Jack O’Sullivan was far from buzzing when his Waikanae Beach home was invaded by a horde of bees who made a giant home in his ceiling.

The ceiling is full to the brim with old hives and honeycomb — enough to fill a wheelie bin — after they were exterminated about four or five months ago.

O’Sullivan, 91, had watched in amazement as the bees took over his two-storey home.

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by Karl Webber

The shallow draft Manaaki was the Webber whanau’s Kapiti Island vessel, she was used extensively to transport people, supplies and sheep between Kapiti and the Mainland.

Manaaki was designed by Hona Webber with a piece of pumice and a nelson based co was commisioned to build her, she was around 28 ft long and 8 ft wide and made of Kauri.

Manaaki would be brought up the Waikanae River and parked near the current launching ramp near Arapawaiti which was the old coach stop at Otaihanga / Waikanae River Mouth. 

by Ken Millward

I can’t help but look with incredulity at the voracious greed displayed by many of our so called Iwi and Maori leaders in their grab for funds, privileges and power. Emboldened by a corrupt political system in which race-based seats allow them to dictate the shape of Government, these people in their separatist drive for so-called self-determination care only for themselves and their so called ‘our people’ and to hell with the rest of the country.

By way of devious and pretty dishonest twisting of that very simple document, The Treaty, Maori have among many other things been granted exclusive rights to a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum, a fair chunk of the fishing quota, a huge area of previously public owned forestry along with numerous other bits and pieces of formally public property. Maori also of course additionally receive the same general entitlement to resources as everyone else.

Among the many resources currently being grabbed at is the entire coast line and sea bed out to 12 nautical miles [about 22 km] including any under-laying minerals. Also up for claim is a fair chunk of the health budget exclusively for Maori along with all areas of Government spending in Social Services, Education and Justice just to name a few.

This of course would not preclude Maori from having full access to all of the remaining funds directed at the rest of the populace.

The one grab that really gets to me is their ownership claim for fresh water which our current bunny Government would have granted if it weren’t for New Zealand First. Fresh water! that substance manufactured and transported by the sun (probably from the territorial seas of other Nations) as part of the very air we breath before being delivered by gravity after which it makes it’s way back into the sea and the atmosphere in a continuing natural cycle. When you read the nonsense justification for Maori ownership put out by the Waitangi Commission, one would have to be wilfully deaf and blind to not conclude the Commission is a nepotist, corrupt, kangaroo court. Fresh water is the collective birth right of every Kiwi regardless of race and is owned by no-one!

As a fifth generation Kiwi I fail to understand why my first cousin (intelligent, articulate and hard working woman that she is) and her children should have greater political rights and privileges under the RMA, substantial extra privileges under The Education Act, The Zero Carbon Bill, Government and Local Body employment policy just to name a few, on the basis of her one eighth Maori DNA. The list of special opportunity and privilege available only to Kiwi’s who identify as Maori is huge and too large to list here.

One has to admit that these so called Iwi and Maori leaders have been highly successful in manipulating a corrupted political system where incumbent Political Parties are more than happy to sell their own Grandmothers in order to retain the levers of power. The only two who appear not to have succumbed to these particular frauds on the general citizenship, present and future have been ACT and New Zealand First.

You also can’t help but notice that almost without exception the most Greedy Iwi leaders are ensconced in comfortable privileged well paid taxpayer funded positions. These fat cats justify their continual claims for more special privilege by crying victim hood and blaming the poor social statistics of lower socio economic Maori on the supposed evils of colonisation. The very colonisation which made New Zealand a first world county and put the complaining fat cats into their comfortable situations.

There is no doubt that past Colonial Governments, permitted by the values of the day, did in many instances treat Maori unfairly and badly. Even so unsavoury actions of these Colonial Governments have been greatly exaggerated to the point of out right lies such as in the case of Parihaka and the earlier Rangiaowhia affair. These lies and gross distortions of the truth seemingly accepted without question by any number of halfwits who haunt the halls of academia, Politicians and of course the Waitangi Commission. I
could probably make a pretty good case that my own Irish/Scottish forbears were around the same time treated even worse which is simply a fact of history and is in the past.

I find it ironic when I consider the fat cat claims that all of the failures among lower socio economic Maori are exclusively the fault of Colonisation, so called systemic racism, and Pakeha generally. Nowhere do you hear them urging the people they claim to speak for to adopt the first world ethics, value of education, and health awareness required to take full advantage of the first world county we have collectively created.

