General McChrystal Loses His Head

"And so, General McChrystal, would you care to repeat what you said about me and Joe Biden? Hmmmmm? Cat got your tongue?"

Kayne West's Porsche Crashes Next-Door: A Cultural Appreciation

It's not a great picture, but you get what you can at 4 a.m., which is what time it was when Kayne West's black Porsche rammed our next-door neighbor's garage door. The impact nearly threw us out of bed. The street was filling with people as I came down the steps in my skivvies. Gas pouring out of the car, which didn't even brake, to judge from the lack of skid marks. A last second wrench of the wheel kept Kayne alive, if he was at the helm; though of course his spokespeople denied this. Said he wasn't even in Hawaii. And later, the car was reported stolen, after the fact. So much for all those anti-theft devices that render a modern luxury car secure.

The photo above is the only one in existence, but despite my call to TMZ, no takers. So my career as a paparazzi is on hold. Fortunately, Kayne rented the house a couple blocks away while he was here to make an album with Jack Johnson, whom he met through Ben Harper. You can see where this is going: Kayne West's Slack Key Hawaiian Throw-Down, a downlow expression of exotica, with lots of marimba action.

In the morning, the damage is apparent (second photo). The house in question used to be a modest classic Hawaiian 1940's style, then a defrocked Judge bought it and turned it into the Parthenon, then a candy heiress bought it and added a 7-fountain roofdeck pool. We call it The Bordello. It's a horrible eyesore, but for awhile on Saturday morning it had a certain architectural modishness, thanks to a certain black Porsche--which added $150,000 to the value of the house, if only until the towtruck arrived to haul it away.

Looking for Mister Fat Finger

"Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths" -- NY Times headline, May 29, 2010

"The civilian deaths highlighted the hazards on relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track people suspected of being insurgents. In this case, as in many others where drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console in Creech Air Force Base in Nevada."

If you've ever wondered how the drone jockeys of Creech AFB, Nevada, spend their evenings after a day of remote control killing...

There's only one place to go in Creech, and that's the Bar at Indian Springs. Otherwise, a long couple hours drive to Las Vegas. So you get off your shift, stretch your back, step outside--not knowing if you'll find day or night, you're always surprised to have to squint in the sun--and with that feeling in the pit of your stomach that won't go away, you decide you need a drink. Get in the car and drive. Park in the dusty lot. You step into the bar. A bar named Bar--that's the ticket to amnesia. So you've only been out in the bright sunshine for 15 minutes and here you are, back in a dark shadowy cave. You order. Nobody bothers with small talk. Not near an AFB. Mind your own business. Which is to stare your hands and wonder why you didn't wait before pressing >Enter
Or, more likely, to order another cold one and say "F*** that, you did your job. Let God sort them out."

Hormone disruptor shampoo given to young girls at Alice in Wonderland premiere: HuffPo by Mindy Pennybacker

http://greenmangreenerpenny.blogspot.com/

The author of Do One Green Thing lands a post-Oscar punch: what were they thinking giving out falsely labeled organic shampoo at the Alice in Wonderland premiere? Do they want all the young girls to get smaller, smaller, smaller...?

Why Hawaii Won't Ever Get a Huge Tsunami: a contrarian view (with farewell video of evacuation orders via loudspeaker)

Here's the way it was on Saturday morning at 5 a.m. back in those innocent days when we still believed in Papa Tsunami. The very able fire dept truck goes by, broadcasting the evacuation. These are top-notch professionals. (Hawaii firefighters are unique in that they take part in a lot of water rescues, probably more than fire calls.) Next we see a pickup truck loaded with coolers of food and water and a longboard, driven by a local gal. Neighbors on the curb are beginning to draw up plans.

And now, here's something the Tsunami Center won't tell you, as a parting thought: the Hawaiian islands are the most isolated chain in the world, and as such are at a very far remove from the major earthquake fault subduction zones in the Pacific Rim. If you think of the Rim as a circle, Hawaii is in the center. Though there is an active volcanic earthquake scene on the Big Island, these kinds of earthquakes are shallow and unlikely to affect even the neighbor islands in any significant way. I'm from California, where earthquakes are a real threat. My grandfather wrote most of the first earthquake-resistant building code after the 1933 Long Beach quake. He consulted in Chile's reconstruction after the 1960 quake. We grew up talking, and reading about, and comparing experiences with earthquakes in our house.

