The 4/17/06 Honolulu Advertiser had an article on page A-11 signed by the leaders of Sierra Club, Hawaii’s Thousand Friend’s and Our Children’s Earth. In it they advocate fixing the current sewage spill problems, putting a stop to assigning blame, and focusing on never having it happen again. Using that same “free pass” thinking for past errors or crimes while focusing on a future that is problem-free creates the kind of culture which lead to the recent ENRON executive trials.

The brutal fact to be faced is that greed, to get votes, drove the current sewage spill debacle. These folks say forget it. I say let’s find a way to hold elected officials liable on a personal basis–soon. Otherwise expect a repeat.

On 4/16/06 The Honolulu Advertiser ran a side by side debate between candidates for president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association. Roger Takabayashi, current president and Joan Lewis, current Vice President.
Joan Lewis in her entire presentation never mentioned parents at all. It was as if children were autonomous in her concept of reality.
Roger Takabayashi did mention parents twice and allude to his debt to his father once.
What do you make of that?
Why?

The Honolulu Star Bulletin ran a special “Day of Destruction” in the “Pulse” section on 4/16/06. It addressed the San Francisco earthquake of 4/18/1906. Among other things, it addresses the extraordinary heroism spirit and resourcefulness of the population in the face of 3,000 to 6,000 dead and unbelievable destruction of property. It did not mention the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or how long it took that agency to respond. You already know the answer: There was no FEMA then.Now look at stories about New Orleans and the Katrina disaster. All talk about FEMA response times etc. Almost none about human resourcefulness of heroism. Yet San Francisco was rebuilt.So was Galveston after the 1990 hurricane destroyed the city.Do you see a connection? What and why?

Richard O. Rowland

Over at Tech Central Station professor Stephen Bainbridge quotes from a report:

“Minimum wages increase the probability that teenagers leave school to become employed or work more hours, and increase the probability that they leave school
and become non-enrolled and non-employed. Minimum wages also increase the probability that lower-wage employed teenagers become non-enrolled and non-employed.”

Bainbridge then notes:

Increasing the minimum wage is thus problematic because it makes the choice of work over school marginally more attractive.

Maybe increasing the minimum wage in Hawaii isn’t such a great idea after all. We have enough of a drop-out problem as it is.

Whole article here.

The residents of Oahu should take note.

Las Vegas, NV – The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada approved moving forward with the Regional Fixed Guideway project today at their April Board Meeting. The choice of rubber tire rapid transit was based on greater flexibility and lower-cost than rail alternatives. During the public process, citizens expressed a desire to go to McCarran Airport and UNLV, among other places close to the proposed route. The plan provides the flexibility to adjust the route according to demand, while a rail option does not. In addition, the lower initial cost of the rubber tire rapid transit system presents a more attractive offer.

Hat Tip: AmericanDreamCoalition Blog

This report from the American Dream Coalition demonstrates in clear fashion how, around the country, “smart growth” policies have driven up the cost of housing. Randal O’Toole, the report’s author says:

Smart growth and other forms of growth-management planning create artificial housing shortages that impose significant burdens on low-income families and first-time homebuyers.

Examing housing costs from around the country O’Toole identifies the one common element to higher housing costs as ” planning and regulation, most often so-called smart-growth planning or some other form of growth management. ”

Since the rail project being considered for the island of Oahu is also part of an overall comprehensive “smart growth” housing plan, the residents of this island should take note. Implementing these plans, as well as rail, will not make housing more affordable, but less so.

Most regions that experiment with growth-management planning see housing prices sharply rise soon after plans are put into effect;

• Of the 124 metropolitan areas with affordability problems in 2005, the problems can be traced to planning in all but a handful of cases;
• In fifty of those metropolitan areas, homebuyers must pay a penalty of $100,000 or more per median-priced home for the privilege of living in a city or region with smart growth;
• The total cost of planning-induced housing shortages is truly staggering, adding approximately $275 billion to the cost of owner-occupied homes purchased each year.

This just an example of what is revealed in this lengthy report.

Whole report here.