Instead our so-called Iwi leaders claim that ‘our people’ can’t adopt these ethics and values as they are Pakeha ethics and fail to take into account the Maori world view. This despite the fact that the fat cats themselves have adopted first world ethics in spades which explains their own success. They also fail to explain how these Pakeha ethics are the same ethics strongly displayed in first world countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Iceland, etc.

New Zealand has some truly inspirational Maori Leaders, among them that truly great kiwi: Sir Jerry Mateparae, love him or loath him, Winston Peters and for that matter Ron Marks, Mavis Mullins, Buck Shelford the list is endless with most of these leaders coming from humble backgrounds. The one thing they have in common you never hear them claim they have been held back or disadvantaged through being Maori.

Finally, yes I am old white stale male and no doubt will be labelled a rabid racist by the outraged liberals who find it more convenient to name call and attempt to intimidate than debate the obvious facts. I actually don’t subscribe to any racist thoughts or theories and like many people of my age with only basic education have had to overcome my own feelings of inadequacy to ensure my family received the benefits of our health and education systems.

The reason I choose to speak out on this matter is it is obvious that the separatist and privilege creating path we are currently on is simply inviting disaster for generations of the future. I find it saddening when despite huge opportunity I hear young Maori who have no work ethic, little education, little aspiration and little future prospects claim that they are owed a living because those white motherf…..s have stolen everything from them. The Greens, Labour and National have all been to varying degrees complicit in this state of affairs.

You can now check the results of the latest round of property revaluations.   Figures released by Quotable Value (QV) show house values across the Kapiti district have risen an average of 29.1% in the last three years. The average house price in Kapiti is now $711,465, up from $541,000 in 2017.   The rateable value of a property does not mean an equivalent rates increase for that property. Valuations are one of the factors that determine how rates are allocated across the district, with a combination of land value, capital value and fixed charges playing a part. Differential rates are applied in some cases.   QV will be sending letters to property owners this week showing their new valuations.

More information

by Cam Slater, Insight: Politics Podcast, The BFD, 26 October 2020

Cam Slater says, in his introduction: “I will challenge Tova O’Brien with some facts that seem to have escaped her slanted view of the world.

“She will, no doubt, dismiss it as fake news. The information doesn’t come from their usual sources like CNN or the Guardian or the mouth of Jacinda Ardern.

“Journalists do us all a disservice when they let their egos get in the way of facts.”

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Podcast:

“Tova O’Brien, one of the more shrill media shills for the Ardern government is currently drunk on self promotion after her interview with Jami-lee Ross.

It was an interview where she showed personal animus towards the interviewee and utter bias in distorting and then shutting down key information about the Chinese plague, simply because it didn’t suit her narrative.

Here (attached) is the relevant bit of the interview, where she asks a question then shuts down the answer:

You have to wonder why she even asked the question in the first place.

Then after a storm of publicity, she then wrote a wanky self-justifying article in that left-wing rag called The Guardian, leaving us in no doubt about her underlying political ideology.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/tova-obrien-my-feral-intervie…

No self-respecting conservative would ever deign to read The Guardian, much less write for it.

She starts the article with some bold and, as it turns out, factually incorrect claims.

“Like the families of 1.14 million people worldwide, our family has lost people we love to Covid-19. They are people who would not have died were it not for this deadly, hyper-contagious virus. We are in a global pandemic that is at least 15 times more fatal than seasonal influenza.”

There is no context to such an emotive and baseless claim.

Is she seriously stating that the 25 people who have died in New Zealand, even though 11 weren’t even tested for the Wu Pox, wouldn’t have died but for the virus?

That’s a stretch. We now have the sad and ironic situation where more people have died on our roads this year than from the plague, but the difference is we haven’t had the Prime Minister and Ashley Bloomfield announcing every road death like they have from the Chinese plague.

But her boldest claim is that the Wu Flu is 15 times more fatal that seasonal flu.

Well is it?

The short answer is no, it is not.

We have basically used the sledgehammer of lockdowns to break the shelled peanut that is COVID-19.

We’ve wrecked our economy for the seasonal flu.

Even the WHO says as much. They now say that lockdowns aren’t the way to go.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/…/co…/DQMBCUNNRCHCBLCITIMKOYXLRU/

And it is WHO that now says that COVID-19 is about as deadly as the seasonal flu.

