Howzit Howard

Well, here we go again: birthers, round 764

Most of the reports use a question mark in the headline: Is Rick Perry a birther? At a time when the Texas governor and presidential candidate has lost some of his early support due to remarks he made, politics reporters will seize on this as another possible gaffe.

I'm not sure he was serious, though. Rather than accept the quote out of context, I decided to read the original interview, which Parade magazine posted online here, and then I decided to put the whole newsworthy bit here so you can decide for yourself. My own comments are in italics. 

Q: Governor, do you believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States? (He didn't bring it up; Parade did.)

A: "I have no reason to think otherwise."

Q: That's not a definitive Yes-I-believe-he...

A: "Well, I don't have a definitive answer, because he's never seen my birth certificate." (I think he meant to say the opposite, a mere slip of the tongue.)

Q: But you've seen his.

A: "I don't know. Have I?"

Q: You don't believe what's been released?

A: I don't know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night. (He did, but this still sounds like a joke.)

Q: And?

A: That came up.

Q: And he said?

A: He doesn't think it's real.

Q: And you said?

A: I don't have any idea. It doesn't matter. He's the President of the United States. He's elected. It's a distractive issue. (By this point he realizes the Parade interviewer is going to take everything seriously, so he answers that way.)

 

What do you think?

I'm not defending Perry out of any fondness for his candidacy. The "Texas Miracle" is nothing more than sub-par jobs with poor benefits creating a false appearance of prosperity that has actually degraded the standard of living. It's okay if you're the one who employs these poor people, but not if you're the one on the payroll. If he wants to lead a nation that has the same situation he should run for the presidency of India. But I would feel sorry for me if he was trying to be witty and was taken seriously by a humorless reporter.

Now then: I know the birther issue is still spreading virally online, and there are people who have come to it lately who didn't read what was written about it before. So once more, for those people, I am going to explain why there is no question among rational people about President Obama having been born in Honolulu.

Hawaii is a small place, a very small place, and it was even smaller when Barry Obama was born here. There are only a handful of hospitals where babies are born, and everyone knows someone who works for one of them. Obama's mother was well-known in the community. Birth notices were placed in both daily newspapers, which were widely read at the time. It is inconceivable that something false could have been perpetrated without this information spread on the coconut wireless, as we call the rumor mill in Hawaii. It would have been all over town. Obama's political enemies would have had no trouble digging up dozens, even scores, of people who knew the truth. And they've tried.

I understand why this would be hard for someone to grasp who has never lived outside a large metro area. I lived most of my life in the Baltimore-Washington area and can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I bumped into someone I knew at the mall. In Hawaii, by contrast, you can't ever go to the mall without meeting several people you know. And if you meet a complete stranger, within five minutes you will discover a common friend or relative.

 

Hawaii farmers vote for Dean Okimoto again

The father of the Hawaii farmers market has regained the presidency of the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation. Dean Okimoto was elected at the annual meeting in Hilo, unseating Myron Murakami, a farmer from Kaneohe who unseated Okimoto last year.

Okimoto founded Nalo Greens of Waimanalo and played a critical role in selling Hawaii hotel chefs on the idea of buying their greens from local farmers. Okimoto routinely gets calls from chefs who have an idea for a new menu offering and want to know if Okimoto can grow some plant he hasn't raised before. He always tries and he usually finds a way to make it work for the chef.

Okimoto and Joan Nankoong were the key figures in establishing the original Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation farmers markets, which included the Saturday market at Kapiolani Community College, the Thursday night market in Kailua, and the Sunday morning market in Mililani. A hardy band of vendors made a go of the markets, including my wife Bernadette, who sold lumpia and beignets using local ingredients such as lilikoi sauce that was really made from local lilikoi rather than French extract.

Okimoto's one year in the penalty box came after he backed Mufi Hannemann for governor, and it may be that some farmers would have preferred for him not to back any candidate. There was no practical harm from the move, however, because although Hannemann had been a big backer of the farmers markets, so was Neil Abercrombie, and he did not alter his position because of Okimoto's decision to back another candidate.

