• Ignorance running strong in our society • Be sure to vote and buy organic • Police giving out unnecessary tickets, treating drivers badly
Ignorance running strong in our society
I can’t decide what I find more offensive, our current county council or my fellow constituents who voted them into office. You need a license to drive or be a doctor, etc. … but you don’t even have to be able to read and you can vote or better yet, run for office. I find it disturbing when I pass people waving signs campaigning for Hooser and Yukimura.
I fear that such ignorance exponentially perpetuates throughout the very grain of our society. Try for one moment to imagine having $200,000 and then tossing it out the window. Wouldn’t most people have at least a Cadillac, or Lincoln and a big screen TV to show for it? Not our council, They just approved more funds that basically serve to put a few lawyers’ children through college, but have no chance of accomplishing anything except generating useless rhetoric during campaign season.
Alexander Hamilton said that the American public was too stupid to vote. That was over 200 ago. How many people who are allowed to vote even know who he is?
Joseph Lavery
Kapaa
Be sure to vote and buy organic
There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about the link between neonicitinoid pesticides and pollinator population decline. Many environmental groups have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to have these types of chemicals banned to help save our honeybees (and therefore our food crops). A huge victory was recognized in this fight when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced that they will stop using neonicitinoids on federal lands. Well, it turns out environmentalists are not the only ones petitioning the EPA for regulation changes regarding neonics.
Our neighbor, Syngenta, has been hard at work petitioning the EPA to reduce regulation and allow higher amounts of these pesticide residues in crops. The particular proprietary pesticide in question is called thiamethoxam which Syngenta currently uses as a seed treatment, but they think it could prove effective as a late season leaf spray. Wait a minute, wouldn’t late season imply the time when many flowers are blooming and pollinators are most active? Their requests show that they want to increase tolerance levels by up to 400 times the current amount.
EPA will accept public comments until Oct. 6, so please do your part and testify at Regulations.gov/Search-Syngenta and don’t forget to vote in November. Biotech corporations depend heavily on their infiltration of politics at all levels to support their goals.
The best thing you can do is buy local and organic. Stop eating processed foods containing corn syrup, corn starch, soy or cottonseed oil because it is all GMO!
Brady Stewart
Kapaa
Police giving out unnecessary tickets, treating drivers badly
I would like to support what the visitor mentions in his letter: ‘Speed trap sours visit to Kauai’ (Sept 19).
Last week I was ticketed in an obvious officer set trap in Lihue between the mall and the civic center. Traffic was barely moving 5 mph, and I reached over to text my appointment down the street that I would be late due to this weird traffic standstill, only to then see four cops standing on the side of the road pulling people over, including me for texting! $307 ticket.
The cops were causing the problem they were writing tickets for. This is both unethical and mean. A week before, I see three cops standing again, hiding behind concrete barricades along the slow-moving Lihue highway traffic, seemingly pulling people over for safety check sticker expirations. These are tickets not for danger to other motorists, but cherry picking/shooting fish in a barrel.
Thirdly, the day before the hurricane, my friend was worried lining up her car for gas in Kilauea and stopped to ask the cop standing at the gas station which way to line her car up, and what does he do? Yell at her to put her seat belt on!
With public relations like all of these, KPD, you anger good-natured residents and visitors alike, but seemingly aren’t responsive to DUI driver reporting, or take hours to respond to theft claims. Lucky I live on Kauai? Except for the cops with priorities backwards.
Change it, Chief Perry!
Jennifer Tyler
Anahola
