Consider cutting green house gasses this 4th
Headline in The Garden Island: “With the COVID-19 pandemic dragging on into its 28th month, the island’s Fourth of July celebrations will again be muted as a result.”
Thank goodness! In case you have not heard, we are now in a climate crisis. And do you know what has brought us to the crisis? Sending green house gasses (GHG) into the atmosphere. In case you have difficulty putting two and two together, FIREworks result in smoke.
Our fireworks are supposedly in honor of the Revolutionary War. War is one of the worst causes of GHG emissions. I know — it’s a shame Putin did not get the message or care.
Fireworks commemorating wars continue the emissions. “Oh, but my little firecracker won’t be a problem!” Multiplied by how many others, they will each contribute to together sending more smokey emissions. Then add all the barbecues ….. It is time to look at everything we do with the thought of how can we cut back on our GHG emissions. Our youth are depending on every one of us!
Ruta Jordans, Kapa‘a
Some thoughts on the Jones Act
The Jones Act does not require foreign shippers to send our goods to the mainland first.
The act requires U.S. nationals to crew U.S. built ships, when shipping between U.S. ports. It has nothing to do with foreign-flagged ships shipping goods to Hawai‘i from other countries. Any reference to air shipping from all over the globe is meaningless, as Hawai‘i can have ocean shipping from all over the globe if a shipper doesn’t mind stopping off here to unload part of their load. We might not be a large enough market for them to normally do that.
Currently, with the increased volume of ocean shipping and increased fuel costs, foreign shippers are charging higher rates than we are charged by U.S. Jones Act shippers. A good source for shipping info is available on the shipping site called gCaptain. It has interesting information on global shipping including port problems and delays, Ukraine war problems including trying to get grain shipped to food-starved countries, soaring profits, and oligarch mega-yacht seizures around the globe.
Lastly, the U.S. has lost many jobs over the recent decades to offshoring. The Jones Act has kept U.S. crews employed, and U.S. shipbuilders employed. U.S. jobs for U.S. workers.
Paulo Tambolo, Wailua Homesteads
Test all candidates for drugs
Hooray!! Banners, posters and signs are up again, which means elections time is here once more.
This could mean that we may be able, or perhaps, and could have a could chance of having our incumbents Tokioka, Nakamura, Morikawa and Kouchi, who’ve ignored or simply neglected our letters and phone calls, listened, or give us a few minutes of their time to talk to us. I’m thinking that this will never happened, but am hoping.
This isn’t my purpose of writing this letter. My letter, which I wrote to our County Council, was to have a bill for everyone seeking any government seats to be drug-tested. Everyone, incumbents and those seeking any political seats, before and after elections, the primary and the general, be drug-tested, and maybe have their backgrounds checked.
Anyone elected making decisions for my future must be totally of clear minds, and not clouded with drugs. If I, who was a state airport rescue firefighter, was drug-tested before hire, and many other times randomly tested, why should our politicians be exempted? Working with the tour industry, since July 2021, I’ve been randomly tested at least six times thus far and to date. And why shouldn’t those looking to be elected, and those already elected, be also background-checked, too?
Why drug-tested? Look what we’ve encountered or seen during these past few years? Crooks who because of their positions and the fact that they can do whatever they want to, accepted money and bribes, stolen money from us taxpayers, those who’d take drugs without anyone knowing, but who dealt with and became drug dealers, doing favors for large corporations for their own personal gains, should and must be drug-tested.
I wrote a letter to our County Council, and like many, who’d think it is a crazy idea, believing it would infringe into their primary lives, maybe laughing, and probably just put this issue aside.
I don’t think or feel that I am stepping way out of bounds by trying to have a bill for all politicians to be drug-tested. I feel it would and could eliminate a bunch of crooked people, and make our government better.
By the way, at the last primary and general elections, there were some people I know who used drugs.
Ray Domingo, Lihu‘e
