as 2002. Attorney General Eric Holder has described waterboarding as illegal, while President Obama now says he won’t rule out prosecuting top Bush officials who approved illegal acts. Rice’s backing came in July 2002, when she gave a green light for the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. One year later, the list of officials voicing approval grew to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger.

Let’s just hope that Obama and Congress have the guts to move ahead on this, instead of just pretending the past is the past and leave it at that.

Tis sad to think of Cheney and his ilk getting off scot-free — and setting a precedent for this to happen again.

Musings: What If?

The sky was multiple shades of gray when Koko and I went walking this morning, and though the sunrise created a hot pink flash on the horizon, the cloud bank quickly snuffed it out in an ongoing intolerance of sunshine.

Koko was snacking on grass at the roadside salad bar when farmer Jerry stopped by to chat. It seems the East Kauai Water Users Cooperative is getting requests for some hydro projects, which currently aren’t allowed under its agreement with the state. But the board is going to review its policies and see if hydro can be accommodated in its system.

I noticed in the most recent issue of KIUC’s magazine that the Wailua Falls hydro project is listed under future power-generating projects, although permitting and environmental issues were cited as a potential obstacle — just as they have been for the past 20 years.

Koko’s whining signaled the approach of my neighbor Andy, so Jerry headed off to work and Andy and I continued on along the road together. We got to talking about Coco Palms, and Andy said he had submitted a letter to the planning commission opposing the developer’s request for a two-year extension of his permits.

The county is looking at giving the Maryland-based developer a six-month extension, during which time he’s supposed to clean up some of the mess that he hasn’t cleaned up thus far, even though his permit conditions required it. And if he does, he’ll get the rest of the extension he’s seeking.

So how many chances does a guy get? I asked.

Really, answered Andy. What kind of parents are we?

Sigh. What if the planning commission actually said no once in a while?

Meanwhile, the developer is proposing such extensive changes — selling the Seashell restaurant, turning the coconut grove over to the state, building a hotel instead of time shares, keeping buildings that were proposed for demolition — that Andy and others are arguing the project no longer resembles the one that was originally approved, and so should go through the process again.

He suspects the developer has run out of money and is just trying to get the permit extension so he can sell the project. Because without permits, that wreck ain’t worth much.

I heard the money also ran out for one of two developers who last year got approval to build timeshare resorts near Coconut Marketplace. The developer of the project that was going to be on the highway, where all the coconut trees are, was served with a non-judicial foreclosure by its bank. So it looks like we’ll be saved from that bit of very bad planning.

Hey, what if the foreclosing bank decided to fire sale it to the trust for public land or something, seeing as how the resort business is kinda flat these days?

The other developer, however, is still alive and kicking and fighting a demand to do an Environmental Assessment for his project. That case goes to trial in a couple weeks.

Speaking of court, a friend recently stopped by the Lihue courthouse to file a paper. It was her first visit to Babylon, and she called me from its cavernous depths, her voice reflecting both shock and awe.

“How many people do they plan to incarcerate?” she asked. “Is this a vision here? What if they put all this money into community-building instead of locking people up?”

What if? And what if they started locking up the really bad guys, the ones who do stuff like plan torture and mass murder for personal and political gain, rather than just the small time ice-addicted burglars and check forgers?

It seems a case is building for doing just that. A new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee turns up more lies by top Bush officials, who claimed they only tortured terrorists when they wouldn’t talk. But they actually began developing the torture program in December 2001 — well before any al- Qaeda suspects were caught and also prior to receiving legal approval by the Justice Department.

As Democracy Now! reports:

In a statement, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Carl Levin said the new evidence provides a direct line from top Bush officials to abuses at prisons such as Abu Ghraib. Levin said, “Senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques…[They] bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses.” Levin went on to call on Attorney General Eric Holder to establish a high-level commission to investigate high-level Bush officials.

After a bit of disheartening flip-flopping, Obama is now sounding like he might just look favorably upon such a review:

“For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted. With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws, and—and I don’t want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.”

Yes, it does get complicated when the highest officials of the previous administration are held accountable for illegal and despicable actions. But it’s even more complicated to try and explain why they should be allowed to literally get away with murder while political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal sit on death row.

I mean, what if there really was justice for all?

Musings: Saving the Day

After a bordering-on-balmy weekend, the brrrr factor was back in effect when Koko and I went walking this morning on ground drenched in heavy dew. Thick mist crept out from the pastures and onto the road, and wide blue shafts preceded the sunrise, which my neighbor Andy — otherwise preoccupied with walking three large dogs — wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t brought it to his attention.

We were talking about UFOs, and Andy said he believed in them because there are lots of objects flying around that the average person can’t identify. He then recounted how he was sure he’d spotted one very early the other morning when he noticed an extremely bright light on the horizon that seemed to be coming toward him. But it was moving ever so slowly, and then a cloud obscured it, and he later realized it was probably Venus rising.

