Month: November 2020

Since the COVID-19 first landed in America, President Donald J. Trump’s relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became the most famous face amongst the coronavirus task force, has been tricky. Trump has repeatedly expressed displeasure with him, as well as obvious jealousy of the rave reviews he’s received and trust he’s earned from the American people. On Sunday he even told the crowd at one of his rallies he was thinking of firing him “a little bit after the election.” It was a grim moment, even for Trump, and it’s inspired one of the most vicious commercials yet from Lincoln Proejct, the band of anti-Trump Republicans whose mission is to take him down.

As is usual with the group, the ad was turned around very quickly — less than a day after Trump’s threat. What’s more, it’s got as a narrator no less than Harrison Ford. The erstwhile Han Solo begins the PSA by listing his credentials: how he’s served as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since the Reagan administration, serving “tirelessly, honorably, and selflessly” through presidents Republican and Democrat.

When things get to Trump, though, it quickly cuts to the famous clip of Dr. Fauci seeming to touch his head in frustration during one of the president’s coronavirus press conferences. To really drive it home, it then plays audio of whipped-up rally crowd calling for his firing, followed by Trump swearing he’d fulfill their demands.

It then gives voters a choice for November 3. “Tomorrow, you can fire only one of them,” Ford intones over a slit image of Trump on one side and Dr. Fauci on the other. “The choice is yours.” Hopefully enough people realize which one has been the person keeping them alive over the last ten months, and if they’ve been lucky.

The ad was dropped the same day as another Lincoln Project video, one that happened to star one of Ford’s fellow Star Wars alumni, Mark Hamill. You can watch their Ford/Fauci ad in the video above.

(Via Deadline)

Dating back to Oct. 23, reports indicate that the NBA and its Board of Governors prefer an expedited start to the 2020-21 season, with a preferred start date of Dec. 22. That speedy timeline would placate powerful television partners and, according to multiple reports, presumably help the league to mitigate potential damage caused by fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, the NBPA must agree to this proposal and, while the two sides have been in dialogue in recent days, it is far from certain that the two sides can close the current gap.

To that end, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe reported on Monday that NBA commissioner Adam Silver, during a phone call with general managers from around the league, conveyed the message that “time is running out” when it comes to the potential to begin the 2020-21 season in late December. While discussions continue on both sides, the NBPA is still reportedly reluctant to jump on board with the Dec. 22 date, and ESPN reports that, while optimism still exists for the league’s preferred timetable, the latest is that the rosy thinking “has been tempered in recent days.”

Though it is unclear how these figures manifest in practical terms, the NBA’s belief is that revenue losses could mount if the Dec. 22 timeline does not come to fruition. ESPN’s reporting centers on a figure “between $500 million and $1 billion” and, while details are sparse, the potential for a playoff run in the late summer and fall could cause issues with regard to the Olympics. Moreover, the NBA is on record as wanting to quickly return to their “normal” calendar and, with a 72-game season beginning in mid-January, that would be difficult to achieve for 2021-22.

In addition to the timeline, the NBA and NBPA have other issues to tackle, especially with regard to financial matters include how escrow will be handled on player contracts. Those details, along with the salary cap details for next season, will need to be hammered out in the near future, but it is clear that the NBA would love things to move quickly, while the players may not be as keen in this instance.

Just a week after over 4,000 independent artists backed a campaign that pressures Spotify to pay artists more per stream, the service announced a new feature that poses another disadvantage to smaller artists. Spotify announced they will begin allowing artists to promote their music in your personalized algorithm — only if musicians agree to take a smaller cut of streaming royalties.

Spotify made the announcement in a press release Monday. Calling the feature a “new experiment,” they explained that “artists and labels can identify music that’s a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithm that determines personalized listening sessions.”

Per Spotify’s blogpost, which Gizmodo noted as “carefully worded,” the streaming service wrote that artists will be taking a cut of royalty payouts. “Instead, labels or rights holders agree to be paid a promotional recording royalty rate for streams in personalized listening sessions where we provided this service.”

Spotify then went on to clarify that if a song isn’t performing well with listeners, they will pull the song from its algorithm placement. “Listener satisfaction is our priority—we won’t guarantee placement to labels or artists, and we only ever recommend music we think listeners will want to hear,” they wrote. In other words, artists cannot ensure priority even if they agree to take a smaller cut of royalties in exchange for taking advantage of the feature.

