local stuffs list: local stuffs

Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:39:55 -1000
From: Lc <palolo@hawaii.rr.com>

anyone care to write a letter to the editor on behalf of hale na`au pono.
if so, here's some info about their program.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Poka Laenui" <plaenui@pixi.com>
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 5:37 PM

> Aloha.
>
> this is for your further information.
>
> Mahalo

[ Part 2, Application/MSWORD 38KB. ]
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Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:06:54 +1200
From: karaka <chooky.clarke@gmail.com>
Subject: [mana_wahine] Guidelines for sex abuse counsellors released

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/GE0806/S00068.htm
Guidelines for sex abuse counsellors released
Monday, 23 June 2008, 3:00 pm
Press Release: Massey University
Monday, June 23, 2008
Guidelines for sex abuse counsellors released

New guidelines for the treatment of survivors of sexual abuse, developed
by Massey University psychologists, have been released today.

Sexual Abuse and Mental Injury: Practice Guidelines for Aotearoa New
Zealand was commissioned by the Accident Compensation Corporation. The
corporation provides counselling and sometimes compensation to people who
have been sexually abused.

The Director of the University's Psychology Clinic, Cheryl Woolley, says
the guidelines will be a practical reference tool based on best practice
principles.

"The guidelines are important because practitioners from a number of
disciplines counsel survivors of sexual abuse," Mrs Woolley says.

"Counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers, psychologists and
psychiatrists are all involved. It's not an academic tome, but rather a
product designed to help practitioners make decisions in the context of
daily practice."

The guidelines include sections on working with victims of all ages and
cultures.

Mrs Woolley says the guidelines went through a rigorous peer review
process by international and national experts.

Mrs Woolley and her team, along with representatives from ACC, are
embarking this week on a national road show to introduce and discuss the
guidelines with counsellors. They will visit Auckland, Hamilton,
Palmerston North, Wellington and Christchurch during the week.
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Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:43:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: Andy Parx <andyparx@yahoo.com>
KKCR^RS STRATEGIC PLANNING- A FACILITATED CHANCE
FOR REFORM OR ANOTHER COMMUNITY SNUB?

A PNN REPORT: KKCR^ÒS STRATEGIC PLANNING- A FACILITATED CHANCE FOR REFORM
OR ANOTHER COMMUNITY SNUB?

As this article is published- at 5 p.m. on June 23, 2008- the second
^Óillegal^Ô secretive meeting of ^ÓKaua`i Community Radio^Ô KKCR-FM^Òs
^ÓStrategic Planning Committee^Ô(SPC) is convening.

As PNN reported the first of two planned secret-agenda meetings took
place in mid-May with an insular group of members of the Board, staff and
the Community Advisory Board (CAB) that excluded members the community
from either membership or participation.

What is KKCR^Òs Strategic Planning Committee? Well we know now what it^Òs
not .

It^Òs not a response to the events we detailed in our April 27
investigative report, ^Ó KKCR: A Study in Brown and White^Ô.

PNN^Òs investigation was presented after the failure of the Kekahu
Foundations (the governing board of KKCR) and its Personnel Committee to
follow through on their promise to address the issues of "institutional"
racism made last January after the previously detailed arbitrary and
capricious decision making of staff and the Board of Directors (BOD)
during the incidents surrounding the firing and reinstatement of ^Óthe
KKCR 3^Ô.

Nor was it originally designed to deal with the long-standing
repercussions of the theft of the voting rights of the members in 1996
and the institution of the LA music industry^Òs just about all-music
format with no local public affairs programming except for a couple of
hand selected programmers taking calls for a few hours a week in a
decidedly and directedly non-controversial format.

As a matter of fact, word leaked out of the first SPC meeting that
governance issues were ^Óoff the table^Ô for the SPC and that they were
even considering trying to create and support ^Óother projects^Ô than
KKCR.

Most people think the SPC is all a show or worse, an effort to
consolidate power and dismiss any attempt to turn KKCR back into the real
community voice and free speech platform it was originally founded to be.

Katy Rose, one of the fired programmers who has since been reinstated
says she tried, along with many other members of the public, to be
allowed onto the SPC without success.

She says that ^Órather than making the deep, structural changes necessary
to open up the station to the broader community of local, working-class
people and their everyday concerns, we'll end up with window-dressing and
token gestures^Ô. from the SPC

And Rose isn^Òt alone. Literally hundreds of people we^Òve spoken to in
the community just don^Òt care to bang their heads against the wall
anymore. And though the third SPC meeting is going to be ^Óopen to the
public^Ô most people have heard that there will be at best token public
input and they assume that, as usual at KKCR Board of Directors^Ò (BOD)
meetings, their testimony will be brief and ignored.

Rose says perhaps the strategic planning process should have been based
on ^Óparticipation and concerns of the great many people on Kaua`i who do
not see themselves reflected in the programming and structure of the
station as it is.

^ÓWithout the vigorous participation in decision-making by the very
people left out of the process now - and out of KKCR generally - ideas
for change will more than likely
reflect the interests of the current gate-keepers^Ô, says Rose ^Óand we
can generally expect ^Òmore of the same^Ò."

It^Òs hard to say what will happen his evening.. But there^Òs one person
who says she is going to make sure full public participation and the
discussion of governance issues will be on the table at tonight^Òs
meeting.

And fortunately for anyone who cares about KKCR reclaiming the community
radio mantle the paid convener and organizer of the ^Óproject^Ô will be
Roxanne MacDougall the top organizational consultant and ^Ófacilitator^Ô
on Kaua`i.

MacDougall, whose responsibilities have included facilitating everything
from the Kaua`i General Plan to strategic-planning and group-goal-seeking
sessions for both for profit and not-for-profit corporations, has a
plan... if the honchos and the dissidents don^Òt mess it up.

MacDougal has told PNN that the process- which she describes in an essay
accompanying this article- will have the SPC establish subcommittees
called ^Óstrategic groups^Ô each dealing with a specific area of
strategic planning. And, although the SPC will determine the set up in
secret, at the next meeting which will be open to the public any member
of the public can actually join one of these sub-groups as ^Ófull
participatory members^Ô.

And, she told PNN, issues of governance will in fact be ^Óon the table^Ô.

In the statement MacDougall prepared exclusively for PNN she attempts to
address many of the question we asked regarding the SPC and to justify
secret agenda and closed nature of the meetings and the reasons for the
insularity of the group.

MacDougall wrote:

As of today, June 17, we have completed the formation of the planning
team, which consists of 6 board members, the former board president who
had been very involved in initiating strategic planning, 4 staff, 2 CAB
representatives and 2 programmer/volunteer representatives. In my 20
years^Ò experience as a consultant, I have found that 15 is an
optimal size for a planning team.

Typically, non-profit strategic planning is done by the board of
directors, who are required to approve the plan as part of their
governance duties, and the executive director/manager. Usually, input
from constituents is solicited in various ways. By having the CAB and
programmers/volunteer representatives on our planning team, we have
direct input from these groups, while their representatives are charged
with keeping them informed and relaying their input. Having as many board
members participate as are available to make the commitment to the
planning process, which is quite a commitment of time and energy, assists
in having the majority of the board present for key discussions and
decisions, to directly hear non-board representatives^Ò points of view,
etc. Some have expressed concern that the Planning Team is dominated by
the board, but the reality is that the more they know about how the plan
was crafted, the more they participate in consensus, the better informed
the board is when they review the plan for approval.

But it was unclear whether theses strategic groups would include
interested members of the public as full participatory members or whether
the public would just be relegated to the peanut gallery to ^Ógive
input^Ô at some point.

MacDougall wrote

Once the Strategy Groups get started, the Planning Team will hold three
sessions in which each Strategy Group reports on its progress. These
meetings will be open to the public and there will be time on the agenda,
after all reports are heard, for public comment and questions. A draft
plan will then be created, and presented to all the board members, CAB
and programmer/volunteers. Feedback will be received and
the draft fine tuned. A public meeting will then be held where additional
input will be received before a final plan is submitted to the board for
approval.

The essay lays out the process in detail but what distressed many like
Rose- and even member of the SPC like BOD member Marj Dente and her
husband CAB President Fred who were founders of the Kekahu foundation and
KKCR and have fought to reclaim the station for 12 years- was the
ambiguous nature and possible obfuscation of the point of whether the
public will be excluded entirely except for the token ignored
^Ótestimony^Ô, which is usually used to protect insularly-formed groups
of privileged people to allow them to consolidate their power and
actually ignore those giving input.

We^Òve seen this kind of imprecision of words lead to false assumptions
before so we twice asked about whether, after all the secrecy was over
and the SPC^Òs secret agenda meetings identified goals and formed the
groups around them- no matter how unscrupulous and illegal the process to
get to that point was- would the public be able to be full participatory
members of those subcommittees which are to prepare reports for the SPC?

As previously reported, according to KKCR^Òs bylaws the meeting of the
SPC is required to be open to the public and non-profit organization are
required by law to adhere to their own by-laws.

Surprisingly our suspicions that the answer would be ^Óno^Ô to public
participation were not borne out. In a supplement to her essay MacDougall
told PNN:

The interested public, who can attend the meetings, will be full
participating members of the groups. The groups will work together to
determine which are the priority goals to support each key strategy. They
will then work together on objectives and action plans. So, everybody
gets to work on coming to agreement on goals, as well as really thinking
through what it is going to take to achieve that goal. The Strategy
Groups present their findings and recommendations to the Planning Team.
There will likely be a couple of Planning Team members in each group, so
they will have been privy to the discussions. The Planning Team pulls
together the draft plan, gets various levels of feedback, as I described
before, and the plan is submitted to the board of directors for approval.
That is the governance process.

Everything one could possibly want to know about the process from
MacDougall^Òs perspective is laid out in the essay, the good the bad and
the ugly.

What has been remarkable is MacDougall^Òs tenacity and apparent integrity
in putting together the project, which is financed through a $5000 grant
from something called the Hawaii Community Foundation a Honolulu
philanthropic non profit run by skeins of Henry P. Baldwin of ^ÓAlexander
And^Ô fame.

MacDougall has told PNN that if she feels the SPC members are just going
through the motions and have a preconceived outcome she will not sign off
on the results.

The grant, according to the Dentes, was to pay for MacDougall^Òs services
and was recently finalized through the efforts of one of the more crooked
BOD members, Ex- President Harvey Cohen.

Cohen has been the top defender of the realm for many years and along
with Station Manager Gwen Palagi conspired to promote Palagi^Òs bar at
the Princeville Airport over the KKCR airwaves with Cohen acting as both
her business agent and head of the BOD which promoted policies to allow
the same blatant commercialization of KKCR that the so-called dissidents
have been trying to eliminate.

Palagi is reportedly leaving her position as Station Manager in December
and a search is on for a successor. It is unknown whether the new manager
will be promoted from within or whether a true experienced community
radio professional will get the job but Fred Dente says he is hoping to
expand the search to the mainland to find someone who knows what
Community Radio is all about.

MacDougall did make one thing clear. The time and energy commitment to
the strategic groups- and for the SPC as a whole- is of primacy. People
who serve on these subcommittees will be expected to attend all meetings
and engulf themselves in the work. She assures us though that at least
two members of the SPC will serve on each group if a plethora of members
of the community do miraculously come to the initial meeting and pledge
to participate.

According to MacDougall a big PR push will be done to let people in the
community know about the opportunity to participate in the strategy
groups. But the question is whether this will be enough to convince those
who have stopped banging their heads against the stonewall of racism,
classism cliqueism at KKCR to come back and give the all-white bastion
one last chance to serve the community.

Many dozens in the community of articulate and experienced activists,
journalists and others have told tales of having such a bad experiences
when they sought to be able to acquire an on air local public affairs
spot on KKCR^Òs supposed ^Ófree speech soap box^Ô that no one bothers to
try anymore.

And their stories have spread to all their friends and neighbors. Some
people are going to be more resistant to trusting anyone at KKCR than
others but almost all will have to be asked- if not begged- to get
involved.

This has become the most intractable problem at the station. It is why
the staff and BOD have had zero success in trying involving non-whites
and others who have been rejected due to the so-called ^Ócontroversial^Ô
nature of their views..

Despite- or perhaps because of- the BOD and staff^Òs half-hearted,
disingenuous and occasional attempts to ask local people to participate
many feel that the only way to regain (or gain for the first time) the
trust of the community would be to have the BOD and Staff admit to taking
the wrong direction until now and promise to reverse the way they have
been doing business, if not apologize to the community for excluding them
in the past.....and do it over and over and over, every hour on the KKCR
airwaves and in newspapers and other media outlets until people believe
them.

Then and only people say will anyone even think about trying one more
time.

And, of course that would have to go along with an immediate expansion of
public affairs programming slots with more to come as people come back..
Right now there are no local public affairs slots and only ^Ómusic^Ô
programs are available and that is linked to volunteering to answer
phones and ^Óstuff envelopes^Ô rather than the talent and ability to
produce a public affair program.

And many say of course that all that must be accompanied by the
re-enfranchisement of the members in voting for all of the Directors, not
just ^Óone as an experiment^Ô as was recently implemented by the BOD in
order to ^Ódeal with^Ô long-time demands for democratic reforms without
actually having to change anything substantive.

Recently, even after the charges of racism in January, the BOD ignored
the publicly stated availability of now-retired, local commercial
talk-radio programmer Jimmy Torio- an outspoken no-nonsense leader in the
Anahola Hawaiian Community- to sit on the BOD when a vacancy appeared.
But they not only selected another white Princeville business associate
of some board members named John Gordon instead, they made him President
at his first meeting.

Even worse PNN was able to track a false rumor from multiple independent
sources of an imminent indictment for some vague sort of criminal
activity by Torio and track it back to board and staff members who
apparently tried to slander Torio through this anonymous whispering
campaign- all so they wound have an excuse not to chose him for the open
BOD position.

What will happen with the SPC or for the matter KKCR in general is
anyone^Òs guess. For that matter it^Òs anyone^Òs guess whether those who
want to use the SPC to further sweep KKCR^Òs almost total dearth of local
community based public affairs programming under the rug will say ^Óno^Ô
to the public actually being able to participate fully in interacting
with them without some ring-kissing ceremony.

Other than two or three, all PSC members have a history of trying to
perpetuate what may call the PBA-CWG the ^ÓPrinceville Business
Association of Connected White Guys^Ô- aka, the Kekahu BOD and their
staff.. Many question what the staff is even doing on the SPC, seeing it
as a conflict of interest.

So will the sub-groups be open to the public? MacDougall says yes but
this is reportedly news to many PSC members. And if they are will anyone
bother to show up to that first meeting and volunteer to participate?
That remains to be seen. And will those participatory requirements apply
to the public and SPC members equally? %They certainly should according
to MacDougall

Maybe we^Òll find out soon but for now it all depends on what happens
tonight.

Fred Dente, with his wife Marj actually wrote the original democratic
bylaws that were fraudulently stolen and replaced by current and
perennial BOD member Richard Fernandez and ex- BOD member Jon Scott who
established the KKCR self perpetuating ^Ójunta"-style governance in 1996
as reported by PNN in 1999 in a ^ÓParxist conspiracy^Ô television report.

And PSC member and CAB President Fred Dente says ^Óbasically
everything^Òs up for discussion or I won^Òt participate^Ô

We^Òll see if anyone decides to participate and if they do whether they
will get anywhere or just get another whuppin^Ò from the massahs at
what^Òs known as ^Óda haole radio station in Princeville^Ô.

But even if they try by participating in the groups and fail to get the
reforms they seek to be implemented by the PCS and BOD they will have a
platform and someone paid to take notes and will be able to submit a
report that will record and officially document for and through KKCR
what^Òs required before KKCR can be called a true community radio
station..
---------------------------

The following is the essay from consultant and facilitator Roxanne
MacDougall referred to in the article above.
..
Kekahu Foundation/KKCR Community Radio Strategic Plan
Update from Roxanne MacDougall, consultant

In September of 2007, I was approached by the Kekahu Foundation Board of
Directors to submit a proposal for strategic planning. My proposal was
accepted and application was made for grant funding to support my work.
The grant was not approved. Later in the Fall, I decided to go ahead and
begin the work after the first of the year. In January, I worked with the
board and station manager to clarify the planning process we would use,
which is fully described on the KKCR website, www.kkcr.com. I attended a
Community Advisory Board meeting where I presented the planning process
and responded to questions and comments.

A second grant application was submitted and the Board received notice
that it was approved a few weeks ago. The scope of work has turned out to
be more complex than I anticipated, but I am honored to be able to lead
this process and contribute to the foundation, station and community. At
the 10th anniversary of the Kekahu Foundation and KKCR, it is clearly
time for a shared vision and clear direction to bring the board, staff
programmers/volunteers, Community Advisory Board, underwriters, members,
listeners and greater Kaua`i Community together, working toward common
goals and outcomes.

In December, the suspension of three programmers occurred. While the
timing made it appear that the strategic plan was in response to this
situation, in fact it was not.

Additionally, since the strategic planning won^Òt be completed until this
fall and will be focused on longer term strategies and action plans, it
is not the best vehicle for resolving an immediate issue. However,
planning involves assessment of current reality. We just completed a
planning survey process which reached out to all the constituents
described above, and I am currently compiling the results of the surveys.
Any feedback regarding issues and potential improvements that come to
light as a result of the situation with the three programmers will be
included with all the other feedback in the report and will help to guide
the content of the vision and plan.

The Planning Team held an evening pre-planning session to establish how
they could best work together. Plan content was not discussed. They will
soon be having two back-to-back sessions to begin the formation of a
vision and key strategies, that will serve as starting points for input
from all constituents. I have found that this is the most efficient way
to launch discussion and input from a large constituent base.