My acceptance of the phenomenon is based more on the belief that it’s ludicrous to imagine we’re the only life in the universe, as well as by what my father told me. It was his job, when he was serving in the Air Force in Alaska back in the late 1950s, to investigate all reports of UFOs, which had him traveling to remote villages and also talking to USAF and commercial pilots.

While he was able to determine that weather balloons and military flights accounted for some of the civilian reports, the stories from pilots left him baffled. They told of strange disc-shaped craft that came in and tucked under their plane’s wings, then zoomed off at unimaginable speeds or performed maneuvers that even military aircraft couldn’t. The pilots were sure they’d encountered alien craft, and that’s how it went down in the reports when my father was unable to find an alternative official explanation.

It’s definitely not official, but a friend offered the best explanation yet for the financial crisis. “There’s no more powerful or addictive drug in the U.S. than $100 bills,” he said.

As a corporate lawyer recently opined in the Wall Street Journal, while noting that “the system is warped” and attorneys really should have seen the crash coming:

The emergency-room atmosphere that permeated the processing of derivatives deals, corporate takeovers, and whatever else has been going on at Goldman, Bear, Citi and Merrill for the past decade, could rival that of an operating room during open-heart surgery. Only, of course, it was a matter of money -- not life or death.

Money made the mad hours worth it. This is why the insanity of working as if the very fate of nations were at stake when it was actually just about whether or not to do a leveraged buyout of, say, a company in Decatur, Ill., went unnoticed by an entire industry.

Anyone in a position to criticize this inhuman work ethic -- meaning, anyone who liked sleeping, or dating, or occasionally walking his own golden retriever -- opted out instead. These are the people who are now attorneys in the public sector, who run nonprofit organizations, or who simply made what money they could and are now painting landscapes in Taos, or skiing full-time in Sun Valley.

I can’t help but wonder about all those people who traded their lives for money, only to see that false world crumble all around them. Do they now — did they ever? — question whether their lives had any meaning, whether they were contributing something to the greater good? Do they ever reflect on how their greed brought down the world’s financial system and caused untold suffering in the poorest nations?

Now Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is saying that Americans need to sharpen their financial know-how, which is all well and good. But it sounded like he was talking to just the average folks, when it’s really the big players who need to check into King Midas rehab.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, it seems that many still haven’t yet gotten the message that the greed fostered by unrestrained capitalism is not good for humans and other living creatures. A recent article in The Week noted that the work of free market crusader Ayn Rand is more popular than ever, with her epic “Atlas Shrugged” selling at its fastest rate since its 1957 publication. The article reports:

A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress described Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book in the U.S., after the Bible.

Yikes.

Apparently she’s not been discredited, even though her most devoted modern disciple, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, admitted last October that he was "partially" wrong to resist regulation of some securities and believe that lending institutions would protect shareholder’s equity.

People are still buying into her idea that the industrialists and capitalists will save the world, even as they systematically destroy it. But frankly, when the shit really comes down, it isn’t the CEOs and investment bankers and guys who in suits who will save the day.

It’s people with common sense, ingenuity and creativity, people who understand and can work with the land, people who are hardy and not afraid to get their hands dirty, people who can cooperate with others. It’s people like those in the video Coconut Revolution, which I recommended before and am putting out there again as a heartening alternative to the “Road Warrior” scenario of a post-apocalyptic world, one that emphasizes community, not capital.

Musing: That Elusive Truth

Venus was rising and Jupiter was snuggling up to a moon on the waning side of half when Koko and I went walking this morning. All the stars were gone, save for Antares in the west, and as the sun — blood red and bold — peeked up over the horizon, it and the planets were scrubbed from the sky, leaving the moon white and all alone.

Mist huddled densely over the pastures, drifting up to cling to the lower extremities of the Giant, and the craggy face and flat summit of Waialeale, buried in clouds for so many weeks, flushed pink in the dawn. Spider webs, some weighted at the bottom with a dead leaf or tiny stick, hung from utility lines or anchored on fences, their perfection back lit by the sun.

It was all so magnificent that when I ran into my neighbor Andy, and his dog, Momi, it was easy to extend the walk so we could catch up a bit. I haven’t seen Andy or farmer Jerry in a while, and I enjoy their take on things. We think enough alike that our conversations don’t turn into heated standoffs, yet we’re different enough that they always leave me with some new perspective on an issue.

Today it was GMOs. I related how a friend who works with UH-CTAHR had responded to an email I sent asking what type of genetic research was being done on taro with the information requested — no research is currently under way on taro in Hawaii, but one project had been looking at three different GE applications to confer disease resistance to Taro Leaf Blight in Bun Long (Chinese) taro — as well as his concerns:

….because funding ran out, these plantlets are sitting in suspended animation in the laboratory, and being maintained on a shoestring. If funding does not resume, and/or if the taro moratorium bill is passed in the legislature, then these transformed plants will, too, reach the end of the line.

