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Kady Pascual

Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Gotta make it sound convincing!"}]

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<title>Hawai‘i Scene on Social: PTO preparations</title>

Today’s social media find comes from @KennyKharisma2.0, who may need to stay home for a few days.

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: PTO preparations

Gotta make it sound convincing!  Make sure you follow @KennyKharisma2.0 on Instagram!

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Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

, is now open to the public. The Pinehopple Room is located on the second floor, directly above the Kaka

The space was previously home to the HI Brau Room, Aloha Beer Co.’s speakeasy that the biz operated primarily as a private event space.

“We always loved the room and felt like it had so much character,” says Candice Ishikawa, Aloha Beer Co.’s head of marketing and brand. “People who discovered it seemed to immediately fall in love with it, and we saw an opportunity to reimagine the space as something more distinctly connected to Aloha Beer and to Hawaiʻi, while opening it back up for more people to enjoy.”

Ishikawa explains that The Pinehopple Room concept came from the idea of taking the creativity and craft that goes into brewing beer and applying that same spirit to cocktails and hospitality.

“We wanted to create an intimate, upscale lounge that still felt unmistakably part of Aloha Beer, while offering a different side of Aloha Beer from the casual beer garden downstairs,” she says. “The name ‘Pinehopple’ comes from our logo icon and is a play on pineapple and hops, bringing together something immediately evocative of Hawaiʻi, with our roots as a brewery.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The venue’s name impacted its décor and ultimate vibe."}]

“We didn’t want to lose the darker, intimate character that made the original space special, so we built it with a vintage Hawaiʻi-inspired aesthetic, adding tropical botanicals, greenery, warm lighting and other details that make the room feel lush and inviting,” Ishikawa says.

She says The Pinehopple Room’s beverage program is where “the concept comes to life.” The drinks were inspired by the golden age of Hawaii cocktail culture, but the team wanted to bring its own unique twist to the beverages.

“We kept coming back to the idea that classic Hawaiʻi cocktails deserve to be remembered, not simply replicated,” Ishikawa says. “We’re taking those flavors and traditions, and reinterpreting them through fresh ingredients, thoughtful technique and our perspective as a craft brewery.”

So far, popular cocktails include the tropical itch ($18), Molokai fogcutter ($16) and paradise of the Pacific ($21). The tropical itch is made with 

bourbon, rum, orange curaçao, lilikoʻi, pineapple and a dark rum float; the Molokai fogcutter features aged and white rums, pineapple, lilikoʻi, lemon and orgeat; and paradise of the Pacific includes aged rum, tamarind, pineapple and hibiscus grenadine, according to Ishikawa.

Customers can also enjoy a scorpion bowl for two ($38), which is served in a vintage-inspired fish bowl. The drink is designed to be shared and also doubles as a fun centerpiece for the table, according to Ishikawa.

She also explains that The Pinehopple Room team is excited to offer a series of guided spirit flights.

“Guests can explore bourbon, Scotch, international whiskies, agave spirits, and Caribbean rum or Hawaiʻi-made rum, with a guided tasting sheet that provides some background and context for each pour without making the experience feel overly formal,” she says.

Customers can also enjoy light bites that pair naturally with the cocktails. Highlights include Pinehopple sashimi trio (market price) — served with a lilikoʻi-wasabi glaze — Pinehopple shrimp cocktail ($12), spinach dip salmon belly bites ($18), Cuban sliders ($13), paprika chicken pops ($18) and a salami caprese flatbread ($15).

“On the food side, we wanted dishes that were easy to share and felt at home alongside the cocktail program,” Ishikawa says.

The Cuban sliders feature brioche buns stuffed with mayo-mustard, ham, kalua pork, Swiss cheese, pickled cucumbers and cilantro-orange sauce. The paprika chicken pops comprises chicken drummettes in paprika batter, served with blue cheese honey-Red Zeppelin buffalo sauce and celery curls. So far, the chicken pops, spinach dip salmon belly bites and sliders have been customer favorites.

Ishikawa explains that The Pinehopple Room team has been excited to welcome guests and have them experience “the way different kinds of craft come together in one space.”

“Pinehopple is also about the experience around what’s in the glass,” she says. “There’s a sense of nostalgia and vintage Hawaiʻi hospitality without trying to recreate a specific era. We want it to feel special, but never overly formal — a place where people can slow down, connect and stay awhile.”

The Pinehopple Room is currently open from 5 to 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The lounge does not have a formal reservation system set up and is primarily open for walk-ins, but if a customer calls ahead, the venue can hold a table for them, according to Ishikawa.

