Pohakuloa: Now that you know. Do you care? Take action at kamakakoi.com from ruben carrillo on Vimeo.

From Chinen’s piece:

Dennis Kamakahi, a prolific Hawaiian songwriter, an influential slack-key guitarist and a central figure in the 1970s cultural movement known as the Hawaiian renaissance, died on Monday in Honolulu. He was 61.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Robin, said.

With his music, Mr. Kamakahi (pronounced KAH-mah-KAH-hee) formed a bridge between ancient and modern cultures. He paid frequent tribute to previous generations of Hawaiian songwriters, and his own songs have strong echoes of the cadence and narrative of traditional hula chants, along with pop harmony and inflection.

Read the full story here.

Is the United States controlled by a wealth-based oligarchy? It would appear that the question is at least interesting—if not downright true—to a lot of people in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is at the #2 spot on Amazon’s best seller list and is, as of publication, temporarily out of stock.

And it makes sense. Piketty uses over 100 years of data to clearly show how wealth grows faster than wages do when the return on capital (r) is greater than the economy’s growth rate (g). Which explains how we’ve arrived at the point that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have a great deal more influence and power that the rest of us do (re: oligarchy).

Even better; he has some ideas on how we can fix this situation, as is outlined by the Washington Post’s Matt O’Brien in his article, “4 ways to stop the U.S. from becoming a Piketty-style oligarchy.”

The flyers appear to make the point that if a UH student isn’t Native Hawaiian, he or she is simply “other.” What makes the flyers puzzling is that it is hard to tell whether the flyers are pro-Hawaiian or anti-Hawaiian. Are the flyers implying that “others” should be treated as illegal aliens, or are they implying that “others” feel as though they are already treated as such by Native Hawaiians who are, in some warped reality, dominant over whites living here? There is precedent for both sentiments, but the real story is what these flyers triggered.

A student-led response challenged the notion that racial differences can’t be converted into cultural appreciation by setting up a space for students to post more flyers—this time signed—in support of racial equality and social justice: