Matisyahu's Blog

I was watching a video from David Pakman today regarding:

Let’s face it, the people who used ‘don’t tread on me’ and ‘you take take it from my cold dead hands’ rhetoric along with the usual spiel about ‘big government’ were never sincere declarations of deeply held beliefs – how do we know that? these are the same people who were noisy under Bill Clinton but quiet under George W Bush’s expansion of government powers under the PATRIOT act along with many other decisions, noisy under Barack Obama with conspiracy theories about ‘death panels’ in regards to the Affordable Care Act and ‘the imperial presidency’ regarding executive orders, then quiet once again under Donald Trump, noisy under Joe Biden then quite once again under Donald Trump. Long story short is the fact that those who make the most noise use those rally cries not as declaring a philosophical or policy disagreement but simply because “my team isn’t in power” thus degrading politics into little more than competing sports teams devoid of any understanding on what the individual parties are actually running on policy wise and what their underlying party philosophy is.

This is the reason why the whole Epstein situation in the MAGA ecosystem isn’t surprising in regards to how there is a split between those who sincerely wanted all the information released vs those who stopped the push for the release and have suddenly stopped caring the moment Trump puts out a signal to influencers to stop talking about it. Those who stopped talking never really cared, they cynically used a horrific case to create an audience then use that audience to get Trump elected but never had any interest in wanting the details of the Epstein case be fully disclosed. Those who are still pushing for the release I think are slowly realising that they were used and there was never any intention of having the case fully disclosed to the public – there have been some attempts by some within that ecosystem to back out of the MAGA cult but for most of their audience they’re seeing the repositioning as either an insincere attempt to remain relevant given the shifting public opinion or alternatively view their political takes as nothing more than vibes based that can change on a wim with comparisons to a sailboat being made regarding the influencer being pushed in a direction based on the political winds of the day. You can ride those political winds but eventually your audience will realise that you have no sincere authentic beliefs that make you unique but rather you pander to your audience. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 2-3 years we see many MAGA adjacent influencers realise what a massive mistake they’ve made and the question is whether they double down and triple down or whether they go on a rehabilitation tour which will involve publicly admitting they screwed up big time and then demonstrate the change is genuine through their behaviour change over the long term.

Getting back to happier topics, I went for a walk today of 11.6km, the weather is good and the temperature isn’t too bad – knowing my past experience I’ll be complaining about the heat soon enough when the temperature increases. On another good note, I was approved for two weeks off over Christmas (from 14-28 December). I wasn’t expecting to be approved because the first time around I put it in the wrong system only to then pick it up by accident then submitted it using the correct system. I expected that it wouldn’t be approved since I’d assume many others had gotten in before I did but I was lucky in that it was approved so I’ll be happy that at the end of the year I can relax for a couple of weeks – chill out, binge watch new shows, catch up with family etc. I’m unsure whether my brother, his partner and kids will come to New Zealand from Australia or whether we’ll be going to Australia but then again it is still 4 months away so I’ll see what happens. Christmas lunch this year I’ll probably bring desert although I’m tempted to bring a savoury dish as well.

Ubiquiti released to the early access channel an update to the UniFi Access Point (all U7 and E7 models except the LR model) which jumped the version from 8.0.58 to 8.1.4 – lots of bug fixes and enhancements with reports that use of MLO (it isn’t enabled by default as it is marked as ‘Early Access’ inside UniFi Network Application. On the topic of UniFi Network Application, that has been updated to 9.3.45 but from the notes in the UniFi Access Point version 9.4.x of UniFi Network Application is being worked on but I don’t see it in the early access area yet. UniFi Gateways 4.3.0 was released around a week ago and normally after a week or so assuming no show stoppers they graduate it to a release candidate but I have a feeling that they want to bring it up to feature parity with the cloud versions of their gateway (I’m looking at maybe moving to a cloud gateway or router that has the UniFi Network Application built in as it is appears that they’re getting updates sooner and then give mum my current gateway since her modem is one provided by Spark and it is pretty old and slow).