That is actually similar to Okimoto's own style: he lobbies for all farmers, including his own direct competitors, and has never suffered for it.

It is ten years since the semi-official founding of the Hawaii regional cuisine movement, and much remains to be done to get Hawaii consumers to invest the time and money to improve their health and enjoyment of food by using more local foods. I expect to see Dean Okimoto, yes and Myron Murakami as well, doing all they can to bring those foods to you.

Life after death? In your dreams

Although I often refer to trivial events from my personal life in this blog, there is much that I choose not to discuss openly, and after some gut-wrenching columns following the death of my first wife Marilyn I drew the curtain over that tragedy. Reading a blog by Ian Lind (http://ilind.net) today impelled me to tell you about something I have experienced in the ensuing years.

Ian, marking the one year anniversary of the death of his father at the age of 96, remarked that his dad has not appeared in his dreams, something Ian attributes to "firmly closing that door in my mind, for now at least."

I am not unsympathetic: one thing I did write about after Marilyn's passing, which I noticed years earlier when own mother died, was not I did not want to wallow in grief, because it hurt enough as it was, and I did not believe in the "let it all out" theory that you have a finite number of tears when when they're all "out" you'll feel better. But on the matter of dreams, my experience has been different.

Marilyn appears in my dreams all the time. And she plays a specific role. She gives me advice. And to the extent that I remember it on waking, it is always consistent with what she would have said while alive. The most interesting thing about it is that these dreams do not make me at all sad; like the happiest memories of my previous marriage, they are really quite pleasant.

I might add that I am especially lucky to have, in my wife Bernadette, a woman who is not troubled by the occurrance of these dreams and is pleased at my undying love for a woman whom she knew and liked.

Ian wrote so extensively about his father's decline into dimentia that there could be a book in it, but he freely acknowledges he has all that set aside. This is entirely understandable. Caring for the physical, mental or emotional needs of someone who is dying requires an endurance that you are not normally capable of, and when your task is finished, always sooner than you would wish even if it lasted for years, you nonetheless need a break. I am not ashamed to tell you that only recently - Marilyn died in 2006 - have I gotten to the point where I can relive happy memories with a smile and not burst into tears. I am glad to have gotten to this point because there are so many happy memories to enjoy.

And in case you were wondering, yes, my mother routinely appears in my dreams, too, but her advice seems to improve with the years.

Music Post: Bach by arrangement

First things first: Hawaii Public Radio met its $861,000 fall fundraising goal Friday around 4:15 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time. A slowing pace of pledging at mid-week was so unnerving that HPR management made contingency plans to continue seeking pledges Saturday morning, but now that's unnecessary and "Howard's Day Off" will be presented normally, if that is the word, as scheduled.

I play more music by Johann Sebastian Bach than by any other composer, and a remarkable amount of it is arranged by others in ways Bach could not have imagined. It's not that Bach doesn't sound great in its original form but that it sounds great in any form, to a degree that cannot reasonably be claimed for any other composer living or dead.

I've done shows like this before but this one focuses in large measure on a single chorale prelude, "Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland," BWV 659, which, through the course of the show, you will hear in five different versions, some authentic, some more outrageous, except, of course, you never get outraged; you're more likely to think, "Wow, that works, too."

You'll also hear Bach fugues arranged for string quartet by Mozart, orchestral arrangements of Bach by both Schoenberg and Webern, and jazzy versions by the Jacques Loussier Trio and the Swingle Singers. We'll also sample Bach arrangements by musicians who record for the Windham Hill label; enough have done so that label was able to put out an entire CD compiling their Bachian efforts.

Howard's Day Off airs live 5am-7am Saturdays HST on KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku and KANO Hilo, while streaming live on www.hawaiipublicradio.org. Max Cacas of Washington, D.C., founded the Howard's Day Off Listener Appreciation Society.

Why the Makaha Resort won't be a hotel any more

Northwynd, the Canadian company that owns the Makaha Resort, called all its local employees into a meeting Thursday afternoon and confirmed rumors that the property will close at the end of the month. The employees knew already but heard some new details they hadn't known for sure.