These sessions will also begin the process of setting up the Strategy
Groups. Each key strategy will be addressed by a group of people, open to
all who are interested, who will meet several times to determine the key
goals, objectives and action plans that will be components of the overall
plan. Much of this session will deal with the logistics of forming the
Strategy Groups. Invitations to participate will be disseminated via
KKCR, email lists and other media, not the least of which will be word of
mouth.

Once the Strategy Groups get started, the Planning Team will hold three
sessions in which each Strategy Group reports on its progress. These
meetings will be open to the public and there will be time on the agenda,
after all reports are heard, for public comment and questions. A draft
plan will then be created, and presented to all the board members, CAB
and programmer/volunteers. Feedback will be received and the draft fine
tuned. A public meeting will then be held where additional input will be
received before a final plan is submitted to the board for approval.

There are truly many issues and opportunities for the foundation and the
station, as trite as this may sound. Some issues are long-standing and
some people feel hopeless about the potential for positive change. I
truly believe, and have experienced, that if people focus on the core
values they have in common (in this case, a love and passion for KKCR and
community radio), start seeing each other as well-intended people with
different points of view and not as enemies, and on a shared vision as
the beacon to guide them, holding an intent to work together for the
highest good of all, seeming miracles can happen. Empowerment lies in
being creators, not victims, no matter how a strong a case
can be made by any side for being a victim. It simply is a very
dis-empowered stance to take in life, and rarely gets us what we desire.

Author Richard Bach said ^ÓFight for your limitations, and they are
yours^Ô. If we focus on what we don^Òt want, that becomes our vision and
that is what is most likely to keep occurring. I advocate forming a
vision of a desired future, and being vision-led, not threat driven.
Intention is everything. Thought does create. I can^Òt always explain
how, but I have seen many wonderful, positive changes occur for
individuals and organizations over the years. This is my wish and
intention for the Kekahu Foundation and KKCR.
Posted by Andy Parx at 4:41 PM [icon18_email.gif]
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Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:54 -0700
From: Kathy Roberts <weerkhr@pacbell.net>
Subject: Video: Ex-State Dept Official: 27 Detainees Murdered

NADLER: Colonel Wilkerson, in your prepared testimony, you write that
^Óas I compiled my dossier for Secretary Powell, and as I did further
research, and as my views grew firmer and firmer I had to reread that
memo (of February 7, 2002), ^ÓI needed to balance in my own mind the
overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and
torture, which at its worse had led to the murder of 25 detainees and at
least 100 detainee deaths. We have murder at least 25 people in
detention. That was the clear low point [lower end of the range] of the
evidence.^Ô Your testimony said 100 detainees have died in detention; do
you believe the 25 of those were in effect murdered?

WILKERSON: Mr. Chairman, I think the number^Òs actually higher than that
now. Last time I checked it was 108, and the total number that were
declared homicides by the military services, or by the CIA, or others
doing investigations, CID, and so forth ^× was 25, 26, 27.

AT TODAY^ÒS HOUSE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS HEARING ON
TORTURE, LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL, TOLD
REP. JERROLD NADLER (D-NY) THAT OVER 100 DETAINEES HAVE DIED IN U.S.
CUSTODY, WITH UP TO 27 OF THESE DECLARED HOMICIDES....

HTTP://SUZIEQQ.WORDPRESS.COM/2008/06/20/LAWRENCE-WILKERSON-HUNDREDS-OF-DETAINEES-DIED-IN-US-CUSTODY-AT-LEAST-25-MURDERED/
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:02:38 +0000
From: Poetry Hawaii <poetryhawaii@hotmail.com>
Subject: re:VERSES is re:TIRING!

This is it!

Come bid farewell to re:VERSES in our last show ever AND watch the battle of battles in our final TEAM SLAM!

*****
The re:VERSES Poetry Collective presents:
The re:VERSES Summer Solstice Aloha Team Slam

Cash prize for the winner!

Tuesday, June 24, 2008
hosted by TravisT, Lyz, & B-Kwon, with vinyl on rotation by dj Mr.Nick
$5 cover
doors open @ 7pm, show starts @ 8pm

The show takes place at The ARTS at Marks Garage, a project of Hawaii Arts Alliance, at

1159 Nuuanu
(Nuuanu & Pauahi, Chinatown)
www.artsatmarks.com

for more info: contact Brenda at poetryhawaii@hotmail.com
or TravisT @ 808-753-4661.

Sponsored by Youth Speaks Hawai'i & Na Mea Hawai'i/Native Books.

Spread the word!
_________________________________________________________________

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:40:15 -0400
From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Subject: Disappeared News - 2 new articles

"DISAPPEARED NEWS" - 2 NEW ARTICLES

1. The press may be dying, but itâ^À^Ùs an American problem
2. Monitoring the media
3. More Recent Articles
4. Search Disappeared News

The press may be dying, but itâ^À^Ùs an American problem

by Larry Geller If you read the overseas newspapers via the web, you
probably already know that media are dying here in America but still
thriving overseas. We Don't Need to Catch the US Media's ColdJournalists
keep droning on about 'the death of their profession', but they're mostly
US journalists talking about the death of US journalism. By Peter
Prestonâ^À¦America's press, on this examination,....

Monitoring the media

by Larry Geller Now that there is one Republican and one Democratic
candidate for president, the media move into full swing. Anyone who
believes that the commercial (or â^À^Ümain streamâ^À^Ý) media are fair
and balanced is somewhat gullible, to be generous. Mostly the newspapers,
magazines and TV station owners feel they can be players in politics. Our
local papers are no exception to this. The news....

More Recent Articles

* June 23 Kokua Council Program: The Rush to Biofuels
* Skinned cadaver promo pic featured by Advertiser even on its
editorial pages
* Rat attackâ^À^Ôwhy we must defend our borders
* What the flag pin means to the world
* I smelled a rat
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:48:27 +1200
From: karaka <chooky.clarke@gmail.com>
Subject: [mana_wahine] FW: Asking And Receiving

From: "Artemis Goldberg" <panthertracker@myself.com>

Asking And Receiving Prayer And Meditation

Prayer and meditation are similar practices in that they both offer us a
connection to the divine, but they also differ from one another in
significant ways. Put simply, prayer is when we ask the universe for
something, and meditation is when we listen. When we pray, we use language
to express our innermost thoughts and feelings to a higher power.
Sometimes, we plumb the depths within ourselves and allow whatever comes
to the surface to flow out in our prayer. At other times, we pray words
that were written by someone else but that express what we want to say.
Prayer is reaching out to the universe with questions, pleas for help,
gratitude, and praise.

Meditation, on the other hand, has a silent quality that honors the art of
receptivity. When we meditate, we cease movement and allow the activity of
our minds and hearts to go on without us in a sense. Eventually, we fall
into a deep silence, a place that underlies all the noise and fray of
daily human existence. In this place, it becomes possible for us to hear
the universe as it speaks for itself, responds to our questions, or sits
with us in its silent way.

Both prayer and meditation are indispensable tools for navigating our
relationship with the universe and with ourselves. They are also natural
complements to one another, and one makes way for the other just as the
crest of a wave gives way to its hollow. If we tend to do only one or the
other, prayer or meditation, we may find that we are out of balance, and
we might benefit from exploring the missing form of communication. There
are times when we need to reach out and express ourselves, fully
exorcising our insides, and times when we are empty, ready to rest in
quiet receiving. When we allow ourselves to do both, we begin to have a
true conversation with the universe.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:26:25 -0700
From: mike reitz <mreitz@pacbell.net>
Subject: [livingnation] Ulu Maika Stones: a Hawaii/Marquesas Connection?

06/23/2008 at 4:00PM
Strange stone discs discovered on Eiao in Marquesas Islands

(Tahitipresse) - A French archaeologist has found several stone discs in
the Marquesas Islands similar to Hawaii's "ulu maika", which he thinks may
confirm there was human travel between the two island groups before the
first European discoverers arrived.

The strange discs discovered on the island of Eiao by Michel Charleux,
who has a PhD in archeology, are currently being scientifically analyzed
to determine what secrets about Polynesia's ancient past they may reveal.
Dr. Charleux made three visits to Eiao, the last one having occurred this
year. Upon discovering the stone discs, he came up with a theory that has
attracted attention in both Papeete as well as Honolulu.

The first missionaries and ethnologists from the American Mainland to
visit Hawaii later described several games played by the Polynesians
during the pre-European period. One such game was "ula maika", a
Polynesian version of lawn bowling. Dr. Charleux explains that for this
game the players used small lava discs or stones found on the beach
measuring four to five centimeters (1-2 inches) in diameter, often convex
on both sides, about three centimeters (1-inch) thick at the center with
a polished or smooth and an edge of about two centimeters. The players
kept the stones oiled and carefully wrapped in tapa cloth. The game of
ula maika was played by using the elliptical bowls made from stone. They
were bowled to stone marker discs called ula, hence the name ula maika.
The distance from the bowling area to the discs was about 18 meters (60
feet).

British explorer Captain James Cook discovered this game in the Sandwich
Islands, today's Hawaiian Islands, in 1788, when he found the Polynesians
using whetstone for something other than sharpening tools. While
ethnographic literature has described this game among the first Hawaiians
in detail, nothing has been written about any such game in the
pre-European period of the Marquesas Islands, suggesting that no such
game existed that far south of Hawaii. So Dr. Charleux was very surprised
when he discovered the strange stone discs during visits to Eiao in 1987,
2007 and 2008. Eiao has a reputation for the exceptional quality of its
stone-a fine-grained basalt-that was used to so much that the island
became a center for making stone tools that were used throughout the
Eastern Pacific.

As a result, stone adzes from Eiao have been found on neighboring
Marquesas Islands (Nuku Hiva, Ua Huka, Hiva Oa, Tahuata and Mohotani) as
well as on Tuamotu atolls and Tahiti's sister island of Moorea, 1,600
kilometers (994 miles) to the southwest and even on Magareva, 2,000
kilometers (1,243 miles) southwest in the Gambier Islands.

Many tests now have to be conducted to determine whether the strange
stone discs found on Eiao originally came from Hawaii. If Dr. Charleux's
theory is confirmed, it will be further proof of exceptional navigational
skills that characterized the ancient Polynesian's ability to leave their
islands in sailing canoes and return home after having traveled thousands
of miles. The stones are undergoing testing to determine their origin. If
the tests prove the stones originally came from Hawaii, this will be
another confirmation of the ancient Polynesian voyages between the two
island groups. However, if the tests show that the stones are originally
from Eiao, this opens up a whole new chapter of study to determine how
their existence escaped the notice of the first European discoverers and
missionaries and later the ethnologists and archaeologists.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 21:22:33 -0400
From: Richard Brown <chooky.clarke@gmail.com>
Subject: [mana_wahine] Re: The Best Article Every day

The Best Article Every day
16 Tips For Getting Good Sleep
Posted: 17 May 2008 12:17 PM CDT
Written by Gretchen Rubin

Thereâ^À^Ùs a lot of advice out there about getting good
sleep â^À^Ô itâ^À^Ùs VERY important. We quickly adjust to
being sleep-deprived, and donâ^À^Ùt notice that we arenâ^À^Ùt
functioning at a normal level, but lack of sleep really
affects us. If youâ^À^Ùre feeling blue or listless, try going
to sleep thirty minutes earlier for a week. It can really
help.

Here are tips that have helped me get good sleep:

Good habits for good sleep:

1. Exercise most days, even if itâ^À^Ùs just to take a walk.
2. No caffeine after 7:00 p.m.
3. An hour before bedtime, avoid doing any kind of work that
takes alert thinking. Addressing envelopesâ^À^Óokay.
Analyzing an articleâ^À^Ónope.
4. Adjust your bedroom temperature to be slightly chilly.
5. Keep your bedroom dark. Studies show that even the tiny
light from a digital alarm clock can disrupt a sleep cycle.
We have about six devices in our room that glow bright green;
itâ^À^Ùs like sleeping in a mad scientistâ^À^Ùs lab. The Big
Man has a new pet, a Roomba (yes, he loves his robot vacuum)
that gives out so much light that I have to cover it with a
pillow before bed.
6. Keep the bedroom as tidy as possible. Itâ^À^Ùs not restful
to fight through chaos into bed.

If sleep wonâ^À^Ùt come:

7. Breathe deeply and slowly until you canâ^À^Ùt stand it
anymore.
8. If your mind is racing (youâ^À^Ùre planning a trip, a
move; youâ^À^Ùre worried about a medical diagnosis), write
down whatâ^À^Ùs on your mind. This technique really works for
me.
9. Slather yourself with body lotion. This feels good and
also, if youâ^À^Ùre having trouble sleeping because
youâ^À^Ùre hot, it cools you down.
10. If your feet are cold, put on socks.
11. Stretch your whole body.
12. Have a warm drink. Supposedly warm milk contains
melatonin and trytophan and so helps induce sleep, but in
fact, a glass of milk doesnâ^À^Ùt contain enough to have any
effect. But itâ^À^Ùs still a soothing drink. My nighttime
favorite: 1/3 mug of milk, add boiling water, one packet of
Equal, and a dash of vanilla. A real nursery treat.
13. Yawn.
14. Stretch your toes up and down several times.
15. Tell yourself, â^À^ÜI have to get up now.â^À^Ý Imagine
that you just hit the snooze alarm and in a minute,
youâ^À^Ùre going to be marching through the morning routine.
Often this is an exhausting enough prospect to make me fall
asleep.
16. If you still canâ^À^Ùt sleep, re-frame: re-frame your
sleeplessness as a welcome opportunity to snatch some extra
time out of your day. I get up and tackle mundane chores,
like paying bills, organizing books, or tidying up. Then I
start the day with a wonderful feeling of having accomplished
something even before 6:45 am.

What am I missing? Are there some more great sleep-inducing
strategies out there?

If youâ^À^Ùd like to read more about happiness, check out
Gretchenâ^À^Ùs daily blog, The Happiness Project.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: welford@hawaii.edu
Date: June 25, 2008
Subject: The Orion Project (fwd)

if you watch the video, this guy sounds interesting.
http://www.theorionproject.org/en/

g
------

Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 17:48:35 -0700
From: Kathy Roberts <weerkhr@pacbell.net>

The Orion Project
Renewable Energy - Free for Everyone!

Imminent scientific breakthroughs will eliminate your
monthly energy bills (and the world's) FOR LIFE!

(Keep reading to learn how YOU can be a part of this
exciting opportunity!)

Dear Friends:

IMAGINE a device that could produce every watt of energy
your home will ever need.
IMAGINE this device being CLEANER than solar power, but
as free as the air you breath!
IMAGINE no more dependence on oil reserves run by
cartels in foreign lands.
IMAGINE no more nuclear waste or stripping of the
countryside for coal.

And finally...

IMAGINE this device being available EVERYWHERE on the
planet: from the apartments of NYC, to the desert communities in Africa,
and even to your favorite camping destination...

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For
knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world,
stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." - Albert Einstein

But do not confuse these exciting possibilities with
mere wishful thinking. These are very REAL technologies that exist RIGHT
NOW! What needs to be done is to quickly develop these technologies into
actual products you can buy at a local store, allowing you to unplug from
high monthly bills and unsustainable, polluting utilities.

Many of you know I have been working together with
scientists, inventors and leaders in society to advance a new, clean
technology energy system for 17 years. My vision for The Orion Project is
to provide free renewable energy for everyone. We're getting so close to
a solution, and I need your help today.

So how can YOU be a part of this?

DONATE NOW to join us on this incredible endeavor!

SPREAD THE WORD by forwarding this note to 10 others!

Your donation of $30 or more will make a huge
difference.
Referring 10 friends will help us reach our goal of $3
Million in a very short time.

We currently have 6 different technologies under
development. Any of them is potentially "the one" that will be the
breakthrough we need. Once we have rigorously verified the results, it's
a straight sprint to optimization and production. But, this is currently
being done on a shoestring budget! To make this occur in 12-18 months
versus 12-18 years, we need to be able to bring these scientists together.
And, we need to give them the necessary tools and assistance to develop
multiple technologies that will provide free energy perpetually for all
people.

Imagine $10/gallon in less than 5 years.
Imagine having to forego heating in the winter or A/C in
the summer.
Imagine familities having to decide between eating and
being able to drive miles away to work.
Imagine having more and more pollution in the water, in
the air, in your food, everywhere...

It's not a pretty future... that is why we need you now
to generously donate as much as you can to develop these new technologies
as quickly as humanly possible!

Cleaner than solar energy, but as free as the air you
breath!
Do not delay! Share this message with ten others, and
Donate today and as generously as you can afford! $30 or more makes a
huge difference in our future. We soon shall stand at the finish line
with our device in hand.

Toward a more sustainable and equitable future for all.

PS. Your donation is tax-deductible!

"Energy Cleaner Than Solar, And As Free As The
Air"

Our campaign needs you and your help. In order to
bring an alternative energy device into your home or place of business,
The Orion Project needs funding to build a prototype, test it and
manufacture it. When you donate a small amount (even $30 makes a huge
difference), we promise that 100% of your contribution goes directly to
the development of an alternative energy device.

DONATE NOW

In addition to making a tax-deductible
contribution, The Orion Project Team asks that you introduce us, and Dr.
Greer's vision of a renewable energy device, to 10 friends and family
members who are passionate about a cleaner, less expensive energy source.

REFER A FRIEND

We appreciate your support and interest and thank
you for spreading the word of our efforts to others. We will share our
progress on this, and other projects under development, in future
newsletters. Do you know of a scientist or inventor whose focus is on
alternative energy solutions? Please let us know. The Orion Project Team

Inventor Shares Energy Prototype with The Orion Project (TOP)

Mr. Bill Costantino and Dr. Ted Loder of TOP just
recently had the opportunity to meet with an inventor who presented a wide
range of possible technologies and prototype samples that may be capable
of producing clean and sustainable electric power - without using
polluting fossil fuels. If such a breakthrough is indeed possible, TOP
expects to have actual data from preliminary tests within 2-3 months!
(To read the full article, please click on Cutting Edge Inventor ).

