Sep 23, 2010 04:20 ET
HONOLULU, HI–(Marketwire – September 23, 2010) – Cannabis Business University’s President, Clifford J Perry, is proud to announce the successful launch of the Medical Marijuana Educational Series in Hawaii.
“We appreciate the people that attended the all-day event to learn about the medicinal and agricultural benefits of Cannabis and Hemp and to engage and participate in the process of determining the regulation and compliance issues that face the State of Hawaii.”
Maui Land & Pine sells Kapalua Bay Golf Course
Maui Land & Pineapple Co. Inc. is selling the Kapalua Bay Golf Course to TY Management Corp. for $24.1 million.
The sale of the course and its maintenance facility at the Kapalua Resort on Maui’s northwest shore is expected to close by the end of September.
Maui Land will operate the golf course under a lease that runs through March 31.
“With this transaction, we are able to consolidate the ownership of both Kapalua golf courses with an esteemed partner,” said Warren Haruki, Maui Land’s chairman and interim chief executive officer, in a statement.
Maui Land sold last year the Plantation Course, also at the Kapalua Resort, to TY Management Corp., a Hawaii-based company.
The 6,600-yard, par 72 Bay Course, which opened in 1975, was designed by Arnold Palmer and Francis Duane.
The course has hosted many high-profile golf tournaments, including the Lincoln Mercury Kapalua International and the 2008 LPGA Kapalua Classic.
Maui Land & Pine sells Kapalua Bay Golf Course – Hawaii News – Staradvertiser.com
A Perk of Our Evolution – Pleasure in Pain of Chilies – NYTimes.com
A Perk of Our Evolution: Pleasure in Pain of Chilies
By JAMES GORMANLate summer is chili harvest time, when the entire state of New Mexico savors the perfume of roasting chilies, and across the country the delightful, painful fruit of plants of the genus Capsicum are being turned into salsa, hot sauce and grizzly bear repellent.
Festivals abound, often featuring chili pepper-eating contests. “It’s fun,” as one chili pepper expert wrote, “sorta like a night out to watch someone being burned at the stake.”
In my kitchen, as I turn my homegrown habaneros into hot sauce while wearing a respirator (I’m not kidding) I have my own small celebration of the evolutionary serendipity that has allowed pain-loving humans to enjoy such tasty pain.
Some experts argue that we like chilies because they are good for us. They can help lower blood pressure, may have some antimicrobial effects, and they increase salivation, which is good if you eat a boring diet based on one bland staple crop like corn or rice. The pain of chilies can even kill other pain, a concept supported by recent research.
Others, notably Dr. Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, argue that the beneficial effects are too small to explain the great human love of chili-spiced food. “I don’t think they have anything to do with why people eat and like it,” he said in an interview. Dr. Rozin, who studies other human emotions and likes and dislikes (“I am the father of disgust in psychology,” he says) thinks that we’re in it for the pain. “This is a theory,” he emphasizes. “I don’t know that this is true.”
But he has evidence for what he calls benign masochism. For example, he tested chili eaters by gradually increasing the pain, or, as the pros call it, the pungency, of the food, right up to the point at which the subjects said they just could not go further. When asked after the test what level of heat they liked the best, they chose the highest level they could stand, “just below the level of unbearable pain.”
The Eat Local Challenge draws awareness to Hawaii’s food system and sustainability issues
If your idea of “eat local” is a paper plate buckling with hamburger steak, two scoops rice, mac salad and extra gravy, reconsider the term.
In this era of sustainability, “eat local” carries the weight of conscience, referring to consumption of locally grown and produced food. By that definition, there are few plate lunches to be found.
So what replaces them? And why?
ON THE NET:
» www.kanuhawaii.orgThere are many places to start and many perspectives to consider. For Hawaii farmers, the issue lies in their struggle to stay viable while we import more than 75 percent of our food, sending more than $3 billion out of state each year. For consumers, it’s about knowing where their food comes from, how it was grown, how nutritious it is. For the state, the concern is over food security. If a catastrophic disaster hits the isles and disables airports and harbors, how will everyone get fed, and for how long?
When it’s laid out this way, it’s clear that beefing up the local food supply is in order. But shifting the situation requires tackling some big issues, one of which is changing consumer habits – not an easy thing.
But here’s one way to start: Kanu Hawaii’s Eat Local Challenge, in which regular folks attempt to eat local for a week, beginning Sunday.
Pasha to ship among islands
After a year and a half of review, the Public Utilities Commission has granted Pasha Hawaii Transport Lines authority to carry cargo between island ports, provisionally through the end of 2013.
Pasha (pronounced PAY-sha, the name of the California family that owns the privately held business) sails the MV Jean Anne to Kahului every two weeks. The Jean Anne is the only purpose-built vehicle transporter in the West Coast-Hawaii service, with a home port in San Diego. It’s next stop at Maui will be next Wednesday.
In a contested case, Pasha argued that competition would lead to a better allocation of resources and better service and prices for interisland vehicle freight and other bulky items that the Jean Anne can handle, such as construction materials.