“Aloha Beer has always been about creating places for people to gather, and Pinehopple gives us a new way to do that,” Ishikawa says. “Someone can have a beer in the beer garden downstairs, then head upstairs for a cocktail or whiskey flight and feel like they’ve stepped into an entirely different experience without ever leaving Aloha Beer. We’ve loved this room for a long time, and we’re excited to finally open the doors and share it with more people.”

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<title>The Pinehopple Room is a new upstairs lounge in Kakaʻako</title>

Located upstairs from Aloha Beer Co. on Queen Street, The Pinehopple Room — previously home to the HI Brau Room speakeasy — recently opened to the public. The upscale lounge features a vintage Hawaiʻi-inspired aesthetic, along with classic Hawaiʻi cocktails with a modern twist.

The Pinehopple Room is a new upstairs lounge in Kakaʻako

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A. Kam Napier

Columnists

Government & Politics

Aloha State Daily received a press release today from a Mainland-based national interest group, U.S. Term Limits (USTL), letting us know that “2026 Hawai‘i state senate candidate, Wallyn Christian (District 13) has committed support for term limits on Congress by signing the term limits convention pledge.”

Why does this matter to that organization? “(USTL, the leader in the national, non-partisan movement to limit terms for elected officials, is gathering support from state lawmakers across the nation,” the statement says. “Its mission is to get 34 states to apply for an amendment proposal convention specific to term limits on Congress.”

Term-limiting Congress is a popular idea, and USTL cites a 

 that, “An overwhelming majority of adults (87%) favor limiting the number of terms that members of Congress are allowed to serve. This includes a majority 56% who strongly favor this proposal, just 12% are opposed.”

The idea emerges often for local politicians, as well. Civil Beat has found public support for term limits to be as high as 70% in a 2018 poll of likely voters, a stat Honolulu Civil Beat resurfaced 

 of the lawmakers themselves to see where they stand on the idea of limiting their own time in office. “Nearly half of House members and more than a third of senators say they support term limits. There are enough undecideds in both chambers to give it a good shot if they held their position for two years,” CB found.

Respectfully, all of these people are wrong. Well intentioned, but they're aiming term limits at the wrong people.

I mean, I totally understand where the frustration is coming from. We elect people, nationally and locally, then are disappointed in their results. We could end their terms ourselves by simply not reelecting these people and yet obviously a lot of the people who say they want term limits do something very odd: They seem to reelect the lousy politicians they say they want to term limit.

You want to limit someone’s term? You’re just a month away from your next opportunity to vote for someone else!

So we’ve always had the power to fire politicians with every election, but don’t, then remain convinced that what we need is more turnover in government to make it more efficient, effective and responsive. Somebodies’ terms need limiting, but who?

Easy: The workforce. The bureaucrats. See, I want term limits, too, but I want them on the people staffing all the departments and agencies that we’re perpetually frustrated with. 

Consider, to cite just one example, how many different mayors you’ve seen over the past 20 or 30 years promise to reform the departments of planning and permitting in each county. The mayors have term limits. They come and go. Have any of them succeeded at this reform?

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi has done more than any predecessor but there’s a long way still to go.

How many Hawai‘i governors — term-limited governors — have promised Hawai‘i a public education second to none? Which of them succeeded? Who is still in place, immune to reform?

What happens in real life is, candidates make bold promises of reform, we elect them, then they announce bold plans for reform and those plans run headfirst into a culture of unfirable civil servants shielded by union protections. These folks don’t even have to noisily and aggressively oppose the reform, all they have to do is … not do it. And wait. Four years later, or eight years later, their antagonist is gone, the staff remains, with its culture of job security over excellence safely intact.

[{"type":"text","text":"We, the taxpayers and voters, then sit around wondering what happened."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Two Hawai‘i’s"}]

What’s happened is simple: Since statehood, Hawai‘i’s people have steadily split into two camps, those who work for government and everybody else. The appeal of Government Hawai‘i is the security and benefits — lifelong employment, if you want it, totally protected from market forces and competition, with solid benefits like healthcare and retirement, paid for by the rest of us in Real Hawai‘i.

If you think the security and the bennies of government jobs are a trade-off to compensate for low pay, guess again. Government Hawai‘i earns more than Real Hawai‘i.

The annual average wage of a non-government job in Hawai‘i is 

 from the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.

The average annual wage in state government? 

What does Real Hawai‘i get in return? One of the highest tax burdens in America for one thing, and then very little to brag about in high-quality government service. (

I would say that that two Hawai‘i’s have hardened into opposing camps, except that’s not exactly true. Government Hawai‘i drives an Us vs Them dynamic, that was never clearer to me than it was during Covid, when Government Hawai‘i showed us that it will shut the rest of down for years at a time given the slightest opportunity. It will also protect itself first, at the expense of the public is supposedly serves, as we see in the lingering effects of the schools closing for so long. That policy made no one safer, but it did mess up the kids. (And have you noticed ever since then, Government Hawai‘i takes the day off for even bad weather like it never did before, while the rest of us soldier on with our work?)

