Category Archives: Blogs

A few items of note (Maui lobbying, homelessness, blog ads, and a hacker attack)

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A few brief items for this morning.

• In a column published in the Maui News this week, and reprinted on the Maui County website, County Council Chair Mike White suggests that Maui’s lobbyist law is not being enforced.

The law, which dates from 1981, requires any person who is compensated for lobbying either the administration or the council must first register with the Board of Ethics “setting forth the name, mailing address, business telephone number, and subject matter of the lobbyist.”

However, White points to a constituent’s experience which suggests the law is not being followed.

In practice, however, the laudable principles laid out in the County Code and the Board of Ethics’ rules are apparently being disregarded, as recently brought to my attention by a member of the public.

This constituent sought to review the current list of lobbyists and was rebuffed by the county administration, until filing a formal request for public records under the Uniform Information Practices Act, the state’s public records law. Once documentation was provided, the list was so short it seemed obvious the registration requirement isn’t being enforced.

It will be interesting to see whether White’s comments, and his position as council chair, will gain any traction on this issue.

• And a reader here raised this question: ” Its weird that you cover the DOE student travel story…and then this ad for one of the companies comes on to your blog. How do the ads worK?”

Well, these ads are served up by Google, which uses some kind of contextual algorithm to “target” ads for the content of the site, and/or the interests of the person visiting the site. At least that’s how I understand the process. It’s not something that I have any direct control over.

• And closer to home, my hosting service notified me on Sunday that I’ve been under attack.

This is a notification that we have been forced to make some changes to your account due to a large volume of continual brute force attempts on your WordPress logins (upwards of 15,000+/day). While we do have security modules in place to block access after a certain volume of failed logins, these brute force attempts have been distributed over hundreds of constantly changing IPs, and the rate is such that the security modules and firewall cannot block all the attempts, leading to poor performance on the server.

So now there’s a two-level log-in procedure, which is being closely watched to see if it discourages these hacking attempts.

• Following Governor Ige’s announcement of the appointment of a “Leadership Team on Homelessness,” Larry Geller (DisappearedNews.com) added some telling comments.

First, he notes the firing of the state’s “homeless czar,” which was not mentioned in the governor’s press release.

Director of the state Department of Human Services Rachel Wong gave homeless czar Colin Kippen four days notice today—his last day at work will be July 31.

Throughout his tenure Kippen was never given a budget to carry out his responsibilities.

And Geller notes that the new “Leadership Team” is “composed entirely of politicians rather than housing or social service experts.”

According to the governor’s press release:

“The underlying issues that lead to homelessness, such as lack of affordable housing, cannot be resolved quickly,” said Gov. Ige. “Meanwhile, we cannot wait for a comprehensive, long-term solution. There are measures we can take and will take, immediately.”

The question is whether, once again, these short-term measures pirate all available resources so that those long term solutions to underlying issues are again ignored?

As Geller notes: “The news release does not mention Housing First, the evidence-based program that has worked so successfully elsewhere on the Mainland. It appears that the focus may be on finding ‘short-term’ solutions, which may mean forcible relocation of individuals and families from Kakaako and other encampments to other temporary locations.”

News aggregator offered a few laughs before disappearing

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An old friend emailed me late last week and suggested that I take a look at a strange online news aggregator which seemed to be reprinting news stories after multiple translations.

He flagged a Hawaii story about the autistic student at Kailua High School who was forced to run until he dropped. Apparently it was drawn from this story in the Huffington Post.

The funny thing was what apparently happened in translation.

“Huffington Post” became “Huffington Submit”.

“Civil Beat” became “Civil Conquer”.

“Kailua High School” appeared as Kailua Superior Faculty, Kailua Significant, or Kailua Substantial.

The aggregator site, www.bulletinstandard.org, is no longer online. That didn’t take long. I’m kind of sorry, in a way, because its linguistic twists were pretty humorous.

“Science Babe” blasts “Food Babe” and it’s a good read

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I usually shy away from direct full-on attacks, but I couldn’t help enjoying this Gawker piece, “The ‘Food Babe’ Blogger Is Full of Shit.”

It’s a frontal attack on Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, by an author who describes herself as “an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology.”

This will give you a quick taste of the article’s approach.

Reading Hari’s site, it’s rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word “toxin” anytime there’s a chemical she can’t pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it’s hard to pinpoint her biggest sin.

A number of specific rebuttals to claims of the Food Babe are included, but there’s also an attempt to describe the essentially misleading way the Food Babe’s arguments are framed.

Hari uses this tricky technique again and again. If I told you that a chemical that’s used as a disinfectant, used in industrial laboratory for hydrolysis reactions, and can create a nasty chemical burn is also a common ingredient in salad dressing, would you panic? Be suspicious that the industries were poisoning your children? Think it might cause cancer? Sign a petition to have it removed?

What if I told you I was talking about vinegar, otherwise known as acetic acid?

This is Hari’s business. She takes innocuous ingredients and makes you afraid of them by pulling them out of context (Michelle Francl, in a review of Hari’s book for Slate, expertly demonstrates the shallowness of this gimmick). This is how Hari demonized the harmless yet hard-to-pronounce azodicarbonamide, or as she deemed it, the “yoga mat chemical,” which is yes, found in yoga mats and also in bread, specifically Subway sandwich bread, a discovery Hari bombastically trumpeted on her website. However, as the science-minded among us understand, a substance can be used for more than one thing perfectly safely, and it doesn’t mean that your bread is made of a yoga mat if it happens to contain azodicarbonamide, which is FDA-approved as a dough-softening agent. It simply means your bread is composed of chemicals, much like everything else you eat.

Anyway, it’s an entertaining entry into an important debate.

Happy Trails, Andrew

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Reading Andrew Sullivan’s “A note to my readers” this week was like an out-of-body experience, as if I could have been reading my own words.

“I want to let you know I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future,” he wrote.

Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

Like Sullivan, I’ve been blogging here daily for 15 years, and I have sometimes ached with a desire to pour myself into some longer investigations and a different form of writing, if only for a while. His words could have flowed from my keyboard, for sure. But unlike Sullivan, I haven’t attracted 30,000 subscribers or built a surprisingly robust business with a million dollars in annual revenue.

No, I’m not quitting, although I won’t deny having played out that scenario in my mind from time to time.

It’s instructive to see how others have responded to his announcement (see “A Blogger Breaks Free: Your Thoughts“; “A Blogger Breaks Free: Your Thoughts II“; and “A Blogger Breaks Free: Blog Reax“).