The really sad thing about this is that this kind of research is simply that, research. This is not any sort of evil conspiracy. The vast majority of the anti-GMO/GE groups do not even know what is going on because they choose not to inform and educate themselves of what the facts are, and continue to perpetuate and fuel fear mongering. In my opinion, to stop research is akin to burning the books.

Andy said he doesn’t have any problem with research, either, but as I pointed out, once a lot of time and money has been invested into research, it becomes very difficult to prevent its application, especially if the work has been done by a private company with shareholders to satisfy.

As The Maui News reports today, the Lege has found a sort of middle path in this dispute, with the so-called “taro security bill” passing the Senate this past week.

Sen. Shan Tsutsui, D-Kahakuloa, Wailuku, Waikapu, Kahului, Lower Paia, said the bill was pragmatic since it allows the science to continue moving forward while respecting the cultural perspective.

"Wouldn't it be ironic if one of these genetically modified taro species saved Hawaiian taro someday from being wiped out," Tsutsui said.

Only Republicans Sam Slom and Fred Hemmings dissented, which tells you something, and I’ll let you decide what that is.

The House already approved its version, HB 1663. Now the two bodies have to hash out their differences, but the final bill will be something like this: a five-year prohibition on developing, testing, propagating, releasing, importing, planting or growing any genetically engineered Hawaiian taro varieties. Open-field testing on non-Hawaiian GE varieties also would be banned.

So it looks like the research my friend was concerned about can continue, if it gets funding. And considering that taro research is still in its infancy, all the bill really does is put the fight off to another day, giving both sides a chance to regroup and re-arm.

While the taro research is being done by UH scientists, the same isn’t true for the other GE crops. And as I told Andy, I’d feel a little more comfortable about the technology if it wasn’t being developed by the same folks who brought us Agent Orange and dioxin. It’s kind of hard to believe these guys when they say, “trust us, GMOs are completely safe.”

Meanwhile, Germany joined Austria, Hungary, Greece, France and Luxembourg in banning Monsanto’s GE corn because it is dangerous to the environment. But as Spiegel Online International reports, that claim may be tough to prove in court.

And the Union of Concerned Scientists this week released a report that contends that despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields and “is unlikely to play a significant role in increasing food production in the foreseeable future.”

So much for that oft-repeated industry claim.

With so much conflicting info out there, the question becomes, who to believe? Unless you’re doing the studies yourself, it’s hard to know for sure. But when you consider those with financial interests in the technology are proclaiming its virtues, and those without aren’t, it does raise a few doubts, at least in my mind.

It makes me think of a conversation I had the other day with my sister, who was stunned to discover that something she’d read in a news story was a blatant lie. “I realize that sometimes they might not tell the whole story, or maybe they spin it a certain way, but to present an outright falsehood as the truth, well, I just didn’t think the newspapers did that,” she said.

Ahhh, Grasshopper. It’s a shock, I know, but they don't call it the "corporate media" for nothing.

I think Pink Floyd had it right when they sang: “Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words, and most of them are lies?”

Or as my philosopher-scientist friend from CTAHR observed: “Truth is simply one's perception.”

Hmmm. Is it?

Musings: Big Spenders

The east was emblazoned with hot pink when I awoke this morning and hurried Koko out of the house — not that she ever needs urging — so as not to miss a bit of it. The color slowly drained as we walked down the street, caressed by the lightest sprinkle of rain, and even the sun, when it rose, couldn’t penetrate the gray.

I’ve been noticing that the wild chickens suffer a high infant mortality rate. You’ll see a hen shepherding a flock of eight to 10 tiny chicks, but by the time they’ve tripled in size and can fly a bit, she’s often down to one or two. Which, when you consider the current teeming population, is a very good thing.

Government spending, when done by Democrats, anyway, is not such a good thing, according to blowhards like Sen. Sam Slom, who attended the ”tea party” tax protest staged in Honolulu and elsewhere yesterday:

”Don't forget we are and always will be the patriots who love our country ... who will fight and die. You want to stimulate America? Believe in and practice the free market," said state Sen. Sam Slom, R-8th (Kahala, Hawai'i Kai), wearing a top hat emblazoned with the American flag. "We will fight, we will win, we will return our country."

Return it to what? The Bushites who racked up a giant debt to destroy Iraq while funneling billions to Halliburton and its ilk and simply "losing" billions more over there? The bankers and investment brokers and car makers who came crying to the feds for a huge bailout as soon as their free-market free-for-all turned into a fiasco?

What an idiot.

Yet for all their whining about government spending, how many of them would be willing to seriously cut, I mean pare ruthlessly to the bone, the one thing that really sucks up the tax dollars? Yup, I’m talking about the military.