Bad news travels fast on the coconut wireless, and both Kristin Consillio of the Star-Advertiser and I heard the rumors in time to report them Thursday morning. For me the giveaway that my main source knew what he was talking about was that the resort website had blacked out all bookings beyond this month and marked the last day of October as being for checkout only.

What wasn't nailed down until the meeting was that the owners had no idea when or if they would reopen because they had thus far been unable to raise financing for renovations, and when they did get financing it was their intention to do a condo conversion. This means most of the resort's jobs are going away forever because a condo doesn't need nearly as many employees as a hotel.

It's almost impossible to get financing to build a new hotel any more because the return on investment comes gradually and you can't be certain if a future economic downturn will interrupt the revenue stream. By contrast, if you build a condo, you can sell units before they exist, raising funds for construction from the very people you're building for. The last developer to try it before a downturn always gets into trouble, and his early buyers lose out, but most of the time it works. I'm sure the executives at Northwynd figure that if it's hard to get financing to renovate a hotel, it will be easier to get it to convert the property in condos it can sell.

Because Walt Disney Co. hired hundreds for the Aulani Resort - a combination of hotel rooms and condos - there is still going to be a net increase in hospitality jobs on Leeward Oahu this year.

American Airlines gets a bum rap from analysts

American Airlines hasn't made a profit since summer 2010. In summer 2011 it lost $126 million, AMR Corp. reported Wednesday. The airline cited the fuel bill, leading airline industry analysts to slam American for "the real reason" for its loss, its high labor costs.

The backstory is that American, the third largest airline after Delta and United Continental, didn't go through Chapter 11 during the last round of airline bankruptcies a few years ago, when it was the largest airline followed by United, Delta, Northwest and Continental.

It is true that American itself estimates its pays $800 million a year in additional labor costs because, unlike the other airlines, it did not avail itself of the last bankruptcy round, which allowed rival carriers to insist on wage and benefit concessions.

But it is also true that jet fuel is 40% more expensive this year than it was last year. The price of jet fuel has not approached the peak level of 2008, but it has been in "super expensive" territory longer this year than was the case in 2008, so over several quarters the fuel bill has really been worse.

American's loss in the usually profitable third quarter was a fraction of the higher labor costs but it was also a fraction of the increase in fuel bills. So it's bad arithmetic to pretend the fuel bill cannot reasonably be blamed.

It's a shame to see American slammed for its attempt to keep its work force prosperous. Even now, pushed to wall on this, the company has avoided a Chapter 11 filing in favor of new negotiations with its employees. Its pilots met with management at the bargaining table Wednesday.

Education, experience and the economy

This post is directed at high school students.

America went through a recession and is now in recovery. But the recovery is so slow that many people are still out of work, and many more people are working only because they took jobs that pay less than the work they used to do. There is real pain that stems from that. But this post isn't about that. It's about another and greater economic problem that contains a lesson for you as a student.

For my entire adult lifetime - I graduated from high school in 1971 - there has been a trend of manufacturing jobs moving overseas or moving to automation. This continued apace through the recession. These jobs are not coming back during economic recovery. They are not coming back ever. They will remain in China until their standard of living improves to the point where it makes corporate sense to m0ve them again. If you're in high school now, you may live long enough to see these jobs migrate to Africa.

At the same time, jobs requiring greater education and skill are still multiplying, and in the worst part of the recession thousands of jobs like this went unfilled for lack of people to fill them. If you sense I'm heading for a "stay in school" argument, yes, I am. Unskilled jobs usually pay poorly while skilled jobs pay better, but beyond that, any job that pays well which can be exported to a country with cheap labor, will be.

It is wrong to think of schooling merely as job training. Parents who urge their kids to go to college only for employment reasons are sending the wrong message. A good education, and a broad one, is not only necessary for everyone, it's fulfilling. You never know what you'll need to know. I had boring math and science teachers, assumed I didn't like math and science, learned very little in math and science, went into a verbal profession - and discovered to my dismay that math and science figured heavily in the technological news that has made up the best stories of my days in the news profession. Oops. I had to go back and learn a lot of that stuff on my own.