We Hope You Can Imagine a Future Where Everyone -
Rich or Poor - Can Have Clean, Free Energy

The technology is just around the corner. Let
your imagination reach higher limits. We can move from imagination to
reality.

Reality is just 1-2-3 steps away:

Refer 10 friends to The Orion Project. Your
contact information will never be sold or exchanged:

1. REFER TEN FRIENDS

Donate what you can, but $30 or more makes a HUGE
difference:

2. DONATE NOW
Sign up for our newsletter and breaking news about
the Orion Project on our website:

3. FREE NEWSLETTER

Upcoming Lectures & Conferences

Dr. Greer will be speaking at the IIIHS Conference
scheduled for July 11-20, 2008. Please check the conference website for
more information.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 08:49:04 -1000
From: Brad Parsons <mauibrad@hotmail.com>
Subject: Matthew R. Simmons: The 'Peak Oil' Guru

MONDAY, MAY 26, 2008
Matthew R. Simmons: The 'Peak Oil' Guru

'Maybe the enemy is us...Grow food at home.' - Matthew R. Simmons, June
20, 2006, at a Pentagon-sponsored seminar series 'Energy: A Conversation
About Our National Addiction'

'I don^Òt think there is [a solution to the energy shortage]. The
solution is to pray. Pray for mild weather and a mild winter. Pray for no
hurricanes and to stop the erosion of natural gas supplies. Under the
best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered there will be no
crisis for maybe two years. After that it^Òs a certainty.' --Matthew R.
Simmons, 2003

Biographical Profile

'He graduated cum laude from the University of Utah and received a
Masters degree with distinction in Business Administration from Harvard
Business School. He then served on the faculty as a research associate
for two years. In 1974, he founded Simmons & Company International.
Simmons is the CEO of the world^Òs largest energy investment bank,
Simmons & Company International...speaks often and knowledgeably about
'peak oil.''

Some links on him:
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research.aspx?Type=msspeeches
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Simmons
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2574
http://www.energybulletin.net/17555.html
http://globalpublicmedia.com/matthew_r_simmonss_13_points_of_light
http://events.caltech.edu/events/event-4681.html
http://www.environment.harvard.edu/navigation2/Simmons.pdf
Check out those links, the gentleman likes to shock,
More on what this guy has to say later,
Aloha, Brad
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 09:37:25 -0700
From: David Pursglove
Subject: Climate Destruction Will Produce Millions of "Envirogees"

Mes amis,

I've been warning y'all about this nightmare for many moons now. Thill
runs a blog mostly about rock music, but read his whole short article, and
you'll see he's done his homework about climate change. He also knows and
documents here that the IPCC forecasts are very conservative and, as the
hard science guys at <realclimate.org> and NOAA have pointed out, have
already been exceeded. Faster and faster.

Handwriting's on the wall in Day-Glo paint, folks,

-=d=-

>Scott Thill | Climate Destruction Will Produce Millions of "Envirogees"
>http://www.truthout.org/article/climate-destruction-will-produce-millions-envirogees
>Writing for AlterNet, Scott Thill says, "Chew on this word, jargon
>lovers. Envirogee. It carries more 21st century buzz than its
>semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced
>individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental
>devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some
>much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by
>the end of this or the next decade."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:40:59 +0000
From: Ana <uriohau@gmail.com>
Toheroa' rich Maori language resource

Dargaville News | Wednesday, 25 June 2008
LITERARY LAUNCH: Te Kopuru kaumatua James Te Tuhi, with his book,
Toheroa.

Te kopuru kaumatua and beach kaitiaki ^Ö guardian ^Ö James Te Tuhi has
written a book in Maori about the iconic toheroa.

The full colour book, called Toheroa written by Mr Te Tuhi and translated
by Ross Gregory, has been launched at Te Kopuru Primary School. It was
written as a resource for children in schools that teach Maori language,
like Te Kopuru.

Mr Te Tuhi told the Dargaville and Districts News that the idea came out
of talking with people in the education field who could see the need for
such a resource in schools.

"I have gained a lot of knowledge over my 30 plus years about the coast,
as a kaumatua and kaitiaki and then the opportunity arose to put this
book together," Mr Te Tuhi says.

It includes a history of the shellfish, it's beginnings with how the spat
^Ö young ^Ö is carried by the wind from the sea foam with the help of
beach vegetation. The story also covers its main predators ^Ö birds, how
its numbers started dwindling and the conservation aspect of the species
in conjunction with the environment.

The book is suitable for children aged eight to 12 years and is available
through the Ministry of Education.

"It's not just a book you can buy on the shop shelf, education facilities
have to apply for it as part of their MOE resources but it is free to
kura kaupapa facilities," he says.

Mr Te Tuhi is a kaumatua of Oturei Marae. His hapu is Te Popoto and he is
from the Nga Puhi iwi.
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:38:33 +1200
From: karaka <chooky.clarke@gmail.com>
Subject: [mana_wahine] FW: Bear Medicine.........Living In All Realms

From: "Artemis Goldberg" <panthertracker@myself.com>

Living In All Realms Bear Medicine

When the image of a bear enters our consciousness, we may first notice
their size, strength, and power, but beyond their physical attributes lay
many traits that can guide us deeper into our experience of life. Their
abilities as hunters and powerful protectors of their loved ones are well
known, but you may also envision them on a quest for variety as they seek
out the flavors and scents of the world, first fishing, then enjoying
berries, or braving angry bees to indulge in honey. But their hidden
strength lies in the bear's ability to travel between the physical and
spiritual worlds, a talent that is recognized all around the world by
those who live in harmony with nature.

One way that bears access their inner world is during hibernation when
they find a safe and womblike environment to let their physical bodies
rest while their spirit travels. They travel through time, mentally
digesting and learning from their experiences, but they also travel beyond
the realm of mind and body into the dreamtime, where they are able to
create their goals and then be rejuvenated by the source of all life. In
this sacred space, they are connected to physical, mental, and spiritual
realms all at once and can find the balance that they need to reenter the
and continue successfully in the world.

Polar bears don't enter a deep state of hibernation like other bears, but
instead fluidly cross between realms on the physical plane as well the
spiritual. Their reflective, translucent fur makes them difficult to see
as they move across the frozen ice, blending into terrain covered with
snow, making them seem like they are shimmering between dimensions. They
move as easily in water as on land, agile and able in both worlds. They
can remind us that we are one with our environment, inseparable from it.
They teach us that while we can take time apart to connect with spirit, we
can also carry that awareness with us as we move through life, making the
spiritual indistinguishable from the material. By aligning ourselves with
bear energy, we fully embody the best of all worlds.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:48:08 -0500
From: nimchira <chooky.clarke@gmail.com>
Subject: [mana_wahine] Voices Health/Environment News

News from the Health and Environmental Communities.
Published since Nov, 2005
June 24, 2008

In This Issue:

Recalls today ...

Jardine Cribs -- Entrapment Hazard
http://list-manage.com/track/click?u=48290de6249ef2cecba9fe5de&id=c71f4bfc9a&e=0fa96e422d

Nordstrom Girls' Sandals
http://list-manage.com/track/click?u=48290de6249ef2cecba9fe5de&id=ee7ec78091&e=0fa96e422d

Dollar Tree Glue Guns
http://list-manage.com/track/click?u=48290de6249ef2cecba9fe5de&id=a268bbd3b6&e=0fa96e422d

Miracle Recreation Tire Swings
http://list-manage.com/track/click?u=48290de6249ef2cecba9fe5de&id=b3eba5f087&e=0fa96e422d

Arctic Cat Youth Model ATVs
http://list-manage.com/track/click?u=48290de6249ef2cecba9fe5de&id=e0971506d0&e=0fa96e422d
===============================

Oil companies given right to 'harass' polar bears
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19826613.500-oil-companies-given-right-to-harass-polar-bears.html

Health Plans Put Profit Margins Before Members
http://www.truthout.org/article/health-plans-put-profit-margins-before-members

Eat Shit and Die: Contaminated Veggies Are the Meat Industry's Fault. The
latest salmonella scare shows that even vegetarians are still at the mercy
of the meat industry
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=VXNcaiF1mLTNyP72EHwywZclaE%2BO%2Fj%2Fb

Paying More, Getting Less: Just Where Do America's Health Care Dollars Go?
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=krMOvRGncBfv00gEPEvWEpclaE%2BO%2Fj%2Fb

Ginseng Tea May Help Lower Blood Sugar
http://www.lifescript.com/NL/56053_20428878.htm

Diagnostic errors happen at alarming rates but remain underdiscussed.
Doctors' overconfidence is just one reason why.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=nuwmcMEGkQv7Y%2FJL4l18n0bEj1I5lViB

Microbes eating away at pieces of history.
http://newsletters.environmentalhealthnews.org/t/13662/3057/17441/0/?u=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5ueXRpbWVzLmNvbS8yMDA4LzA2LzI0L3NjaWVuY2UvMjRtaWNyLmh0bWw%3d&x=061c93d5
============

The news that is reported is not necessarily the viewpoint of Voices
Health/Environmental News. Nothing within this message should be construed
as endorsing, promoting or abetting any illegal or unethical activity. The
articles in this newsletter are not necessarily the opinion of the editor.
Material appearing here is distributed without profit or monetary gain to
those who have expressed an interest in receiving the material for
research and educational purposes. This is in accordance with Title 17 U.
S. C. section 107. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of International Copyright
Law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

All copyrights belong to original publisher.Under Bill s.1618 TITLE III
passed by the 105th U.S. Congress. This letter cannot be considered spam
as long as we include: Contact information & a Remove Link Reprinted under
the Fair Use Law: Doctrine of international copyright law.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

To send news reports, subscribe or unsubscribe send email to:
nimchira@cox.net Specify Voices, the Peoples News, or Voices
Health/Environmental News.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:17:35 -0700
From: mike reitz <mreitz@pacbell.net>
Subject: How the Rich Confiscate Natural Beauty from the Public

...I suspect some spots in Hawaii could be included in this assessment...
m
------

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: HOW THE RICH CONFISCATE NATURAL BEAUTY FROM THE
PUBLIC
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
Posted on June 17, 2008, Printed on June 21, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/88095/

I took a little vacation recently -- nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho,
before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air
crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the
Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with
Swiss-style bakery, multistar restaurant and "opera house." What luck --
the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale!
Nature and commerce were conspiring to make this the perfect
micro-vacation.

But as I approached the stores things started to get a little sinister --
maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet? --
because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless
cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been
outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since
sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to
be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions -- a few scenic
spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast.

About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug,
inexpensive one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Teton Range
from wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At that time, Driggs was where the
workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and
make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent
folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed and hike
along the same pine-shadowed trails.

But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs -- Paul Allen of
Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford --
transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven't
been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable
Jackson Hole. Where the wait staff and bed-makers live today I do not
know.

I witnessed this kind of deterioration up close in Key West, Florida,
where I first went in 1986, attracted not only by the turquoise waters
and frangipani-scented nights but by the fluid, egalitarian social scene.
At a typical party you might find literary stars like Alison Lurie, Annie
Dillard and Robert Stone, along with commercial fishermen, waitresses and
men who risked their lives diving for treasure (once a major blue-collar
occupation). Then, at some point in the '90s, the rich started pouring
in. You'd see them on the small planes coming down from Miami --
taut-skinned, linen-clad and impatient. They drove house prices into the
seven-figure range. They encouraged restaurants to charge upward of $30
for an entree. They tore down working-class tiki bars to make room for
their waterfront "condotels."

Of all the crimes of the rich, the aesthetic deprivation of the rest of
us may seem to be the merest misdemeanor. Many of them owe their wealth
to the usual tricks: squeezing their employees, overcharging their
customers and polluting any land they're not going to need for their
third or fourth homes. Once they've made (or inherited) their fortunes,
the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need --
housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into
overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms
displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can
easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make
college education a privilege of the upper classes.

There are other ways, too, that the rich are robbing the rest of us of
beauty and pleasure. As the bleachers in stadiums and arenas are cleared
to make way for skybox "suites" costing more than $100,000 for a season,
going out to a ballgame has become prohibitively expensive for the
average family. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, superrich
collectors have driven up the price of artworks, leading museums to
charge ever rising prices for admission.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the Pew Research Center finds happiness
to be unequally distributed, with 50 percent of people earning more than
$150,000 a year describing themselves as "very happy," compared with only
23 percent of those earning less than $20,000. When nations are compared,
inequality itself seems to reduce well-being, with some of the most equal
nations -- Iceland and Norway -- ranking highest, according to the UN's
Human Development Index. We are used to thinking that poverty is a
"social problem" and wealth is only something to celebrate, but extreme
wealth is also a social problem, and the superrich have become a burden
on everyone else.

If Edward O. Wilson is right about "biophilia" -- an innate human need to
interact with nature -- there may even be serious mental health
consequences to letting the rich hog all the good scenery. I know that if
I don't get to see vast expanses of water, 360-degree horizons and
mountains piercing the sky for at least a week or two of the year,
chronic, cumulative claustrophobia sets in. According to evolutionary
psychologist Nancy Etcoff, the need for scenery is hard-wired into us.
"People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they
like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves," she told
Harvard Magazine last year. "That's a place desirable to a predator who
wants to avoid becoming prey." We also like to be able to see water (for
drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade) and animals (whose presence
signals that a place is habitable).

Ultimately, the plutocratic takeover of rural America has a downside for
the wealthy too. The more expensive a resort town gets, the farther its
workers have to commute to keep it functioning. And if your heart doesn't
bleed for the dishwasher or landscaper who commutes two to four hours a
day, at least shed a tear for the wealthy vacationer who gets stuck in
the ensuing traffic. It's bumper to bumper westbound out of Telluride,
Colorado, every day at 5, or eastbound on Route 1 out of Key West, for
the Lexuses as well as the beat-up old pickup trucks.

Or a place may simply run out of workers. Monroe County, which includes
Key West, has seen more than 2,000 workers leave since the 2000 Census, a
loss the Los Angeles Times calls "a body blow to the service-oriented
economy of a county with only 75,000 residents and 2.25 million overnight
visitors a year." Among those driven out by rents of more than $1,600 for
a one-bedroom apartment are many of Key West's wait staff, hotel
housekeepers, gardeners, plumbers and handymen. No matter how much money
you have, everything takes longer -- from getting a toilet fixed to
getting a fish sandwich at Pepe's.

Then there's the elusive element of charm, which quickly drains away in a
uniform population of multimillionaires. The Hamptons had their
fishermen. Key West still advertises its "characters" -- sun-bleached,
weather-beaten misfits who drifted down for the weather or to escape some
difficult situation on the mainland. But the fishermen are long gone from
the Hamptons and disappearing from Cape Cod. As for Key West's characters
-- with the traditional little conch houses once favored by shrimpers
flipped into million-dollar second homes, these human sources of local
color have to be prepared to sleep with the scorpions under the highway
overpass.

In Telluride even a local developer is complaining about the lack of
affordable housing. "To have a real town," he told the Financial Times,
"Telluride needs some locals hanging out" -- in old-fashioned diners, for
example, where you don't have to speak Italian to order a cup of coffee.

When I was a child, I sang "America the Beautiful" and meant it. I was
born in the Rocky Mountains and raised, at various times, on the coasts.
The Big Sky, the rolling surf, the jagged, snowcapped mountains -- all
this seemed to be my birthright. But now I flinch when I hear Woody
Guthrie's line "This land was made for you and me." Somehow, I don't
think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New
York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New
York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to
Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~--------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:25:22 -1000
From: Dedibble DeKepalo <dekepalo@gmail.com>
Subject: [kaleimailealii] Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland: president and Princetonian
A century after his death, Cleveland is remembered for his integrity
Tuesday, June 24, 2008 1:35 PM EDT
By William Myers Special Writer

Cleveland's headstone in Princeton Cemetery. Beads, shells and coins are
left in tribute by supporters of Hawaiian sovereignty, recognizing
Cleveland's initial opposition to the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in
a coup d'etat in 1893.
Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

'In Grover Cleveland the greatness lies in typical rather than unusual
qualities. He had no endowments that thousands of men do not have. He
possessed honesty, courage, firmness, independence, and common sense. But
he possessed them to a degree other men do not.'

Allan Nevins, 'Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage' (1932), Pulitzer
Prize-winning biography

Princeton has hosted many presidents of the United States ^× yet only
one, Grover Cleveland, chose the town for his retirement home and final
resting place.

At the time, Princeton was considered a rural community, appropriate
for a man who enjoyed serenity and the outdoors. Cleveland's Scots
Presbyterian origins made the college and the former president a perfect
match. Although the assessment of his presidency varies considerably,
Cleveland may be a contender for one distinction ^× he certainly stands
among the most interesting and unusual of America's presidents.

Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837 ^× June 24, 1908) was born to a
Presbyterian minister in Caldwell, Essex County, N.J. While intending to
migrate to Ohio, he stayed with an uncle in Buffalo, N.Y., where he
realized that Buffalo presented him with more favorable opportunities.
During a successful career as a lawyer, Cleveland ran for sheriff of Erie
County and won. He was diligent and conscientious, always making certain
that goods bought for the office were of proper quality and quantity.
Wishing to spare an underling the stigma of executing criminals,
Cleveland personally attended to the executions of two murderers, pulling
the lever himself. His friends said he was ill for days as a result.
*
The conscientious sheriff was asked to run for mayor of Buffalo on
the Democratic ticket. He accepted with reluctance. During a successful
stint as mayor, he ran for governor and won.

Cleveland's rise to national prominence began with his fight against
rampant corruption in New York State. He was intolerant of influence
peddling and secret deals. If anyone sought to whisper a deal with him,
he would answer so loudly the entire room would realize what was
happening. Cleveland was known for his honesty, stubbornness, temper and
humility. This reputation for honesty in an age of corruption led
Cleveland to a run for the White House.