A report by the National Priorities Project shows how the federal government spent each income tax dollar in 2008: a whopping 37.3 cents went to the military and military-related debt, while environment, energy and science-related spending split just 2.8 cents.

Wow. Just 2.8 cents. Does that spending scheme mesh with your priorities, your world view?

If you want to get really depressed, you can go to this link and watch your money being frittered away in Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t worry, there’s no blood and guts depicted, just the result of your sweat and tears.

Hey, what if we were to get really radical and flip that formula, and start spending large on restoring the environment, developing clean and renewable energy projects and beefing up scientific research and science education? (See, contrary to what some might think, I am not at all anti-science, anti-technology or anti-engineering. I happen to like nerds and a lot of the stuff they dream up.)

What kind of nation do you 'spose we could make if we channeled all the money and creativity and innovation and intelligence that now goes into destroying life into endeavors that would instead support it?

Do you suppose we could try it? Come on. Just for a little while or a few trillion, whichever comes first.

Musings: Start Over

Sometimes there’s a lot to be said about going back to bed and starting over, which is what Koko and I did after first venturing outside when the world was cold, wet and windy, and mostly gray with just a hint of pink around the edges. Ninety minutes later, the sun was out, the wind had lost its bite and the birds were madly singing.

Setting my own hours — pretty much, anyway — is one of the nice things about working for myself. That, and the lack of office mates. A friend who works in a cubicle often sends me emails that perfectly summarize the worst of that environment. Today’s was classic:

There's a guy here, total hypochondriac, and yesterday I'd about had it if I had to hear about his diarrhea one more time. Of course it was 'worse than most people's' since the prednisone he was on masked the bacterial infection compounded by the lipitor and heart meds he's on......

Made me think about an interview I did with a progressive doctor last week, who said he just can’t understand why people who are devoted to meds, eat crap, never exercise and do nothing to improve their own health aren’t charged higher insurance rates, as in the model used for high risk drivers.

I’m always fascinated by the work that other people do, and getting a glimpse into it, without actually having to do it every day, is one of the better parts of being a journalist. I did a piece on Uncle Bernard Mahuiki, the dump master at Hanalei, and it was not only good fun, because he’s such a kick, but an eye-opener into how the county works — or doesn’t.

He said he was given a list of guys — cronies of county bosses — who shouldn’t be asked for their pre-paid tickets to dump commercial waste because they were getting freebies. In that case, he told them, I won't ask for anyone’s tickets. Oh, you can’t do that, he was told. I can and I will, he replied. Either everybody pays or nobody pays.

Folks often think that really big money changes hands in back room deals and friendly favors. But a lot of times, it’s pretty manini, like $10 or $20 bucks a day in waived dumping charges. Still, as Uncle Bernard noted, that does add up over time.

Uncle Bernard said the 10 years he spent working at the Kekaha landfill blew his mind. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff people throw away,” he said, including department and discount stores that dump entire racks of perfectly good clothing rather than give it Goodwill.

Even at the transfer station, the waste is unreal. He said one guy from Princeville brought in his new rider mower to dump because he hadn’t used it in a year and couldn’t get it started. Needless to say, it was snapped up by someone who quickly fixed it.

The county discourages that passing along form of recycling at the transfer stations, and it’s forbidden at the dump. The gleaners that you see in developing nations are absent from our solid waste programs as we continue to spend billions on landfills.

Heck, even little Kauai is looking at spending $385,000 just to study waste reduction or conversion technologies, including waste-to-energy. As JoAnn Yukimura noted at the last Council meeting, that money could be used to find land for a materials recovery facility — a place where the still-good stuff that’s now dumped could be re-used.

It must be frustrating for JoAnn to be relegated to a (largely unheeded) voice in the audience. I notice Mel Rapozo hasn't been over there lately, and he pulled his blog, too. Maybe he's just had it with politics, which is entirely understandable.

I was interested to learn that despite the much ballyhooed effort by the citizenry to fix up Polihale, the state still has not announced a date to reopen the park. It seems that people can do all the work, but the government still runs the show.

Problem is, if the transfer stations and parks are any indication, it does it very badly. That's why, frankly, I have a hard time getting revved up to testify at public meetings or participate in campaigns or otherwise participate in the workings of a dysfunctional system. It mostly amounts to band-aids, window-dressing and wheel-spinning as we try in vain to fix something that's inherently broken.

What we really need to do is scrap it and start over.

And on that note, I just have to share this very short video.

Musings: Same Old New Bosses

Brilliant stars filled large patches of the night sky, offering a celestialscape that’s been decidedly rare in these months of wet weather, but it, too, soon succumbed to the thick clouds that delivered rain up until the crack of dawn, when Koko and I went walking on streets that glistened in the flashing orange lights of the garbage truck.

The wind was chill, making me glad for long pants and a sweatshirt, and it gusted through the trees, spattering us with large drops that mixed with a fresh new shower and sent us heading quickly for home.