And my point is this: Hawaii is too far away to ever receive a full on 20+ foot Indonesian-style tsunami except (note emphasis) in those fjords and harbors which funnel the wave force, such as at Hilo, which is the only major population area to suffer a serious loss of life and damage. While there will be tsunamis in the years to come, they will be in the 1 to 4 foot range unless an earthquake even stronger than the largest ever recorded--Chile 1960--strikes opposite those fjords and harbors. At 1 to 4 feet, there may be street flooding and beach erosion and major inconveniences and some loss of life--some dumb surfer is going to get it, one of these days--but nothing compared to what the East Coast goes through 3 or 4 times a year with Nor'easters.

This is the sort of prediction that can outrage people. It can weigh like an albatross if proved wrong, but I'm willing to make it in order to emphasize the kind of provincial and panic-based thinking that goes on, still, in the places that are funded to protect us. They need to keep that funding going, so the danger has to manifest frequently enough to keep the budget line alive.

The places where tsunamis do horrible damage are those closest to the Pacific Rim subduction and strike-fault zones. Japan. Indonesia. Chile. Alaska. The Pacific Northwest. California. They're at the outer circumference of the Rim, not at the center, as we are.

TSUNAMI WRAP-UP: it was all about the shopping, folks

Increasingly likely that the tsunami, while serious in Chile and in theory, was highjacked as an excuse for the media and hotel folks to cook up a huge one-day shopping event that would boost the sagging local economy, raise TV ratings (and hence ad rates), mention all the stores and gas stations (advertisers) where you could stock up, and virtually force the tourists to order room service food in the expectation they'd be marooned for a week.

To be clear: the threat was real, but the Pacific Center knew by 6 am it would not be a major event, yet they and the Hawaii powers let an entire day unfold at crisis tempo.

We know how media works: it's exactly what happened with The Weather Channel in the two years following Katrina. Expecting an increase in hurricanes and preparing to get bought out, TWC turned every weather event into a catastrophe. And then sat there mumbling while no hurricanes hit the US for the next two years.

The plantation mentality in Hawaii is to just say, "Thank God nobody was hurt," and ignore the flaws and scare-mongering. Unfortunately, the odds of a free press shedding any light on the subject just went down a lot, given the fact that the day before the Tsunami alert the two Honolulu papers, The Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, merged. The latter paper buying out the former and closing it--and this six months after all four local TV news stations merged.

waiting for the Hawaii tsunami that wasn't

What we find is that rumors are their own kind of natural disaster. A siren at dawn. Loudspeakers on a truck. A sea of people moving this way and that, taking orders--buy 7 days of food and water, stay in your hotel... It's also true that this is a drill for The Next One. My problem with that? It's the third such drill this year in Hawaii. And I wonder what the experts knew and when they really knew it.

For instance, the local Star Bulletin led with a front page story on Tourism Returns to Hawaii, and buried the AP report on the tsunami on Page 5. This in Hawaii, where a similar Chile quake in 1960 devastated the islands? If it were truly news, and the Star Bulletin truly a newspaper, wouldn't that be on the cover?

My green author and blogging wife, Mindy Pennybacker, put some of these thoughts up on Huffington Post and drew a sharp series of "how dare you" comments. Yet we were in New York City on 9/11 and know people who lived that day because they disregarded those very pompous experts who like to believe they have the right to herd us like sheep.

running to higher ground TSUNAMI

Last view of Kapiolani Park in Honolulu empty as a police cruiser warns of a tsunami wave. Gotta run to high ground now. Aloha!~

TSUNAMI civil defense radar on Diamond Head

Back from a walk around Diamond Head. The civil defense mobile radar is in place. The sea has filled with boats, as owners and sailors are taking them out to be safe. An unusual sight, like Dunkirk on a sunny day. The farmers market at KCC was open, so I bought 3 papaya, choy sum, manoa lettuce and 3 organic chocolate bars. I credit my emergency ration response to Do One Green Thing, the new book by Mindy Pennybacker. And, yes, that's my plug for the day!

