1. The Devil’s Advocate
Time Stamp: 21:30
- Balance in Satanism
- Stop comparing yourself to others
- Living within your means financially
- Debate the true cost of making money
- Time spent making it vs. time spent enjoying it
- Learn how to be true to yourself
- You must first know yourself
- Own your faults and strengths
- Acknowledge The Balance Factor in and out of the ritual chamber
- You don’t have to step on other’s necks in order to rise professionally or socially
2. Infernal Informant
Time Stamp: 41:31
- A Stinging Setback in California Is a Warning for Democrats in 2022
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o2aFOz6J6kXJVRX840ywmwiVbmNPy9h4MMpqr58QIU0/edit#heading=h.1e5qeyx5p3ju
- Two years ago, Democrats celebrated a sweep of seven Republican-held congressional seats in California as evidence of the party’s growing ability to compete in swing districts here and across the nation.
- But this year, Republicans snatched back four of those seats even as Joseph R. Biden Jr. swamped President Trump in California. The losses stunned Democrats and contributed to the razor-thin margin the party will hold in the House of Representatives this January.
- The turnaround is testimony to how competitive the seats are, particularly in Orange County, once a bastion of conservative Republicanism that has been moving steadily Democratic over the past 20 years.
- But by any measure, the results were a setback for Democrats in this state and nationally, signaling the steep obstacles they will face in 2022 competing in the predominantly suburban swing districts that fueled their takeover of the House in 2018.
- The Democrats’ losses came for a number of reasons, including forces particular to California and the complications of campaigning during a pandemic. But as much as anything, they reflected the potency of Republican attacks, some false or exaggerated, that Democrats were the party of socialism, defunding the police and abolishing private health insurance.
- The attacks — led in no small part by Mr. Trump as a central part of his re-election strategy — came at a time when parts of California were swept by street protests against police abuses, some of which turned into glass-shattering bouts of looting and confrontations with law enforcement that were heavily covered on local television.
- “Republicans hung around Democrats’ necks that we are all socialist or communist and we all wanted to defund the police,” said Harley Rouda, a Democrat from Orange County who was defeated by Michelle Steel, a Republican member of the Orange County board of supervisors. “In my opinion, we as a party did a less than adequate job in refuting that narrative. We won in 2018 and took the House back because of people like me — moderates — flipping radical Republican seats.”
- Republicans said that attempts by Democrats to portray themselves as moderates were undercut by a shift of the party to the left and by the demonstrations.
- “It was incredibly easy for us to draw contrasts,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, the leader of the California Republican Party. She said the protests “were happening all over. It looked like a war zone.”
- For all that, election outcomes are the result of many factors — and that was particularly the case in a campaign that played out against a deadly pandemic and with such a polarizing figure as Mr. Trump dominating the political debate.
- Democrats said they were also hurt by a national policy, set by the party, to avoid door-to-door canvassing during the pandemic. Presumably, that will not be a factor in 2022.
- “The No. 1 issue in our campaign is we didn’t canvass,” said Representative T.J. Cox, a Democrat who represents the San Joaquin Valley and lost to David Valadao, the Republican he unseated in 2018. “We didn’t do the door-to-door.” He said it was like playing for a football team that had been told “they can’t pass.”
- California’s often lurching effort to combat Covid-19 was damaging in Republican-leaning districts where there has been public defiance of mask-wearing mandates and contempt for the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.
- “Everyone is concerned about Covid,” said Sam Oh, a Republican consultant to two of the Republican winners, Young Kim and Ms. Steel. “But we are trying to find a path to give small-business owners a way to keep making a life. This is incredibly important and Democrats are tone-deaf to this.”
- And Republicans, analysts said, recruited strong candidates, which is always the most critical task in an election. They included Ms. Steel and Ms. Kim, who will be among the first Korean-American members of Congress, and Mike Garcia, a former military pilot who won a special election in May to replace Ms. Hill and then beat Ms. Smith in November.
- Republicans succeeded this time by playing on themes that have long been resonant among moderate voters, particularly in places like Orange County: high taxes, intrusive government and law and order. Democrats said the debates on the national stage hurt them, particularly among Latino and Asian-American voters.
- “I think we undervalued the strength of the attack,” said Dan Sena, who was the first Hispanic executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The national socialism messaging, combined with the crime messaging, was a death by a thousand cuts in a place like California.”
- Ms. Smith said she was frustrated in trying to campaign in an environment “where Republicans are so persistent in false narratives,” and that Democrats had failed to figure out how to address that. “We never got our hands around it,” she said.
- For California Republicans, the victories were a rare glimmer of good news for a party that has been in decline in this state. “We now have a blueprint that shows that these really dynamic candidates can win with a presidential turnout, running in a polarized environment,” Mr. Oh said. “We are in an incredibly good position looking forward.”
- In one potential sign of a shift, Mr. Newsom is facing a recall campaign, in no small part because of his handling of the pandemic, and while it is unlikely that he will be knocked out of office and replaced by a Republican, it is certainly not impossible. That was how Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, became governor in 2003.