Koko is not fond of getting wet, unlike, I’m assuming from its breed name only, the Portuguese water dog that has taken up residence at the White House. I’m sure it was just a bit of media hyperbole that prompted this caption on a Yahoo slide show of the pup last night:

The news all Washington is bracing for will break on Tuesday -- the debut of the new White House dog Bo.

Despite all the talk about getting a shelter dog, the First Family ended up with a purebred from a breeder that is likely, given Americans’ penchant for copycat behavior, to spawn a run on Portuguese water dogs, as happens every time a particular breed gains celebrity. And since they tend to be hyper, with coats that are hard to maintain, it’s likely a good many of them will end up in shelters months or years down the road, where they’ll add to the legions of unwanted dogs that are euthanized.

The dog, just six months old, is now in its third home, having passed through what appears to be a highly contrived scheme to give it the appearance of a “rescue dog.”

Bo reportedly was adopted from Texas breeder Martha Stern by someone who then “gave it up” and from there it went to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s trainer, who kept it for a month before the Senator presented the dog as a gift to the Obama girls. Uh huh. Likely story. Who thinks this stuff up?

It's too bad they didn't adopt a shelter dog, because the actions of the Obamas bear a lot of weight. Just consider the shuddering reaction from the chem ag MidAmerica CropLife Assn. to the organic garden.

But organic gardens aside, Noam Chomsky pretty much summed it up in a Democracy Now! yesterday when he said:

As far as policy is concerned, unless [Obama] is under a lot of pressure from activist sectors, he’s not going to go beyond what he’s presented himself as in actual policy statements or cabinet choices and so on: a centrist Democrat [who’s] going to basically continue Bush’s polices, maybe in a more modulated way,” says Chomsky.

In other words, he’ll close down Guantanamo and the secret CIA black sites — while still allowing the agency to retain the power to detain suspects "on a short-term transitory basis."

You know, just long enough to get them to a black site operated by somebody else.

Meanwhile, it seems there’s another side to the piracy story, one that tells of Western nations poaching in Somali fishing grounds and dumping barrels of nuclear and toxic waste off the coast there. Nevertheless, Obama is promising not a full investigation, but a crack down only on the Somali rogues, with some war mongers even calling for a land invasion.

As my accountant observed yesterday, noting the prescient quality of so much music from the ‘60s: “meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

That holds true for our planning department, too, where Ian Costa, the junk old boss, was chosen to continue on as the junk new boss by a mayor identified, in what can only be described as a Freudian slip by KONG DJ Ron Wiley, as Bryan Carvalho.

It seems the County Council, like the rest of us that aren’t brain dead, is wondering why the department has failed to do so many of the planning projects it’s supposed to do, while remaining largely unaccountable for its actions.

Well, at least some on the Council were wondering. According to The Garden Island Darryl Kaneshiro “tried to rein in the line of questioning,” while Planning Committee Chair Jay Furfaro urged the others “to trust him in his new position, saying he has had conversations with Costa about setting realistic and attainable deadlines for the reports.”

Ummm, shouldn’t “Bryan” Carvalho be having those kinds of conversations with his appointee? (Clarification: As Andy Parx helpfully pointed out, technically, the Planning Commission appoints the director.)

Former Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura, who certainly would have axed Ian if she’d been elected mayor, was sufficiently disturbed to show up at the Council and complain:

“The planning process in the director’s head is extremely worrisome. ... We are treading in very dangerous waters,” Yukimura said. “It’s important to have good plans in place and regulations to back up the plans. If regulations mean a draft ordinance, that’s fine. ... Otherwise it’s a constant ‘I need more money’ and you’re never where you need to be.”

But JoAnn, you don’t understand. When it comes to planning on Kauai, it’s not about needs, it’s about wants, and the planning department, under Ian, is exactly where it wants to be. And that's in bed with big landowners like Grove Farm and the other developers who benefit from having all the long range planning and updates left undone.

In short, we're looking at a continuation of the same old planning policies set by the last two do-nothing administrations — Kusaka and Baptiste — which is what happens when you keep the old bosses instead of finding someone new.

Musings: It's a Pity

A shrinking moon floated in a sphere of iridescence before it was swallowed up in a sea of gray when Koko and I went walking this morning. We soon encountered two mynahs beefing on a neighbor’s front lawn, with a small flock of bystanders raucously egging on the combatants. Koko was ready to rush in and break it up, but I thought it best to let them work it out on their own.

As we walked, entertained by a chorus of bird song, the sun appeared first as golden gilt on a puffy cloud that grew into a band of orange on the eastern horizon. But the light show was quickly extinguished by a rain squall that arrived just as we returned to the house, where I had a good laugh reading the comment left on the last post by a person who actually believes that only humans are sentient beings.

Now why would a person want to limit himself to such a small dead world, when it’s actually teeming with life? I asked Koko, as I prepared to whip up a batch of hot cross buns. Koko did not reply, because she can’t, of course, speak, although I discerned a pitying expression in her eyes.