Cleveland's presidency includes many firsts. He was the first
Democrat to be elected following the Civil War; he was the first
president to be married in the White House; his daughter, Esther, was the
first child born in the White House, and as the 22nd and 24th president,
Cleveland was the first and only president to serve non- consecutive
terms (1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897). He was also the only president to
be born in New Jersey.

As president, Cleveland opposed public spending promoted by the
Republican-controlled Senate. He vetoed attempts to provide pensions for
Civil War veterans, specifying many fraudulent claims. The vetoes did not
end there ^× disabled veterans were denied benefits for non-combat
injuries. Cleveland held the record for presidential vetoes until
Franklin Roosevelt's third term.

During the 1888 elections, Cleveland won the popular vote, although
his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won the electoral vote.
Cleveland left the White House to open a law office in New York City. He
ran for president again in 1892, emphasizing his opposition to government
spending.

Soon after his return to office, a four-year depression descended on
the country. By the time he left office, his economic policies and his
initial failure to support a new Hawaiian republic had led to resentment
and ridicule. Many observers considered him the most detested man in
America.

On a brighter note, Cleveland modernized and strengthened the U.S.
Navy, including the construction of the battleship U.S.S. Maine; these
improvements led to victory during the Spanish-American War, which was
fought the year after his presidency.

Among the derogatory nicknames Cleveland was given during his
political career are "The Beast of Buffalo" and "The Hangman." Cleveland
enjoyed beer and cigars ^× he was known for his paunch. His nieces and
nephews called him "Uncle Jumbo." His habit of smoking cigars most likely
contributed to cancer of the palate, which was diagnosed in 1893. The
operation to remove the tumor was kept secret from the press and public.
In the guise of a yachting trip, the operation was performed at sea. The
press was deceived into believing the President had two teeth pulled. The
true story was not revealed until 25 years later.

There are other points of interest in Cleveland's presidency.
Cleveland occasionally answered the White House's single telephone if it
rang while his clerks were off duty. Cleveland became the first president
to appear in motion pictures ^× not precisely a film but a "picture
play," a series of sequential photographs viewed through a peephole
machine, titled "A Capital Courtship" and filmed by Alexander Black in
1896. Cleveland appears in three 1897 films made during McKinley's
inauguration.

Although these films are silent, Grover Cleveland's voice has been
recorded. A widely circulated recording of an 1892 campaign speech may
not be authentic, though another recording from this campaign, in which
Cleveland evokes the spirit of 1776, is believed to be genuine.

The first electrically illuminated Christmas tree at the White House
was unveiled in December 1895, an event credited with popularizing the
use of electric Christmas lights.

Princeton University celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1896, with
former President Cleveland and his wife in attendance. Just as Andrew
Carnegie had, Cleveland considered Princeton for his retirement.
Arrangements were made by his friend Andrew Fleming West for the purchase
of Commodore Robert Stockton's former home. The house, modeled after
Morven, still stands, and is privately owned; it is still known by the
name Cleveland gave to it as gratitude to his friend ^× Westland.

The former president was soon active with the university and, despite
having never attended college, accepted an invitation to join the board
of trustees. He negotiated with Andrew Carnegie to construct an
artificial "loch" on the Millstone River, similar to those he had
constructed in Scotland. Cleveland also took sides with West during the
Graduate School controversy against Woodrow Wilson. Students frequently
thronged his home during Princeton events such as football victories,
singing patriotic songs and firing volleys into the air.

Cleveland was an outdoorsman who refused to allow the most violent
storms from interrupting his fishing. He enjoyed duck hunting and
referred to his favorite shotgun as "Old Death and Destruction." These
pursuits occupied much of his life during his Princeton years. In
addition to his political writings, Cleveland wrote many articles for
sporting magazines and a book, "Fishing and Shooting Sketches."

While spending time at the Shore in Lakewood during the spring of
1908, Cleveland took ill. He was taken to his home in Princeton, where he
died on the morning of June 24, 1908. His funeral was attended by
President Theodore Roosevelt. Cleveland was laid to rest in Princeton
Cemetery. His humility is reflected in the inscription, which simply
states his name and vital statistics.
During the past few years, supporters of Hawaiian sovereignty,
visiting from Hawaii, have been decorating Cleveland's gravestone with
beads, shells and coins, as is Hawaiian custom, in tribute to his initial
opposition to the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in a coup d'etat in
1893.

One of the last avowedly anti- imperialist presidents, Cleveland, in
a scathing message to Congress, denounced what he saw at the time as an
abuse of U.S. power. He withdrew his opposition, however, when an
investigation concluded that the coup d'etat had indeed been an
indigenous Hawaiian affair. The Cleveland administration recognized the
government of the Hawaiian Republic in 1894. Spurred by the nationalism
aroused by the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Hawaii in
1898 at the urging of President William McKinley.

William Myers of Highland Park, writer and translator, is a
10th-generation descendant of Henry Greenland, one of Princeton's first
settlers (1681). Mr. Myers has a longstanding interest in Princeton
history.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:28:29 -1000
From: Dedibble DeKepalo <dekepalo@gmail.com>
Subject: [kaleimailealii] Giving the one drop

One Drop of Blood that Divides Us
By Mike Palcic, 6/24/2008 11:01:48 AM

U.S. District Judge Susan Mollway ruled that the Office of Hawaiian
Affairs may not discriminate against people who are 99.99 percent
non-Hawaiian. It's OK to withhold support for needy Hawaii residents who
are 100 percent non-Hawaiian.

Ah, that one drop of blood that divides us.

The judge has angered the fifty-percenters. They will appeal and the
needless fight will continue. But no matter where the line is drawn, it
will be an arbitrary and senseless boundary.

The result of any apartheid-like division will be pain, heartache and
continued conflict and disunity among us. Judge Mollway's observation
about detrimental results applies no matter where the division lies.

Hawaii should abandon efforts to establish funding or governing entities
based on bloodlines. We should endeavor to keep Hawaii united by
protecting equal rights in Hawaii for all who call Hawaii home.

Mike Palcic can be reached at mailto:bigmouse@hawaii.rr.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:30:29 +0000
From: Ana <uriohau@gmail.com>
Ponder the cost of NZ^Rs US-like
economic policies

We have all been sickened at the callous brutality in the killing of
New Zealander Navtej Singh last week.

This father of three young girls was shot during a botched robbery of
his bottle store in Manurewa.

This was not a planned, premeditated crime. It was a hapless, pathetic
attempt to get booze and cash.

There is argument about the police response and the time taken before
clearance was given for an ambulance to tend to Singh but while issues
like this are important, they are dwarfed by the bigger picture.

For a long time now, we have been on a relentless downward spiral of
social breakdown.

More than any other developed country we are undergoing nothing less
than the transformation of New Zealand into a mini-America, a place
where the rewards are great for the few while hopelessness grows for
the many.

We tend to think other countries are on the same path but we are well
ahead on the road to riches and desperation.

The gap between rich and poor has grown more quickly here than in any
developed country over the past 20 years. We have the least regulated
economy in the developed world but while we have low unemployment, this
merely masks the degree of poverty and alienation associated with the
working poor who inhabit our low-income communities.

But still we feign shock and outrage when the social consequences of
economic policy repeatedly smack us in the face.

We tend to respond in much the same way as the United States. We want
the Government to harden up on crime. Our major political parties, and
most of the minor parties, compete to see who can be the toughest on
lawbreakers. More and more extreme measures are proposed and then
adopted into policy because the greatest political dread is to be seen
as soft on crime. The mindless cry of the many is for tougher parole,
more prisons and harsher sentences.

So while we worry about underfunded schools, long hospital waiting
lists and poor public transport, we never question the amounts spent on
the bottomless, dead-end pits which are our prisons. Already in the
developed world we rank second only to the US in the proportion of our
population in jail. We will surely overtake them if we try just a
little bit harder.

The same people who want more in prison also applaud the arming of the
police with pepper spray, guns, rifles and Tasers, and are ready to
extend police powers at the drop of a hat. Civil liberties are for
pansies, they say.

Lobby groups, well funded by the corporate sector, advocate for harsher
sentences. Until, of course, someone is charged with the murder of a
tagger when suddenly these same people spring to the defence of the man
charged and claim the murdered tagger got what he deserved.

All this serves to divert attention from the reasons for rising crime.
We need to accept that the increased crime we face goes hand in hand
with extreme free-market economic policies.

It's no coincidence that New Zealand's economic policies more closely
resemble the US market model than other developed countries which have
not suffered social breakdown to the extent New Zealand has. The simple
truth is there is a strong correlation between the degree of
free-market economic policies and the degree of social breakdown. The
US and New Zealand have big doses of each. Countries such as Australia
have more moderate amounts of each and so it goes through to
Scandinavian countries which have much more modest amounts of both.

So while there's never any excuse for vicious criminal activity,
neither is there any excuse for us not to recognise this relationship.

The unregulated free market has seen our low-income communities flooded
with pokie machines, loan sharks, bottle stores and the garish glare of
fast-food outlets. Community attempts to control these have been
ignored by political parties which have been happy for this unregulated
market activity to flourish on the backs of poor families and poor
communities. Our leafy suburbs are not afflicted by these parasitical
services.

Labour is unlikely to form the next government and future historians
will point to its failure to deliver policies to build dignity and
respect for families and communities. Just this year, Labour reduced
business tax by 9.1 per cent while the working poor, facing big
increases in the cost of living, will receive around 3%. Beneficiaries
have received nothing and the 180,000 New Zealand children living in
poverty is the result.

Some applaud New Zealand's rush to become a US lookalike. The rest of
us should ponder the cost.

http://socialistaotearoa.blogspot.com/2008/06/john-minto-ponder-cost-of-nzs-us-like.html
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:34:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jewish Voice for Peace <info@jewishvoiceforpeace.org>
Subject: Sign the Petition to Obama and McCain about AIPAC Statements

We are deeply concerned by statements that both Senator McCain and Senator
Obama made at the AIPAC Conference. Please sign our petition calling on
Senators Obama and McCain to moderate their stances in the interests of a
peaceful future.

www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org

In particular:

1) Senator Obama declared that Jerusalem "must remain undivided."

We believe the future status of Jerusalem must be negotiated.

Since declaring on Wednesday at the AIPAC conference that Jerusalem
"must remain undivided," Senator Obama has backtracked and
indicated he is open to a shared Jerusalem. We welcome his new
statement, because the first one undermines the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations that Obama promises to promote. Indeed, declaring
Jerusalem as Israeli-ruled-only violates U.S. policy and
international standards, ignores Palestinian claims to East
Jerusalem and the more than 240,000 Palestinian residents there,
while implicitly supporting Israel's continued land expropriation,
demolition of Palestinian homes, and expansion of settlement
building, such as the 900 tenders issued to new housing for Jewish
Israelis in East Jerusalem this week.

2) Both Senators McCain and Obama promised enormous sums of unconditional
military aid to Israel.

We believe the U.S. must hold Israel accountable for using
U.S. weapons against civilians.

Numerous human rights organizations have documented Israel's
use of U.S. weapons against civilian populations - from the
basic maintenance of the Occupation of Palestinian
Territories to the bombing of civilian areas in Gaza to the
use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians in 2006. The
use of weapons against civilians is in violation of the Arms
Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act; even the
U.S. State Department itself believed it likely that Israel's
cluster bombs in Lebanon violated U.S. law. We implore the
Senators to hold Israel accountable to U.S. law and prevent
the use of our weapons against civilians.

3) Both Senators McCain and Obama continued to demand the exclusion of
Hamas from the negotiating table.

We believe peace agreement cannot be achieved without Hamas
at the table.

While we, too, deplore any and all violence against
civilians, we stand behind former President Jimmy Carter when
he claims that Hamas must be included in Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations. 64% of Israeli citizens want their government
to speak to Hamas, the democratically elected leadership of
the Palestinian people. Peace agreements are negotiated with
enemies, not friends. For the sake of achieving a just peace,
we ask the Senators to support the inclusion of Hamas in
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:49:12 +1200
From: mike reitz <mreitz@pacbell.net>
Subject: Kiribati President Declares Country Doomed

Independent.co.uk
Paradise lost: climate change forces South Sea islanders to seek
sanctuary abroad
By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent
Friday, 6 June 2008

After years of fruitless appeals for decisive action on climate change,
the tiny South Pacific nation of Kiribati has concluded that it is
doomed. Yesterday its President, Anote Tong, used World Environment Day
to request international help to evacuate his country before it
disappears.

Water supplies are being contaminated by the encroaching salt water, Mr
Tong said, and crops destroyed. Beachside communities have been moved
inland. But Kiribati - 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million
square miles of ocean - has limited scope to adapt. Its highest land is
barely 6 feet above sea level.

Speaking in New Zealand, Mr Tong said i-Kiribati, as his countrymen are
known, had no option but to leave. "We may be beyond redemption," he
said. "We may be at the point of no return, where the emissions in the
atmosphere will carry on contributing to climate change, to produce a sea
level change so in time our small, low-lying islands will be submerged."

President Tong, a London School of Economics graduate, said emigration
needed to start immediately: "We don't want to believe this, and our
people don't want to believe this. It gives us a deep sense of
frustration. What do we do?"

Kiribati - a former British colony called the Gilbert Islands - is home
to 97,000 people, most of them squeezed into the densely populated main
atoll, Tarawa, a chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Along with
other low-lying Pacific island nations such as Tuvalu, the Marshall
Islands and Vanuatu, it is regarded as one of the places most vulnerable
to climate change.

Erosion, caused partly by flooding and storms, is a serious problem in
Kiribati, which straddles the Equator and International Dateline. Most of
the land is as flat as a table. "We have to find the next highest spot,"
said Mr Tong. "At the moment there's only the coconut trees." But even
the coconut trees are dying - casualties of an unprecedented drought. The
country has had next to no rain for the past three years and meanwhile
the freshwater table is being poisoned.

Mr Tong was in New Zealand - which was chosen to host the UN's World
Environment Day after committing itself to becoming carbon neutral - for
talks with Helen Clark, the Prime Minister, whom he hopes to persuade to
resettle many of his people. But he also appealed to other countries to
help relocate i-Kiribati.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said
of Kiribati's plight: "It's a humbling prospect when a nation has to
begin talking about its own demise, not because of some inevitable
natural disaster... but because of what we are doing on this planet." The
world must find the "collective purpose" to combat climate change, Mr
Steiner said. "Unless everyone... on this planet takes their
responsibility seriously, we will simply not make a difference."

New Zealand already has a substantial population of Pacific Islanders,
but absorbing another 97,000 would strain its generosity. Besides, that
is just Kiribati. A report by Australian government scientists in 2006
warned of a flood of environmental refugees across the Asia-Pacific
region. New Zealand is already experiencing significantly increased
levels of migration from affected countries.

President Tong said he was accustomed to hearing national leaders argue
that measures to combat climate change would jeopardise their economic
development. But he pointed out that for Kiribati "it's not an issue of
economic growth, it's an issue of human survival". And while scientists
were still debating the degree to which the seas were rising, and the
cause of it, he said, the changes were obvious in his country. "I am not
a scientist, but what I know is that things are happening we did not
experience in the past... Every second week, when we get the high tides,
there's always reports of erosion." Villages that had occupied the same
spot for up to a century had had to be relocated. "We're doing it now...
it's that urgent," he said. "Where they have been living over the past
few decades is no longer there. It is being eroded."

The worst case scenario suggested that Kiribati would become
uninhabitable within 50 to 60 years, Mr Tong said. "I've appealed to the
international community that we need to address this challenge. It's a
challenge for the whole global community."

Leading industrialised nations pledged last month to cut their carbon
emissions by half by 2050. But they stopped short of setting firm targets
for 2020, which many scientists argue is crucial if the planet is to be
saved. For Kiribati, it may already be too late.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~--------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:22:14 -1000
From: Oahu Deeksha <ohm.oahu@gmail.com>
Subject: Fwd: FW: Deeksha on Moloka'i-Sun 13 & 20-11am to 3pm

If you feel like a short trip to Molokai for deeksha and some amazing
chanting, fly over on Sunday July 13 or July 20th.
Rev. Sue Crane

-----Original Message-----
From: Zelie Kuliaikanu'u Duvauchelle [mailto:zelie@zelied.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:01 PM

In July Lucia and I will be on Moloka'i and we are inspired to do two
deeksha days at our home.

We thought Sunday would be a good day and we hope you can join us for
one or both. Please invite family and friends. We will bring in
chanting, a short meditation, and deeksha. A pot luck will follow for
those who wish to stay. Please bring your swimsuits, towels, laughter,
food and drinks. Donation $10

Namaste & Aloha,
Zelie & Lucia

For more information about deeksha/oneness blessing:
https://www.onenessmovement.org/index.cfm?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:26:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: PuaNani Rogers <kealiagirl2004@yahoo.com>
Subject: [mana_wahine] ***hooknet***PROTECTING NA IWI KUPUNA AT NA HALA O
NAUE-KAUAI- LANAKILA KAKOU!

Aloha to all my ohana and friends,

WE WERE VICTORIOUS IN OUR KU`E! MAHALO KE AKUA, NA AKUA, NA AUMAKUA, NA
TUPUNA AND ALL THE SPIRITS THAT SURROUNDED US!

All was peaceful and spirtual at Naue this morning. There were no arrests
and we stopped the construction of Brescia's house at the burial grounds.
Chief of Police Darryl Perry publicly announced that in his opinion the
area is a grave site of 30 known burials. He said this on the news at six
o'clock KGMB channel 9. Check out the brief story they did on us this
morning. They may show it again on their next newscast at 10.

