No more coddling of anti-vaxxers
Anti-vaxxers threaten the economy and your safety. No, I don’t mean the medically disqualified, nor the vaccine “hesitant” who wore masks and distanced.
Anti-vaxxers are healthy enough. While you missed your family, they partied. Between their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lamentations that masks bring tyranny, public tantrums, screaming and fisticuffs, I’ve lost sympathy.
Their tropes about masks and vaccines killing business are pathetically false. Many conscientious people now minimize time in public, thanks to these swaggering bullies.
When automobile users won’t buckle up or drive sober, we don’t beg. COVID-19 is now as preventable as smoking-related illness. Long ago, anti-vaxxers made up their minds. Government needs to stop holding their hands. They’ll behave when they face more consequences than those they terrorized.
Dylan Armstrong
Punahou
Comment on Army’s land lease renewals
The Army’s $1, 65-year lease of 23,000 acres at Pohakuloa won’t expire until 2029, but it is already preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) for keeping that land. We have until June 7 to comment on the draft EIS; you can see it and make comments at home.army.mil/hawaii/index.php/ptaeis/project-home.
Unfortunately, the lease covers a relatively small area of land that was tacked onto a much larger piece: 84,000 acres that had been taken by executive order. The same thing — theft of a big piece and lease of a neighboring smaller piece of land — happened at Makua Valley. A draft EIS for land retention at Makua is in the works, together with land at Kahuku and Poamoho. Keep your eye out for public participation opportunities.
Regina Gregory
Makiki
Feral chicken bounty could easily be filled
If there was a $5 bounty on live feral chickens out here in Waianae, there would be dozens of chickens ready for pickup overnight (“City spends $7,000 to trap 67 feral chickens,” Star-Advertiser, May 12).
They are all over and are a nuisance (they crow at 1 a.m., and dig up vegetables while looking for bugs). Just say the word and you’ll have a line of folks with choke chickens the next day.
John Burke
Waianae
America shares guilt of global war crimes
America has been at war every day since World War II. Something’s wrong.
The enemy-bashing and warmongering from right and left politicians and media imply there are only good guys or bad guys, and we’re the good guys. But if bad guys kill civilians, then America is in the same categories as our enemies.
So let’s deal with our crimes against humanity:
America’s incendiary bombs killed between 80,000 and 125,000 civilians in Tokyo in one night. And our nuclear bombs killed between 125,000 and 225,000 (mostly civilians) after that.
American soldiers intentionally killed about 500 unarmed civilians in My Lai in Vietnam.
In the President Bill Clinton-directed NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia, more than 13,000 civilians were killed. According to then-Sen. Joe Biden, the war was important for “our ability to secure our interests any place in the world.”
More than 180,000 civilians were killed in President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
The list goes on.
Carol Han
Makiki
TMT protesters left a mess at access road
My wife and I were on Hawaii island recently and we went to Mauna Kea to see if it is as beautiful as we’ve been told. We found that to be true.
The only blight on the landscape was the mess at the bottom of the access road left by the protesters of the Thirty Meter Telescope. If that is the type of stewardship we can expect from the new governing body that is being created, maybe the University of Hawaii should be left in charge (“Lawmakers tout ‘historic’ $1 billion in state funds benefiting Native Hawaiians,” Star-Advertiser, May 5).
John Buennagel
Salt Lake
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