And pity the poor people who are regularly duped by the mainstream media, which loves nothing more than to drum up fear through the dissemination of propaganda because, as a friend astutely noted, when people are afraid, they are stupid.

For a bit of back story, let’s return to last Sunday, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich started some tough talk about how he would have shot down the North Korean missile.

This was preceded by his assertion a week or so earlier that America was in grave danger from a nuclear attack:

Again: One to three missiles tipped with nuclear weapons and armed to detonate at a high altitude — to achieve the strongest EMP over the greatest area of the United States — would create an EMP “overlay” that triggers a continent-wide collapse of our entire electrical, transportation, and communications infrastructure.

Within weeks after such an attack, tens of millions of Americans would perish. The impact has been likened to a nationwide Hurricane Katrina. Some studies estimate that 90 percent of all Americans might very well die in the year after such an attack as our transportation, food distribution, communications, public safety, law enforcement, and medical infrastructures collapse.

We most likely would never recover from the blow.

This was followed by more tough talk last Tuesday about how the Obama Administration is weakening the missile defense system — aka “Star Wars” — that Ronald Reagan dreamed up and Gingrich helped resurrect during the Clinton presidency.

Now Tuesday just happens to be the same day that the New York Times ran — under the headline “Indictment Says Banned Materials Sold to Iran" — a story on an indictment related to the alleged sale of “sensitive materials” to Iran. The story was picked up by newspapers all across the country, including the Wall Street Journal, which led its story with:

Authorities accused a Chinese defense company and its manager of illegally accessing the U.S. financial system and aiding Iran's nuclear program and pursuit of ballistic missiles.

What these high profile stories fail to report, however, is that according to the actual indictment, the materials in question — including maranging steel, a high nickel content specialty steel that can be made into a centrifuge for uranium enrichment —were not actually delivered to Iran. Indeed, the shipment was never even started.

The fact remains, as it did before this story came out, that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon and doesn’t have the right materials and equipment to make one.

But the media spin on the indictment works to dramatically stoke fears on the Iranian menace, thus prompting folks whose wallets have been closed since the Madoff indictment to start giving money again to Israeli defense and charity projects.

It also serves to build political support for Newt Gingrich, who is pondering a 2012 Presidential run and financial support for the missile defense system, which has been estimated to cost some $200 billion and is one of the major activities at Kauai’s PMRF.

So it wasn’t such a surprise, then, to look at yesterday’s Garden Island and see a front page article on a groundbreaking at PMRF for a $200,000 facility that will serve the strange dual purpose of “eternal memorial” for the fallen war dead and missile test viewing site.

And who should be in attendance at this otherwise mundane event but our own Sen. Dan Inouye and Riki Ellison, chairman and founder of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that seeks, according to its website, “to educate the general public with respect to missile defense issues and the urgent need for it.”

As The Garden Island reports:

“Having these defenses gives the president another option to pre-emptive military action,” Ellison said in an interview following the ceremony, noting strong missile defense efforts will keep soldiers out of harm’s way and also deter rogue nations from pursuing ballistic missiles, helping “secure your neighborhood.”

“Future defense tests ... ensure our country and our people are safe,” Ellison said in his remarks.

Now all this isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an orchestrated PR campaign.

So the government starts spending billions on this program and the executives of the corporations selected for the lucrative contracts make contributions — of their own free will, of course — to both political parties, with the party in power getting the bulk and the one on the outs the rest.

In this way it becomes, if not a perfect way to defend the nation, a perfect way to fund political parties for sizable amounts of money. And this initiative — like the never-ending “war on terror,” with its nebulous and ever-changing perps — is especially perfect because you can keep throwing money into it without ever having prove it works.

Because to truly test it, you’d have to launch a global thermo-nuclear war, which nobody is going to do, right?

Meanwhile, as America moves to spend billions on this scheme and a trillion to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, a projected budget deficit of a measly $303 million has prompted a proposal for massive cutbacks that would close 23 Detroit city schools and lay off 600 teachers. And with a crappy education, what kind of future do poor black kids have — I mean, aside from the military?

Now that's the real pity.

Musings: Persistent Myths

The moon was full last night, not that it had much chance to shine, covered as it was in a thick, persistent of layer of clouds. I woke in the wee hours to a muffled roar, and it took me a few moments to realize that it was the sound of big rain approaching. It continued intermittently, and briefly sprinkled upon Koko and me while we were out walking this morning.

I remembered to bring a beet and a carrot for the small white horse that lives along my route and she was pleased to get a little something more than the usual scratching between her ears, under her shaggy forelock. Snacks trump petting any day of the week.

The air was perfumed with citrus blossoms, spider lilies, horse manure and the smell of damp earth, and the street was blissfully quiet on this holiday morning. I never could understand, I told my neighbor Andy, how the secular state can legitimately celebrate a fully religious holiday like Good Friday.