Out here in Real Hawai‘i, we grumble but otherwise settle for apathy (i.e., low voter turnout) or outright flight to states where it feels like a good life is more possible. I don’t know who Government Hawai‘i is going to tax when the last of us moves to Vegas.

With all that in mind, term limits on government service seem like the one revolution we haven’t tried, haven’t even discussed, but should. Say 10, 15 years max, total lifetime employment in government at any level. We want people to stay long enough to learn the ropes and finish things they’ve started, not so long that they just settle in and kill time until retirement.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The upsides:"}]

Breaks up all the pockets of resistance to change. Turnover would occur systemwide, one person at a time, as they age out. Reformers at the top have a chance building support in the workforce among newer staff.

[{"type":"text","text":"Brings in new people and new ideas in government at every level."}]

Opens up more opportunities for Government Hawai‘i and Real Hawai‘i to trade places and live in each other’s worlds. This may be the biggest upside — more of us would get a chance to feel like we had a chance to change the system from the inside and deliver the service we’ve always wanted, while more of them would be forced to realize that Real Hawai‘i is something more than subjects to be ruled and tax cows to be milked.

Forces a revolution in how government hires. Using Mayor Blangiardi again as an example, he’s talked about how it took people six months on average to get hired by the City & County of Honolulu when he assumed office. 

, he had cut that down to three months. Compared to the speed at which the private sector can hire, that’s still an eternity, and that would have to change immediately to deal with the kind of turnover we need.

(To be fair, government is not alone on this front. In my decade at Pacific Business News, I heard executives at Hawai‘i’s larger companies talk endlessly about a labor shortage. At the same time, I knew plenty of talented people who could not land great jobs. Something is seriously broken in the hiring process, and I suspect HR, especially using automated keyword-based filters on resumes, is to blame. Make Direct Hiring by Managers Great Again!)

Loss of expertise, I suppose, but we’ve seen what the accumulated expertise gets us: A chief elections officer who thought a lauhala basket suited the dignity of a Hawai‘i electoral tie-breaker and ended getting his office sued — successfully — and 

. Scott Nago has worked at the Office of Election for nearly 26 years, almost 17 of those years as its chief election officer. As Civil Beat 

, it’s just about the only place he has ever worked in his life. Well, in the private sector, you can lose your job for bungling things so badly you get sued. Under my plan, the private sector is where he would’ve been sent years ago. Had someone else, perhaps with a wider range of life experience, been at the helm, maybe that person would've made better decisions.

[{"type":"text","text":"So, OK, there are no downsides."}]

Term limits on government service. If you like this idea, spread the word. We’d be moving a mountain to make it happen. But that’s got to be better than carrying the mountain of Government Hawai‘i on our shoulders forever.

A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.

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People take time out of their lives to participate in the democratic process by testifying before committee hearings. Too often, the committee isn't there.

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Pipikaula Corner: Invisible Legislators

It's not getting much media attention, but the private diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci have been published online by Sen. Rand Paul in advance of his hearings this week into Fauci and Covid-19. What they reveal across thousands of pages is man in love with the adulation he received, who privately knew that many of things he said publicly about the pandemic were wild exaggerations.

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Pipikaula Corner: Fauci revealed as fear-mongering, fame-loving fraud

<title>Pipikaula Corner: Limiting the wrong terms</title>

It's an election year, and some people are running on the popular idea that legislators and Congress should have term limits to prevent lifers from working the system. ASD Editor in Chief A. Kam Napier argues this is a great idea, with the wrong target. What if it's actually the government workforce itself that needs a term limit?

Pipikaula Corner: Limiting the wrong terms

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Sterling Higa

Crime & Courts

On the last day of August, a woman pulled two kitchen knives from a shopping bag on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan and used them on two people, 20 seconds apart.

One was a 68-year-old man coming up from the subway at 41st Street with his wife. He survived. The other, a block north, was Erin Piacenti, a young mother on her first day back at work from maternity leave. She died.

Pamela Cisneros walked on toward a police substation with the knives still in her hands. For four minutes officers told her to drop them. She would not. Then she was dead, shot by police.

By evening, everyone who read the news knew why. Cisneros was mentally ill. Her family said so, her old Facebook posts said so, police sources said so, and the newspapers said so with a kind of relief, because it meant the event had an explanation.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"I want to look at that explanation."}]

Cisneros had written on Facebook last November that the end times had come. Among her signs, the 

 reported, she listed “the diminished love of people to the point of stabbing others for no reason.”