Dr Sebastion Rushworth points this out in a recent column:

https://sebastianrushworth.com/…/10/24/how-deadly-is-covid…/

“In August, I wrote an article where I proposed that the mortality for covid is only 0.12%, roughly the same as influenza. That number was based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I figured that, since the death rate had dropped continuously for months and was at very low levels, Sweden must have reached a point where it had herd immunity. And I figured that at least 50% of the population must have been infected for herd immunity to have been reached. 50% of Sweden’s population is five million people. 6,000 / 5,000,000 = 0.12%”

https://sebastianrushworth.com/…/how-bad-is-covid-really-a…/

He adds;

“At the beginning of October, one of the World Health Organisation’s executive directors, Mike Ryan, said that the WHO estimated that 750 million people had so far been infected with covid. At that point, one million people had died of the disease. That gives a death rate for covid of 0.13% . So the WHO said that the death rate is 0.13%.”

The WHO has completed a study by John Iaoannidis.

Click to access BLT.20.265892.pdf

Dr Rushwoth examines this and says:

“This analysis was based on seroprevalance data, i.e. data on how many people were shown to have antibodies to covid in their bloodstream at different times in different countries, which was correlated with the number of deaths in those countries. Through this analysis, professor Ioannidis reached the conclusion that covid has an overall mortality rate of around 0.23% (in other words, one in 434 infected people die of the disease). For people under the age of seventy, the mortality rate was estimated at 0.05% (in other words, one in 2,000 infected people under the age of 70 die of the disease).”

None of that suggests even remotely that the Chinese flu is 15 times more deadly than seasonal flu.

Again Dr Rushworth comments:

“But even if the antibody based number is the correct number, then covid still is not a very deadly disease. For comparison, the 1918 flu pandemic is thought to have had an infection fatality rate of 2.5%, i.e. one in forty infected people died. So the 1918 flu was 11 times more deadly than covid if you go by professor Ioannidis antibody based numbers, and 19 times more deadly than covid if you go by the fatality rate provided 12 days earlier by the WHO’s Mike Ryan.”

‘And this is missing one big point about covid. The average person who dies from covid is over 80 years old and has multiple underlying health conditions. In other words, their life expectancy is very short. The average person who died in the 1918 pandemic was in their late 20’s. So each death in the 1918 pandemic actually meant around 50 years more of life lost per person than each death in the covid pandemic. Multiply that by the fact that it had a 19 times higher death rate, and the 1918 flu was in fact 950 times more deadly than covid, in terms its capacity to shorten people’s lives.”

Which is exactly what I recently said.

And the numbers are now not going to change. Viruses don’t suddenly become more virulent, they are what they are and there is now plenty of real evidence out there that COVID-19 isn’t the mass killer it was purported to be. More cases and and deaths aren’t going to change the statistics.

We now know categorically that COVID-19 is a bad flu. That’s it.

Which is precisely what Jami-lee Ross was trying to say when Tova O’Brien shut him down. Her self-congratulatory Guardian column is also a big lie.

As you’ve seen the Wu Pox isn’t 15 times more deadly than seasonal flu. And again we can look at Sweden, with little or no controls over the population:

“September 2020 was the least deadly month in Swedish history, in terms of number of deaths per 100,000 population. Ever. And I don’t mean the least deadly September, I mean the least deadly month. Ever. To me, this is pretty clear evidence of two things. First, that covid is not a very deadly disease. And second, that Sweden has herd immunity.”

https://cornucopia.cornubot.se/…/september-2020-den-minst-d…

Dr Rushworth continues:

“When I posted this information on my twitter feed, the response from proponents of further lockdown was that the reason September was such an un-deadly month, was because everyone has already died earlier in the pandemic. To me, that seems like a pretty self-defeating argument. Why?

Because 6,000 people have died of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of 10,000,000 people. 6,000 people is 0.06% of the population. If it is enough for that tiny a fraction of a population to die of a pandemic for the pandemic to peter out so completely that a country can have its least deadly month ever, then the pandemic was never that deadly to begin with.”

Which brings me back to Tova OBrien’s grandiose and false claims.

She states near the end of her column:

“I was just doing my job that morning and the interview did not happen in a vacuum. Journalists all over the world have been calling out lies relating to Covid-19, especially when they’re adopted by powerful figures attempting to legitimise falsehoods.”

Well, what happens, Tova, when powerful media figures lie and are caught out?

Who holds you to account?

Little wonder that Newshub is now rated as one of the most biased news organisations in New Zealand, and The BFD one of the least biased.

Perhaps we need to rewrite that paragraph.

“Honest scientists and citizens all over the world have been calling out lies related to COVID-19, especially when they’re adopted by biased Mainstream Media journalists attempting to legitimise dodgy lying Prime Ministers”.

There, fixed, you’re welcome Tova dear.”

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(Thanks to Carol Sawyer for putting this together. We know Tova O’Brien even turns off some Labour supporters.)

About where the bus stop next to the tennis courts on the beach side of Tutere Street is now.

Google street view