• Mahalo county planners • Warm aloha, Cold War • Safe roadways and driving with aloha • Shame on you Mahalo county planners I attended the Planning Commission hearing all day Nov. 22, and it was long and very detailed
• Mahalo county planners • Warm aloha,
Cold War • Safe roadways and driving with aloha
• Shame on you
Mahalo county planners
I attended the Planning Commission hearing all day Nov. 22, and it was long and very detailed with an extensive agenda. After the meeting, I was able to watch the whole proceeding on TV later that evening.
How professional, government at its best. The Planning Department was prepared and detailed and had the answers to difficult questions. The Panning Commission was respectful and caring to everyone and made everything understandable to even me.
Mahalo to our Planning Department and Planning Commission for doing a great job following and enforcing our laws with a vision to look to the future to protect our grandchildren.
And to Commissioner Jan Kimura, keep up the great job and keep asking those questions. There may be questions we hesitate to ask, worrying they may make us look silly, but it may bring the answer to the question that someone did not want us to ask.
Bill Troutman, Kilauea
Warm aloha, Cold War
Heeding the warning of outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s televised speech in 1961, the American people must diligently beware the ever-growing threat of the military industrial complex.
According to a local anonymous source later confirmed by numerous reporting agencies, including The Associated Press and Mail Online among others, Kaua‘i’s Pacific Missile Range Facility successfully tested unprecedented, cutting-edge, hypersonic-missile firepower as part of the Pentagon’s Global Strike Program.
Dubbed Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which travels five times the speed of sound, is now shown to strike a target anywhere in the world in just 30 minutes. The test rocket fired early Nov. 15, glided southwest through the upper atmosphere over the Pacific at hypersonic speed before hitting its target on the Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands — some 2,500 miles away.
PMRF reveals to the public this new gun on the heels of the U.S. Air Force announcement that it has taken delivery of eight, 15-ton bunker buster bombs called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator that can blow apart 200 feet of concrete. AHW could accommodate the MOP. However, it is logical to determine Kaua‘i is already well-stocked with nuclear warheads.
Ironically, and typically talking out both sides of its mouth, the U.S. military says with the full implementation of Global Strike, America will no longer have to rely on stationing missiles in allied foreign countries at the same time it defends the future of its missile shield defense of the European Union (see “Russia outlines response to U.S. missile shield,” Reuters, Nov. 23). Cold War rhetoric now heats up once again between Russia and the United States.
If you did not know or have forgotten, our island of warm aloha is far from the immunity of war and the military industrial complex that feeds upon it. In fact, it appears Kaua‘i is still quite relevant and central to it.
Rolf Bieber, Kapa‘a
Safe roadways and driving with aloha
The short road between Wilcox Hospital and Walmart’s parking lot is finally accessible to pedestrians for the first time since I moved here 14 years ago. It is now safe for walkers to traverse this area with pets or to shop. This is especially welcome now that Kaua‘i buses are limited in stopping at Walmart on several routes, making it necessary for shoppers to walk over from the Wilcox Hospital stop.
Vehicles were parking in the grassy area beside the bike lane, often overlapping onto the blacktop/hard surface so that walkers and bicyclers had to use the middle of the road. Mahalo to those who made this positive change most welcome for us seniors at Sun Village, many of whom no longer drive cars.
On another traffic note: Has the cant of the road in the Blood Alley section of Kuhio Highway been evaluated? I suggest that for southbound motorists, the slope should be downward on the mauka side with the reverse for the northbound traffic such that the cant would be down sloping toward the makai side ensuring that traffic would less likely lurch toward the center line of the highway in which movable cement barriers would be placed until a permanent safety solution has been installed in this heavily trafficked area.
On another front: Have nail strips been considered for Honolulu’s highways such that wrong-way drivers would tear their tires, whereas right-way drivers tires are unscathed? It works in Los Angeles, Calif.
Here’s to safe roadways and driving with aloha.
Alice Parker, Lihu‘e
Shame on you
To the big black truck that ran over a small dog on Wednesday morning on Hulemalu Road near Niumalu Park and drove on: What you did was unneccesary and cruel. Cars were already stopped. I was standing there with dog treats and a leash to try and get the scared and confused little guy off the road. I don’t know whose dog it was, but it had a collar, so someone loved it.
I hope the few minutes of your life it would have taken to slow down and let me get the dog off the road was worth the loss of the pet you killed, but I doubt it.
Shame on you.
Julie Hayward, Lihu‘e
