Another Opportunity Lost

It doesn't seem to matter how good and eminently qualified a candidate is in Hawaii; the people of Hawaii won't vote for them -- because they've been conditioned not to, and prefer not leaders but followers at the top, which is the crisis of leadership in Hawaii.

The bright side is that there are 1 in 5 people who will vote intelligently and independently -- from all the special interest endorsements and campaigning -- to do what is best for all. Obviously, that is not enough to win elections, but that does not invalidate the thoughtfulness and validity of their assessments and analysis.

For many, Panos was a litmus test of whether the populace had it in them to do the right and rational thing -- in a very clearcut matter and manner, that was summed up in that one issue of the rail. The outcome was disappointing but not surprising.

The people wish to be fooled, deceived and manipulated. They've come to prefer it.

A few have come to realize that if betterment and rationality is to come to the Islands, it won't come as the result of elections, but probably has to sneak in through the back door of cultural changes -- rather than through the political process. That is the power of choice -- in a much more everyday and far-reaching impact on lives.

Politics and government has become the entertainment for the voting minority of the population who still take an interest in such things. The vast majority, have moved on, or were never enticed in the first place, that the ballot box was the instrument of power and change -- in their own lives. It is something only "lawyers" do -- and the government workers ensure their own enrichment as their "public service."

So where does that leave everyone else not aboard the gravy train? People need to seriously ask themselves that question.

Is Honolulu Really the 12th Largest City in the US?

That Honolulu is the "12th largest city in the US" is used as the basis of the argument by rail proponents that it is the largest city in the US without rail.

In most standardized lists of "largest cities in the US," Honolulu is 50th, and San Francisco is 12th, which is what most would agree is the experience they feel of a truly large city. The city of San Francisco is an area of 49 sq miles, and so dividing that population of 900,000 by that area gives one a population density of 16,500 people per square mile, which is the kind of density required to make rail feasible, if not absolutely necessary. In places like Tokyo and New York, the density is double that.

The population the City and County chooses to use, is the whole population of Oahu, which is 602 sq miles of the approximately same population of San Francisco, giving it a population density of 1,650 -- or 1/10th that of San Francisco, and if one uses the Census Bureau's figures for the City of Honolulu, that would be 350,000, which places it properly at 50th, just above Wichita, Kansas, which is more the experience of the population density of Honolulu.

If we place Honolulu 12th, then it is larger than Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C, Denver, which is a tremendous distortion of reality and perception -- no matter how much one uses statistics to lie, misrepresent and distort, because those places are destination hubs for at least 5-10 million metropolitan areas.

The San Francisco Bay area also has other very large cities (San Jose, Oakland) as well as several other 100,000+ cities in their own right (Berkeley, Sunnyvale, Vallejo) and therefore draws from a metropolitan area of 10 million. In New York, it's 20 million, and not just the 350,000 population of Honolulu, in which 0% of the population presently lives where they will be building the Rail.

So we have a tremendous manmade fiasco and disaster in the making besides the natural risks of earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc., because of a egregious distortion of perception and reality perpetuated by the politicians and media of Hawaii.

And that's why Ed Case is right in saying Hannemann may be the most dangerous person in government in Hawaii because he has such a corrupting influence on everything in Hawaii, that with his election, there is no hope anymore for a meaningful existence of integrity and sanity in the Islands any longer.