TSUNAMI VIDEO we go down to the sea to see

Here is our walk from the house to the beach this morning at 6:30. The sirens went off. The emergency trucks came by telling us it's a mandatory evac. We talk with neighbors about where to go (up the volcano on foot). Got water. Got Spam. Here comes the next siren, much louder.

With the wave now expected to arrive at 11 am we have a few hours. How to spend them? I think we may go for a walk around Diamond Head, stretch out. Cell phones are out, the evacuation zone maps online are crashed. Gonna see how long the Internet holds up.

This is when ham radio suddenly becomes relevant again.

TSUNAMI will head straight up our street in 5 hours

Here's Coconut Avenue, looking up at Diamond Head from the beach access. Which also will be the tsunami access in 5 hours. Think of this as a "before" shot.

TSUNAMI as economic opportunity? who's making money?

Lot's wife looked back. Should I?

Or should I just keep blogging?

This is a job opportunity, right? The new economy would call this an example of Shumpeter's "creative destruction" - and I'm going to be there to cash in on the ground floor. I bet a lot of fish will be left high and dry when the suckout comes. Probably find some spare change.

In the meantime, the merchants are opening up ahead of time for those early bird specials.

TSUNAMI PATH to our house: no picnic

This lovely scene may shortly witness untold destruction: Le'ahi Beach Park, South Shore Oahu, under the Diamond Head volcano. The predicted 12 foot tsunami will come rolling up here in approximately 5 and a half hours. We live 300 yards inland, at the end of the street. Photo: Don Wallace

TSUNAMI still no daylight doing preparedness drills

Filling the bathtub and looking out to sea in the dark.

Charging the cell phone, the Canon PowerShot and the Sony DV-mini-cam (professional quality).

We have matches, bbq propane. Canned food and drink. A bottle of Laphroaig.

The announcers saying lines are forming at gas stations, stores. Tourists will go to higher floors of hotels, third floor and up. Buses are coming.

A 12 foot wave is coming. That is going to be HUGE. It's serious.

Our Filipino tenant came up to warn us. He got a call from his grandmother in Manila, where his family was dislocated by the cyclone flooding and he lost his grandfather. We'll keep an eye on him, and he'll keep an eye on us.

TSUNAMI 5:17 am the experts already sent their families away?

Hmmm. On the tube here the experts let slip their families evacuated hours ago. That should tell us something.

We're at the end of Coconut Avenue, where it runs straight from the ocean up to our stairs. About a quarter mile from the surf break known as...wait for it... Suicide's.

So far we're holding. They're saying add water for 7 days. Food. Oops. Better get busy!

p.s. mayor hanneman is unavailable, on a junket to the Mainland. thank heavens we don't have to listen to a politician

TSUNAMI the bulldog knew at time of quake

Marley the neighbor's bulldog went missing right around the time of the Chile quake. No birds chirping, though. The popular indicators of a major event like tsunami, quake seem to be missing - except for the newscasters sternly warning us to not go swimming.

Still, a big one coming. Our third this year. Can't remember even one in the last 33 years. That says something, according to Pat Robertson. I think it's because we haven't passed comprehensive health care with a public option.

TSUNAMI 4:55 am report Hawaii

ONLY 2 CANS OF SPAM??? What kind of emergency is this that they ration fried processed meat byproducts? Only in Hawaii. 4:51 am Tsunami Time.

TSUNAMI coming here

We're up at 3:30 am in Honolulu getting word. Sirens at 6 am. We will probably be forced to evacuate, and the road below us forms a highway to our doorstep on the slopes of the volcano. I've got an urge to just climb up Diamond Head and film it. Mindy is deciding whether or not to surf it. Kidding.