Three articles in the last few days have made the point – documented the fact – that science reporting is not objective, but significantly biased. Increasingly science reporting is dominated by political or environmental agendas and those that do not conform to these agendas are punished in a number of ways. If they are researchers they are denied funding. If they are scientists they can be shunned by their peers for challenging the orthodoxy.

The problem is that only dire, extremist news sells; so it is reported even if it is wrong. For example John Stossel reports:

If you’re a scientist working for private industry, it helps to invent something useful. But if you’re a scientist trying to get funding from the government, you’re better off telling the world how horrible things are.

Stossel goes on to give us several examples.

Chaos from Y2K. An epidemic of deaths from SARS or mad cow disease. Cancer from Three Mile Island. We quickly forget. We move on to the next warnings.

Too bad he forgot Alar.

Or this from Bob Carter at the OpinionJournal.com:

After all, who puts money into science–whether for AIDS, or space, or climate–where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today.

Carter also notes:

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest.

Earlier this week there was an article by Bob Careter in the Opinion.Telegraph on global warming that probably started the ball rolling:

In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

After deconstructing the false facts presented to support global warming he said:

The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself.

These three articles should not be missed by anyone who wants to keep up on the global warming myth saga.

Articles here, here and here.

Rail projects don’t “accidentally” have cost over-runs, they are planned that way. They aways have been. Same will be true here.

So it was clear that the Shinkansen was designed for cost overruns and the original budget had been drafted before standards had been set and even before a final alignment had been chosen. In other words, the designers, estimators and engineers had no idea what the final cost would be. But they firmly believed that investing in high-speed standard gauge railways would be better for Japan than in keeping its old, slow and narrow railway and building highways. One small group ended up spending 380 million yen and designing the transportation future for Japan. Project managers everywhere studied how the Japanese constructed (and funded) this new type of railway.

Closer to home, we have San Francisco’s Bechtel Corporation, one of the largest construction companies in the world. They have a really big project going on in Boston, called the “Big Dig,” where they are burying 7.5 miles of roadway to eliminate a rusting elevated structure. But all is not well in Beantown, as the state filed a complaint in Superior Court seeking up to $146 million in damages, the estimated profits and incentive fees for Bechtel and Parsons Brinkerhoff (an engineering consultancy). The familiar cause for this action is that the original 1994 estimate was a whopping $7.7 billion and as it nears completion later than expected, it looks to be almost double, chiming in at an unbelievable $14.6 billion.

The cost of rail is almost always much greater than projected. The promoters of rail simply lie.

Whole article here.

Is this the future for Oahu? Will we one day tear up the rail we are now planning to build to replace it with a highway? Presposterous? Well, that is what they are going to do in Mississippi.

The high-octane Mississippi Senate delegation is using a mammoth bill funding hurricane relief and the war in Iraq to have taxpayers foot the $700 million bill for a rail line along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. But there’s a catch. The track in question, owned by CSX Transportation and damaged by Hurricane Katrina, has already been repaired at a cost of $300 million.

Now, Mississippi GOP Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott want to tear up the just-rebuilt track _ which divides virtually every city and town along the state’s coast _ and use the land to build a much-needed highway along the congested coastline.

It is so very easy to throw money away when it is other people’s money.

Whole story here.

Over at the Reason blog – Out of Control – they note that red light cameras are good at raising revenue but are also good at causing accidents. Quoting from The Newspaper.com:

Red light cameras in Anne Arundel County, Maryland failed to reduce accidents in five years of use. A set of five cameras were set up in the communities of Arnold, Pasadena, Parole, and Crofton in 2000, but a comparison of accident statistics five years before and five years after their installation shows accidents have increased beyond the ten percent increase in traffic volume.

Upon installation, the cameras caused an immediate 40 percent increase in rear-end collisions from 53 in 1999 to 74 in 2000. Overall accidents were up between 25 percent and 41 percent from 107 in 1999 to 134 in 2001 and 151 in 2002.

There are more links to other articles about how many states are dropping the program after seeing the results. Leave it to Hawaii to be so far behind the curve that we are trying to get them when other states have already learned their lesson and are getting rid of them.

Link to the blog article.