• Plant a paradise • Who’s calling the pot black? • High produce prices leave a bad taste Plant a paradise Good news! Gay and Robinson’s last harvest of sugarcane means no more smoking from burning cane and plastic drip
• Plant a paradise
• Who’s calling the pot black?
• High produce prices leave a bad taste
Plant a paradise
Good news! Gay and Robinson’s last harvest of sugarcane means no more smoking from burning cane and plastic drip tubing. No more headaches, asthma and emphysema. We should ban backyard burning as well.
Documented Hawai‘i State Board of Health statistics reveal polluting our air with toxic poisons has resulted in Westside residents having the highest rate of asthma, emphysema and cardio-pulmonary diseases in the USA. Our health is our greatest wealth.
Ask anyone who’s suffered from air-polluting sugarcane smoke or burning household trash in backyard 50-gallon incinerators. It is a fact that burning plastic creates cyanide gas. Diseases are caused by polluting air, water, food and ignorance.
Wake up Kauaians, we can create a happier, healthier life by making intelligent choices.
Ban burning! Ban polluting toxic herbicides and pesticides. Grow and eat organic natural fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and grains and stop eating all the fake food the profiteers are foisting on a brainwashed legion of addicted dummies.
Sugar companies have mined Hawai‘i’s soils. They should be fined for causing erosion and polluting our water reefs and land with arsenic mercury from herbicides, rodenticides and pesticides.
Our ‘aina is for growing healthy food and people, not a commodity to be exploited for profit to build big white mansions on the hill from which to survey their domain.
Ua Mau ke ea o ka ‘Aina i ka Pono. The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.
Plant a garden, plant some trees. We can create a paradise or we can eat weeds.
Kawika Moki, Kekaha
Who’s calling the pot black?
I could not help but sarcastically laugh at the state Board of Education’s and Department of Education’s ridiculous self-righteousness and holier-than-thou attitudes during Gov. Lingle’s senior policy adviser Linda Smith’s testimony concerning withholding stimulus dollars from the DOE’s budget.
The BOE/DOE calling it “dishonest” and a “drain” and “even suggesting it may not follow federal law came straight out of the BOE/DOE game book. Since when did the BOE/DOE become concerned about following the law? BOE member Donna Ikeda stated that “everything we’re reading … tells us that this is, one, not the intent of the law, and two, you can get in trouble if the governor does this because it does not meet the intent of the law.”
Ms. Ikeda, have you ever heard of substitute teachers’ wages being partially withheld by the DOE, with BOE approval, for over nine years (1996-2005)? Was that the “intent of the law?” Did you ever hear about the class action lawsuit won by substitute teachers in 2005 that awarded substitutes $15-plus million that has yet to be paid?
Isn’t Lingle doing exactly what your BOE/DOE board and department did to these state employees? Withholding funds. And where was the union support for substitutes (state employees, don’t forget) when your “dishonest” acts were exposed? Oh yes, substitutes have no collective bargaining rights nor union or a professional group behind them so I guess its OK to embezzle their wages and “misuse the funds” and not have their actions called “an unfair trade-off” questioning “whether the … BOE/DOE … was following the guidelines for the money” that the state Legislature intended them for?
Actually, to be fair, substitute teachers should be the first ones paid out of any stimulus funds to make up for the criminality of your two department’s past actions. Let’s pay the substitutes first what they are owed and stimulate their desire and hopes of being treated as other than substandard individuals, a policy the BOE/DOE perpetuates. Pay substitutes what’s owed them in order to display a new BOE/DOE philosophy that assures “the money is intended to drive educational reform.” Such reform would relieve your fear that “the department and the kids and the state will be the one holding the bag.”
I’d better stop here. I feel another laugh coming on.
John Hoff, Lawa‘i
High produce prices leave a bad taste
I have lived in Kilauea a long time and found the Kilauea Farmers Market to be a convenient place to pick up last-minute goods that you may have forgotten at Foodland or Safeway.
I have noticed recently that since the ownership has changed that prices have gone up considerably. I enjoy the fact that local farmers are able to sell their produce there and I think it is commendable that they choose to get vegetables from locals only.
The things that have begun to bewilder me are the prices for 4 oz. of cheese $6 (cheddar). A small container of sour cream $3.95 (Meadow Gold). I have on occasion seen the cashiers bagging up pasta, a bag that is around $10 they are individually bagging for $5 to $6 dollars apiece.
I guess the point I am trying to make is I feel like as a customer I am being taken advantage of and I realize that I have other options and I do use them instead.
I now make sure to make a list when I shop or I go to Foodland, but I would really enjoy seeing a local owned store in a mom and pop fashion not taking advantage of the convenience they know it provides, and to realize that in this time of economic hardship raising prices just because you can puts a bad taste in customers mouths.
Joni Selter, Kilauea