This new tool will not factor into listener’s Discover Weekly playlists, which is a curated cluster of music the streaming service’s algorithm has deduced a listener will enjoy based on their streaming history. The feature will only apply to radio and autoplay services, though Spotify did note they may eventually expand it to “other personalized areas” of their platform.

Read Spotify’s full blog post here.

LeBron James is one of the the most beloved athletes in the history of the state of Ohio. While he received a great deal of ire for leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat, James returned back to his home state to lead the Cavaliers to their first NBA championship and, in the process, put the finishing touches on an irrefutable sporting legacy. Off the court, James has also given back in a significant way, founding his “I Promise” school in Akron and providing leadership on a number of issues.

With that as the backdrop, President Donald Trump spent part of the day before the 2020 national election speaking to a crowd of supporters in Avoca, Pennsylvania, and James became a topic. In fact, supporters of Trump chanted “LeBron James sucks” with the apparent backing of the speaker.

“How about basketball?” Trump said. “How about LeBron? I felt badly for LeBron, very badly. Down 71% and that’s with the championship. I didn’t watch one shot. I get bored. Back, forth, back, forth. You know why? When they don’t respect our country, when they don’t respect our flag, nobody wants to watch. Nobody.”

Trump didn’t stop there, transitioning into a common refrain about the NFL and pivoting back to previous rhetoric about the flag and national anthem after leading with television ratings.

“And the NFL is way down,” he said. “The NFL is way down. You gotta stand for our flag. You gotta really be great to our flag and to our anthem. And if you don’t do that, we’re not watching.”

As his NFL comments came to a halt, the chant began. Then, Trump encouraged the behavior by saying “what a crowd” and indicating that he would be okay with it continuing if not for more rallies to attend later in the day.

Reactions will undoubtedly be divided along the political spectrum, and that is the nature of the discourse in 2020. It is unquestionably bizarre, however, to have the president encouraging this kind of chant against an active athlete, and we can add this to the seemingly unending list of norm-breaking activities in recent months and years.

2020 is a strange place for a variety of reasons, but among them is brand Twitter accounts taking on a very specific voice and firing off strong takes on all manner of things from politics to sports. Sometimes that means that the Steak-Umms Twitter account brings you a painful dose of reality. Sometimes that means Velveeta’s Twitter account decides to fire off some incredibly strong takes on the usefulness and application of analytics in evaluating basketball players.

The latter of those things happened on Monday when Velveeta decided to respond to a tweet asking about an underrated player and fired off a Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf answer that stunned folks.

When asked about Abdul-Rauf’s historically bad career +/-, Velveeta then brought some heat in response to using that and on/off numbers as a metric to judge individual players.

They were not done there, launching a #TrustTheProcessed hashtag that was very clever and bringing some extremely solid takes on analytics, the issues with the GOAT debate, and more.

It all made for an excellent afternoon on Basketball Twitter, but the best idea/take Velveeta had was this.

Make Velveeta’s social media manager commissioner of the NBA or at the very least put them on the competition committee.

Many musicians have used their platform in recent months to encourage fans to vote. Taylor Swift offered her support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Demi Lovato slammed Trump’s administration in her poignant single “Commander In Chief,” and Lady Gaga wrote a “cheesy” tune about voter registration. Now with the election just one day away, Beyonce has followed suit, announcing that she voted for Biden and encouraging her home state to do the same.

Bey took to Instagram to share her endorsement via a black-and-white video of her flexing an “I voted” sticker while sporting a Biden/Harris mask. The singer rallied her followers to join her in voting, writing: “Come thru, Texas.”

In other Bey news, the singer recently revealed she is a beekeeper — much to the excitement of her Beyhive fanbase. In a recent interview with British Vogue, she was asked, “What is something I would find surprising about you?” She responded, “I know it’s random, but I have two beehives. Real ones. I’ve had them at my house for a while now. I have around 80,000 bees and we make hundreds of jars of honey a year. I started the beehives because my daughters, Blue and Rumi, both have terrible allergies, and honey has countless healing properties.” Responding to the singer’s surprise answer the interviewer said, “So, you really are the Queen B.”

As of this writing, Election Day is still just over the horizon, and it’s safe to say that everyone, no matter the party they’re voting for, is a little on edge. Even as Team Trump has gotten even more desperate than usual in the final push, some have tried to put on a brave face, taking the high road and talking maturely about trusting “the process,” hoping that democratic norms will spare us any skullduggery. But who are we kidding? Even the most calm Biden voter must be screaming on the inside.

