Enjoy the rain while we can

Whether good or bad, we always need the rain to replenish and keep moist dry areas of our island, especially on the Leeward coast in the summer time, and to replenish our water supply.

Enjoy the rain while it lasts. I shudder every time we are in a drought period.

Of course,my heart goes out to the people or residents affected by the rain in flood-prone areas, but living in Hawaii, we have to take the bad with the good. Farmers hurt by excessive flooding should be compensated for their losses in these drastic conditions.

Randall Ng
Kapahulu

Critique of BOE a fuzzy diatribe

Was anyone else struck by the fact that Amy Perruso and Doug Robertson’s commentary supposedly regarding returning to an elected state Board of Education ended up being a fuzzy diatribe against "corporate raiding of our public schools" ("Appointed Board of Education gives excessive influence to governor," Star-Advertiser, Island Voices, July 28)?

I expected discourse on an interesting political subject, but ended up slogging through something resembling a stale Occupy Wall Street handout sprouting the usual "corporate greed" social memes.

I get it: The authors oppose people who are "tainted" with business expertise being involved in education, and believe our governor stacked the BOE with "insulated members of Hawaii’s corporate elite" because he favors his predecessor’s "corporate-driven reforms."

What I don’t get is how returning to a system in which anyone with enough special-interest campaign money can become a board member addresses the "problem."

Sure, let’s switch BOE membership from a meritocracy back into a popularity contest; what could possibly go wrong?

Richard Thomason
Hawaii Kai

Buying tickets from UH is hard

We moved here in February from Oregon. I am a retired teacher and high school football coach of more than 30 years.

I wanted to become a supporter of University of Hawaii football, but they are making it very hard for me.

I have tried twice to buy an individual game ticket.I drove in from Ewa Beach each time to their ticket office. Phones were always busy. I was told that I could not buy tickets until after Aug. 12, only two weeks before the first game.

"Sorry," was the answer I got.

So I went downstairs and waited to see someone. They were all busy. I was asked if I wanted to write a note. So I did, with my name and phone number on the paper. I explained my frustrations about getting tickets. No one even asked if I was interested in getting a season ticket. I was thinking about it!

It is hard to become a fan when they don’t seem to care.

Mike Clarke
Ewa Beach

More weddings here not answer

Remember Judas Iscariot? For a few pieces of silver he sold out Jesus Christ to the Romans.

Now for few pieces of tourism money, some people want to shove same-sex marriage down our throats.

Business is business in Hawaii. If the prices are too high, people won’t come, even if you pass same-sex marriage.

People will come if it were more affordable. But if it were more affordable, then the vendor would be barely making it. Our government at all levels is making it hard on businesses to survive because of the increase in taxes and fees every time a baddecision is made and efforts are made to cover those bad decisions.

Passing same-sex marriage isn’t the answer.

Henry P Kahula Jr
Paia

Racism a threat to civil society

"Breathing while black" is getting dangerously close to "being alive while a Jew."

Adolf Hitler’s complaint was that German society (and civilization and order itself) was threatened by the fact that a Jew, any Jew, was born. That pathological and paranoid viewpoint is a byproduct of rigid social separation by class and/or race. When people don’t talk with others, they don’t know others as human beings.

Tom Coffman’s "The Island Edge of America" reminds us that a multiplicity of persons of different races came forward after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to vouch for the loyalty of the nisei they had come to know, delaying and moderating internment policy.

Susan Liang
Honolulu

Subsidies benefit business insiders

Sunday’s Star-Advertiser reports that phone users pay $2.50-2.75 per month to "subsidize" the Federal Communications Commission’s universal phone service program by paying Sandwich Isles Communications, a company owned by the brother of a prominent state Senator, $26.5 million per year.

One wonders why the subsidy is downplayed (e.g., "$858 a month" instead of "$10,300 a year per customer," or "$25.6 million a year for five years" instead of "$128 million paid to SIC")?Regardless, this program mocks the "middle class" and demonstrates yet again how governmental programs so often result in redistributing taxes paid by the many to benefit the well-connected few.

No matter that for a modest fraction of the current subsidy all 3,000 Hawaii beneficiaries of this giveaway could be provided the latest version of smart phones while lowering the phone bills of millions of ratepayers. Eliminating federal giveaways such as this might well result in the sequester disappearing. And visitors to paradise could stop wondering whether they had mistakenly arrived in Greece, not Hawaii.

David L. Mulliken
Diamond Head

Kakaako could have meltdown

"Critical mass" is defined asthe smallest amount of fissile material for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.

Real estate developer Stanford Carr used this term to describe the booming development in the Kakaako area ("Luxury condos to go up on Ala Moana Boulevard," Star-Advertiser, July 27).

A controlled nuclear chain reaction with water produces steam that generates power. An uncontrolled nuclear reaction produces a meltdown or an explosion.

With uncontrolled growth in the Kakaako district, will we have a disaster on our hands? The Hawaii Community Development Authoritykeeps signing off on all these projects. At what point do we overtax our infrastructure — our roads, the sewer systems? What about our aquifers? Will they cease to pump fresh water and we end up with brackish water?

I’m all for building affordable housing. However, we need to proceed with caution. We live on an island. We have limitations.

Robert K. Soberano
Moiliili

Business climate a health factor?

It was intriguing to read articles in the Star-Advertiser lamenting a bad business climate, and others extolling the superior health of residents and the position of happiest people in the nation.

Perhaps there should be an article exploring the possibility of a nexus between these phenomena.

Chuck Prentiss
Kailua