Young Brothers, which has what Pasha calls a monopoly of interisland shipping, objected that the proposal was not an apples-to-apples comparison, since the Jean Anne will call only at big ports: Honolulu, Kahului, Hilo, Nawiliwili, Barbers Point and Pearl Harbor.
Smaller harbors, like Kaumalapau on Lanai and Kaunakakai on Molokai, are served by Young Brothers barges.
Navy opposes changes to 90-year-old shipping law
The Navy is opposing legislation in Congress that would scrap the 90-year-old Jones Act.
The law requires vessels transporting goods between states to have been built in the United States, be crewed and owned by U.S. citizens, and fly the U.S. flag.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s measure would abolish those rules, which he says raises prices for consumers and farmers.
But the Navy says the act’s repeal will erode the U.S. shipbuilding industry and hamper the service’s ability to meet strategic ocean transport requirements and Navy shipbuilding.
U.S. Rep. Charles Djou, a Republican from Hawaii, also supports ending the Jones Act. But Democratic Sens. Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, and Rep. Mazie Hirono back it.
Navy opposes changes to 90-year-old shipping law – Hawaii News – Staradvertiser.com
Miller acknowledges getting farm subsidies
JUNEAU, Alaska — Alaska Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller, who believes the federal government is on the brink of bankruptcy and has called for an end to the “welfare state,” received federal farm subsidies for land that the fiscal conservative owned in Kansas in the 1990s.
The acknowledgment by the Miller campaign that he accepted farm subsidies follows a story by the Alaska Dispatch, which discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request that he got $7,235 in subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1991-97.
It drew a sharp response from critics, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which headlined a news release: “Extremist Joe Miller also a hypocrite.”
Hawaii-based eBay founder won’t endorse Whitman for governor
LOS ANGELES — Pierre Omidyar, who created eBay and hired Meg Whitman as his company’s chief executive, said Tuesday that he would not endorse her and would find it “difficult” to vote for her for governor if he still lived in California.
Omidyar praised Whitman’s leadership skills and said she would do a “great job” if elected, but said he could not back her candidacy because of her stance on gay marriage and her alignment with former Gov. Pete Wilson.
Wilson, who is a co-chairman of Whitman’s campaign, was a vocal supporter of taking away taxpayer-funded benefits from illegal immigrants.
“Now I have not endorsed her because we have some differences on some of the political issues,” Omidyar, who is now based in Hawaii, told Bloomberg TV in an interview that will air Wednesday on “InBusiness with Margaret Brennan.” ”I was disappointed in her not-correct decision, in my view, to support Proposition 8 in California. I was disappointed in her alignment with former Gov. Pete Wilson on immigration issues, who I think took some very extreme views years ago about denying benefits to illegal immigrants. And so because of those types of issues, I think we are a little bit apart, and I can’t quite support her because of that.”
Editorial Observer – Hawaii Forgets Itself in an Ugly Human-Trafficking Case
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
This is a story of two farmers, Laotian immigrant brothers who grow vegetables in Hawaii. People love their onions, melons, Asian cabbage, herbs and sweet corn, and their Halloween pumpkin patch is a popular field trip for schoolchildren all over Oahu. They count local politicians and community leaders among their many friends, and run a charitable foundation.
Though they are relative newcomers, their adopted home is a state that honors its agricultural history, where most longtime locals are descendants of immigrant plantation workers. The brothers fit right in.
But they had an ugly secret. A captive work force: forty-four men, laborers from Thailand who were lured to Hawaii in 2004 with promises of good wages, housing and food. The workers sacrificed dearly to make the trip, mortgaging family land and homes to pay recruiters steep fees of up to $20,000 each.
According to a federal indictment, the workers’ passports were taken away. They were set up in cramped, substandard housing — some lived in a shipping container. Many saw their paychecks chiseled with deductions for food and expenses; some toiled in the fields for no net pay. Workers were told not to complain or be sent home, with no way to repay their unbearable debts.
The news broke last August. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice filed charges of forced labor and visa fraud. The farm owners agreed to plead guilty in December in Federal District Court to conspiring to commit forced labor. They admitted violating the rules of the H-2A guest worker program, telling the workers that their labor contracts were “just a piece of paper” used to deceive the federal government.
I wish I could say that at this point the case so shocked the Hawaiian public that people rushed to aid the immigrants, who reminded them so much of their parents and grandparents. That funds were raised and justice sought.
But that didn’t happen.
In an astounding display of amnesia and misplaced sympathy, Hawaii rallied around the defendants. After entering their plea deal, the farmers, Michael and Alec Sou of Aloun Farms, orchestrated an outpouring of letters begging the judge for leniency at sentencing. Business leaders, community activists, politicians — even two former governors, Benjamin Cayetano and John Waihee, and top executives at First Hawaiian Bank — joined a parade attesting to the brothers’ goodness.
The men were paragons of diversified agriculture and wise land use, the letter writers said. They had special vegetable knowledge that nobody else had, and were holding the line against genetically modified crops. If they went to prison, evil developers would pave their farmland. Think of the “trickle down impact,” one woman implored the judge. Besides, their produce was delicious.