Christmas is one thing, because despite its religious origins, it’s turned into more of a pageant. But there’s no way to take the Christian veneer off Good Friday, which a friend likes to call Bad Friday because it launched that whole weird myth that turned a murder into a heavenly sacrifice. Talk about spin masters.

It’s sort of like that myth of happily-ever-after. I was interviewing a man the other day and asked him if he was close to retirement. “I don’t want to retire and stay home with my Portagee wife,” he exclaimed. Added his sidekick: “I don’t think too many married men do want to stay home with their wives.”

Getting back to the Jesus-as-savior myth, Andy remarked that he’d been talking to a man who expressed his fear that Obama was trying to destroy America as a Christian nation. Where did you get the idea that America was a Christian nation? Andy asked him, to which the man replied: It’s in the Constitution. Andy reminded him that some of the founding fathers were Deists and advised him to go read the Constitution, realizing later he should have directed him to the Bill of Rights.

Not that it would have mattered, anyway, because it was obvious, Andy said, that the man was just repeating something his pastor had said.

A woman stopped by my house the other day and was offended I didn’t want to take “the invitation” she was extending to all her neighbors to attend a Son Rise Service. I wasn’t trying to hurt her feelings, but why accept something that’s gonna go straight into the recycling bin? Now if she would have been passing out chocolate bunnies, she might have gotten my attention.

The Los Angeles Times certainly got the attention of its reporters when it decided to run an ad that resembled a faux news story on its front page. And since it’s LA, the ad was for a TV series — and not even a reality show, either. Of course, papers like the Star-Bulletin have pop up ads that cover the content on their websites, but it’s not likely anybody’s gonna mistake a Pizza Hut special for news, even in this dumbed down society.

According to a report by AFP:

"The NBC ad may have provided some quick cash, but it has caused incalculable damage to this institution," it said. "Placing a fake news article on A-1 makes a mockery of our integrity and our journalistic standards.

"Our willingness to sell our most precious real estate to an advertiser is embarrassing and demoralizing," the petition said.

But what the reporters viewed as heresy, the financially-strapped publisher termed innovation. Looks like another crack in the myth of objective journalism.

Geez. Is nothing sacred anymore?

Musings: Two Masters

Dark was the operative word when Koko and I went walking this morning, although it wasn’t all that early. But the dark sky was mottled with darker clouds and the streets were dark with rain. At times Koko nearly disappeared when she slipped into the shadows, following some tantalizing scent, prompting me to recall a conversation I had with a hunter the other day.

You always want to have at least one white dog in your pack, he said, so you can follow it out in the dark.

Makes sense.

Numerous trucks passed me, with all the drivers waving, and then I passed a small, black truck parked alongside the road. Its entire back window was filled with old English lettering that read: Charge Um Like One Visa.

Ran into my neighbor Andy and his dog Momi, who always greets me with sweet, restrained affection. It’s in marked contrast to the way Koko says hello to Andy, which is standing on her back legs, front paws waving, and all the while whining.

We got to talking about a number of things and somehow the conversation wound around to the bisexuality of the alii, with one Hawaiian scholar suggesting that perhaps it was safer for chiefs to have sex with other men because then they didn’t have to worry about offspring, especially those who might be of lower status or plotting to kill their siblings in order to gain power.

Makes sense.

We parted ways and within a minute I heard a raucous, wild squawking, which set Koko to lunging, and I looked through a hedge to see one rooster mounting another. Then they parted ways, shaking out their feathers.

Stopped to read the headlines on my neighbor’s newspaper and a man walked by, smoking a cigarette, and asked, what kine dog that? I don't know, I answered, just poi. We smiled at each other and he stopped to pet Koko, then I turned my attention back to the headlines and was aggravated to see yet another front-page splash on that lame Wailua reservoir fish-stocking project. It's a perfect example of the conflict between the mission and actions of DLNR.

On the one hand, you’ve got our state aquatic biologist, Don Heacock, fighting these releases because numerous scientific papers show how badly introduced species impact the native environment.

And on the other you’ve got DLNR employee Wade Ishikawa pushing them — under the guise of “natural resource management,” no less.

As one scientist noted in an email to me:

By law DLNR is supposed to malama the natural environment, protect native species, not destroy them.

It’s the same conflict we see over feral animals, with the state caught between its mandate to protect native species and its desire to perpetuate hunting. What’s that old saying about you can’t serve two masters?

I thought about that while reading an Advertiser article that was distributed today via email under the subject heading Hewa: Settlement Proposed in Battle Over Hawaii Ceded Lands. For those who don’t know, the Hawaiian dictionary defines hewa as mistake, wrong, incorrect, defect, and the man who distributed the email often uses it to mean evil.

