Other airlines will likely fill the void in our interisland skies left by the closing of Aloha Airlines without much long-term disruption, but the blow to Hawai’i’s psyche may take longer to heal.

Aloha’s demise marks the loss of yet another of the venerable old institutions that helped build and define our modern Hawai’i.

It reminds me of the 2001 Liberty House bankruptcy in terms of both the sentimental loss and the business circumstances.

Worthy competitors such as Macy’s and now Nordstrom’s have nicely filled the market niche held by Liberty House, but Liberty House represented something unique about Hawai’i and we miss it. We’ll probably feel the same about Aloha no matter how well other airlines serve the market.

On the strategic side, Hawai’i’s two established interisland airlines, like Liberty House, have conducted business in a way that has constantly tempted Mainland competitors to come in and take them on.

And like Liberty House, they responded not by toughening up and learning how to compete, but by using their political and economic muscle to try to keep competition out. In the end, this was a no-win tactic for both Liberty House and Aloha.

Where Aloha’s downfall greatly exceeds the Liberty House impact is in the crushing blow to most of the airline’s 3,500 employees.

While Liberty House workers were mostly able to land comfortably with the competitors that came into the market, Aloha’s employees may not be so lucky.

They already took big cuts to save the company in its first bankruptcy, and now face unemployment with compromised pension, medical and severance benefits and bleak options for finding comparable jobs in Hawai’i.

That disturbing reality is what sends us to bed feeling so sick about this turn of events.

Hawai’i temperatures have been rising rapidly since the 1970s as our state suffers the effects of global warming, a researcher says.

Perhaps that explains the boiling tempers that have come to define our public discourse lately — and the abundance of news to amuse and confuse in Hawai’i’s week that was:

• State legislators held a farmer’s market at the Capitol yesterday. The economy must really be tight if lawmakers are getting that hard up to raise campaign money.

• Democrats in the Legislature are sponsoring a bill to make it easy for labor unions to organize workers without holding elections. Looks like a trial balloon to see if lawmakers can get away with seating themselves without the formality of voting.

• Legislators dropped a bill that would have banned drivers from text messaging and e-mailing in traffic. It raises an interesting chicken-and-egg riddle: Do you need to have a brain to recognize a no-brainer when you see one?

• More on the theme: A judge didn’t buy the free speech claims of an MIT student from Hawai’i who created a terrorism scare at Boston’s Logan Airport by wearing a fake bomb attached to her shirt. Somebody should send her one of those shirts they sell at Ala Moana Center that say on the chest, “I wish these were brains.”

• Mayor Mufi Hannemann, who’s already banked $2 million with no opponent in sight, is holding a $500-per-person fundraiser featuring 10 feeding booths. For the convenience of guests, one booth should serve transit contracts, one should serve development permits, one should serve labor concessions …

• Hawai’i astronomers are aiming their telescopes at a “white dwarf” star in the constellation Virgo that previews our own sun’s eventual death in 4 billion years. That could put a serious damper on Sen. Daniel Inouye’s swearing in for his 666,666,675th term.

• N’ice lede by Jim Dooley: “The illegal drug commonly known here as ‘ice’ was found disguised as ice cubes in a ‘portable ice box’ carried by a traveler from South Korea, according to federal agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).”

• Two O’ahu schools have come under criticism for sex education programs that some parents and students found too graphic. They had to know they were asking for trouble when they let the birds and the bees play with dildos.

• A new vent at Kilauea volcano’s summit is pumping out unprecedented amounts of volcanic ash, geologists say. Sounds like Pele’s got a great idea for a blog.

And the quote of the week …

… from Gov. Linda Lingle on the shutdown of Molokai Ranch and the devastating loss of 120 jobs on the tiny island:

“The loss of this many jobs in such a small community like Moloka’i is equivalent to 23,000 people on O’ahu losing their jobs on the same day.”

The only way that could happen would be if she shut down the government.

Sean Hao had a good story yesterday about one of my biggest peeves — the Legislature’s pilfering of hundreds of million dollars from O’ahu residents paying the half-cent excise tax for rail transit.

When lawmakers authorized the city to collect the tax, they took a 10-percent share for the state off the top to pay for collection costs that aren’t nearly that much.

The result was a $40 million windfall in the first three years that could grow to some $300 million over the 20-year life of the tax, money that goes into the state general fund for legislators to spend on whatever they want — including projects in other counties that didn’t pay the tax.

The Legislature has refused repeated requests to return the windfall to the city for its intended purpose or give it back to taxpayers.

Their excuse now is that state revenues are down and they can’t afford to give up the money, but the state had a $700 million surplus when legislators first voted to pointlessly run up the cost of Hawai’i’s most expensive public works project ever by 10 percent from the outset.

The state’s greedy rake isn’t the chump change some have depicted; $300 million could go a long way toward paying for one of the rail lines to the airport, Waikiki or the University of Hawai’i that were cut to reduce the cost of the $3.7 transit project from Kapolei to Honolulu.

In non-rail terms, $300 million would mostly cover the massive cost of upgrading O’ahu’s dilapidated sewage collection system or pay one-third the cost of Sand Island and Honouliuli sewage treatment upgrades being demanded by the EPA that Mayor Mufi Hannemann claims would bankrupt the city.

At least Hao got an e-mail advocating returning the surplus to the city out of Hannemann, who has been mostly silent on the matter. He needed the support of legislators to enact the transit tax and no doubt will need their good will again before this this project is done.

Also quiet is Gov. Linda Lingle, who opposed having the state collect the city’s transit tax, but now is benefiting from having the extra money for the state to budget as much as the Legislature.

There’s little chance these funds will ever be returned unless Hannemann and Lingle make a bigger issue of it by standing up to fight for cheated O’ahu taxpayers and demanding that lawmakers publicly explain their shameless vigorish.

It won’t really be much different from the original, other than the nicer digital digs.

I reserve the right to talk about anything that captures my fancy, but mostly the subject will be politics and public affairs, which we’ll try to keep interesting with pointed opinions aimed across the political leavened by lots of humor.

Strong views and lively discussion in the comments section are encouraged; I only ask that it be kept civil so we contribute something useful to the public discourse instead of becoming engulfed in flames.

Ideas for improving this forum are always appreciated.

I’m baffled by the Board of Education’s move to create a new class of graduate degree called the “College and Career Ready Diploma,” which essentially certifies that bearers are workforce-ready and won’t require remedial instruction in English and math.

What does that say about students who graduate with regular diplomas — that they’re qualified to throw eggs at homes and cars in Lanikai?

Their diplomas won’t be worth much more than used chewing gum wrappers in the job market and college admission halls.

There’s nothing wrong with recognizing graduates who did especially well in their classes or completed more rigorous course work, but schools should do it by adding honors designations to graduates such as cum laude or magna cum laude instead of creating divisions of diplomas that devalue the work of the majority of graduates.

We need to get to the point where all of our public school graduates are college or job ready, not just a select few. It’s disgraceful that colleges and employers assume that so many will need remedial instruction in basic academic skills.