Mahalo to all for your prayers and well wishes from our people here on
Kauai and other islands that responded. Mahalo to the Police Dept. for
their understanding and for helping us with our ku`e.

We will continue to be persistent and show our resistance to the hewa of
burial desecrations! Don't know if and when the construction crew will
return. We do know that Mr. Brescia is saying that he is going ahead with
his plans to build!

We'll have to wait and see. On June 4th, we stopped the construction and
today, June 24th, we did it again!

All is well at Naue for the time being and our na iwi kupuna are resting
in peace.

PuaNani, networking wale no

Puanani Rogers
Ho`okipa Network - Kauai
Kapaa, Hi 96746
Ko Hawaii Pae Aina

Think Kanaka maoli......Think Ahupua`a
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:54:38 -1000
From: Lc <palolo@hawaii.rr.com>
Subject: [kaleimailealii] Fw: Franchise Renewal Public Input Meeting and
Forums

hi all, if you folks are free thursday evening, please join us at the palolo
studio for this talk story.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gigi Miranda" <gmiranda@olelo.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 5:37 PM

Aloha,

This is the meeting date & franchise renewal update for Olelo and community
access television. The community's input and support is requested.

Olelo will be holding informational forums at our different media centers
prior to the meeting.

For members of the Public:
Thursday, June 26 at 6:00 pm at Palolo CMC
Monday, June 30 at 6:00 pm at Waianae CMC
Wednesday, July 2 at 6:00 pm at Mapunapuna CMC

For Educators:
Tuesday, July 1 at 6:00 pm at Mapunapuna CMC
Thursday, July 3 at 10:00 am at Mapunapuna CMC

For Government officials/agencies
Wednesday, July 2 at 2:00 pm at State Capitol Room 309

Please come with your input and questions. If you could please forward this
far and wide to your networks. Thank you for your continued support of
community access television!

Mahalo,
Gigi Miranda

Gigi Miranda, Media Resource Coordinator
Mapunapuna Community Media Center
Olelo Community Television
1122 Mapunapuna Street
Honolulu, HI 96819
Tel: 808.834.0007, xt-124
Fax: 808.836.2546
gmiranda@olelo.org
www.olelo.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Olelo Community Television [mailto:info@olelo.org]
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 5:47 PM

Aloha,

To follow up on our last email regarding the upcoming Franchise Renewal
process, we wanted to let you know that the Department of Commerce and
Consumer Affairs (DCCA) has identified a date for community input.

The meeting will be held:

Tuesday July 15, 2008
McKinley High School
Hirata Hall
1039 S. King Street
4:00pm to 6:30pm

The DCCA is also accepting written testimony until July 31.

A link to the hearing notice and more info about franchise renewal can be
found on our website here:

http://www.olelo.org/news_franchise_renewal.htm

To inform you about the Franchise Renewal process and to answer
questions you may have, 'Olelo will be conducting a series of
informational forums at our Community Media Centers.

The dates are:

Palolo CMC, Thur 6/26 6p
Waianae CMC, Mon 6/30 6p
Mapunapuna CMC, Wed 7/2 6p

We hope you can join us. If you are unable to make the forums, please
plan to come to the DCCA's community input meeting on July 15.

We will continue to keep you up to date. This is a critical time for
input as your thoughts, needs, and vision can help define the role of PEG
Access television for the next 15 to 20 years. Please feel free to
forward this to others who are interested in Community Access.

Mahalo for your continuing support of PEG Access in Hawai'i.

Keali'i Lopez

President and CEO
---------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Steve Tayama
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 3:28 PM
Subject: RE: Native Hawaiian Constitutional Convention ALERT ALERT ALERT -
false information

Aloha, This so called 'press release' is totally false. Bump jus
got off the plane from Guatemala and he told me that the release is
totally UNAUTHORIZED and makes false claims. It also quotes Bumpy
inncorrectly. Please disregard the press release. Please notfy all your
contacts. st
-------

From: Terri Kekoolani
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 1:39 PM

Press Release Source: Nation of Hawaii

Native Hawaiians Move Toward Independence ... Date Set for
Constitutional Convention
Monday June 23, 8:25 am ET

WAIMANALO, Hawaii, June 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Dennis Kanahele, a
Native Hawaiian and a leader in the Hawaiian Independence movement,
announced today that a Constitutional Convention will be held on
September 2nd and 3rd at a location in the Hawaiian Islands which
has been determined and will be announced at a later date. 'We have
established an informational website at
http://www.hawaiianindependence.com and are actively seeking
contributions on a worldwide basis to help cover the expenses of
the Constitutional Convention and the elections which will occur
shortly after a Constitution has been adopted.'

The Constitutional Convention has been convened in response to
petitions signed by thousands of Native Hawaiians. Mr. Kanahele
stated, 'We will adopt a new Constitution to replace our original
Constitution which was in place in 1893 when the United States
armed forces invaded our country and overthrew our democratic
government.' Mr. Kanahele noted that, 'The Constitutional
Convention will set the date of the vote by Native Hawaiians to
approve the new Constitution and for the simultaneous general
elections to elect a Legislature and a President and Vice
President.'

Mr. Kanahele further stated that, 'Once our new government is in
place we will enter into negotiations with the United States to end
our status as a colonial possession of the United States and to end
over 100 years of the political, economic and cultural suppression
of our people. We look forward to a peaceful and just resolution
with the United States, to becoming a member of the United Nations
and to renewing our participation as a member of the international
community of nations.'

Further information, and a draft of the proposed Constitution, are
available on the Internet at http://www.hawaiianindependence.com.

Contact:

Thayer Lindauer
Communications Director
Nation of Hawaii
tlindauer@gmail.com
618-659-9168

This release was issued through eReleases(TM). For more
information, visit http://www.ereleases.com.
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:09:41 -0700
From: `Ehu Kekahu Cardwell <ehukekahu@koanifoundation.org>
Free Hawai`i TV - "Rebuilding The Nation"

FREEHAWAII.INFO PRESENTS
FREE HAWAI`I TV
THE FREE HAWAI`I BROADCASTING NETWORK
TODAY'S VIDEO COMMENTARY -

"REBUILDING THE NATION"

How Will A Free Hawai`i Be Built?

Is There A Plan? Can Anyone Participate?

Watch & Find Out Here - http://FreeHawaiiTV.com - We've Got Your Answers!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:54:45 -1000
From: Lc <palolo@hawaii.rr.com>
Subject: [livingnation] Fw: Hale Na`au Pono Rally 6.24.08

Photos from rally today at the State Capitol.

If you can't see the pictures in this email, click here to see it in a
web browser:
http://olympus.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=bhucg3l.7xf2ahal&x=0&y=jojluz&localeid=en_US

Lynette has shared photos with you.
Hale Na`au Pono Rally6.24.08
(1 album)
Photos from today's rally at State Capitol
- Lynette
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:28:26 -1000
From: Global Media Productions <info@globalmediaproductions.com>
Big Island INNER FIRE Retreat & Adventure - July 10 - 13

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Airfare not included. We have a group rate on Hawaiian Air for just $140
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With over 6 years, 44 workshops including to Bali last year, over 570
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:19:37 -1000
From: Tane . <Tane_1@msn.com>
Giving the one drop - comment

I responded to this at Hawaii Reporter:

This is about a criminal trying to hide the crime he's committed; a liar
that tries to hide the truth by telling more lies to cover the initial
lie, the criminal using this tactic to conceal the crime. In this case,
there are witnesses present with evidence to prove the criminal acts. The
criminal use his influence and pushes the lie until he actually believes
it to be true and gets others to believe what he states is credible.
Meanwhile, the witnesses maintain their testimony which is documented and
tell their children what they witnessed; knowing the truth about the
crimes and who is responsible.

To further cover up the crime, the criminal establishes his own flawed
rules. As his lies unravel, the truth emerges and received with great
disbelief. Many are in denial for living a lie and feel used. The
criminal is too powerful and big for them to do anything so they think by
supporting the criminal, they will save face and their interests will be
protected. They are looking for the victims to be merciful, forgiving,
and let bygones be bygones. They are trying to make the victim feel
guilty for the crimes committed against them. It's like the woman who was
raped was at fault for being raped.

This is what happened to Hawai'i. Instead of attacking the perpetrator,
U.S. Americans are attacking the victims. They feel their loss is greater
than the Hawaiians whose country this is, which is under U.S. Belligerent
Occupation. They are in disbelief at this revelation and don't wish for
it to be true; but one cannot change the facts.

While trying to appear legitimate, the U.S. applies its own rules in
attempting to cover its tracks of crime. In their arrogance, the U.S.
begins to treat the native Hawaiians like Native Americans, figuring that
it worked with them; it should work with the Hawaiians. Setting blood
quantum is an American system in reducing its obligation to the native
population.

This was the intention when they created the Hawaii Homestead Act. They
figured that it was a dying race and they were already successful in
killing off many Hawaiians which shouldn't take long to get rid of them
all. Those who weren^Òt killed off were depleted by blood through
intermarriages which they thought that whatever foreign blood they
inherited would dominate their Hawaiian. What was forgotten is that the
Hawaiian Kingdom was multi-ethnic and regardless of the amount of
Hawaiian blood one has, this was their homeland and the root of their
ancestors.

Settlers from the US continent will never have that attachment; nor be
able to comprehend that attachment since they severed theirs' to live
here with a lifeline connected to the US continent. They should realize
they are a neo-immigrant country and their ancestors immigrated to North
America. It bugs them that they don't have the roots we have in our own
country and that their predecessors left their homeland to settle in a
foreign land. Europeans did not go to North America to assimilate with
the people there but to be isolationists to force others to assimilate to
them, their culture, heritage, and newly developed WASP society of
transplants. If you want to stay, denounce your US citizenship and
naturalize to our country and its Polynesian Hawaiian Society.

DMK Inciong, II
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:50:22 -0400
From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Subject: Disappeared News - George Carlin

"DISAPPEARED NEWS" - 1 NEW ARTICLE

1. George Carlin
2.More Recent Articles
3.Search Disappeared News

George Carlin

I can do no better than to send you to this article in The Nation:
George Carlin, American Radical The article links to this YouTube video,
might as well put it here as well: Â Technorati Tags: George
Carlin...

More Recent Articles

* The press may be dying, but itâ^À^Ùs an American problem
* Monitoring the media
* June 23 Kokua Council Program: The Rush to Biofuels
* Skinned cadaver promo pic featured by Advertiser even on its
editorial pages
* Rat attackâ^À^Ôwhy we must defend our borders
________________________________________________________________________________

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:02:36 -0700 (PDT)
From: apunohu <noreply-comment@blogger.com>
New comment on local stuffs special --
PROTECTING IWI KUPUNA AT N....

apunohu has left a new comment on your post "local stuffs special --
PROTECTING IWI KUPUNA AT N...":

ALoha AUntie Nani how was Japan? I could not get to the protest, but as
you know my daughters are the neices of jeff, and are from wainiha and
haena born and raised, so i felt the right to comment on this issue on
their behalf since they are not old enough to do so themselves. I fif a
lot of research for this letter so im confident in its accuracy.I called
kaiulani, and gave her my encouragement and love the day before this. By
the way i heard they tried to serve you with a restraining order by
slapping a paper on a pohaku and declaring you served. HEWAHEWAHEWA.Well,
anyways, this is a letter i emailed to Katy Rose to have read that day,
in case there was trouble i thought maybe it could helpI want to add a
little postscript to this.These bones were not kauwas, they were ussually
buried with animal carcasses or disposed of in very unceremonious ways,
or used as burials under heiaus and such. THis was a tahitian kapu system
practice, and Kauai was immune from this influence for about 500 years,
so especially in Wainiha and Haena, the lines were New Caledonian, Cook
Islander, New Guinea and Maori. These practices were not part of the ways
of this particular area pre contact.The fact that only women and children
were buried there can have 3 factors:One, it was kapu to be buried with
the mentwo, these were victims of diseasethree: These were victims of
famine4: These were victims of a battle. However, I see that these were
not victims of a battle, so I would expect this was an area set aside
specifically for women and children, and may have been disease or famine.
THis would require research done in a respectful manner to determine the
exact cause of death. Well anyways I hope you like this letter.Love and
alohaAnnie Walaau and the girlsDear Katy Rose:Please ask someone to read
this statement tomorrow as circumstances beyond my control prevent me
from attending . My children are Shanarae Kaulananapuaikaikamaolino
Donovan, Seanne Kananiahiahi Donovan Richards and are part Hawaiian
decendents of the people of Wainiha and Ha'ena. THe lines are:Kekahuna,
Piilani and Puulei., and Chandler. These are in part, royal lines.
However, the people buried in the sands of these areas were commoners,
also known as the "Kuaaina" and Makaainana" respectively. THe meanings of
these words are : THe back of the land and the eyes of the land. This was
a rich and thriving area consisting of many thousands of individuals and
was something of an area of commerce for the many peoples populating the
Na Pali Coast area in pre contact times. Because many families would
travers in and out of Na Pali and filter into the more central areas of
Ha'ena, Hanalei and Wainiha, the burials here are quite numerous. You
might ask why the commoners were buried in the sands and the Ali'i in the
mountains in caves, or in special hidden areas, or in certain parts of
reefs. That answer is a simple one. As the common people were the back of
the land, and the bones and eyes of the land in life, so are they in
death. The bones are ussually preserved well in the sands, which retains
their mana and power, such as a commoner could have. It was not the great
mana of the Ali'is, but it was enough to give grace to the life of the
average person living in this area. Walking on the sands, fishing,
harvesting from the sea and the edge of the sand, and honoring the old
Gods and Godesses by ceremonies on the sands as well as just gathering
there was something that the common people always did. Women brought
wauke to the fresh water streams feeding the areas to soak, and the
lauhala was often soaked here in the oceans. Hawaiian salt was made in
the crevices of rocks here, and near here the auwais kept the lois fed
with water. So here, the bones of the commoners could remain with the
people and be a comfort, and they could feel the aumakuas here, and
sometimes here the whispering voices in the soft winds of a full moonlit
night. Now perhaps you may all understand that this is not a insult to
bury a person in the sand just becasue the label of commoner is attatched
to them. There is meaning and purpose to everything that was done before.
As our lives change, and buildings are built over these protective bones,
the lifeline of the spirit world of the old ways is cut off from the life
of the commoners today, just when they may need them the most.
Geneologically many people are related to the commoners bones buried
here, which may also include those very minor kahus of small ilis in the
area which there were many precontact. Living between two worlds, these
stewards of the lands, both males and females were not recognised ali'is
but many did have alii blood, and were most often the unrecognised and
illigitimate ofspring of higher ali'is. They were given minor
stewardships, and were buried in the sands as well. Today, as you who are
fortunate enough to be here gather, remember your purpose is to educate,
and bring to light the truths and facts surrounding the true old ways,
since there is no other reason to protect these special comforting bones
of the commoners than to continue the unbroken line of geneology. Let us
also remember that without the commoners the Ali'i could not survive.
this was a symbiotic relationship, and each upheld the other. The
commoners were also the instant armies, since there was no standing army,
they made the bulk of the forces while minor ali'is led small groups.
Many of these are buried here as well, so many warriors also lie here,
both male and female. Children, when they died were often diefied as they
were buried and beleived to take shapes of plants, animals and birds
found in the immediate areas. People were often buried with tools, and
posessions for their use in the afterlife. The preservation of ancient
burial sites is paramount, with the advent of mitrochondrial DNA testing
for the modern Hawaiian to be able to trace their geneological roots, for
science to study and observe, and for cultural anthropoligists to begin
to discover new truths about the lives of the people of one of the most
sacred areas in all of the Pacific. I entreat all gathered here today, to
understand that this is not a protest so much as it is an educational
opportunity for a window into the past, and a respect of the people whose
ancestors are laying amid these sands. They are not criminals. They are
standing up for their deeply held beleifs in their own families rights to
respectful rest after death, as is the right of any human being. Consider
this. What if someone decided to build over an area of a public graveyard
merely becasue it held no illustrious members of the town, but was merely
populated by the remains of maids, housewives, chefs, handymen, artisans,
cashiers, clerks, secretaries, laborers, farmers, and teachers. They
claimed that these graves were not important enough to be concerned
about, and besides they had the right to build their house. How would you
feel as an average citizen about that? You would probably be charged with
emotion, and want to do something about it. Although this is a simplified
versian of what is happening today, Ka'iulani Huff and others are
standing up against what they see as the desecration of a graveyard that
holds not only bones and DNA but memories, and an culture preserved in
its cool deapths. I ask for cool heads, comfort, empathy and a change of
heart for those that would paint this in a dark light and see it as what
it is. THe mourning of a family for their loved ones, their right to
greive, and the right of the dead to be left in peace. Much love, respect
and aloha Anne Punohu
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:05:37 -0700
From: mike reitz <mreitz@pacbell.net>
Kauai Police Chief Halts Construction

Chief halts home work
A Kauai landowner, after getting permits, sought to build on an ancient
burial ground
By Tom Finnegan
tfinnegan@starbulletin.com

KAPAA, Kauai >> Kauai Police Chief Darryl Perry stepped into a six-year
legal battle yesterday, stopping the construction of a Haena home set to
be built on a Hawaiian burial ground.

Perry halted the work on the home, on an oceanfront parcel once owned by
movie star Sylvester Stallone, saying that any work done on the property
would violate state laws of grave desecration.

However, the owner of the property, Joseph Brescia, had clearance from
nearly a half-dozen state and county agencies, including the Burial
Council of Kauai and Niihau, the state Historic Preservation Division,
the Kauai Planning Department and others.

"I now have no choice," Brescia said in a prepared statement faxed to the
Star-Bulletin by his lawyer, Walton Hong. "I have done what I could after
learning of the burials."

Thirty graves have been found on the small lot, which sits on Naue Point,
just off Alealea Road.

But opponents of the construction say there could be many more unearthed
if the house is built.