To review:

1. An education is good for its own sake.
2. An education can get you a better job.
3. You might intend career A, but what if you wind up in career B? Learn as many things as you can. 

Hey! I found a new wormhole!

If you do a lot of driving in Honolulu you quickly learn that Young St. is an excellent wormhole. It's a two-way street in the middle of what traffic planners would call the King-Beretania couplet (King is one-way eastbound and Beretania is one-way westbound) and when the main streets are congested it can be easier to get where you're going by taking Young.

The term wormhole comes from physics. If spacetime is curved by the gravity of massive objects, so the theory goes, maybe it can curve over on itself now and there, producing wormholes, short cuts between two places that otherwise are really distant. Science fiction writers love wormholes, though it's by no means clear that anything could survive passage through one.

So in traffic a wormhole would be any short cut, but especially one that seems unlikely until you pass through it.

I found a new one!

With my usual commuter route - Nimitz/Ala Moana Blvd. - thoroughly disrupted by efforts to repair and beautify the corridor before APEC - I've been experimenting with other options. Driving to work in the middle of the street, the simplest route, which saves more time hitting the lights right than any amount of excessive speed would supply, is Kalakaua to Beretania/King to Waiakamilo. But driving home, when there's actual traffic, has been trickier.

Frustrated with King St. eastbound, which really is no better than the coastal route, I drove mauka on Waiakamilo toward the H1 and noticed a number of cars making a right turn onto a lane just before the expressway. Where does that street go? I turned, too. The little lane became the eastbound lanes of Vineyard, a better bypass for downtown Honolulu traffic than the H1 itself.

A wormhole.

Adventures in computing

I feel very lonely this week: the only unsatisfied Apple customer in the world. And in a way it may be my own fault.

After a lifetime of using PCs, I had to learn Macs when I went to work for Pacific Business News and discovered they were a bit easier to learn and less prone to bugs. Eventually I got a Mac at home with a Def Leppard operating system or whatever they call it, and, don't get me wrong, I love it. But I'm as bad as everyone else about backing up my hard drive, and Bernadette finally got me an Apple machine that does this while also providing a new wireless LAN base. Which was great, but to make it work I had to upgrade my operating system to, dropping the lame OS joke, Snow Leopard.

Somewhere in the court of moving everything wrong to get to the plugs, my CD drive stopped reading discs. Now, it has been like that for a few discs for months - self-releases, mostly, never anything from a class label like Deutsche Grammophon, but now it wouldn't read anything, including DVDs. A really, really nice Apple customer support guy walked me through diagnostics and finally concluded I needed to haul the unit into a store. So I did.

The genius, who was also really nice and wore pink sneakers that were really cool (I'm relying on Bernadette for this information; I thought they were gray), told me it would probably take two or three days to put a new drive in; he told us over the weekend that it should be ready by Wednesday but it might take a week because of the iPhone rollout and the move back to the redecorated store in Ala Moana Center. He offered me the option of taking the machine back and hauling it back in when the part was found, but Wednesday seemed near and even the following weekend seemed bearable. So I left the computer at the store.

That was eight days ago. They haven't called. And why would they? They're totally slammed with the iPhone crowds. And I can't reach them for the same reason. Each time I've called there have been at least three people in line in front of me to talk to a human. And clearly I should have foreseen this. So for an entire week, rather than two or three days, I've been without the computer that has all my bookmarks and templates for researching and writing the news I report to you every weekday morning. Until last night I refrained from replicating them on the laptop I've been using instead because it's Bernadette's. She has two laptops and two iPads. I have my big Mac and a laptop PC that the station gave me which I use exclusively for the Skype connection in the afternoon. Bernadette finally persuaded me to delete her scores of bookmarks and enter the dozen of so that I rely on, like the website where defense contract awards are announced and the one where the state posts its weekly jobless claims and the one where the Honolulu Board of Realtors reports local bank mortgage rates.

This, incidentally, is also why I have been absent from my blog for a week. I kept forgetting to email myself the login information to access my blog from another computer. I'll do that today and resume daily posts. Miss me?

