The hearing for the sentencing of Lance Bermudez, the last of about 18 co-defendants and associates of the late Michael J. Miske, Jr., was held on Monday morning, July 14, 2025, in the federal courtroom of Chief Judge Derrick Watson. It was five years, almost to the day, since a grand jury indictment was unsealed and Miske was arrested in a pre-dawn raid on July 15, 2020, and co-defendants tracked down.

With strong words for the defendant and his attorney, Watson sentenced Bermudez to a total of 30 years in federal prison. Nearly 20 family members and friends sat quietly in the courtroom as the sentence was announced.

Bermudez’s sentencing marked the end of the case that broke up a racketeering organization controlled and directed by Michael J. Miske, Jr. who, over the course of two decades, grew from a runaway kid from Waimanalo living on the streets in Kailua into a prolific car thief and drug dealer, and over time into a widely feared crime boss who owned multiple well-known businesses, several homes, and a luxury home in Portlock overlooking the ocean, as well as a reputation for violence that silenced critics, scared off business competitors, and protected his associates from retaliation when they assaulted, robbed, or cheated their victims.

The case became the most complex criminal case in the history of Hawaii and this judicial district, eventually involving over 2 million pages of documents, including almost 300,000 pages of accounting records from his business and personal finances, hundreds of gigabytes of digital files including data extractions from 150 digital devices including phones, computers, hard drives, thumb drives and DVDs with over 200,000 video clips and masses of text messages, and more than 200 hours of audio and video recordings.

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Oh, no! Another week, and another melincholy memory of saying goodbye to one of our many much-loved cats.

We adopted Kua, the second of our pair of first-generation calicos, on June 6, 1987.

The next year, we moved ourselves, and three cats, from a townhouse in Kahala to a home in Kaaawa. It was a great place to be a cat, at tne end of a short dead-end street with an undeveloped 4-acre parcel right in front for wandering and hunting. But, as I recall, Kua wasn’t really a hunter, or a wanderer. But oh, she was sweet!

Kua died on July 14, 1998, not too long after being diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

Here’s a photo of our original two calicos. Kua in her prime, splayed out on the floor of the house in Kaaawa, with Ms. Miki, who was a year older, relaxing in the box.

If you would like to know more of her story, just click on the photo for a short essay I wrote not long after she died. This was in the very early days of online sharing, and the post looks its age, but the story catches much of

This week I shifted gears and asked ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI assistants to write a blog post about our feline household in the style of the late great columnist and political commentator, Molly Ivins.

It was different from my earlier explorations that used the AI assistants to help process large numbers of documents, either using them as intelligent search agents, or to suggest ways of organizing both the documents and the multiple issues raised.

For the cat blog post experiment, I provided each with similar instructions.

write a blog post about the problem of living with four indoor cats that don’t all get along with each other, in the style of molly ivins. The four cats are Kali, the calico and the oldest at about 8 years; Kinikini, the big orange tabby who thinks he’s the top cat; Ms. Bessie, another calico who is a bit timid and gets picked on but is totally loving with people; and Kiko, a spotted black and white cat just over a year old who provides the comic relief for the family. Kiko, which means “spot” or “spotted” in Hawaiian, is a female. Kiko has not been afraid, and she has built a strong relationship with each of the other cats. A friend to all. A couple of additional things. Our house has wood floors and no carpet. We live in Hawaii, so have lots of windows and glass doors that bring the outdoors in, and that provide many vantage points for bird watching and sun bathing. And the windows and a double sliding glass door provide a view out into our large back yard that all the cats enjoy. Two large mango trees planted about 80 years ago cast their shade in the afternoons, surrounded by tropical plants and a large lawn. The cats can vicariously enjoy the outdoors and the bird life!

Each produced a draft between 700 and 800 words. They apparently drew on common descriptions of cats, their likes and dislikes, and their behavior. They were both able to turn the brief instructions into themes that carried through their drafts.

And both were fun to read. But it’s more than a little humbling. These computer dig into its vast training libraries and, in seconds, comes up with good workable text in the appropriate tone of Molly Ivin’s voice. Impressive.