The proposed agreement, being drafted by attorneys for the state and OHA, calls for the lawsuit that was just bounced back from the U.S. Supreme Court to be dismissed with prejudice in return for Gov. Lingle signing a bill that would require two-thirds approval from the Lege on any sale of the so-called “ceded lands.”

The article states:

The proposal appears to be a way for the two sides to come to a compromise each can live with while taking away the uncertainty of an impending Hawai'i Supreme Court ruling.

Problem is, it would quash attempts to secure a moratorium on “ceded land” sales until Hawaiian claims are resolved. So any such settlement is bound to result in folks condemning OHA as an instrument of the state, a sell-out.

Like DLNR, OHA often finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place — which is not to say that such predicaments aren’t at times entirely of its own doing.

If you’ve been wondering what the big agribusiness and chemical companies are doing in Hawaii, you might want to check out the cover article I wrote for Honolulu Weekly. It gives an overview of what’s happening with GMOs in the Islands, and some of the related issues.

And in the midst of it all is the state again, trying to please the folks who produce our number one farm commodity, while mandated to protect the environment and public health. Except in this case, they aren't even making the pretense of serving two masters.

I’ve also got a piece in that issue on how the Maui District Court decision on Kahoolawe relates to sovereignty.

Support your independent newspapers!

Musings: Screw Nature

I’m not sure if comment sections in newspapers or blogs are representative of wider public opinion, but I certainly hope not given the sort of responses posted to an Advertiser article on Congress appropriating $5.7 million for Hawaiian monk seal recovery.

Aside from the fact that many readers seem to be ignorant of the difference between state and federal funds, among other things, there was a discouraging “screw nature” attitude running through the comments. Guess when money gets tight, although not, curiously, for military expenditures, the first thing some folks want to cut is money for environmental programs.

This sort of comment was typical:

$5,700,000 for the seals. Polihale closed for 2 years unless you people on Kauai get out your shovels and start digging out your STATE PARK. I might kick the next Seal I see at Polihale when it opens back up. Joking, but sounds good.

Lots of folks are lauding the volunteer effort that got Polihale re-opened to the public after heavy rains washed out the bridge and road. But farmer Jerry wasn’t so sure. “Mother Nature closed that park,” he said, “and maybe it needed to stay closed for two years so it can recover from overuse. Now it’s open again so people can four-wheel out there and tear up the dunes and the plants.”

It does seem a few heavily-used places would benefit from a breather, like Kealia and Kee, to name two.

Of course, some people do understand the value of malama `aina. Was talking to a couple of Hawaiian friends who farm taro yesterday and they were expounding on the need to care for the land even before you take care of yourself and your family, because without the land, you won’t be able to care for yourself and your family.

“It’s simple, but people just don’t get it,” one friend said.

Perhaps that’s because so many people are so far removed from anything that comes from the land that they think if you just take care of the supermarket, bank and mall, then you can screw nature.

As Jerry noted the other day in response to a recent call out for Kauai folks to start 1,000 gardens a year until we achieve food self-sufficiency: “that’s not going to make much difference in meeting our food supply, but at least it might make people appreciate how much work farmers do to feed them.”

Meanwhile, the state DLNR is participating in an aquaculture project at Kapaa High School. It’s great to teach the kids how to raise fish and give them real world learning experiences. But why are they talking about releasing alien fish — bluegill and catfish — into the Wailua Reservoir as being part of an “ecosystem restoration” process? Those fish are not part of the native ecosystem, and in fact compete with native freshwater species. Are we going to have a whole generation of kids growing up believing tilapia are native because they’ve never seen or eaten an oopu?

Finally, as both the Associated Press and Science News reported, a new study shows that dolphins are temporarily deafened by direct exposure to loud military sonar. According to the AP story:

Marine biologists led by Aran Mooney at the University of Hawaii exposed a captive-born, trained Atlantic bottlenose dolphin to progressively louder pings of mid-frequency sonar.

The scientists fitted a harmless suction cup to the dolphin's head, with a sensor attached that monitored the animal's brainwaves.

When the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound.

The deafness, though, was only temporary and the dolphin was not hurt in the experiment, said Mooney.

Now how does he really know whether it hurt the dolphin or not?

The Science News article offered a little more depth in its coverage:

That’s a mild threshold shift, and physiological changes caused by sonar may not be as important as the animals’ behavioral reactions, comments veterinarian and stranding specialist Paul Jepson of the Institute of Zoology in London. Startled animals may panic and surface so fast that they get decompression sickness, which would explain some of the damage Jepson has seen.

While 20 minutes of deafness in a tank where you’re being fed fish might not be such a big deal, it’s a very different story out in the wild.

Still, as I read these articles, and the perennial scientific conclusion that more tests are needed, I had to wonder what, really, was the point? Even if we find a definitive link between sonar and cetacean strandings, what is the likelihood the Navy will give it up? All they have to do is play their trump card — national security — and it's screw nature.