Military research inappropriate for UH

I was appalled to read in The Advertiser of Nov. 19 that the UH regents have approved making the University of Hawai'i a major site of Navy and Pentagon research, including classified projects. Such research to provide politicians the tools of killing at their discretion is not compatible with the aims of a university.

Although the reporter says that contracts with the Navy and Pentagon are all for "defense," the Unites States is currently engaged in an offensive war in Iraq. President Bush's own panel admitted that there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, and members of Bush's own team have leaked that Bush created a plan to invade Iraq as soon as he was elected, long before 9/11 and long before the often insinuated but false association between al-Qaida and Iraq.

To justify accepting $50 million in contracts (paid for by taxpayers) for offensive wars in the name of defense ignores the critical thinking and analysis of manipulating language that a university is supposed to be teaching.

Since the regents have already pronounced, the "consultation" with faculty and Native Hawaiian groups mentioned in the article looks like a token effort. The larger community must now add their voices to protest the inappropriateness and venality of a university blindly providing killing tools for aims that the researchers themselves do not control.

We must do our part in protecting species

The possible extinction of yet another avian species native to Hawai'i, the po'ouli ("Bird may have been last of kind," Dec. 1), marks only the latest chapter in over a century (truth be told, many centuries) of gradual disappearance of Hawai'i's endemic birds.

The frustrating thing is that most of the causes stem from human ignorance in intentionally or inadvertently introducing non-native species, whether predators (i.e. the mongoose) or competitors. Even in my Canadian homeland, we see native species of all kinds under pressure from introduced species.

While mass culls can be impractical (as we may end up also killing many of the native species we seek to preserve), all of us can at least do our part by preventing escapes of pets or commercial stock. Once they're out, they're very hard to lure back.

Shower trees planted too close to each other

The shower trees planted along Kuhio Avenue in Waikiki already have greatly improved the appearance of the entire length of this busy and crowded street, but why are there so many of them and why are they planted so close together?

Not only will the roots eventually lift and crack the new sidewalks, but the branches have nowhere to go either.

City workers should cull, separate trash

O'ahu is facing an overflowing amount of refuse, with no room to put it. We are forced to recycle refuse so it will not have to fill up another landfill. Collecting a deposit of 5 cents on each beverage container may sound like the perfect solution.

In reality, most of the bottles will never be taken to a redemption center because of our busy lifestyle. The most effective way to recycle garbage is to have the city refuse workers cull and separate the different types of trash.

Blue-collar workers should receive break

If Congress decides it's necessary to raise the retirement age in order to save Social Security, I hope it doesn't forget that all jobs are not equal.

There are two kinds of workers in the world: those who shower in the morning before they go to work and those who shower when they come home from work. This is the traditional distinction between white-collar and blue-collar workers. It's one thing to imagine having to sit behind a desk in an air-conditioned office beyond 65 in order to collect full benefits; it's quite another having to imagine working at a job that requires hard labor and the sweat of one's brow beyond that age.

If the retirement age must be raised, one size does not fit all. Let there be two retirement ages: one for white-collar workers and one for blue-collar workers. It's the right thing to do.

Propaganda spread by Ken Conklin himself

So Ken Conklin accuses the Office of Hawaiian Affairs of spreading "propaganda" (Letters, Dec. 2).

This from a man who appears in the opinion pages every so often spouting his anti-Hawaiian agenda.

This from a man who sued to eliminate the requirement that OHA trustees be Hawaiian, and then attempted to infiltrate and destroy OHA by running for a seat (by the way, he lost badly).

This from a man who is a regular fixture outside court hearings in which his fellow litigators are trying to kill OHA, the Hawaiian homestead programs and the tens of millions in federal dollars that annually flow into our state to assist needy Hawaiians.

In his latest missile, he once again fails to acknowledge that more than 500 Native American and Alaskan native groups have been granted federal recognition — and not one Hawaiian has achieved similar status.

Why is Ken Conklin so obsessed with tearing down Hawaiians who are only attempting to seek justice?

Could it be that Mr. Conklin is engaging in ho'olaha mana'o (propaganda)? Webster's, after all, defines propaganda as "information or ideas methodically spread to promote or injure a cause, movement, nation, etc."

Medical marijuana use critical to many

As the founding director of the Honolulu Medical Marijuana Patients Co-op, I can only hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in the interest of common sense, compassion and humanity in the case of use of medical marijuana by Angel Raich and many hundreds of thousands of others.

I have seen firsthand for the past four years how medical marijuana has literally saved the lives of Honolulu's seriously ill. One of our members suffers from AIDS-related grand mal seizures, and without marijuana, his seizures spiral out of control. All the other medications he has tried have failed, and without medical marijuana, he will certainly expire.

Add to this our members who are cancer patients whose fight for survival depends on marijuana's ability to suppress their vomiting and continuous nausea and restore their appetite so they can eat and regain their strength. Multiply these examples thousands of times nationwide and one can see just how life and death this decision is.