In a sketch that was actually cut from SNL’s John Mulaney-hosted show on Saturday, a cadre of smiling Democrats line in a faux-PSA, preaching their sunny optimism to the camera before revealing the bottomless anxiety raging underneath. You hear characters — played by Heidi Gardner, Kate McKinnon, Ego Nwodim, Bowen Yang, Beck Bennett, and Kyle Mooney — say things like “This election is about more than next four years” and “Despite how challenging the last year has been, I’m hopeful and confident.”

But then you see McKinnon gasping for an armful of Plan B pills, Bennett hording food in a vault, Mooney buying a crossbow, and Nwodim having her son pour her a couple fingers of wine. Meanwhile, Gardner finds that the Canadian border isn’t as receptive to people from a COVID-strewn country as she assumed. It’s a final exorcism before the stuff possibly really hits the fan, with an election that may be contested days, weeks, surely not months. Maybe in a couple days this sketch will already look like a time capsule from a much different era.

(Via Vulture)

Americans are facing uncertainty, and it’s starting to seem as if uncertainty is the norm. Over the past eight months we have battled the never ending war with COVID, started, stopped and restarted virtual school, and witnessed the reanimation of a civil rights movement. We’ve watched daily as news outlets recount death tolls and survival numbers for the pandemic, all while trying to give our family a semblance of normalcy, but nothing about this is normal and the helpers we are used to turning to are burning the wicks at both ends.

In today’s climate, therapists are battling the same battles as our patients. Once upon a time before COVID, our stressors would occasionally overlap, but in recent months the stressors are exactly the same as the majority of our clients. Therapists are encouraging our clients to do the very basics to keep from spiraling into a depression, all while we struggle to change out of our pajama bottoms for virtual sessions. At times it’s difficult to put aside your own personal struggles to focus on the needs of our clients, but we still show up.

We keep showing up ready to hold space even though our own cups are empty, but the fear of the election outcome is a different level of connectedness that we as therapists were not prepared for. The fear around elections is not new, of course; we navigated this in 2016. But with the very palpable division in our country, our clients are scared. They’re scared of either outcome, and so are we.

Communities of color are turning to therapists to help them not only navigate the continued shootings of unarmed Black and brown men by police, but to also have a safe place to express their fears and anxieties around the election. The state of the country is shaky, to put it mildly, for our minority communities. This includes increased depression and anxiety rates in LGBTQ+ communities as well. It seems as if therapists have noticed a collective holding of breath, and yet we also sit not breathing, waiting for the shoe to drop.

Therapists are not immune from current events. In fact, it’s in many of our codes of ethics to be updated and actively advocating for things that are or will negatively affect our clients. Our clients are seeing news reports of the lines wrapped around sporting goods stores to purchase ammo and calls for a civil war should the election swing the pendulum toward the other direction. We sit in uncomfortable fear while our clients pour their hearts out, expecting us to have the answer. But we weren’t trained for pandemic counseling in a tumultuous election year while the country is literally on fire. There was not a class for that.

We are sitting across from clients via screen or in person empathizing with their fear while experiencing the same gut-punching terror. We are getting hung up on what coping skills to suggest because we’ve tried them and they’re not working for us, so we hesitate to suggest them to you. Of course, a brave face is put on display and we walk through mindfulness exercises to help ground you to the present moment, but in reality, the present moment is filled with uncertainty and doubt. When the only way out is through, we have to give our clients the tools to push through.

Therapy still works, even if at times your therapist may look haggard. We want you in our office, physical or virtually. This state that we’re in is hard for everyone. It’s important to know you’re not alone and to develop the tools you need to push through to the other side of this election and beyond.

It’s natural to have fear when nothing seems certain. We’ve been living in a heightened sense of survival for an extended period of time, and our brains are just not equipped to thrive in fight or flight for that long. So rest, talk to someone, and give yourself permission to feel whatever you’re feeling. Even your therapist needs to do that right now.

Robert Carter is an amazing example of someone who took the pain from their childhood and used it as inspiration to help those in a similar circumstance as an adult.

At the age of 12, Carter was placed in foster care in Hamilton County, Ohio because his mother struggled with alcoholism and was unable to care for him and his eight siblings. Once he was emancipated, he adopted two of his younger siblings he hadn’t seen for years.

“My mom had nine kids, and I didn’t see my youngest again. He was two. I didn’t see him again until he was 16, so for me going through that, I knew how important it is for them to see each other and be around each other,” Carter said according to FOX19.

via WSAZ

In December 2019, Carter began fostering three brothers, Robert Jr., Giovanni, and Kiontae. Later, he learned they had two sisters, Marionna and Makayla, in the foster system as well.

