Is your 9/11 memorial still in good shape?

Today is the six-month anniversary of September's infamous terror attack on America.

May I suggest you go out to your yard, your school, the freeway fence where you lovingly crafted patriotic memorials to those who died in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. Check on the condition of your work and, if necessary, either freshen it up or take it down.

Check the flag flying from your garage. If it is faded and frayed, please either replace it or take it down.

To leave such fading, fraying displays out for the world to see discounts the sentiments that were so strongly felt and expressed after Sept. 11. Let us continue to show our respect and sympathy for those who were killed and our appreciation for all those who helped heroically afterward.

Blaine Fergerstrom

Long-term care plan is state Ponzi scheme

An March 3 Associated Press article said Vicky Cayetano has a scheme that would provide long-term care through a $10-a-month payroll tax, with increases of 5 percent each year.

That means that -- assuming no other increases -- a 25-year-old would be involuntarily paying $20 when he is a 39-year old, $40 when he is 53 years old, $80 when he is 68 years old and $160 per month when he is 82 years old. What sounds good now looks bad in the long run.

About 97 years from now, the monthly tax would be $640 and, in 2113, up to $1,280. In case you don't have a calculator handy, $1,280 times 12 equals $15,360 a year. By 2117 the cost exceeds the benefit promised.

And for those of you who believe the fee would be adjusted downward in the future, please find me one state government program where that has been done. Then I'll send you a money machine.

Elsewhere in the same paper, Star-Bulletin columnist Richard Borreca defined a Ponzi scheme, pointing out that it is illegal in the private sector but quite legal in government. The current long-term care proposal is a Ponzi scheme. It may not be illegal, but it is certainly immoral, and is a cruel joke if there ever was one.

Richard O. Rowland
President
Grassroot Institute of Hawaii Inc.

[Quotables] "We disagree, but faced with the fact that the judge wanted to throw the case out, we had to make a choice. I feel if we had been able to present our case, we would have made a good case." Gov. Ben Cayetano On Chevron Corp.'s statement that the $20 million settlement of the state's $2 billion lawsuit against major oil companies supported the company's contention that the suit was baseless and that gasoline prices have been lawful and fair. "We realize that an act of cruelty against an animal is just another form of violence in our community, violence that should not be tolerated." Letha DeCaires Honolulu police detective, on a $1,000 reward offered by Animal CrimeStoppers for information about the cause of a Nov. 27 fire that killed two horses in a Maunawili stable.

City abuses principle of eminent domain

Eminent domain is supposed to be used for a public reason, such as a highway, school or sewer system. It is despicable that it is being used in Waikiki to benefit the Outrigger.

Pam Anderson and Joan Brown of the Andrade Trust (who own the land under the Ohana Reef Towers Hotel) wrote a letter summing up their position: "The way we see it, the city is forcing a small, private landowner to sell to a big developer, so the developer can make a bigger profit."

Both sisters object to the government taking their property and point to the Outrigger lease, which lasts until 2019 with an option for extension until 2069.

For the government to use the power of eminent domain on behalf of a private entity is pure theft.

This obvious abuse of eminent domain should not be allowed. This issue should be before the Hawaii Supreme Court.

Todd Wetmore
Kaimuki

Centuries of smoke call for apologies

John L. Werrill (Letters, March 6) wrote that he was in a deadly 1963 London fog. Perhaps he means 1952, when more people died over a five-day period from bronchitis because of the polluted atmosphere of London than died in the attack on the World Trade Center attacks last September. In 1873, coal-smoke-saturated fog caused 268 deaths during a week in England's great metropolis.

In 1661, John Evelyn noted that Londoners "breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist accompanied with a fuligous and filthy vapour."

The capital of North Carolina is named for Sir Walter Raleigh. Werrill lauds that explorer. Back when Raleigh was 20 years old -- and still waxing poetic about shepherdesses -- King James I described passive smoke: "the filthy custom, to exhale the smoke of tobacco one to another athwart the dishes; and infect the air at the table; when very often men who abhor it, are at their repast ... Shall not the husband be ashamed to reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome and clean-complexioned wife to that extremity that either she must also corrupt her sweet breath therewith, or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment?"

Raleigh might have wanted to say "pardon me" at some point to this sovereign author of Counterblast to Tobacco, since he was beheaded by him in 1618.

Richard Thompson
Gwangju, South Korea

Apathy gives power to those who do vote

I really don't see what the big deal is about the low voter turnout in Hawaii. All it means is that my vote and those of the handful of people who still care have more meaning in local elections. That is probably why more Republicans are now in office than at any other time in Hawaii history.

Voting by mail would increase the chance for fraud. If voting is such a serious matter, shouldn't it be treated that way by making sure the person casting the vote is still alive or even exists at all?

No matter how busy people are, they still take the time to go to the movies and other events. If taking a little time out to cast a few votes is chore to them, why should anyone else care?

Wendell Hong

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