Matisyahu's Blog

I woke up this morning just before midday and headed down to Awanui Labs which does the blood testing – the test was for liver function and blood sugar to see how things are progressing. I’ve continued losing weight since my last blood test so hopefully that should translate to better blood test results but at the end of the day I’m doing all I can so hopefully it’ll translate to a good result.

Another update has been released for uBlock Origin Lite has been released – uBOLite 2025.817.1539 has been made available on Edge but it is waiting for approval on the Chrome extensions store. It has quite a few changes so it’ll be interesting to see whether it’ll translate into any user visible changes that are noticeable.

Oh how I love online banking – I had some money I inherited and like a good steward of my finances I put them into a term deposit for 6 months (I bank with ASB Bank) at 3.80%, if I wanted more than that I would have had to lock it away for 5 years and that is far too long. I’ve also paid off almost all the debt that I have which has put me on a much better financial footing long term. The whole experience has reduced the amount of stress down to zero or as close to zero as possible.

On a side note, what we see with the Trump administration is the end result of congress for decades delegating more and more power to the executive branch which has allowed congress to abdicate their responsibility for holding the executive to account and make the tough decisions. Two things people need to realise is this a) Once power is consolidated in the hands of a small number of people or one person that power is never given up voluntarily and b) If you have a look at the dictatorships that emerged in the early 20th century their power grab was enabled through emergency powers granted in the constitution who made sure there was always a crisis or an emergency to justify that consolidation of power – “you need to give me the power to protect the country in this time of crisis” they will claim.

We only need to look at the Trump administration invoking ‘International Emergency Economic Powers Act’ in justification of tariffs (tariffs are never mentioned in the bill itself but by the time something is done the damage is already done) with the court system so feckless and lacking in testicular fortitude to do something about it. I don’t expect the Supreme Court to do anything about it given that the ‘conservative’ judges (I put in quotations for the very reason that they’re as far from traditional conservatism as possible – a conservative would oppose the consolidation of power in the hands of the executive as many high profile conservatives have voiced their concerns going as far back as the passing of the Patriot Act) will roll over and allow the expansion of executive power to do whatever they want which of course will magically change the moment a Democratic president gets into the White House.