P.S. When I got home I decided I should bite the bullet, call yet again, and wait as long as it took. There were seven calls ahead of me, which turned out to be eight, because after telling you there is one call ahead of you they then say you are the next call, which means that all along they weren't counting the person who was actually on the line, even though he is also ahead of you. Maybe the auto-attendant was programmed by a former maitre d' ("There is a 20-minute wait!") But what was really frustrating was that after waiting more than half an hour, when the phone was answered the other person was unintelligible (probably talking on an iPhone). I tried the old journalists' trick of calling the same number except to make the last digit higher, and disturbed a civilian. Calling back, the line seemed entirely disabled. Then I got through to a nice guy who checked and told me the computer was "so not ready." I found this so refreshingly candid that it drained much of the anger, which I was careful not to betray but was bottling up, right out of me.

Of course, I'm still upset with myself for being so stupid as to take the machine in just before a new product rollout. I mean, what was I thinking?

Post-Postscript: Later the same day, I got a call that the computer was ready, and it's back, though I won't have time to reconnect it until today.

This reminds me of a story Victor Borge told. He returned to his native Copenhagen for his father's funeral and found a decades-old chit for shoes left with a cobbler. He thought it would be amusing to go to the shop and produce the pre-war paper. The cobbler read the chit and said, "They'll be ready Wednesday."

The Wall Street demonstrators: stuck in the sixties or raising valid points?

Public demonstrations are so often tiny events crafted for media coverage that I often view them as a splash of color on the news but not a substantive contribution to our public discourse. But the Wall Street demonstrations have become more than that because politicians of all stripes have begun to discuss whether it is fitting to shout complaints about our great corporations.

Demonstrators sometimes seem "stuck in the 60s," when my generation changed the world by gathering in large crowds to demand civil rights, an end to the Vietnam war, and other things. It was later that we began to see the mini-demonstration, a few activists creating a picture that looks like a big deal on TV but pitiful in person.

"I don't have a lot of patience for people who want to protest the success of somebody else," Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said on the CBS program "Face the Nation."

Well, yes, but we protest the success of a burglar or bank robber, and the whole point of these demonstrations seems to protest the successful shifting of tax burdens from the wealthy to the middle class, and the successful shifting of bank profits to nickel-and-dime fees even as banks keep credit tight to the detriment of the larger economy.

A generation of fans of Ayn Rand has completely misunderstood the point of her books, which lauded people who actually built something - skyscrapers, railroads - not the middlemen who make money playing games with other people's money. Cain built a business and deserves respect for that, but his criticism of the protestors may be misplaced.

"I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment... that change has to happen," said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Well, yes, but one welcome change would be for people like Nancy Pelosi to realize it's their responsibility to learn how the nation's financial industry works, and no longer take advice from Wall Street leaders who have their own particular interest in the least possible regulation and the most inept possible enforcement.

A key factor in the screwing up of the U.S. economy was members of Congress relying on a few comments by former Fed head Alan Greenspan, who told them not to worry about risky investments by Wall Street. Greenspan later admitted he totally misread the situation. He thought the great financial houses would never risk having their names besmirched by bad investments. As it turned out, the senior people at the great financial houses were more concerned with their great bonuses than with what happened to their companies. Greenspan is not a bad guy, and he's very, very smart. That's part of the point, for anyone willing to see it.

U.S. news media include several organizations devotedly entirely to covering financial and business news: the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, CNBC, CNN-Money, and more. And corporations of all sizes have full-time spokesmen and public relations agencies. So when companies want to present a message to the public, they have professionals on call to shape the message and willing news media recipients and transmitters for that message. It is interesting that they have mobilized to denounce the Wall Street demonstrators, and like-minded people in a dozen other cities. The last time a grass roots movement appeared, some business people wrote big checks to support it - the Tea Party.

It's a shame that these two movements have sought to divide the nation into pro-business and anti-business factions. We should all be pro-business and pro-fairness, by which I mean enforcing the regulations we have and making sure the rules of the business game are reasonable.