Perry did not return a call seeking comment.

The roughly 75 protesters who showed up to stop the construction workers
from disturbing the graves yesterday morning declared the chief's
decision a victory.

"It was very nice and peaceful," said activist Puanani Rodgers. "The
construction guys were very cooperative ... and I want to thank them for
all their consideration."

Brescia, however, said he was "disappointed" to hear of Perry's decision.

He filed an injunction in early June, asking the Circuit Court to keep
the protesters from blocking construction after about a dozen people
disrupted a blessing ceremony at the site June 6. It's unclear whether
Perry will also be named in the lawsuit.

"At this time, my attorneys and I are proceeding with all necessary steps
to continue construction in accordance with all of the government
approvals received for the work," Brescia said in his statement.

Brescia's problems started in 2003, when his shoreline certification was
challenged. After having it recertified, the planning commission imposed
a setback from the shoreline that was more than what was required by law.

Brescia appealed to Circuit Court and won in 2005.

However, in 2007, after Brescia had approvals to build his home, the
state Supreme Court overturned his Circuit Court win, saying that the
setback originally imposed by the county should be made valid.

It was in 2007 that construction workers originally found the burials,
court records indicate.

Brescia went through every state and local agency, and finally received
approval to build his home in April, despite protests from native
Hawaiians, who said the land was a cemetery and should be left alone.

Since April, a number of Hawaiian activists have camped out at the site
and placed torches at the graves.

"We want to support, protect and preserve" the cemetery, Rodgers said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:17:25 -1000
From: Viviane Lerner <vivlerner@gmail.com>
Subject: Lingle swings ax on state budget

>>State agencies' nonessential services will have less funding<<
>>The biggest loss, $8.5 million, is to the Department of Education,
which has the largest budget of any state department. The Department
of Health was next at $4.4 million. $3.9 million Human Services<<
"Nonessential," eh?
===========
http://starbulletin.com/2008/06/25/news/story01.html
Lingle swings ax on state budget
State agencies' nonessential services will have less funding

STORY SUMMARY »
Fiscal belt-tightening means state agencies will have about $33
million less for nonessential spending in the fiscal year that begins
next week.
Gov. Linda Lingle announced the new budget restrictions yesterday,
saying tighter fiscal management is needed during the current
"softening" of the economy.
Lingle urged departments to accelerate construction projects to
invest in long-overdue repairs and upgrades to public facilities,
while also promoting construction activity to stimulate the economy.
The biggest loss, $8.5 million, is to the Department of Education,
which has the largest budget of any state department. The Department
of Health was next at $4.4 million.

FULL STORY »

By B.J. Reyes
bjreyes@starbulletin.com

State agencies will have about $33 million less in the next fiscal
year for nonessential services and programs under new spending
restrictions being implemented by Gov. Linda Lingle.

Feeling the pinch

Gov. Linda Lingle has implemented a 4 percent restriction on non-
essential spending for all state departments. According to the state
Department of Budget and Finance, the departments most affected include:
Education: $8.5 million Health: $4.4 million University of Hawaii:
$3.9 million Human Services: $3.5 million Accounting & General
Services: $2.5 million

Lingle, in a memo to department heads this week, said the
restrictions were needed because of slower tax collections and a
"softening economy."
"The restrictive policies for FY '09 are the first step in managing
the changes brought about by a new fiscal environment," Lingle stated
in the memo sent Monday. "As we look toward the next round of budget
preparation for fiscal biennium 2009-11, we can expect the
continuation of this cautionary stance plus other fiscal measures
that are necessary to safeguard the state's general fund."
The biggest restriction, $8.5 million, is to the Department of
Education, which has the largest budget of any state department. The
Department of Health was next at $4.4 million.
Restrictions apply only to discretionary, or nonessential, spending,
and residents should not expect any impact to essential government
services, said state Budget Director Georgina Kawamura.
She noted that her agency has been in talks with department heads
about the potential restrictions, so the memo should not come as a
surprise.
"I don't think there's cause for anyone to panic," she said. "Our
directors are well aware of the delivery of public service that's
being counted on with regard to our communities and those kinds of
things."
The 2009 fiscal year starts Tuesday.
At the close of the 2008 session, lawmakers passed a supplemental
budget for the upcoming fiscal year that trimmed $44 million from the
$5.3 billion operating budget passed a year ago.
Lawmakers cited the slowing of the state's economy and bleak
forecasts from noted economists.
Their budget anticipated revenue growth of about 3.5 percent in the
current fiscal year. Weeks after the session ended, the state Council
on Revenues -- which sets the forecast upon which the state budget is
based -- predicted growth of only 3.3 percent.
Rep. Marcus Oshiro, House Finance Committee chairman, said he was
pleased to see Lingle's recognition of current revenue trends.
"I am happy that the Lingle-Aiona administration finally decided to
take off the rose-colored glasses and honestly report what's going on
in the local and national economy," said Oshiro (D, Wahiawa-Poamoho).
Oshiro was referring to a speech Lingle gave on April 25 -- the same
day lawmakers completed work on all bills -- in which she painted an
upbeat picture of the state's economy following recent airline
shutdowns and the closing of Molokai Ranch.
Speaking to the Hawaii Economic Association, Lingle blamed the media
for highlighting negative stories about the nation's economic woes
and contended that Hawaii's economy is not so bleak.
In her latest memo, Lingle urged departments to accelerate
construction projects to invest in long-overdue repairs and upgrades
to public facilities, while also promoting construction activity to
stimulate the economy.
Oshiro said he is hopeful the new memo indicates a willingness to
work with the Legislature to address budget shortfalls that may occur
in upcoming years.
"We'll be going through a re-prioritization of what we consider
essential government services -- both in scope and scale -- and look
at where we may have to make some hard decisions and may have to make
some cuts," Oshiro said.
=====------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:28:51 -0700
From: mike reitz <mreitz@pacbell.net>
Subject: [livingnation] Hawaiian groups plan own concon document

HonoluluAdvertiser.com
June 25, 2008
Hawaiian groups plan own document
Activist Kanahele sees constitutional meeting as way to unify factions
By gordon Y.K. Pang
Advertiser Staff Writer

Hawaiian rights activist Dennis Pu'uhonua "Bumpy" Kanahele is gaining
support for a proposed Native Hawaiian constitutional convention aimed at
unifying the historically fractured Hawaiian independence movement.

A Native Hawaiian convention would be separate from a ballot issue in
November asking voters whe-ther they want a convention to amend the state
Constitution.

A Native Hawaiian concon was supported yesterday by several members of
Native Hawaiian organizations, including the Kanaka Maoli Tribunal
Komike, the Kaua'i-based Koani Foundation and Hui Pu, an umbrella
organization of various independence organizations.

The Hawaiian Kingdom Government, which is occupying the mauka lawn of
'Iolani Palace and "conducting business" there as its first step toward
reclaiming Hawai'i from the U.S., also supports the intent of a
constitutional convention, said spokes-man Orrin Kupau.

Kanahele said a petition drive to gather supporters for a Native Hawaiian
concon has drawn more than 20,000 signatures.

Kanahele, leader of the Independent and Sovereign Nation State of Hawaii
(Nation of Hawaii), said the constitutional convention would create a
"free, fair and impartial process" for sovereignty advocates to discuss
how they can collectively move forward.

He said convention participants may ultimately decide they favor federal
recognition for a Native Hawaiian entity through the Akaka bill as
advocated by the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs instead of sovereignty.

But that's not likely, given that most sovereignty groups don't think
federal recognition will offer enough in compensation for the 1893
overthrow of the Hawaiian government and that a Hawaiian government
entity should be negotiating with an international tribunal rather than
the U.S. government.

Kanahele said that all Hawai'i residents, not just Native Hawaiians,
would be welcome to take part in the process, unlike OHA's federal
recognition process which calls for only Native Hawaiians to participate.

Several sovereignty leaders yesterday said they support Kanahele's call.

"We have too many rival groups, and most of them are not even talking to
each other," said Kekuni Blaisdell, chairman of the Kanaka Maoli Tribunal
Komike. "I'm in favor of a meeting and talking, and talking, and talking.
We know it's going to be a long and difficult process."

Blaisdell said he would like a concon to "form a provisional government
so we can deal with the U.S. and other nations. We will need to invoke
international law, because we're not going to get anywhere with the
United States."

'Ehu Cardwell, of the Kaua'i-based Koani Foundation, said his
organization supports a constitutional convention as proposed by Kanahele
because "everybody's welcome at the table."

Cardwell said a key reason groups would support a constitutional
convention is that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which has played a
major role in lobbying for the Akaka bill and federal recognition of a
Hawaiian governing entity, would not take the lead at a constitutional
convention.

"OHA will not control the process," Cardwell said. "The people will
control the process. It's from the ground up, not from the top down."

The Hawaiian Kingdom Government's Kupau said, "We support any intent
which recognizes the unification of the Hawaiian people." He added,
however, that he did not know if the government's legislative council had
yet decided to participate in a convention.

Ikaika Hussey, a spokesman for Hui Pu, said the group had also not yet
discussed participation. But personally, Hussey said, he likes the idea
of a concon.

"I think everyone's goal is freedom. Discussion is always good," Hussey
said.

Kanahele urged those in favor of a constitutional convention to go to his
Web site, bumpykanahele.com, for more information and to find ways to
obtain the petition.

Also yesterday, Kanahele said he is disavowing himself from a press
release sent to the media Monday by Thayer Lindauer, a California-based
attorney who described himself as the communications director for Nation
of Hawai'i.

The press release, which attributed quotes to Kanahele, formed the basis
of a story about the planned constitutional convention which ran in The
Advertiser's online edition yesterday.

Lindauer could not be reached for comment yesterday.

The press release speaks of a concon where a president, vice president
and legislature would be elected and "enter into negotiations with the
United States to end our status as a colonial possession."

Kanahele told The Advertiser last night that while the scenario described
could be one outcome, it will be up to those attending the convention to
decide.

Lindauer's press release also said the convention would take place Sept.
2-3 at a place in Hawai'i yet to be determined. Kanahele said that's a
tentative plan and that the dates were established to satisfy potential
supporters of a convention who wanted a definitive date.

Lindauer "jumped the gun" on that news, Kanahele said.

The release and Web site also encourage people to contribute money to The
Nation of Hawaii Trust Fund, which is being administered by FullOn
Holdings Inc., a Cambria, Calif.-based company.

Kanahele said the fund is to support the constitutional convention.
FullOn Holdings is headed by Richard Kamahele Fi-gueroa, whom Kanahele
described as a Hilo-born associate.

Figueroa, reached last night, had no comment.

Kanahele said Nation of Hawaii is examining its relationship with
Lindauer, FullOn Holdings and its other Mainland associates.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:04:00 -1000
From: Viviane Lerner <vivlerner@gmail.com>
Subject: Inside Baltimore's Home-Birth Underground

http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=15918
6/25/2008
Home Made
Inside Baltimore's Home-Birth Underground
MICHELLE GIENOW

LIKE ANY 8-DAY-OLD BABY, Jimmy Gaffney spends most of his time either
nursing or sleeping. Peacefully alternating between the two while
cradled in his mother's arms in the family's sun-dappled Hamilton
backyard, the robust newborn looks like a promotional photograph for
parenthood. And yet, so far as the state and city of his birth are
concerned, this baby does not officially exist.

He was born at home, in May, with only his mother and father, Alana
and Matt Gaffney, in attendance (his two excited siblings, who had
slept through most of the five-hour labor that culminated in his 4
a.m. birth, came in just as their father was placing the freshly born
baby on his mother's chest). The family is in no rush to notify the
authorities about Jimmy's birth; they have been taking it easy for
the past week, sticking close to home and bonding with the new
addition while Alana recovers. A call to register his birth with the
Baltimore City Health Department will summon a visit from a home
nurse, and the Gaffneys are not quite ready for outsiders,
particularly bureaucrats asking a lot of questions about a process
they regard as utterly natural--and completely private.

Although they have health insurance that would have paid for a
hospital delivery, Alana and Matt managed Jimmy's birth entirely on
their own; Alana even administered her own prenatal care. Neither is
a doctor; she is trained as a nurse and Matt is a wildlife biologist,
so there is a certain amount of medical/scientific experience between
them, but it's hardly the job experience most people look for when
hiring a birth attendant. In fact, 99 percent of women in the United
States give birth in a hospital; the remaining one percent of births
include all births outside the hospital, including accidental births
(as in, say, the back seat of a taxi).

Thus it is impossible to say how many of the nation's annual 4
million births take place at home. Not all states track births
outside of hospitals, and those that do typically classify
intentional home births together with the kind attended by taxi
drivers. Furthermore, in Maryland and other states where certified
professional midwives cannot legally practice, many midwife-attended
births end up being recorded as unassisted to keep the midwife off
the bureaucratic radar.

Disenchanted with a medical system that treats birth as an emergency
instead of an emergence, seeking an alternative to the tubes and
wires and monitors of a high-tech birth, some women are stepping
outside of the hospital to have their babies. And some say their
numbers are growing.

But is home birth safe? No studies exist for unattended births like
Jimmy Gaffney's, but there are dozens demonstrating that, in low-risk
pregnancies, home births attended by a midwife are as safe for mother
and baby as going to the hospital. The largest and most
scientifically rigorous home-birth study to date, sponsored by the
Canadian government, followed all 5,418 planned home births across
the United States and Canada attended by Certified Practical Midwives
in 2000. The authors concluded that babies are born as safely at home
as they are in the hospital, and with vastly fewer interventions like
cesarean section, the use of forceps, or episiotomy; other recent
studies, including a 1995 study of 11,788 intentional home births
under midwife care published in the Journal of Nurse Midwifery, have
reached the same conclusion.

Despite evidence that it is safe, "I think some people shy away from
home birth because of the responsibility," Alana Gaffney says. "If
you're at home, attended or unattended, and something happens to the
baby, it's your fault for not seeking appropriate medical care. But
if you go to the hospital and something happens, you're guilt free.
No one is going to say anything to you--it's just one of those things
that happens."

THE GAFFNEYS' DECISION to have an unassisted birth was not made
lightly. The births of their first two children, Joseph, now 10, and
Keira, now 3, took place in medical facilities; Joseph was born in a
hospital, Keira in a birth center. "We are pretty mainstream," Alana
says. "We own our home. We drive a minivan." But when she became
pregnant with Jimmy, Alana knew she wanted to do things differently.

"The first two times there were a few issues with both my care and
the baby's care," she says wryly. While in labor with Joseph, Alana
says she was given pitocin (a synthetic hormone that speeds up
contractions) without her knowledge or permission, and another drug
caused her to hallucinate. During Keira's birth at a now-defunct
birth center, each time Alana's labor plan diverged from birth-center
policy the staff threatened to transfer her to the hospital for a
cesarean section; even worse, immediately after Keira was born, they
took action that potentially endangered the neonate. There was
meconium stain--feces passed by the baby in utero, which happens in
approximately 13 percent of births--when Keira was born, and, as
Alana explains, "studies show that if the baby is alert and crying,
suctioning in the presence of meconium will do more damage than good--
it can cause pneumonia. I repeatedly told them not to do it, and even
gave them the reference number of the article, but they just did it
anyway. It was maddening."

So for Jimmy's birth the Gaffneys sought a setting where no one would
be threatening them, giving medication without consent, or performing
potentially harmful treatment on the baby: their own home. In
deciding to do it themselves, they skipped right over the usual
alternative to a hospital delivery: birth at home under the care of a
midwife.

"We did initially consider using a midwife," Alana explains during a
visit shortly before Jimmy's birth. "But if we were looking for
something that was truly intervention-free, and we knew what we
wanted and we knew how to do it, then we finally decided we should do
it ourselves" A daunting proposition to some, perhaps, but not to
Alana, who has attended births as a nurse. "I don't have any
apprehension about the birth, or about labor," she says. "In 95
percent of births there is no special equipment but two hands to
catch the baby. While there are things that could happen, it doesn't
take a rocket scientist to deal with those things."

It's a decision that mystifies Evelyn Muhlhan, who has worked as a
Certified Nurse Midwife for 22 years. "If you want to be left alone
while you labor, that's fine, but have an attendant in the next
room," she says. "For the most part, birth is normal and very few
women will have problems, but when a problem does arise are you going
to be equipped to handle that?"

A veteran of a recent unintentional unassisted birth, Brigitte
Jacobson wishes that Muhlhan could have been in the same room when
her son Noah was born in September 2007. Jacobson's plan for the home
birth of her second child definitely included the presence of her
midwife, but labor progressed more quickly than anticipated, and
Brigitte began pushing Noah out before Muhlhan could get there.
Although everything ended well, Noah's shoulder got stuck, and
Jacobson, along with husband Mike and doula Bobbie Humphrey, spent a
terrifying couple of minutes trying to dislodge the baby before he
suffered oxygen deprivation. Noah's birth was one of the 5 percent
where complications arise, but Jacobson is confident that her animal
instincts saved the day: Although her helpers urged her to remain on
her back, she says, "I just felt the overwhelming urge to stand up--
when I finally did, he just fell out of me. Bobbie actually dove down
and caught him!"

Despite the drama of Noah's birth, Jacobson says she has never
regretted her decision to birth at home: "If I had encountered the
same shoulder dystocia at the hospital, I may have ended up with an
injured baby or a C-section."

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF OBSTETRICIANS and Gynecologists (ACOG)
strongly opposes home birth--at its annual conference in 2006, the
organization gave out bumper stickers reading home deliveries are for
pizza. The official ACOG statement on home birth says in part,
"Unless a woman is in a hospital . . . with physicians ready to
intervene quickly if necessary, she puts herself and her baby's
health and life at unnecessary risk."