“When I had my boys before I got the girls, that’s all they talked about was their sisters,” Carter said.

The three boys and two girls had been separated for six months, so when Carter and the girls’ foster parents brought the children together, there was an outpouring of emotion.

“We met up for visits, and all the kids were crying,” Carter said. “They didn’t want to leave each other, and at that moment, I knew, ok, I have to adopt all five.”

via WSAZ

So Carter worked hard to afford a larger house for all five children and last Friday, on Adoption Day in Hamilton County, Carter became their father.

“I’ve never had a single father adopt five children,” Adoption case manager Stacey Barton said. “I’ve had married couples who have adopted six or seven, so this was a unique experience for me. Children need families, and it’s an opportunity for Mr. Carter to show the community that he can do it and others can too.”

via WSAZ

While it’s beautiful that the entire family is back together, the transition hasn’t been perfect. But, as any parent knows, that’s par for the course. Carter says it took his daughter, Marionna, a little while to warm up to him.

“At first, she didn’t like me,” he admits. “But eventually, she came around. She walked in my room last night and said, ‘I just want to say thanks for taking us in and taking care of us when our real mom couldn’t.’ It just really touched me.”

Having personal experience in the foster care system has given Carter a deep understanding of what his children are going through so he knows how important it is to make them feel secure after so much chaos.

He says his new job is “making memories to replace a lot of the bad ones.” Carter said. “Every night I talk to them and let them know, ‘I’m your dad forever. I know what it’s like and I’m always here for you.'”

Judge Carlos Moore has a unique approach to the justice system in which he serves—one that many people find refreshing.

Moore is a municipal judge and attorney in Mississippi. He’s also the President-elect of the National Bar Association and is listed as a “Rising Star” in African-American Leadership Magazine’s 2020 Top 100 Influential African-American Leaders list. In 2017, he made national news when the first thing he did after being sworn in was remove the Mississippi state flag from his courtroom. (Up until this year, the Mississippi state flag had the confederate flag, widely seen as a symbol of white supremacy, as part of its design.)

Unafraid to take bold steps to ensure justice is served in a way that actually improves people’s lives. One way he does that is using alternative sentencing—giving unique, creative, individualized consequences instead of standard fines or jail time.

Moore wrote in an Instagram post:

“As a judge I love alternative sentencing especially for young people. Today I announced that I would give an 18 year old young lady a break on a speeding ticket if she brings me back proof that she voted in next Tuesday’s general election or writes 500 word essay on the importance of voting. Then I told a young 17 year old man that if he pulled up one of his Cs to a B by his next report card I would withhold adjudication on a misdemeanor ticket. Our young people are our greatest treasure and if I can encourage them to be their best and do their best I’m happy.”

“I believe in alternative sentencing especially when dealing with young people who have accepted responsibility for their wrongs,” Moore told Upworthy. “I believe that by giving the young people unexpected choices or alternatives to jail or a fine I can have a bigger impact on their lives and futures. I really favor rehabilitation over pure punishment.”

Moore’s approach has fans. As psychiatrist and author James Gilligan wrote in the New York Times in 2012, “If any other institutions in America were as unsuccessful in achieving their ostensible purpose as our prisons are, we would shut them down tomorrow.” Alternative sentencing such as community service or restitution—or more creative options such as Moore’s “get your grades up” or “show me you understand civic duty”—appeals to those of us who understand that punitive measures are not always the most effective. A study from the Macarthur Foundation found that when people are informed that rehabilitation is more effective than incarceration, people were willing to pay more in taxes to support it.

Rehabilitation also saves money overall. In an article in The Conversation, Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, a professor of economics at the University of Birmingham, wrote that community sentences cost on average a quarter of the amount as prison sentences and reduce crime more than prison sentences do.

But for Moore, alternative sentencing is primarily about what’s going to be best for the young person in front of his bench.

“I want all that appear before me to be better upon and after meeting me than before doing the same,” he says, adding, “I think anyone who administers justice must also know how to show mercy.”

Justice must be served, but justice doesn’t automatically mean handing down harsh punishments. Providing young people an incentive to improve is perhaps the best way to prevent crime—it requires them to take responsibility while simultaneously instilling hope and faith in their own futures.

More of this wholesome, reasonable approach to criminal justice, please, and thank you for providing the example, Judge Moore. We love to see it.