Stories of ThinkTech

JUST ANOTHER WAY TO WATCH THINKTECH Smart TVs, including Samsung, give you still another way to watch YouTube and thus ThinkTech.   Try it on your smart TV and you will see.     It’s not just access to YouTube, it’s smart access to YouTube, and that means a world of YouTube content organized in a way that reflects and responds to your viewing history and tastes.   And it’s easy to use and find and watch.   It often knows what you want to watch before you do. That on top of the fact that YouTube is growing logarithmically every day.   A huge amount of new and better content all the time.   Anything you could want to see, and it’s all right there for you.   In many ways, better than regular network or cable TV.   I thought it was just me, but other people are telling me they are caught up in it too. And you can easily include ThinkTech Hawaii in your smart TV profile, so that when you go onto the YouTube section of your smart TV, ThinkTech come...

SURE YOU SHOULD ATTEND OUR AWARDS CEREMONY It’s coming soon, December 8th.   It’s a webinar 6:00-7:00pm.   Here’s the link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TWm1nclyTkKARXa8bsafaw Register and you’ll see our Year in Review, our Oli Aloha with Keli’i Akina, and then a keynote by our great friend Suzanne Puanani Vares-Lum, President of the East-West Center, telling us about development at the East-West Center and foreign policy in the Pacific Region. And of course, this will be followed by our 2022 Award Ceremony.   We’ll be presenting three Community Service Awards, one to CompuGirls of Hawaii (represented by Executive Director Whitney Aragaki), one to Project Expedite Justice (represented by CEO Cynthia Tai), and one to Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald of the Hawaii Supreme Court. Then we‘ll present our ThinkTech Family Awards, the first for Show of the Year to "Nation of Immigrants" hosted by Chang Wang, and two Host of the Year awards, one to Christ...

TWITTER, A CASUALTY OF MUSK Up till now ThinkTech has been on Twitter .   It was pretty much going in the right direction particularly when it barred Donald Trump.   But Elon Musk's frenetic purchase of Twitter and what he has done since then has changed all that. What Musk has done even in the past few days give us great concern.   He’s permitted outrageous lies and conspiracy theories on Twitter, pulled moderation systems, and has himself tweeted hateful lies, appalling conspiracy theories and calls for violence, motivated by a bizarre schadenfreude against Paul Pelosi, misinforming and spreading hate among millions of Americans, and encouraging others to do the same. On a number of occasions, Musk has said he will permit Trump back on Twitter, which will undoubtedly enhance these lies and hate and dog whistles for violence, just as in the past, or worse.   This is all too much.   Only days after Musk closed, and only days before the 2022 midterm elections,Twi...

NAKA DO - RENEWING OUR MARITAL VOWS Trump is many things to many people, but mostly he is a distraction, distracting us from the national democracy and the national business. Regrettably, we haven’t paid enough attention to those things, and we’ve lost focus on the national democracy and the national business.   Thanks to Trump, we are in a profound national decline. It’s time to ignore him and the narcissistic distractions he creates.   It’s time for us to pay attention to what we learned or should shade learned in social studies. It’s time for us to recognize that we are all part of a fundamental social compact that has kept us together, kept us productive and kept us safe over these 230 years. It’s time, past time, for us to restate and renew our marital vows to the country, to the Constitution and to the rule of law, just like married couples reaffirm their vows in Japan. We need to reestablish the social compact that has bound us, the fundamental promise to care for and t...

THEY’RE ONLY A BUNCH OF CLOWNS - PEOPLE LAUGH AT THEM, BUT ONLY OUT OF NERVOUSNESS We assume our beloved democracy will be resilient.   They felt the same way in Europe.   At first, the middle class thought Hitler and Mussolini were clowns, ephemeral, even pathetic.   This was a theme in the Ken Burns U.S. and the Holocaust series on PBS.   It was also a theme in the 1972 Garden of the Finzi-Continia film on Amazon Prime. But after a while, not very long, we find they are not clowns at all.   By then it’s too late and we’ve been ambushed by your own wishful optimism that they would go away.   We humor ourselves with hopeful points of light - but hope is not enough, end not soon enough. If Trump gets investigated or loses a motion or says something stupid, that’s not enough. His acolytes are deadly serious, working hard around the country to advance his conspiracy every day, investing tons of time and millions in money. It’s a deadly sport.   For many o...

COVID IS NOT THE ONLY INFECTION TRUMP GAVE US He gave us a whole phenomenon of infection; a package of sick positions.   He built this base out of disaffected people, tens of millions.   We saw COVID grow to a Pandemic under him; it was part of his search for chaos.   History shows that autocrats need chaos to enhance their power.   He gave us a country divided on covid, on medicine, on science, where millions acted against their own interest, refused masks and medicines that would have saved their lives.   His legacy is a whole package of sick positions like that. He fomented racism and hatred, bigotry and violence, Immigration politics that separate children, inhumane bans on abortion, fighting like hell against gun control that would protect us against massacres, ignoring climate change, undermining voting rights and representative government, calling for people to deny the rule of law, even though that makes their lives worse. Is it that Trump’s base all agr...

THE SIGNALS ARE CLEAR, BUT HISTORY IS NOT HERE TO HELP Trump has unloosed a torrent of destructive time bombs into our society, and has given us a legacy of chaos operating not for our interest or to improve our lives, but only his. Congress is dysfunctional, and will be a basket case after the mid-terms.  The judiciary has lost it, not only the train wreck at the Supreme Court but many of the lower courts, including our favorite compromised judge Aileen Cannon, who doesn’t know up from down.  How can we have confidence in these people and thus in our government.   Rights are being taken away from us, like abortion, and so are national security documents, like Mar-a-Lago. You don’t have to be a genius to know that our legal and governmental system are disintegrating.  At some cortical level, even the walking dead cult people know it.  They don’t admit it, they can’t admit it, but certainly they must know it. “The true administration of justice is the firmes...