• Remain vigilant • The evolution of marriage • Election machines Remain vigilant The newly released results of the survey conducted by the Hawai‘i Meth Project show that their hard-hitting ads are working and that Hawai‘i’s youth see greater risk
• Remain vigilant • The evolution of marriage • Election machines
Remain vigilant
The newly released results of the survey conducted by the Hawai‘i Meth Project show that their hard-hitting ads are working and that Hawai‘i’s youth see greater risk associated with using “ice.”
As our island residents become more aware of the dangers and consequences associated with this drug, the better our chances of tackling this epidemic from all angles.
The Hawai‘i Meth Project has demonstrated a commitment to spreading their “Not Even Once” message across the state and to the community here on Kaua‘i. In the past year, the Kaua‘i Police Department’s School Resource and Community Policing Officers worked collaboratively with the Hawai‘i Meth Project to get in front of the problem while at the same time working to manage the epidemic and criminal activity associated with crystal meth, ice, in an effort to keep our community safe.
A mahalo must go out to all of our partners throughout the island, including those who have put Hawai‘i Meth Project posters in their places of business and others who are addressing the crystal meth epidemic through peer outreach such as the Hawai‘i Children’s Theatre’s Pono Players.
There is no magic bullet to stop the scourge of this drug, but, working together, we can ensure that our children are aware of the dangers associated with trying this drug “even once.”
Also of concern is the upward trend of marijuana, alcohol, and pharmaceutical drugs usage. We must all remain vigilant.
Chief Darryl Perry, Kaua‘i Police Department
The evolution of marriage
If someone in your family is an Asian married to a haole, you should know that prior to around 1950 this would have been illegal in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and Missouri.
Miscegenation (mixed-race marriage) has been illegal at one time or another in almost all states, Hawai‘i one of the few exceptions.
Oregon forbade Hawaiians from intermarrying between 1862 and 1951.
Miscegenation isn’t something most of us think about these days. I was born six years after the last miscegenation laws were overturned on June 12, 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. I never knew as a child that the marriage of my Asian father and white mother would have been illegal in Missouri less than a decade before my birth.
In the 16th century the Council of Trent decreed a priest was required to perform a marriage and instituted licenses. Before then, marriage was merely an agreement between two people. Licenses were a dispensation paid to the Catholic church, and the government didn’t get involved until later.
Vetoing HB 444 wouldn’t be about protecting the definition of marriage — at least not the definition of marriage as it stood when Jesus was around. It would only be about disgust, unease, mistrust and elitism.
To veto HB 444 is to say Oregon was right, 60 years ago, when it officially declared that its residents didn’t want their white sons and white daughters to marry unworthy Hawaiians — or worse, to create that distasteful product of miscegenation: hapa children.
Matt Chan, ‘Ele‘ele
Election machines
The GOP has stolen another election using electronic voting machines. And the Democrats have — again — decided to pretend it did not happen. This time it was in the South Carolina Democratic Senate Primary where a man who never campaigned won nearly 60 percent of the vote.
I was a precinct elections officer in Santa Cruz which used Sequoia optical scanners and touch systems. I have faith that we did a good job within our precinct processing the voters. I felt the Santa Cruz elections officials did a great job in promulgating procedures to ensure the vote. I talked to Lyndon, the Kauai Elections Chief, and he was very informative about Kauai’s very detailed elections procedures. He, and the other folks at elections, give me the impression of dedicated public servants who work very hard to protect Kauai’s vote.
But I have no faith that a machine from a private company will accurately tabulate the vote, because, as shown in the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy”, all that is required is one person with the right access to flip the vote.
I called each of our federal representatives but they are unwilling to challenge the use of private voting machines. Blackboxvoting.org has hundreds of examples of machines that were tampered with.
Kauai uses machines from Hart Intercivic, a Texas company. Hart, like all private voting machine companies, has a dark history of bungled public tests. Although Hart just this year has opened its source code to public examination, there is no guarantee that this is the code that runs on each machine on voting day.
So as long as fraudulent elections continue to be reported in the US, we should not accept the use of electronic voting machines that use private, secret, computer code.
If voting machines are mandated, Kauai, and the rest of the USA, must move to Open Source machines such as those available from Scantegrity.org. Our elected representatives should make this happen as soon as possible.
I hope people will call our local elections offices, but please understand that these folks are caught between a rock and a hard place. Find out what you can do to help them. And find out what you can do to protect the vote all across the USA.
John Zwiebel, Kalaheo