Unlike the majority of his ACOG colleagues, Dr. Robert Atlas, chief
of obstetrics and gynecology at Mercy Medical Center in downtown
Baltimore, is not against home birth per se. "I think in the correct
patient demographic, home birth is an acceptable alternative," he
says. However, he explains, "the problem most obstetricians have with
home birth is that [at the point] when we get involved, nothing is
good, things have gone awry, so we have a bad taste in our mouths
because of being placed in that situation."

On the other hand Dr. Victor Khouzami, chairman of obstetrics at the
Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, agrees wholeheartedly
with ACOG's anti-home birth stance. And, although he confirms Alana
Gaffney's contention that the incidence of complications in a normal,
low-risk pregnancy is 5 percent or less, he looks at this statistic
from the diametrically opposite view. "The incidence is low, yes, but
the severity--the `what if'--well, in medicine we do a lot of testing
to find that one in a thousand," Khouzami says. "And I don't think
that anyone is willing to be that one in a thousand. It's fair to say
that anyone doing a home birth is taking at least a 1-in-1,000 risk."

Advocates for home birth, however, argue that in always looking for
that one in 1,000, that 1/10th of 1 percent, has resulted in
hospitals treating every birth, even in low-risk mothers, as a
potential emergency. Instead of trusting the human body to bring
forth babies as they have for millennia, requiring mainly time and a
supportive atmosphere, risk management has transformed birth into a
heavily medicalized event where the laboring woman, bristling with IV
tubes and multiple probes and monitors, must remain on her back in a
hospital bed--which may be the worst possible position for
effectively pushing out a baby.

Well, yes, says Khouzami. "If you are here long enough, we are going
to do something to you. It's a matter of time. I will be the first
one to admit that," he says. "The trade-off is that I am going to
make sure that nothing happens to you or to the baby.

"So which risk do you want? You can't have it both ways."

Khouzami oversees Maryland's most prolific labor and delivery
hospital ward: GBMC physicians and staff delivered nearly 5,000
babies in 2007. Almost half--42 percent--of those babies arrived via
surgery.

The cesarean section is unquestionably one of modern medicine's
greatest achievements. Still, it is major surgery and carries risks
that for the mother include death, hemorrhage, infection, organ
damage, uterine rupture, and threats to future fertility. Nor are
babies necessarily better off: Studies show that the risk of post-
cesarean infant death rate is double that of babies delivered
vaginally. Long-term side effects include substantially elevated
rates of asthma and severe food allergies in cesarean babies.
(Researchers are beginning to understand that the cruise down the
birth canal serves a biological purpose, squeezing amniotic fluid
from the baby's lungs to facilitate breathing, and colonizing the
baby's digestive tract with healthy bacteria that help protect
against future food allergies.) Other neonatal risks include,
according to ACOG's own research on cesareans performed in low-risk
pregnancies, "increased fetal hemorrhage, asphyxia, birth trauma,
electrolyte abnormalities, and use of mechanical ventilation,
suggesting that high cesarean delivery rates themselves are not
protective."

Overall, Maryland hospitals had an average C-section rate of 32.2
percent in 2006; nationwide the same-year average was 31.1 percent.
In plain terms this means one in three of babies in our state is now
born via surgery. (According to Atlas, Mercy's 2007 overall cesarean
rate is 30 percent, though the cesarean rate for deliveries by its
staff midwives is "5 to 10 percent at most.")

Both Maryland and U.S. cesarean rates are double the World Health
Organization's recommended proportion (for developed countries) of 15
cesareans per 100 births. Beyond that number, a 2005 WHO survey
reports, "the maternal injury and death consequent to major abdominal
surgery begins to eclipse the lives and health saved."

There are, of course, births where a cesarean is medically necessary,
and even the most ardent birth activist readily admits that properly
administered C-sections have saved the lives of countless women and
their babies. What is startling, however, is the rapidly increasing
number of cesarean deliveries in the United States experienced by low-
risk pregnant women who have uncomplicated labors. According to the
National Center for Health Statistics, "Twenty-four percent of first
births to low-risk women in 2003 were cesarean births, an increase of
one-third since 1996."

"There's always a reason to cut," says Barbara Stratton, a former
doula who now leads the Baltimore chapter of the International
Cesarian Awareness Network ( ICAN). "Your labor's too early, your
labor's too late. Your baby's too little, your baby's too big, you're
too little, you're too big. You have too little amniotic fluid or you
have too much amniotic fluid. They come up with reasons sometimes
verging on the bizarre about why they have to section." And many
women, she says, are not properly notified of the risks to their
health, fertility, or life.

Mercy's Atlas says that obstetricians are in a tough position. "What
we're held to now is the expectation that every patient who delivers
a baby should have a perfect baby," he says. "Cesarean rates keep
rising because obstetricians can't practice in a safe environment
legally." Fetal monitoring during labor produces a paper trail and,
Atlas explains, "any time you have a bad outcome you then go back and
say, `It was here, this drop in the heart rate right here that caused
the baby to suffer.' So most likely any time there's an abnormal
fetal heart rate tracing they're going to do a cesarean section." In
other words, when doctors perform a cesarean it is seen as doing
everything they can--they get sued for the C-section they don't do.

Escalating cesarean rates have grabbed headlines in recent years, but
one trend behind the trend--a corresponding jump in the artificial
induction of labor--has garnered less attention. Induction occurs
when, rather than waiting for labor to start on its own, medical
personnel jump-start things by administering pitocin, a synthetic
version of oxytocin, the "birth hormone" secreted by the body during
naturally occurring labor. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention report that in 2005 the rate of induction of labor was
22.3 percent, a number that has more than doubled since 1990.

"I can't tell you how many times people asked me during this
pregnancy, `So when are you getting induced?'" Alana Gaffney says.
"One woman even told me, `The last two weeks don't count.' Inductions
and interventions have totally just become how we, as a society,
picture giving birth."

"Don't. Be. Induced," Mercy's Atlas says emphatically. "Inductions
themselves increase the rate of cesarean twofold."

Beyond creating contractions in an otherwise nonlaboring woman,
pitocin is also used to speed up existing labor that is not
progressing quickly. That goes against everything one Baltimore
midwife believes in.

"Some women just take a long time to have their babies," says
"Denise," a midwife who has practiced locally for years and who asked
that her real name not be used to protect her from possible arrest.
"Birth is a normal bodily process. It's not a medical event. When you
treat it like one you're creating problems. Lots of times what I see
with hospital births is them tinkering around the edges, cranking up
this thing and that thing, to move everything along according to
their outline of how a birth is supposed to go.

"They tweak the labor until there is a problem, and then they
`rescue' the woman from that and say, `Aren't you glad you were
here?'" Denise contends. "It happens all the time. And the woman
feels sure that something terrible would have happened if they hadn't
had their baby in that hospital. But the truth is if she hadn't gone,
none of those problems would have arisen."

NICHOLE KIRBY COULD BE A POSTER CHILD for the process of one
intervention leading to a series of interventions resulting in an
unwanted cesarean. The March 2006 birth of her first baby, Alana, at
a local hospital, was artificially induced and turned into a grueling
30-hour marathon of suffering and fear. "I got the epidural and all
progress stopped," she recalls. "I had at least eight or nine
internal exams. I had doctors coming in in pairs of two to do exams.
They didn't really talk to me or even introduce themselves. It felt
incredibly violating--there were at least 15 different people in that
30-hour period poking around my genitals, and that's not cool."

Although the baby was not in distress, Kirby says, "They did the C-
section as a policy decision--it was 24 hours after my water had
broken. It was so traumatizing, I was crying and begging them not to
give me a C-section. They just started tying me down to the table--I
had no idea that it's part of surgery. I was terrified, and they
didn't explain anything. I was hyperventilating and shaking so much
they thought I was having a seizure." The surgery proceeded, and
Alana was quickly born.

"I heard her crying and asked if I could see my baby, and they said I
couldn't see her. So I tried to ask how she was doing, what color
eyes does she have, what color hair, and nobody would even answer me.
They were just busy doing what they were doing to my body, but it's
like I wasn't there. I was so exhausted after 30 hours of not
sleeping or eating and then the surgery that I just passed out and
woke up half an hour later when they were done with my stitches." It
was another hour before Kirby got to hold her baby, she says,
"because even after I got to the recovery room I was shaking so badly
from the epidural I couldn't control my muscles."

Ultimately, Kirby says, "It was a really, really horrible experience,
but it's the standard way things are done, and what a lot of women
are told is that this is what you have to go through to have a baby,
and you just have to suck it up for the baby's sake."

Perhaps it is not a surprise that when Kirby became pregnant for the
second time she was reluctant to return to a hospital. Initially, she
says, she wanted a midwife-assisted home birth but was told "because
of the [previous] cesarean, no nurse-midwife would deliver me at
home." Ultimately, Kirby saw no other option except to do it herself:
"I had a friend who was studying to be a midwife one day, and she had
an unassisted birth herself, so I had her come and keep me company. I
did a lot of reading and research to learn about possible
complications, how to handle it if something went wrong."

But this time, in September 2007, at home instead of the hospital,
everything went smoothly. "I had a 14-hour labor at home," she says.
"I could move around, eat and drink. Lying in the tub with a hot
towel over my stomach took away a good portion of the pain." Kirby's
baby boy Robbie arrived without incident and, she says, this time the
experience was exhilarating: "I wanted to do it again, right away!"

IS THERE ANY SCENARIO where women can have it both ways--freedom to
labor and birth in their own time and their own way, yet do so within
the medical safety net?

"There are a lot of people who believe that all you need are midwives
and high-risk obstetricians," Mercy's Atlas says. "The reality is,
many midwives have been driven out of practice themselves because of
the difficulty of being able to afford malpractice insurance. What's
sad is that midwives, dollar for dollar, get paid less than
obstetricians for doing more. They spend more time with their
clients, they have better interactions with their clients, and they
get paid less."

Local midwives and doulas have good things to say about Mercy's
support of alternative birth choices. "I think that it has been
helpful to our institution to have women come in who do want to do
things differently, because it makes the team have to think
differently," Atlas says. Mercy prides itself on its in-house
midwifery practice, where women can move about--"We have multiple
telemetry units, so you can walk around and still be on the monitor,"
Atlas notes--and eat during labor, as well as choose any position,
including in a water tub, for pushing.

"We just had a woman deliver a 12-pound infant with a midwife, and
she would never have delivered vaginally with an obstetrician," Atlas
says. "The question is, did she get the correct care? Or was that too
risky to have allowed that patient to have delivered vaginally? The
fallacy is, `Ooh, doctors say we gotta get this baby out before it
gets too big,' and there's no data suggesting that is of benefit."
Atlas says, whenever possible, "labor should be natural. It is not a
pathologic process but a natural process and should be treated that
way."

In many other hospitals, however, all bets are off. "An issue with
natural birth at the hospital is, if you ask most hospital staff what
that means, they think it just means labor without an epidural or
painkillers," Kirby says. "Natural birth is so much more than that.
It is birth unfolding in its own time, without a deadline, without
pitocin, without monitors, without IVs, without being stuck in a bed
or deprived of food."

"Doctors will say that they support natural birth," local nurse-
midwife Evelyn Muhlhan says. "I think they think they support natural
birth, but when it comes down to it they really don't. In the
majority of hospitals, the system is really set up to handle one kind
of birth, and the pressure is on to get with the program."

Atlas, Kirby, and Muhlhan all agree that the best thing that women
can do is educate themselves about birth, and then seek out a health-
care provider that will support their birth plan. "Be an advocate,"
Atlas says. "Make it clear when you come through the door: This is
how I'd like things to go."

Actually, it appears that the majority of women would like things to
go as painlessly as possible. In the 1990s, birth centers became a
popular alternative: home-birth comfort and freedom with a medical
safety net. Recently, however, birthing centers have been going out
of business at a brisk rate. Due partly to slim profit
margins--"Vaginal deliveries are not a moneymaking enterprise,"
Barbara Stratton observes--and partly to ever-rising liability
insurance, birth centers are losing out to hospitals that have wisely
co-opted the birth-center ambiance (comfortable homey setting,
complete with mood lighting, Wi-Fi, and iPod docks) while also
providing epidurals.

Ahh, the epidural. Epidural pain relief is an anesthetic/narcotic
cocktail administered continuously into the lower spine via catheter.
Ideally, when administered at the right level at the right point
during labor, the epidural dulls the pain of contractions while
allowing the laboring mother enough sensation to be able to push the
baby out when the time comes. When administered in the wrong amount
or at the wrong point during labor, however, epidurals can slow or
even stall contractions altogether, leading to pitocin or a C-section
for "failure to progress." It can also leave a woman too numb to
push, necesitating a vacuum extraction device to help the baby out
through the birth canal.

GBMC's Khouzami reports that, among women birthing there, demand for
epidurals is such that "we had to create a dedicated OB anesthesia
department to make sure epidurals are given 24-7. . . . I would say
the majority, certainly more than 90 percent, want an epidural."

"In our world today we are very comfortable," midwife Denise muses.
"People just don't do anything that's hard anymore. We don't even
have to suffer the heat or the cold anymore, we drive everywhere. You
don't really get that challenge that helps you to grow, to mature--
avoiding those challenges seems to be the order of the day. And I
think that is translating to how we give birth in this society."

But birth in the sweaty, grimacing model--birth that puts the labor
into labor--still holds attraction for some. "I got interested in
home birth because when I talked to women who had done it, they all
talked about how it was so incredible, a peak experience like nothing
else," Brigitte Jacobson says. "I had never heard anyone talk about
their hospital birth like that and I wanted that experience."

Having had it, she describes it as "incredible--like the best drug in
the world, free and nonaddictive."

FOR THOSE UP TO THE CHALLENGE of a no-pain-relief birth, midwives
Evelyn Muhlhan and Denise are at your service. For home birth in
Baltimore they are the two to see--pretty much the only two.

In Maryland, only Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) like Muhlhan are
allowed, under state law, to "attend births habitually or for hire."
CNMs have nursing degrees with graduate-level training in delivering
babies; due to burdensome regulations and skyrocketing liability
insurance, nearly all of them work in hospitals or as part of a
medical practice. As an independent practitioner, Muhlhan sees about
100 patients each year through her Catonsville practice, Alternative
Birth Choices. She works with clients who want a hospital birth with
her as their midwife, but she says the vast majority of her caseload
is home-based.

A lay midwife, on the other hand, always works outside the medical
system. "We learn from other midwives, we don't work in hospitals.
It's mostly a lot of self study and apprenticeship," Denise says. "I
call myself a lay midwife, but technically I do have a Certified
Professional Midwife certification." Passing the CPM test is a way
for independent practitioners to get professional recognition through
the North American Registry of Midwives, and in some states a CPM can
practice legally. Virginia recently started allowing CPMs to be
licensed, but, Denise says, "I will be perfectly honest, I don't mind
being illegal.

"The reason women come to us in the first place is that the licensed
practitioners' hands are tied in many ways," she continues.
"Hospitals are now discouraging VBACs [vaginal births after
cesarian], not delivering breeches, and doing everything they can to
give you that first C-section, and the midwives who work there are
bound by hospital policy. It's very distressing. People come to me
because they need to get outside the system to birth appropriately."

Denise sees about 120 patients a year: "Sometimes it's people who
have had previous traumatic experiences in hospitals, but I do have a
lot of religious women and women who are just very comfortable giving
birth. I think I get a lot of religious ladies because they don't
deify doctors as much as the rest of us might--they feel like they
can trust a different kind of power to see that their birth goes
well. I do get all different persuasions: Christian women, Orthodox
Jewish women, Muslim ladies that come here in the whole burka
business." Furthermore, she has seen "nurses who have home births,
physicians, wives of physicians. They are intimately familiar with
the medical model and realize that it is a better choice to birth at
home.

"In my opinion the only reason to give birth in a hospital is to get
pain medication," she says. "There's really nothing else they have to
offer you. It's safer at home, or at least as safe, and some studies
show it's significantly safer. People always say, `Well, what if
something happens?' Nobody ever asks that same question about
hospitals, because they assume that if you are at the hospital then
they are going to take care of it. We have one of the highest infant
mortality rates in the developed world, and it's not because of home
births--how could it be, there are so few--it's because of hospital
births."

With only 1 percent of births in this country taking place outside a
hospital, that means when mothers and babies die in the United
States, the vast majority are doing it hospitals. "Well, when 10
percent of my patients who come through my door have no prenatal care
at all, that would give some of the answer," Mercy's Atlas explains.
"Other industrialized countries give prenatal care. I think the fact
that the US doesn't have universal health care is the main factor [in
elevated maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity rates]."

Muhlhan and Denise each end up transporting less than 5 percent of
their laboring home-birth patients to the hospital. They report
cesarean rates of 3.5 percent, meaning that 95 out of 100 patients in
their care will deliver at home and 97 percent will deliver vaginally.

Denise's low C-section rate is one reason Barbara Stratton chose
Denise to deliver her second baby at home after a traumatic C-section
with her first. The other reason was she had little choice: "I wanted
a VBAC and I didn't trust that I would get it in the hospital."

As liability-leery hospitals increasingly limit or even ban post-
cesarean vaginal deliveries, home births after cesarean are becoming
increasingly common.

"It's not like I thought, Woo-hoo, I have a scar on my uterus, let's
go give birth at home!" Stratton says. "I knew that risk of uterine
rupture was there, and if you rupture in labor, the best place to be
is not at home. But in my mind the risk of what they could do in the
hospital to actually raise my risk of rupture, like artificially
breaking my bag of waters, using induction or augmentation drugs,
ending up with an unnecessary C-section, I felt that outweighed my
risk of the very small chance of having a uterine rupture at home."

Mary Haber also chose Denise to deliver her second child, in April.
"I am not radical" she says. "I really want to be safe. And I chose
home birth with [Denise] because I knew she would transport the
moment she suspected a problem. She is not going to take that risk
for me, for the baby, or for herself." Haber had given birth to her
daughter Ella in a birthing center; the closest one to Baltimore, it
was still an hour away. "I loved the place and loved the midwives,
but I did not love the drive," she says.