- “California’s at a turning point,” Ms. Patterson said. “People are waking up to what Democrats are doing here. This was a referendum on what California Democrats have been doing and what the governor has been doing to this state.”
- The Trump administration wants to take credit for a covid vaccine. Trump supporters are undermining it.
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/24/trump-vaccine-misinformation/
- President Trump and his allies have spent years stoking disinformation and doubt in official accounts about the election, the coronavirus, and other topics. Now those efforts are making it harder to rally support around his administration’s vaccine push.
- Even as Vice President Pence took the vaccine on TV on Friday and the White House called the efforts to speedily produce a vaccine “historic,” Trump supporters have become forceful proponents of conspiracies about the vaccine on Twitter and Fox. Some of Trump’s most high-profile allies, including his former attorney Sidney Powell, for example, have pushed misleading claims that the government will force people to receive a vaccination or use the vaccine to conduct surveillance of the population.
- Candace Owens, a prominent Black activist and Trump ally, tweeted on Dec. 9 that “the same people that are out here yelling ‘my body my choice’ will be telling you that the government has a right to force vaccinate you for a virus that has a 99% survival rate.” Twitter spokeswoman Lauren Alexander said the tweets did not violate the company’s misinformation rules, which specifically prohibit false statements saying the vaccine could be used to harm or control populations.
- Complicating matters is Trump himself. The president — who has a history of questioning vaccines — has also been notably less vocal about vaccine promotion. He has hailed his administration’s investments in vaccine development, including tweeting that the vaccine’s impending arrival was “GREAT NEWS” — but has not committed to taking it publicly. Since the election, he has used his Twitter account to primarily focus on baseless claims of election fraud rather than the covid-19 crisis.
- Trump’s messaging that people should distrust authority has made it harder for the administration to take a victory lap over vaccine development, misinformation experts said.
- “His base has been primed to believe conspiracies and disbelieve in official accounts,” said Joan Donovan, a disinformation expert who is director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. “The skepticism that allows him to draw in these communities is the same skepticism that they are bringing to this world historic moment.”
- Over the last year, social media companies have taken aggressive steps to remove misinformation, including banning false and misleading information about the coronavirus and covid-19 vaccination. But their efforts over the last year have fallen short. They have been hamstrung not only by the volume of misinformation, but also by the powerful ways in which misinformation is turbocharged by algorithms, highly motivated groups and users that exploit the gray area over what speech is permissible.
- “In close consultation with local, national and global public health authorities around the world, we are focused on removing misleading information that presents the biggest potential harm to people’s health and well-being,” Twitter’s Alexander said. “Starting in early 2021, we may label or place a warning on tweets that advance unsubstantiated rumors, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines.”
- “President Trump has repeatedly referred to the vaccines as ‘miracles’ and encouraged the American people to take them — including when he hosted an hours-long, live-streamed and nationally televised summit to educate the American people about the vaccine development and distribution process, build confidence in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and commemorate their creation as a national achievement that will save millions of lives,” White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said.
- In recent years, conspiracies and misleading narratives have moved from the fringes to the center of the national conversation — thanks, in no small part, to a disinformation machine led by Trump, high-profile influencers and his most ardent supporters. Trump has retweeted supporters of the conspiracy theory QAnon hundreds of times, raised misleading claims about mail-in voting and election results, and even suggested that injecting disinfectant could help cure the virus. Disinformation experts called the campaign by Trump and his influencers the most significant threat to democratic processes during the presidential election — worse, even, than Russian interference.
- The distrust of authority dovetails with a year-long push by activists that have effectively used social media to undermine vaccination. In the spring, for example, online anti-vaccination groups came together with groups supporting Trump and the conspiracy theory QAnon to push a viral video that made false claims about the virus, such as wearing a mask makes it easier to contract covid-19, according to researchers.
- Experts say it is unlikely that the federal government could force people to take a vaccine. Both president-elect Joe Biden and top infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci have said it will not happen.
3. Creature Feature
Time Stamp: 1:08:52
- WW84
- https://www.hbomax.com/wonder-woman-1984
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman_1984
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7126948/, 6.2/10
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wonder_woman_1984, 67% Fresh, 74% Audience Score - 2020 American superhero film based on the DC Comics character Wonder Woman
- It is the sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman and the ninth installment in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU)
- directed by Patty Jenkins
- script by Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns and David Callaham,
- based on a story by Johns and Jenkins
- Log Line: Rewind to the 1980s as Wonder Woman’s next big screen adventure finds her facing two all-new foes: Max Lord and The Cheetah.
- Starring:
- Gal Gadot – Diana Prince
- Chris Pine – Steve Trevor
- Kristen Wiig – Barbara Minerva/The Cheetah
- Pedro Pascal – Maxwell Lord
- Speaks to the consequences of getting your wishes
- I disagree with the premise
- Dreamstone was created by Dechalafrea Ero – the god of treachery and mischief
- https://www.hbomax.com/wonder-woman-1984