Here are the lead paragraphs of each to give you the flavor.

ChatGPT: Living with Four Cats Who Don’t Like Each Other (Much)
In the style of Molly Ivins, God rest her wise-cracking soul.

Now look, I love cats. Always have. Something about a creature that can sleep 18 hours a day, demand food like royalty, and still act like you’re the guest in their house—it’s humbling. But living with four indoor cats who mostly don’t get along is like trying to referee a family reunion where half the cousins are feuding and the other half brought tequila.

Gemini: The Uncivil War Right Here in the Living Room

Your correspondent here has seen his share of political donnybrooks, but the current situation right here on the wood floors is starting to look like a four-way primary with no clear winner and a whole lot of caterwauling. Forget the Legislature, folks. If you want to see a real turf war, complete with entrenched incumbents, blowhard challengers, and a long-suffering populace, just try living with four cats who’ve decided peaceful coexistence is for the dogs.

I have to give Gemini higher marks for finding the Molly Ivins tone and maintaining it through the text, not simply using political metaphors but slipping in references to her Texas background as well.

Gemini’s description of Bessie is a good example: “She’s another calico, sweet as a pecan pie, but timid as a freshman legislator on their first day. Ms. Bessie is the long-suffering public in this equation. Both Kali and Kinikini, in a rare display of bipartisan agreement, tend to pick on her.

Clever, and a mighty fine imitation of Ms. Molly’s style of writing.

ChapGPT tried, but didn’t really get into channeling the inner Ivins, although it displayed a familiarity with the behavior of cats.

ChatGPT also added a description of Kiko grooming Kali that I consider that a hallucination. I don’t think that’s ever happened, and I doubt that it ever will. But most of the other descriptions of cat behavior are general enough that they fit this and a lot of other situations.

While both drafts are clever and fun to read, I’m struggling to describe my reaction. They are somehow too clever, too glib, but in some sense hollow, a good imitation of someone telling a story but with something lacking.

Maybe someone out there can help me out with this. What’s missing? Is there some telltale quality that the trained eye can use to identify that it was written by a computer assistant?

If you want to go further, here are links to the full text of both versions.

Cats by Gemini

Cats by ChatGPT

This is in memory of our cat, Ms. Wally, who died on this day in 2015.

I’ll start this story at the beginning.

It began on Saturday morning, January 24, 1998. We were driving from Kaaawa into downtown Honolulu to attend an auction run by friends, and hit unusual stop-and-go traffic on Kahelili Highway just Kaneohe-side of Temple Valley Shopping Center. We could see that cars in the line in front of us were veering out into the other lane to avoid something in the road. When we got to the front of the line, we were shocked to see a tiny gray/brown kitten in the middle of the lane of traffic, facing off with the oncoming cars.

Meda jumped out, snatched up the kitten, and hurried back to the car. The kitten huddled in her lap as we slowly proceeded. But down just a short way ahead, another car had pulled over out of traffic and the driver was standing alongside his car holding a second kitten.

We stopped, and he told me that someone had been driving along and dropping kittens out of a moving car.

“What should I do?” he asked, holding up the kitten.

“We picked up another kitten and are taking it to our vet right now,” I said, “so we’ll take it.” Luckily, he willingly gave up custody and handed us Kitten #2.

Meda held the two kittens, and off we went see our vet, Doug Hooks, who had an office just across the hall from the Times Supermarket back in the shopping center. And that was it. They were now part of the family.

We named the first kitten, the one with some brown coloring, Kili, a nod to the spot on Kahekili Highway where we had found her. The other kitten, gray with a bit longer fur, we named Wally, for the set of Wallace flatware that we had intended to bid on at the auction.

Wally collapsed in our kitchen and died on July 9, 2015, just five weeks before we moved from Kaaawa to what had been my parents’ home in Kahala. Kili was one of five cats that made the move from Kaaawa to Kahala with us. She lived to 19. But that’s another story.

And, for the record, here‘s a slide show of photos taken during Wally’s long life. Yes, it’s too long, but you can skip ahead at any time.