Amazon wants to control all content? Bad news for all of us

Once again, Amazon still won't sell any books from Macmillan, even though it says it will. With the e-book a reality and this one company, Amazon, controlling 75% of online sales, book pubishing is heading down the road music industry took after Ticketmaster gained control of all concert venues. It's not a free market ...if one company owns it. Especially when the day is approaching when a post like mine will result in my books disappearing from Amazon as well.


http://tiny.cc/Oxglk

How Palin’s Hawaiian Past Will Haunt Her in 2012 Presidential Election

Turns out it’s not just President Obama whose Hawaiian whereabouts are in question:

Why did the 18-year-old beauty queen chose to live in go-go Waikiki, instead of student housing? Why won’t she say how she supported herself? Allow media to verify her alleged registration at three different campuses in 7 months? What about the rumors that she was pregnant?

Then there’s the mother of all speculations: Did Palin, aka "Barracuda" for her basketball prowess, find herself covering "Barry-O" on Kapiolani’s fabled Fire Station courts -- and if so, did sparks fly? (And if they did–where did they hide their love child?)

It’s all in The Realm of Possibility (tm). Read on for our 100% factual speculation.

Dateline Honolulu Nov 18 2009 – As thousands of fans line up to buy Sarah Palin’s book, the spotlight has returned to a still-unexplained gap in her resume: the seven months she spent in Hawaii after high school graduation. All the candidates’ lives were exhaustively scrutinized during the 2008 election campaign, but Palin’s surprise selection as vice-presidential nominee left the mainstream media scrambling to catch up to her colorful Alaskan roots and complicated family dynamics. Although the Hawaiian aspects of candidate Barak Obama’s life were also "exhaustively scrutinized," Palin’s tropical interlude escaped the same treatment–leaving unexplored the provocative question of how she supported herself while living in Waikiki, what were her true reasons for visiting Hawaii, and even the speculation that she met, and even played basketball with, her future rival and possible foe in the 2012 Presidential elections.

Palin herself tells the story of how she changed from tomboy to beauty queen in her senior year of high school. Friends and family have recalled how they were surprised and even shocked at how the scrappy basketball star nicknamed "Barracuda" went from slouchy sweats and Carhartt jackets to wearing sequined satin-polyester and high heels. It was a textbook case of discovering her attractiveness as a woman. And, like so many a small town wallflower making up for lost time, 18-year-old Sarah set off for the nearest big city–in this case, Honolulu.

Traveling with a high school girlfriend, Palin arrived poor and unprepared for the exotic and seductive streets of Waikiki. Palin has said variously that she attended three different colleges during her seven month sojourn, although she has repeatedly refused media requests to allow confirmation of her claims by accessing her records, protected under federal privacy laws. Only one school, Hawaii Pacific University, has affirmed her attendance, for a single semester.

Unusually for someone who has spent a "gap year," Palin has offered no details of her time in Hawaii: nothing about jobs, housing, tourist or cultural adventures, romance under the stars. She may be the only 18-year-old who traveled to the Islands during the peak of the surfing boom and never tried the sport–this despite practically living on the beach at Waikiki, the most tourist-friendly surf environment in the world, home to a cadre of beach boys who specialize in initiating Mainland wahines into Island mores.

The lack of detail is particularly curious because of the Waikiki connection. Where Palin lived was definitely not a student housing, being expensive, seedy and unsafe, particularly for women. It is, however, Hawaii’s 24/7 party zone, comparable to New Orleans’ own Latin Quarter or the Strip in Las Vegas or New York’s old Times Square, all world-famous attractions for tourists drawn to drinking, dancing, drugging, promiscuity and prostitution.

Most of the housing in 1982 Waikiki was of the shabby, SRO (single-room occupancy) kind, often rented by the hour. Transients, surf bums, hookers, petty criminals and drug dealers mixed with homeless Native Hawaiians squeezed out of their birthright, making life there, so close to the bright tourist lights of Kalakaua Boulevard and the International Marketplace, a bittersweet proposition. When you consider that 1982 was the climax of the disco era, a final flowering of polyester bodysuits, cocaine spoons worn as jewelry and amyl nitrates popped on the dance floor and boudoir for stamina, Palin’s silence is all the more indicative. As Sherlock Holmes said to a Scotland Yard detective, it’s the dog that doesn’t bark in the night that calls attention to itself.