She wrote that Satan, knowing his time is short, wants to take as many souls to hell as possible. That’s why some people hear voices telling them to kill.

Nine months later she stabbed two strangers. I am not going to diagnose her from her posts; enough people are doing that. But she showed concern about hearing voices, and she wrote that those voices come from the devil.

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a jury spent seven days deliberating over Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury nurse who strangled her three small children in January 2023 and then tried to end her own life. Her lawyers said she suffered postpartum psychosis and that a voice told her to do it. On Friday the judge 

. Eleven jurors were ready to acquit. One was not.

The public debate is over whether hearing that voice excuses her. What strikes me is how little fight there is over the premise. The pundits agree that mental illness produced the voice. The only question is whether Clancy is responsible for heeding its instruction.

But if she did hear a voice, was it caused by mental illness?

Every human culture before 1800 had a name for a voice that tells you to kill your children, and the name was not “symptom.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The Gospels are almost casual about this."}]

When the crowds came to Jesus at Capernaum, Mark says they “brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons,” and he healed the one and cast out the other.

Casting out demons was not the exclusive province of Christians. Outsiders also got into the trade. In Ephesus, seven sons of a Jewish priest named Sceva went about expelling spirits in the name of “the Jesus whom Paul proclaims,” having seen that the method worked. One spirit answered them: “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” Then it beat all seven of them out of the house, leaving them naked and wounded. Nobody in Ephesus was arguing about neurotransmitters.

And once, the disciples failed. A father brought his son, seized since childhood by a demon that threw him into fire and water, and men who had cast out demons before could not cast out this one. Jesus told them why. “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” And then Jesus commanded the spirit to leave. It did.

If these stories seem fantastical, it is because we live in a disenchanted world. Nearly every culture has made room for the supernatural, but ours prefers to reduce everything to chemistry. We hold to this explanation with a faith that would shame a monk. The chemistry cannot be seen. And the cures built on it do not reliably work. But we persist.

Consider the pills for depression. A whole class of drugs works by tinkering with serotonin, a chemical in the brain. These SSRIs help many people, modestly. They also carry a federal warning that they can increase suicidal thinking.

 that psychiatric drugs are among the leading causes of death for the elderly across the West. His critics say he overstates the case, but there is a case.

The drugs are a gamble, and everyone involved knows it. So their television commercials end with a voice reading from a long list of side effects. The list includes 

: the drug may “increase suicidal thoughts or actions in some people 24 years of age and younger, especially within the first few months of treatment or when the dose is changed.”

A drug that can either cure depression or cause suicide is like a ball dropped into a spinning roulette wheel. Parents who place their faith in such drugs and the doctors prescribing them are gambling with their children’s lives.

Lindsay Clancy and her former husband are both suing the professionals who treated her for depression in the years before she killed her children. Insurance companies will likely push the defendants to settle out of court. And whenever the courts are done with Clancy, everyone will go back to business as usual.

But she claims she heard a voice, and I believe her.

Her mistake was to obey that voice, and she should bear the consequence of her heinous crimes. Scripture never once lets the tempter assume the guilt of the tempted.

Christians have erred in two directions. Many stopped believing in demons a generation before the psychiatrists did, and now define “mental health” exactly as the world does. Others tell a bipolar woman to pour her lithium down the sink and come to the Wednesday deliverance service instead.

None of this is an argument against medicine. In some cases of mental illness there is a real chemical issue. A person is deficient in some vitamin or mineral, and a supplement fixes the problem. Sometimes a neurotransmitter runs high or low, a receptor stops answering, and the mind begins to hear things. Some medicine works. But not all cases respond to medical treatment.

The trouble comes with the diversity of human response. Not everyone whose brain misfires hears a voice. Not everyone who hears a voice hears it say 

Chemistry alone cannot account for these differences. And a focus on invisible brain chemistry leads us to ignore what’s right before our eyes.

Human sinfulness is enough to account for mothers who murder their children. But this does not mean the devil is absent. Scripture says that he “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

Blaming the devil would not be accepted as a defense in court, but blaming neurotransmitters is. That tells us where our superstitions lie.

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<title>Pamela Cisneros, Lindsay Clancy, and the voice that said ‘kill’</title>

A woman pulled two kitchen knives from a shopping bag on Seventh Avenue and used them on two strangers. By nightfall everyone knew why, and no one argued. ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa on the explanation for mental illness that every culture but ours took for granted.

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: PTO preparations

Kady Pascual

Social Media & Marketing Manager

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Hawai‘i Scene on Social: PTO preparations

Authors

Kady Pascual

Social Media & Marketing Manager

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