I can only wonder how it is that nine justices, who have no medical training, are in a position to overrule the expert opinion of thousands of doctors, most of whom have decades of training and hands-on experience in their field, who have recommended that their patients use medical marijuana to treat their illness or injuries.

If we lose this case, I will have to shut down our co-op, and without our help, most of our members will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to grow their own medicine and will be forced back out on the streets.

Department of Education is not fiscally accountable

Jerome Manis says the basic problem with our educational system is a lack of money (Island Voices, Nov. 21). Mr. Manis may be right, or he may be wrong. The fact is, we can't know because the Department of Education is not fiscally accountable.

The Hawai'i state auditor has conducted seven fiscal-accountability audits of the DOE. The 2003 report found that "the department's measures of effectiveness in the executive budget are irrelevant, inaccurate and ambiguous. Measures are unrelated to program objectives and are based upon assumptions, estimates and unverified data."

The DOE hired an outside auditor to conduct another study. That 2003 report found that the "DOE's fiscal accountability reveals a system that needs significant improvement."

The DOE has adopted a plan to become fiscally accountable. Unfortunately, we're told this plan will take several years to implement, and there is no independent review of the plan or the implementation process.

So what do we do in the meantime? Predictably, many people in the DOE will advocate for more money. This makes no sense because the DOE's fiscal system has never been able to translate higher funding into higher student achievement.

Over the past 30 years, Hawai'i has increased the DOE budget by 160 percent, and that's accounting for inflation. We doubled our salaried staff and added thousands of "casual" hires. Yet during that same time we have not seen any significant improvement in student achievement.

Einstein's definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. Perhaps we should try something new, like holding the DOE accountable for becoming fiscally responsible before we increase its funding. What if we:

• Maintain the current DOE budget until it implements its fiscal accountability plan. That would give the department incentive to finish quickly.

• Require the DOE to work with the state auditor and the state budget director to provide some independent input and oversight. That would ensure both the Legislature and governor support the new fiscal system.

• Give the DOE greater flexibility over its current budget during this period so it can shift funds to address changing needs.

If two years from now a fiscally accountable, cost-effective DOE needs additional funds, we could all feel secure that the tax dollars would improve our student achievement.

Until then, adding more money to our current system will not improve our schools. According to Mr. Einstein, it would be insanity to expect anything different.

Teach our students to think

I am a social studies teacher on O'ahu. Although I applaud Dave Rolf's efforts to get the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association to support education in Hawai'i, Rolf's Nov. 26 op-ed piece illustrates what often happens when the business community gets involved in education reform.

Rolf lauds "research-based" curriculums that teach "facts" such as the Hammurabi Code and the Pythagorean theorem (found on his so-called "Wall of Words"), and then goes on to argue that Hawai'i needs a standardized curriculum — so kids are tested fairly — and that the Legislature is right to get involved in such efforts. The result of such actions, according to Rolf, will be a "river of learning" that will be joyful for all.

I disagree.

The result will be a river of testing (designed so that we adults know the kids know the "facts" we surely would not know if we were tested as well), more micromanagement of our Department of Education by our already educationally challenged Legislature (most of whom know nothing about Pythagoras or our state water code, the former which does not matter, the latter which does), and a whole lot of joyless teaching and learning of "facts."

Who decides what is "fact" and what is not? Who decides whether this fact or that fact gets into the textbooks? Perhaps we should defer to the folks in Texas, who as I write are busy changing their "health" textbooks to reflect their assumption of abstinence-only sex education and marriage as between a man and a woman as "fact." Perhaps we should defer to those Mainland boards of education that want to remove Darwin from their textbooks. Rolf's assumption is that all knowledge already exists and it is the job of everyone to help support a standardized delivery system wherein teachers deliver the facts from bright shiny new textbooks.

When are we going to refrain from these kinds of leaps of logic? How much more time and money will be wasted in the next 100 years by educational groups trying to determine which "facts" need to be taught and which should not? And just because a curriculum works at one school does not mean all schools should adopt the same approach. In "fact," the most success we have seen in Hawai'i in a long time comes at schools where the notion of standardization has been abandoned, and small, self-governing (yes, that means curriculum too) schools within schools were chartered.

I respect Mr. Rolf's care and concern — kids need to be able to learn in a positive environment — but what we should be doing is decentralizing our school systems, avoiding standardized curriculums as much as possible, and teaching our kids the processes of critical thinking (or skepticism of "fact") in all subject areas.

Unfortunately, if our students learn how to think, they might begin to question why the inflow of cars to Hawai'i is so much higher than the outflow (a simple math problem). They may begin to question the virtue of any failure to understand that we live on an island and we cannot be the location of the highest car sales in the United States. They might begin to question why there are more cars on O'ahu than people, and why it takes a half hour to travel from Ala Moana to the freeway, and then another two hours to Makakilo.

We do not need more calls for standardized curriculums, or more cars. We need students who are deeply skeptical of the kinds of decisions our business community and policy-makers are making with regard to Hawai'i's future. If they happen to be turned on to Hammurabi's Code along the way, so much the better.