I’ll just tag a few bits of Sunday reading before we head out for breakfast with friends at Koolau Golf Course. With our range out of order, we’re thrown off our normal Sunday routine of a puffy egg white omelet. So we’ll go the commercial route today.

So, to the reading. Sometimes I’m very glad for Ken Conklin, and this is one of those times. He has taken the time to dismantle Keanu Sai’s latest pseudo-history in a long essay: “So-called executive agreements between Hawaii Queen Liliuokalani and U.S. President Grover Cleveland — the new Hawaiian history scam by Keanu Sai.”

Thank you, Ken.

An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor this week also caught my attention (“For US economy, investments first, jobs to come later“). It compares economic approaches of the U.S. and Germany, with rather eye-opening conclusions.

Long the largest and the strongest economy in Europe, it channels its savings into wise investments in the people and technology that fuel the successful export of manufactured goods.

Compared with the US, Germany has not put vast resources into buying homes, creating a giant financial-services industry, or stimulating consumer demand.

More than half of German households rent while home prices have been level for a decade. Much of business is privately owned, not relying on Wall Street-style public ownership and its fickle, short-term perspective. Germans are modest consumers, living within their means.Long the largest and the strongest economy in Europe, it channels its savings into wise investments in the people and technology that fuel the successful export of manufactured goods.

Compared with the US, Germany has not put vast resources into buying homes, creating a giant financial-services industry, or stimulating consumer demand.

More than half of German households rent while home prices have been level for a decade. Much of business is privately owned, not relying on Wall Street-style public ownership and its fickle, short-term perspective. Germans are modest consumers, living within their means.

And…

In Germany, exports account for nearly half of the economy; In the US, it’s only 13 percent.

So instead of talking of “job creation,” let Washington rally around “investment in manufacturing.” That was once America’s strength before it was lured into putting its savings and its best and brightest into the real estate industry, the New York canyons of high finance, and high-flying corporate takeovers.

Maybe our much heralded consumer-driven economy hasn’t been the best model in the long run.

And then, from the Mother Nature Network (really, that’s what it says), another thought about economic insanity, “Why would a Hawaiian coffee shop import bananas?”

At a coffee shop in a remote town at the crest of a pass between two volcanic peaks, on an island whose soil is so awesomely fertile it’s inspired a local adage that says you could stick a broomstick in the dirt and it’d soon bloom, at the far end of a lush island chain that produces 15,000 tons of bananas every year, there is a tray of Ecuadoran bananas for sale. Shipped from several thousand miles south by container ship, unloaded first at Honolulu for transfer to a barge and then tugged to the port of Hilo and then trucked past fields filled with papaya and pineapple and lilokoi and oranges and delectable little bananas to a Starbucks in the shadow of Mauna Kea. Ecuadoran bananas for sale on Hawaii’s roof for a dollar each. Not an outrageous price, but it doesn’t begin to account for the skewed math that makes it economically “rational.”

And so it goes on a lovely Sunday morning.