Who benefits from division?

July 24, 2021

Divide and conquer — the strategy has been around at least since the days of the Roman Empire. Divide et impera, divide and rule, was a strategy that allowed the Romans to subjugate adversaries with a minimum of cost and effort. Why fight a united foe when you can soften it up by sowing discontent among its people? That’s how it feels in America these days, like our politicians are so intent on taking bold stands and bickering, the country is ripe for the picking. Rather than working together to address bellwether issues such as the rise of geopolitical rivals, our own social ...

More than a joy ride

July 23, 2021

The richest man on Earth briefly lost that title Tuesday morning, but only because for a few floaty minutes he was no longer on Earth. Jeff Bezos has spent two decades using his Amazon wealth to underwrite a rocket venture, Blue Origin. On Tuesday the company launched its first manned flight to space, with Bezos on board. After riding the New Shepard rocket to Mach 3, experiencing weightlessness, and parachuting back to the Texas desert, Bezos thanked the engineers and crew, along with “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” because “you guys paid for all ...

Corporate tax evasion

July 20, 2021

President Biden and other world leaders are on the brink of an extraordinary agreement that could curb the maddening —” and until now, seemingly insoluble —” problem of corporate tax evasion. Success would mean hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue for fixing crumbling infrastructure, healing the sick, and improving schools from Massachusetts to Mumbai. But the president cannot deliver on the American end of the deal alone. He will need help from Congress if the world’s most powerful country is to do its part to bring a measure of justice to an unjust system. For ...

Lessons for newcomers

July 17, 2021

A beloved, 82-year-old kumu hula was recently attempting to pull out of the Costco gas station when a young man cut her off in his truck. His friends thought it was funny when he flipped her the bird. A fancy car with out-of-state plates pulled to within feet of our rear bumper this week as we were traveling in a long line of cars on Maui Veterans Highway. Its driver stayed glued there until he could veer into the other busy lane and jump two car lengths ahead to tailgate someone else. We won’t say what state the car was from but it rhymes with California. Maybe the two drivers were ...

Science clear on heat dome

July 16, 2021

Last week’s shockingly high temperatures in the northwestern US and Canada were — and are — frightening. Heat and the fires it caused killed hundreds of people, and are estimated to have killed a billion sea creatures. Daily temperature records were smashed by more than 9 degrees Farenheit in some places. In Lytton, British Columbia, the heat reached 121F. The wildfires that consumed the town produced their own thunderstorms, alongside thousands of lightning strikes. An initial study shows human activity made this heat dome — in which a ridge of high pressure acts as a lid ...

Fear of critical race theory

July 13, 2021

Republican legislators in about two dozen states have introduced or won passage of bills to censor the education of children on race. Exactly what are they afraid of? A lot of it stems from President Donald Trump’s “liberal indoctrination of America’s youth” demagoguing last year, when he created a commission to promote “patriotic” education in classrooms. (President Joe Biden killed the panel.) Part of it is reaction to the The New York Times’ Pultizer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” which argues that Black Americans first brought to this country as enslaved ...