Is the bark that didn’t happen, the great unspoken in this case, the trap that awaits young country girls, aspiring beauty queens, and runaways on their own in the big city? Are we talking about the plot of countless novels and movies, The Perils of Pauline, Jenny: A Girl of the Streets, Pretty Woman? In morality tales and real life, the progression is always the same, starting with taking a job in an establishment that hires pretty young things. Soon enough it becomes apparent that the $1.71 an hour minimum wage for restaurant workers won’t come close to making the rent. Around the time of this realization, a suggestion is made on how to supplement one’s income by being nice to the customers. Tourists, especially the Japanese, are generous to those who give personal attention. They buy more drinks, bottles for the table, private dances...

This is 100% speculation, but I’ve known of at least three girls who found themselves in the exact situation. In each case, they ran out of cash and couldn’t buy a plane ticket home. One called home in tears and got pried loose from the goon who was holding her passport as collateral (the job was teaching scuba diving). The other two took jobs, ironically, in Alaska; they too were bait-and-switches. Both girls took the bait. One ended up dead.

Is it fair game to question Palin about how she made the rent? About her uncharacteristic discretion? Given the rough-and-tumble of recent political campaigns, and the ongoing anti-Obama "birther" movement, the obvious answer would seem to be Harry Truman’s: "If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." But time and again when her version of events is challenged, Palin has played the gender card, and can be expected to do so here. (She might even cite Truman’s use of the word "kitchen" as evidence of subliminal woman-bashing.)

A true feminist might celebrate the thought of a teen beauty queen, away from home for the first time, claiming possession of her sexuality in such an environment as Waikiki’s. A true conservative might find it relevant if the same young woman were today jockeying for the most powerful elected leadership position in the world. As for Palin’s coy disclaimer that she isn’t interested in being President at present, wasn’t that stalling tactic at the heart of the McCain’s choosing her at the last second? While the mainstream media begged for background handouts tailored by GOP flacks, Palin could dominate the convention and revive the campaign. By the end of October, with McCain looking his age and worse, Palin was, in effect, running for President.

Right now Sarah Palin would no doubt love nothing more than for the media to declare a time out on any but fawning reportage. Then, by popular acclaim, unscarred and money coffers full, Palin could launch the first Presidential campaign by a talk show host. It’s a plan no more audacious than that of the first-term senator from Illinois who currently holds the office.

To wrap on an even more surreal note, it’s equally within the realm of possibility that the "Barracuda" point guard went one-on-one with the slick-shooting power forward from Punahou. The public basketball courts most frequented by visiting athletes and even celebrities happen to be in across the park from Waikiki, next to the Fire Station. Like New York City’s West 4th Street cage, the hot asphalt is where it’s at, where both young Barry and older Barak liked to showcase his game.

This brings up the inevitable, ultimate what-if: the likelihood that Barak and Sarah met, playing basketball. It’s certainly within the realm of "birther" possibility, a standard of truthiness that makes it almost a certainty that they guarded each other, got sweaty and, well, noticed the other was "hot." It happens in movies all the time.

The rest we'll leave to your naughty imaginations. But given that Sarah by her own account hid her last pregnancy, even from her husband, until she was 7 months along--before deciding not to abort Trigg--and given that we can say without refutation that 7 months was the same amount of time she was absent from public and family view in Waikiki–it begins to appear that we have no choice but to assume, using the same logical progression, that there is a love child of Sarah Palin and Barak Obama alive and well today.

Perhaps s/he’s living under an assumed name (Brandy O'Palin?). Perhaps s/he’s locked away in Gitmo or enjoying full Secret Service "protection" in a dusty Kenyan village far from civilization. The point is, we don't know, and that's wrong. We have a right to know.

These are the sort of questions that go unanswered because unasked–except when you’ve decided to risk another visit to....

[spooky music]

The Realm of Possibility.

[theme song and Outro]