• Hats off to Jason Blake • Shadow grows long in DC • Youth Treatment Center • Ticketed for not clicking Hats off to Jason Blake Way to go, Jason, getting the ball rolling to get us a new bookstore.
• Hats off to Jason Blake • Shadow grows long in DC • Youth
Treatment Center • Ticketed for not clicking
Hats off to Jason Blake
Way to go, Jason, getting the ball rolling to get us a new bookstore.
Come on everyone let’s write a letter to Mitchell over in New York and let him know how much we’d welcome and appreciate Barnes and Noble being the new kid on our Kaua‘i block.
A small group of people can be very powerful and make great change. Remember that small pack of surfers and friends keeping the monster of a Superferry out of our beloved harbor not so long ago?
Here’s the address again in case yesterday’s paper is already lining Polly’s birdcage:
Mitchell Klipper, Retail Division, Barnes and Noble 122 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10011.
Sign me as a hungry bookworm in Kapa‘a.
Rebecca Gorsline, Kapa‘a
Shadow grows long in DC
Eight months and counting I monitor Kaua‘i skies each day — alas, not for its intended, heavenly, crystal brilliance and deep-blue beauty but instead its sobering pathology. Kaua‘i’s sky, crowning the Garden Island, that evergreen jewel of Hawai‘i, is but an apparition of its bygone self most recently suffering the indignity of near daily man-made persistent aerial contrail attacks that bleed rich royal blue into bleak blankets of pathetic pale particulates en-mass. Horizons blot as the ringed, midday sun hangs a bleached and smothered carcass.
Pop on your Polaroid shades and look up at the mess.
It is not bad enough the abuse to pristine, ancient soils and waters. Or even that the country is broke and our currency is dying or that the Anglo powers swindled these islands in the first place. Now the very air we breathe succumbs to wretchedness.
I do not know why this is happening. Candidates for who seem obvious for mere resources alone — who else but the military and its contractors? Scattered, semi-organized Internet groups slowly compile and exchange information, yet most folks are oblivious to this mystery or pretend to be. Because this phenomenon appears around the globe without answers from our leaders and governments, I suppose reasons our skies are manufactured so is the same reasons for evermore exploited lands and perverted waters — money and power. One conspiracy theory suggests the blanching of our sky is done for our own good — say, “national security”, to protect us from something so egregious that our leadership refuses to reveal it at present to avert panic.
In 2010 alone, six million pages of US government documents went hiding behind the convenience of “national security”. The shadow grows long in Washington.
I won’t be writing any longer on this subject, my messages island-wide by now having come through. Others will surely take it from here, perhaps to finally alleviate speculation to tell the truth of the matter.
However, I anticipate unprecedented turmoil in 2011 — events, some surely related to our skies, others already underway that will quickly expand, still others will thunder down as life-changing shockwaves too close to home. These events reveal themselves shortly.
We find ourselves thick in interesting times. No longer is Kaua‘i what I wanted or hoped for in my naiveté, a secret paradise — uncharted and unscathed, but perhaps still the finest speck in the Pacific.
My hope now is the human endeavor throughout presents its best aloha spirit to clear the air not but with its masters but its Maker.
Rolf Bieber, Kapa‘a
Youth Treatment Center
There are two possible sites for the Youth Treatment Center that are not in use right now. The sites are as follows, Lihu‘e Old Courthouse (to house the youths) and the old KPD Station (for center’s staff offices) and/or, the Old Kekaha Sugar Mill (can be converted all-in-one to house the youths and staff offices).
The site mentioned in an earlier letter on May 22, which is located on the land that the county owns near the airport is also a choice location. I too, join the author of last week’s letter, “Just do it and build it.”
Howard Tolbe, ‘Ele‘ele
Ticketed for not clicking
Obviously Dale Winters does not live in Koloa. The “police officers” have been working our community by pairs for the past three months.
Apparently it takes two officers to write one ticket. One to stand in the bushes at Koloa Union Church with binoculars and the other to wave you over for a traffic violation.
I have been safely driving for 50 years and have received two tickets since January. I guess they need the revenue.
Public safety is really at issue going 20 mph in town without your seat belt.
Kathy Lanstyak, Koloa
