Did you see that Iraqi Minister of Information on TV? He was great, a classic.
I wish that if people here in Hawaii were going to propagate misinformation to that same extent, that they’d at least do it with that flair and panache — rather than in all seriousness. Then at least we’d know when to laugh. Otherwise, like the Arabian audience who really took them seriously, they lose all faith and confidence in the reports and media.
Today’s local media offerings indicate some union is readying itself for contract negotiations by planting the notion that in Hawaii, the poverty level is three times higher than what it is as a national standard.
So while it would be at the poverty level for three to live on an income of $18,000 in the rest of the U.S., in Hawaii, a family of three needs $51,000 just to match that poverty level.
The Honolulu Advertiser’s writer couldn’t tell the difference between the University of Washington and Washington University, where presumably he got that authoritative information.
The KITV article omitted attributing that to any Mainland source but instead quoted some person affiliated with the University of Hawaii for his credibility.
The pathetic thing is that neither source apparently have anybody on their staffs who can discern the preposterously bogus from real science — and that is the indictment of the education one expects to get in Hawaii. Why is that worth a premium?
The ultimate objective of education is to produce citizens capable of learning and thinking for themselves — and not going through their whole lives relying on these “experts” to do their thinking for them.
Such a system is referred to as a technocracy — in which those who have been given the benefit of the credit for being knowledgeable in a field, then claim that trust as their divine jurisdiction. And thus they claim in future discussions on these matters, that only these experts, know and have a right to direct the course of the agenda, which invariably comes to be, that they endlessly need to get more money because the problem they were charged with addressing in the first place, has now gotten totally out of control, requiring all our society’s resources.
When this occurs, obviously we are investing in the problem rather than its solution and elimination. The object of health care is not to have better, more expensive health care and well-paid professionals in this field — but to have health to obviate the need for health care.
But we also notice when these health-care workers go out on strike that they’re not exactly paragons of good health themselves but often as it turns out, are the prime candidates for their own services. Likewise in education, one would think that the good teacher is the one to which his students feel less reliance on his continued, perpetual guidance.
Isn’t that the product we hope to produce through education? Or is it these people who are so easily manipulated and deceived because they cannot discern any differences that they will believe anything any propagandist and con artist wishes them to believe? And that’s why we need the people to reclaim education and health as their essential rights — rather than continue to be exploited for the benefit of a few self-designated people (oligarchs).
So as we see the people being liberated in Iraq, here in Hawaii, we need to be mindful that we too are not really a democracy in this true sense but are controlled by the powerful vested self-interests, whose only skill and talent seems to be in learning how to play the game. And that is what we reward rather than the person of honor, integrity and good health. Thus we see in the reports this pervasive cynicism and corruption of those who have known and know nothing else. And that is all they ever communicate to us — their utter despair of ever having met somebody who ever told them the truth about anything. “What difference does it make?”
The objective of any healthy society are people who can tell these differences and therefore make intelligent choices — for themselves, and not to produce as its ultimate product, people who cannot — and thinking that is a compassionate, intelligent, well-meaning society, liberal and tolerant society. Societies like that are the evil in the world.
”’Mike Hu is a resident of Honolulu and can be reached via email at:”’ mailto:humikhu@aol.com