“The hate crime messed me up…(they) brutally attacked me out of hate for the color of my skin.” 

American progressives have reacted with horror, outrage, tears and fainting spells following the jailing of two native Hawaiians for beating hell out of an old man from Arizona who’d moved to Maui thinking the proximity to the ocean might help his wife’s multiple sclerosis. 

Last November Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi and Levi Aki Jr. were convicted for punching, kicking and using a shovel to hit Christopher Kunzelman, who suffered concussion, two busted ribs and head trauma, in 2014. 

It’s the first time the US has prosecuted Native Hawaiians for hate crimes, which ain’t to say it beat-downs of white devils don’t happen. 

The Magic Mike of surfing, the ageless, peerless, dick-swinging Mr Laird Hamilton, who grew up on Maui, knows. 

“There was a certain level of …of…of…aggression… on the land. Or should I say, instead of aggression, a certain level of separation. I was a white guy in a dark guy’s world. When you’re a minority in a racially tense environment you get used to being an outcast.”

Aki and Alo-Kaonohi’s lawyers said it wasn’t so much Kunzelman being a white devil so much as his “entitled and disrespectful attitude.” 

U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright didn’t buy it telling ‘em, “You were a racist on that day” and sentenced Alo-Kaonohi to six-and-a-half years and Aki to four years and two months in prison. 

Heat between the men began to simmer after Kunzelman and his wife, who has MS, bought a run-down oceanfront home in Kahakuloa for $175,000. 

“We loved Maui; we loved the people,” Lori Kunzelman told The Associated Press. 

Things got real heated when Kunzelman cut the locks to the village gates, saying residents kept locking him and out. 

“It was obviously a hate crime from the very beginning,” she said. “The whole time they’re saying things like, ‘You have the wrong skin color. No ‘haole’ is ever going to live in our neighborhood.’”

Prosecutors said Aki described Kunzelman to the cops as “rich Haole guy,” a “dumb haole,” and a “typical haole thinking he owning everything … trying to change things up in Kahakuloa,”

Kunzelman said the attack left him with lasting psychological damage. 

“The hate crime messed me up…(they) brutally attacked me out of hate for the color of my skin.” 

Interestingly, Kunzelman had a gun but didn’t use it which impressed hell out of the judge. 

“He had a right to defend himself,” Judge Seabright said. “He didn’t use that firearm.”

And, in a letter to the judge, Aki pulled out the old “some of my best friends are Jews/Blacks/Homos” defence.

“I have people who I love and care about who are white.”

The Kunzelmans’ love affair with Maui is over and they now split their time between Arizona and Puerto Rico although they still own the Kahakuloa house. 

“We couldn’t even sell it to anybody because it’s not safe,” Lori Kunzelman said. “It’s not safe because of the animosity that’s there.”

Perth's famine of waves set to end with man-made utopia!

In 2016, investment banker Andrew Ross announced a masterplan to dot Australia with a ten-pack of Wavegarden pools, a bullish target he looked like hitting when the first tank opened at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport in 2019 and with a second in Perth a virtual fait accompli.  

Melbourne opened to much celebration from that city’s wave-starved surfers, only for it to be shuttered during the pandemic one year later as that state endured six wretched lockdowns for a total of 262 days, the longest in the world. 

The Perth pool, which was going to be built in the Perth suburb of Alfred Cove and, importantly, a few hundred metres from my parents’ house, was shut down by the state government after local activists claimed bushland and marine reserves would be damaged. 

A few residents who, let’s be frank already had one foot in the grave, also complained it might impact upon their access to the lawn bowls club there, which apparently carried a bit of sway.

Ross and his company Aventuur shifted their focus to a bleak part of Perth called Jandakot, flat, hot, ain’t much there in that part of town except broken dreams, only for it to be suddenly revealed as home to endangered vegetation and the habitat of the almost extinct black cockatoo. 

Now, after investigation, submissions etc, the Environmental Protection Authority has said the vegetation is already degraded so, fuck it boys, y’might as well bring in the bulldozers. 

“The vegetation has been impacted by historical clearing and ongoing degrading processes leading to large proportion of weeds and limited canopy connectivity,” said the EPA.”The vegetation is of low to moderate quality foraging habitat for Black Cockatoos.”

The tank takes up fourteen acres and thirteen of ‘em have to be cleared, including “3.15ha of Banksia Woodlands, a state-listed priority ecological community.”

To offset the demolition of the Banksia Woodlands, the developer Aventuur will buy 44 acres of Banksia Woodland on the Swan Coastal Plain and give it to the state in a modern-day version of the Catholic Church selling indulgences, same sort theory as carbon credits and so on. 

The tank set-up looks pretty wild, elevated walkways around the pool, caravans around the perimeter mimicking Slater’s set-up at Surf Ranch and a low-rise building which may or may not have been designed by an architect overlooking the familiar wedge-shaped pool.

If you live in Perth, this’ll change your life while simultaneously melting your credit card.

Building starts later this year, we’re told, with gates opening in 2025, 

“My mate said he thought my board had snapped because of the sound but then I realised it had been my shin!”

If it ain’t a Great White coming atcha from below, eyes dead, jaws ready to cleave you in two, now it’s jacked seals turning surfers into bottom bitches.

Cornwall’s Nathan Phillips,  “a local surfing legend”, was shredding at Porthleven, one of the best waves around, last Friday when a seal started giving him heat as he paddled back out.

The animal pulled on his leash, whiplashing his board into his stilt, breaking it in two.

Phillips, forty two and standing six-five in high-heels, was then too big to squeeze into the Air Ambulance and was forced to lay in “stinking” water inhaling a “cocktail of antibiotics”.

“I had just been paddling out and something started tugging on my leash,” he told Walesonline. “It kind of freaked me out because I didn’t know what it was. After I worked out that it was a seal and fended it off, it was just playing I think, but a wave then crashed down on me just after at a weird angle and sent my board flying into my shin.

“I remembered my mate saying he thought my board had snapped because of the sound – but then I realised it had been my shin when I felt my foot hitting the back of my leg. I just started screaming with pain, and my mate dragged me onto his board and told me to start paddling back to shore.”

Phillips is in a Devon hozzy awaiting surgery with his leg pinned by a metal frame.

A GoFundMe has been set up etc.

“He’s currently on morphine waiting for surgery so the least we could do would be to set up a page to try and raise some money for him,” said his pal Alec. “Him and his partner are expecting their next child in only a few weeks too, so it’s not the best time.”

As for seals,

“We do get a lot of ’em down here in Cornwall and they do try and play with you or mess about with you a bit sometimes.”