So for Haber's second birth, she sought options closer to home. "It
just came down to I don't want to disappear from Ella's life for two
days, or even 12 hours, and come back with a new person," she says.
"It would be the biggest shock of her life, not being part of that
experience. I didn't want her to be there so much as to have the
choice to be there. And it turned out--this is the irony--that I was
making such loud horrific noises that she didn't want to come
anywhere near."

As soon as Caleb came out, however, Haber felt nothing but "pure bliss.

"When I tell you it was the perfect experience, that doesn't mean
that it didn't hurt," Haber says. "There were moments I thought I
might die, that's how bad it hurt. But birth is such a paradox,
because it is simultaneously the most blissful and most painful
experience.

"It still hurts like hell, no matter where you give birth."
=====------------------------------------------------------------------

----- Original Message ----- From: mike reitz
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 8:10 AM
Subject: Hawaii in South San Francisco...

Hawaiian troupe's costumes are home grown
Ron Sullivan,Joe Eaton
Wednesday, June 25, 2008

We hadn't dressed up just for the occasion. We wear aloha shirts often
because they're cheerful. So when we were welcomed, looking all tropical,
into this outwardly unassuming South San Francisco backyard, we felt
simultaneously appropriate and amateurish. We'd scored our raiment in a
secondhand store, but this little spot is the origin of some seriously
authentic and handmade Hawaiian wear.

Halau o Keikiali'i gets part of its performance regalia from Hawaii. Raw
materials for the rest grow right here in the garden of the APOP (Aloha
Pumehana 'O Polynesia) Hawaiian Cultural Center, where members meet to
learn, practice and make traditional food and hula clothing.

Traditionally, Hawaiian hula is sacred and hula plants - kinolau - are
among the embodiments of the gods. The ti plant - "ki" in Hawaiian - is
the kinolau of Ku, who protects against evil. The percussive ipu gourd is
the kinolau of Lono, the spirit of fertility.

Kawika Alfiche, the kumu hula (hula teacher) and choreographer of the
halau, told us his group grows the original hula plant species, with a
few substitutes. The red-blossomed 'ohia lehua doesn't thrive here; its
surrogate is a look-alike close relative, the hardier New Zealand
Christmas tree. "It functions the same as lehua," Alfiche said. "We'd
rather use these than have lehua shipped to us."

Some hula plants, like hopseed or a'ali'i, are native to the Hawaiian
Islands. It's the same tall bush, usually burgundy-leaved, growing in
droughty gardens here.

"A'ali'i grows differently in Hawaii, as a little tiny shrub," said
Alfiche. "Here it grows all over. We used to go gather it along
Interstate 80 for performances."

The burgundy cultivar and the original white-flowered green variety both
live in this garden, and Alfiche encourages halau members to grow it at
home. The leaves and papery fruit are woven into leis.

'Canoe plants'

Others in the garden are "canoe plants," brought to Hawaii by the first
settlers who carried the core of Polynesian culture in their great
voyaging canoes. The ipu gourd, native to Southeast Asia, is one of
these. The garden's pond is ipu shaped. Alfiche said the halau sacrificed
a prime gourd-growing spot for its new library. Ipu production is now
another home project for members.

The leaves of ki, another canoe plant, are used for hula skirts and leis.
They also provide the outer wrapping for laulau, a tasty packet of pork,
salt fish, and kalo (taro) leaves, and lining and covering for earth
ovens. Kalo, also the source of the Hawaiian food staple poi, grows in
the pond.

"We're also trying to grow wauke, the plant we make kapa cloth from,"
Alfiche said, pointing to three potted paper-mulberry seedlings. "We're
keeping them together so they'll compete, race with each other in
growing."

The cultural center's garden was mostly weeds five years ago. Now it's
lush with bamboo, tree fern (hapu'u), banana and more, and a carpet of
kupukupu, single-stem fern. Alfiche called kupukupu most useful: "We make
these into braids that wrap around the head, and into skirts - the whole
thing, midrib, leaflets and all."

The grassy dance space is bordered with white, yellow and kahili ginger.
We were astonished to see the border extravagantly mulched with fresh
purple-and-white orchid blossoms, left from a lei-making workshop.

All halau members pitch in with gardening: "This place ensures that
everybody gets their hands dirty," Alfiche said. There's also a Keiki
Summer Day Camp for children, who help harvest the garden and learn to
prepare traditional foods.

Alfiche sees the South San Francisco halau as another example of
"Hawaiian culture sprouting up all over." Halaus are burgeoning in
England, Germany and Mexico. Locally, about a quarter of his hula
students are ethnic Hawaiians, some 90 percent of them born in
California. The rest are a mix of Americans with European, Asian and
African roots, and a couple of Native Americans.

The local hula tradition has deep roots. Alfiche's original kumu hula was
the late Tiare Maka Olanolan. For the past 12 years Alfiche has studied
under Ray Fonseca, who lives in Hilo on the Big Island. Fonseca in turn
learned from George Naope, founder of the Merrie Monarch hula festival.

Halau o Keikiali'i blends tradition and innovation in its performances.
"One of the suite of three dances we're doing at the Ethnic Dance
Festival has been passed on for many generations," Alfiche said. "Another
is based on a song that I wrote."

Legends of Pele

The dancers, accompanied by pahu, a coconut log and sharkskin drum, enact
legends of the family of the volcano goddess Pele, and a high priest's
prophecy of the coming of Europeans.

In addition to hula instruction, Alfiche teaches ukulele, and an
associate offers traditional Hawaiian lomi massage. The halau is also
building a library and resource center. The group helps run the Kaleo
Cafe on Irving Street, which features Hawaiian food and music, and has
performed for school audiences through the World Arts West program.

You can see the halau in its homegrown splendor this weekend at the
Palace of Fine Arts. Performances are at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m.
Sunday.

Resources

-- San Francisco Ethnic Arts Festival: tickets: (415) 392-4400;
www.cityboxoffice.com. General information: links.sfgate.com/ZDWI.

-- APOP Hawaiian Cultural Center: 423 Baden Ave., South San Francisco.
(650) 588-1091; www.apop.net.

-- The "Canoe Plants" of Ancient Hawaii: www.canoeplants.com.

-- "A Native Hawaiian Garden: How to Grow and Care for Island Plants" by
John L. Culliney and Bruce P. Koebele. University of Hawaii Press, 1999,
$24.95.

Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are freelance nature and garden writers in
Berkeley. E-mail them at home@sfchronicle.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:55:14 -1000
From: penny levin <pennysfh@hawaii.rr.com>
Subject: Re: You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food. - report on trends

" But the fact that people are (1) not anticipating any more demand for
local and organic food this year, compared to last year, and that (2)
there is no apparent need to gear up for greater production, seems
ominous. It seems to indicate that there needs to be a raving crisis to
get people to change their habits and plans. "

or maybe these small family-sized organic farms have learned the lesson
that bigger isn't necessarily better; that a few farms trying to feed
everybody doesn't work. and then too, maybe these farms grow what they
like to grow and not what or how much the market wants/demands...is it
possible they might even being growing what is appropriate to the land
itself and not forcing it to grow what doesn't fit? nah, probably not,
but, wouldn't that throw a wrench in market theory.

a better predictive question should have been asking to the rest of the
community (not just the organic farmers) - as Lundberg raises in his
article - "how many people who aren't farming/growing food now are
considering or planning to do just that in the next year?

----- Original Message -----
From: mike reitz
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 9:18 AM

You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food. - report on trends
Written by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #189, June 20, 2008
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179&Itemid=1

The empire of cheap food is crumbling

You. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Get. Food. Need this be spelled out
any more plainly? It is time to consider that the stage has been
set for petroleum-induced famine.

We have "innocently" accommodated rising population with greater
and greater food production via technology and the profit motive.
But now we have run out of room to grow, as biotechnology, for
example, has severe limitations -- major ones being petroleum
dependence and topsoil loss. The biggest wild card for our
existence is climate change, as we see with floods and other
extreme weather affecting our food supply.

We are headed for massive shortages of food and other essentials,
mainly brought about by the depletion of geological fossil reserves
of cheap energy and water. The situation is demonstrated regularly
with easy arithmetic based on statistical indicators from the
United Nations, Worldwatch Institute, World Resources Institute,
Earth Policy Institute, and numerous governments. Usually the full
force of the message is offset by predictions of huge rises in
future human population growth that are simple extrapolations of
historical trends.

No one can say with certainty that the worst effects of today's
crisis will occur tomorrow or by any particular date. But it is
irrational to assume there will only be gradual tightening of
supplies until some solutions miraculously come to our aid. One
ought to at least admit that one year ago few people thought we'd
be going in the direction we're going in, this fast, today.

Three days is our average food supply around the modernized world,
i.e., for cities and their supermarkets. Long-term food stocks have
plummeted: "Cereal stocks that are at their lowest level in 30
years," according to Worldwatch institute in its most recent Vital
Signs. This is exacerbated by increasingly weirder weather,
compounded by the oil price/supply pressure on food. What can
interfere with the three-day situation are truckers on strike (as
in Europe), extended/repeated power outages, and the inability of
the work force to commute to work.

I asked Chris Flavin, Worldwatch Institute president, about the
escalating crisis that I assumed he was quite worried about. He
told me on Wednesday,

"A lot will depend on the crop year and the weather. There is
slack in the food supply system from meat consumption, for example.
One steak's energy requirement is the same as one gallon of
ethanol. I see the glass half full and don't have an apocalyptic
view. We're seeing fuel economy improvements and other
self-correcting mechanisms. There's $100 billion in renewable
energy investment this year. We needed this crisis to start
changing toward conservation. The pendulum is swinging again, as it
did in the 1970s. We're not going off the end of the cliff on peak
oil. Production declines will be gradual." I sent him my thoughts
on the latter, with my thanks. I sure was surprised that he wasn't
half as worried as I am. Maybe he does not see as much of a problem
the fact that the nation's infrastructure is petroleum-based. He
probably would not agree with me that the Earth is being murdered
along with us human beings.

Zap! A global-warming heat wave kills many thousands in a U.S.
city. Other cities take note, realizing their own cities are "like
the one that got zapped last weekend." Between the water supply
problems, energy overload for air conditioning, rising prices for
food, water and gasoline, people try to escape the urban heat
island effect. Too many consumers stocking up and trying to split
town exacerbated the tragedy.

When cities run out of food, and people want to leave en masse,
they will get stuck in traffic jams the way fleeing (potential)
victims of Hurricane Rita did in 2005. Will survivors be the ones
who had the fullest gas tanks? Will these survivors also require
guns to obtain food outside the city, whether by hunting or
sticking up some hapless or well-armed locals?

Culture Change's reports do not intend to add to hysteria. Indeed,
if only there were no reason to be alarmed. But looking at our
collective situation, it is difficult to see how wrenching
shortages are avoidable. The consequence of reactions to these
shortages will not be pretty. Without facing this, and taking
action to prevent it, our Ship of Fools is on a course to hit the
rocks.

Whether you are relatively "set" -- with local food supply, not
just money -- or you are living from paycheck to paycheck and thus
depend on the trucks coming into the supermarket without a hitch,
you will not be immune to some interruption or limitation on the
food you have probably taken for granted. As petroleum is in
fast-dwindling supply and is relied upon for mass producing our
food, shipping it (on average 1,500 miles for North Americans),
packaging it and preparing it, we are up against a
petroleum-induced famine of our own making. What evil-doer will we
blame instead of ourselves?

The good news is that creative ways to obtain wild food are alive
and well. Acorns and insects, however, are frowned upon -- by the
conventional consumer well fed for now. Is it time to stop cutting
down oak trees? Poisoning snalis that are the escargot species?
Wasting our nitrogen-rich urine by flushing it into our water
supply instead of feeding it to fruit trees? Let us go over other
options that we have:

Will we bring back the Victory Gardens through depaving and
planting food in lawns? Until the food pops up for harvest, what
will we eat -- cats and rats? None of these sudden strategies can
feed millions of hungry people in cities that don't have pro-active
leadership as yet. Yet, pedal power feeds millions in many a
Chinese city surrounded by small farms. But every day the global
economy plugs along, China is more fossil-fuel dependent, using far
more coal than the U.S. and the U.K. combined.

Progress has been illusory in the last half century, but the period
has been ballyhooed as amazing. "...the amount of grain produced
per person grew from 285 kilograms in 1961 to a peak of 376
kilograms in 1986." Since then it has gone down to 350 kilograms.
China's is 325 kilograms, the U.S. enjoys 1,230 kilograms, and in
Zimbabwe -- which Richard Heinberg told me is a guide to U.S.
society after petrocollapse -- is just 90 kilograms per capita.
[Worldwatch, 2008] Can the most modern in the world really conserve
the Earth suddenly?

There's no let-up on the horizon, but people fervently hope for
relief, as sure as tomorrow's newspapers will be printed. As sure
as the July 4th fireworks will be another display of our powerful
continuity. Is this "Summer Driving Season" our last hurrah?
Meanwhile, people are hurting in the pocket book, and are buying
less stuff because of the oil price trend. So they look to blame
someone, such as OPEC, the major oil companies, George Bush, take
your pick. Some await Barack Obama to take over the White House and
cleanse us of our woes, but even he says that community action is
where it's at.

Clearly, a half trillion dollar war on Iraq was not what our
finances needed. If all that money had not been wasted, oil prices
and food would be cheaper than they are. But what about the
trickle-down of those corporations profiting off the war? Surely
those billions for the contractors, and the fat salaries for those
Americans so welcome in the Land Between Two Rivers, aided our
economy. Or did they? The war profiteers and their friends in the
corporate media expect everyone to buy capitalist theory. But
wouldn't you rather have had the half trillion bucks go to more
livable conditions in our towns, such as community gardens,
extended hours for libraries, better pay for teachers, and
preventive health care? Thought so.

Unfortunately, our socioeconomic problems are too deeply rooted in
disastrous treatment of Mother Nature, for even radical changes in
federal spending priorities to get us out of this. So, the big one
is coming. Looking at the fundamentals of our society and how it
has changed from The Great Depression of the 1930s, we are in for
something much worse than those days when the family farms were
intact. What is implied for the big one on the horizon, according
to optimistic activists such as Joanna Macy and David Korten, is
"the great turning." Doesn't sound too scary, so I hope they're
right. They will be right, but they seem to skip the unpleasant bit
about collapse.

The empire is crumbling, but first we must go through end-stages as
the Romans and others had to: increasing debt, falling agricultural
output, over-extended military, growing urban population without
much productive purpose, etc. But we're the good guys! -- we call
our empire's philosophy "Democracy," and we are so clever with
science. Really, though, we've simply done better at distracting
the populace and giving them the carrot more often than the stick,
apparently. This translates to consumer freedom through more goods.
The Big Gulp drink in disposable plastic -- who could ask for more?
We have had none other than The Empire of Cheap Food. Cheap in the
sense that cancer can be had at lower prices than previous
generations had to pay. Also, subsidized petroleum (to this day as
well) jacked up the food supply and the human numbers.

It's amazing how really intelligent people can be in dreamland over
the possibility of positive change coming to the rescue. It's not
just limited to the technofix. It's the general idea that people
"are becoming more aware," or "there are more and more people
getting into organic gardening, CSA's (Community Supported
Agriculture), permaculture" and the like.

To get an indication of which may be more valid -- (A) the trend
for salvation as indicated by the growing phenomenon of gardening
as noted by the New York Times last week, or (B) the inexorable,
accelerating crunch of dwindling resources for too many people no
matter how positive they may feel now -- let us consider the result
of a test on the community level.

This was very recently done in a most aware and progressive
place. The population is small but well educated, oriented to be
sensitive to world affairs, affluent, and active for local
improvements. Sustainability is a goal in the eyes of many.

Here's what was found from a survey of small and/or organic
farms: no labor-help is needed at the beginning of the summer, nor
for the whole summer long. Not even free help, volunteering. The
farms' production are set and unchangeable, apparently. Too bad,
when the amount of food imported from afar is about 95% of what is
eaten. One would think that at a time of rising food prices and the
awareness of the global energy picture, such as peak oil, and when
climate change makes the growing of food far more chancy, there'd
be a discernible interest in upping the output and adding to
community involvement of local farming. But the fact that people
are (1) not anticipating any more demand for local and organic food
this year, compared to last year, and that (2) there is no apparent
need to gear up for greater production, seems ominous. It seems to
indicate that there needs to be a raving crisis to get people to
change their habits and plans.

Meanwhile, with a 100-year flood on the Iowa corn fields -- where
erosion on monocropped, depleted soil killed by petroleum
pesticides and fertilizer and mechanical tilling -- we are in for a
hell of a summer. Is your food secure? Are you gardening, saving
seeds, and protecting precious land and water?

The food price increases have something to do with oil prices that
have doubled in a year. And the oil prices have something to do
with peak oil. And peak oil has something to do with wasting the
Earth headlong into deprivation and ecological destruction. And
it's about civilization as a runaway train. If you don't agree with
the metaphor, just try getting off. Crash must come, and come it
will, and soon. I hope I'm wrong that: You. Will. Not. Be. Able.
To. Get. Food.

That would be our concern when the price of oil can skyrocket
(which it is already doing) -- if we were prudent. The price of oil
is far too low when there are still countless people driving cars
unnecessarily. Apparently these drivers don't find global warming
to be as a big deal as "the economy." Because it's money, and only
money, that can change some people -- until they find they cannot
eat their money.

Where I sit, the plants are crying out: It's near 100 degrees
Fahrenheit two days in a row in bone-dry San Francisco. It's the
wild deviations from the averages that are deadly to life.
* * * * *

local stuffs list

Thursday, June 26, 2008

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