#and making nurturing and maintaining that his number one priority ALWAYS is extremely correct and smart

[statementlou]

https://www.tumblr.com/louisupdates/754934426217152513/goodbye-faith-in-the-future-world-tour-272024?source=share

did he or did he not lose fans then?

I will answer this because this anon actually brings a concrete question to the table rather than just "hurhur but you're a larrie??" (tell me you can't actually refute any of our points…). Anyway this post shows the decrease in Louis instagram followers between the screenshots taken directly after the release of Faith in the Future in Nov '22, when he changed his bio to promote that album and the tour tickets, and now, when he changed it again to mention the current release. But I'm putting that response under a cut because I'm tired of the actual POINT of all this nonsense getting lost in a sea of made up things people insist are important:

There is no rational argument you can make to say that Louis has less fans now than he did 2, 4, or 6 years ago. You don't need a spreadsheet of details you need to USE YOUR EYES! He has gone from filling theaters to filling arenas and stadiums. His second album made a higher chart position than his first album. His festival has doubled in size EVERY year of its existence. And for that matter: his insta post engagement numbers remain about the same (despite the fact that older posts should have way MORE likes due to having been there longer, even aside from follower counts.) SO WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT HIS INSTA FOLLOWER NUMBER???? Serious question: what does the word "fans" mean if these things aren't what matters? ALL of this quibbling about what he should do to make things better and people can't even see that THINGS AREN'T BAD.

Anyway to address the specific question- (con't......)

NO- HE DID NOT LOSE FANS. HE LOST SOME INSTA FOLLOWERS. THESE ARE NOT THE SAME THING. As I said above, literally what does it mean to lose fans if that number change coincides with him having higher sales, more audience members, and higher engagement than ever before? Whatever he lost ISN'T FANS. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant factor was something like a bot purge, but also yes: I'm sure a lot of casuals followed him around the time of his big album release and later unfollowed him. That's extremely normal because that's how casual engagement works, and why the definition of fan really matters. Louis and his team understand this and have referenced it repeatedly, talking about how lucky he is to have *us* specifically, to have the kind of dedicated fanbase he has, to have the KIND of fans he does who will allow him to do what HE wants. @dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram named the issue of depth vs breadth with regard to fans a long time ago, and pointed out why having DEPTH is so much more important. It's like this- artists who are on top 40 radio have more numbers on things like insta follows, and for a time on sales and tickets. But those aren't FANS- they're people with a casual interest. And as soon as that person isn't being forced in their ears 10x a day, those people lose interest and stop supporting them, stop buying stuff and unfollow, and those artists end up doing the 'opener on the jingle ball' circuit rather than their own tours. One Direction as a whole, and Louis maybe most of all or near to at this point, have something MUCH MORE VALUABLE than that- DEPTH FANS. Louis has fans who will support him even if he takes years to release music, or stops parading around with a pretend girlfriend to stay in the headlines at least once a month, or completely changes his image and genre, and that is UNHEARD OF. It's ASTONISHING and worth SO MUCH MORE. And they get that! THAT is why he always bragging about us, why industry people he works with are always so agog about us, why he will do anything for US- not for randos. He is also growing his breadth- and it's OBVIOUSLY WORKING whatever his follower counts are, but that is always going to be secondary to doing things for THE FANDOM because that is his sustainable business model. That is what keeps him onstage and reaching number one. And not coincidentally, the things they do are also working to grow that- much more valuable- commodity. So the fact that that's exactly what these chuckleheads complain about- that he does things that are just fandom facing or serving rather than everything being aimed at recruiting casual fans- does nothing but betray how completely they, unlike Louis and his team, misunderstand the actual drivers of his (actual, existing, happening) success. Luckily for Louis, he and his team rely on their own data harvesting (they do a LOT of it) and growth metrics (they're off the charts) rather than the smug assumptions of random (mostly quite new to this) fans and the few bitter people leading the complaining about everything Louis does.

[newstfionline]

Parenthood lost: How incarcerated parents are losing their children forever

By Eli Hager and Anna Flagg, Washington Post, December 3, 2018

Lori Lynn Adams was a mother of four living in poverty when Hurricane Floyd struck North Carolina in 1999, flooding her trailer home and destroying her children’s pageant trophies and baby pictures. No stranger to moneymaking scams, Adams was convicted of filing a fraudulent disaster-relief claim with FEMA for a property she did not own. She also passed dozens of worthless checks to get by.

Adams served two year-long prison stints for these “blue-collar white-collar crimes,” as she calls them. Halfway through her second sentence, with her children--three toddlers and a ­14-year-old--temporarily under county supervision, Adams said she got a phone call from a family court attorney. Her parental rights, he informed her, were being irrevocably terminated.

Before going to prison, Adams had sometimes drifted from one boyfriend to another, leaving her kids with a babysitter, and she didn’t always have enough food in the house. But she was not charged with any kind of child abuse, neglect or endangerment. Still, at a hearing that took place 300 miles from the prison, which she couldn’t attend because officials wouldn’t transport her there, she lost her children. Adams’s oldest daughter went to live with her father, and her other three kids were put up for adoption. She was banned from seeing them again.

“I know what I did was wrong, and I had to pay the price for my actions,” Adams, now 50, said. “But this is the most extreme price there is.”

Mothers and fathers who have a child placed in foster care because they are incarcerated--but who have not been accused of child abuse, neglect, endangerment, or even drug or alcohol use--are more likely to have their parental rights terminated than those who physically or sexually assault their kids, according to a Marshall Project analysis of approximately 3 million child-welfare cases nationally.

In about 1 in 8 of these cases, incarcerated parents lose their parental rights, regardless of the seriousness of their offenses, according to the analysis of records maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between 2006 and 2016. That rate has held steady over time.

Female prisoners, whose children are five times more likely than those of male inmates to end up in foster care, have their rights taken away most often.

To some adoption proponents, immediately finding children a nurturing home should always be the priority. Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that while some parents turn their lives around when they leave prison, their children should not have to wait for a family.

“You never know if they’ll just go right back to a life of crime,” she said, “and kids deserve better than that.”

A growing contingent of family advocates, however, say that removing children from their birth families is a destructive act in itself. A prison stint alone, they say, should not be grounds for severing the bond between birth parent and child, which can lead to profound negative effects on children’s mental and physical health.

“The right to your children is the most fundamental one you have, but we strip it from incarcerated parents so casually,” said Kathleen Creamer, a family attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. “This is the family separation crisis that no one knows about.”

Over the past few decades, the number of imprisoned parents in the United States has skyrocketed. From 1991 to 2007, it jumped by more than 357,000. Today, more than half of the 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails have minor children.

All the while, lawmakers have taken a tougher stance on troubled and absent parents.

In 1997, with first lady Hillary Clinton’s vocal support, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which mandated that federally funded state child-welfare programs begin termination of parental rights in most cases in which children had been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. The measure’s supporters hoped it would pave the way to adoption for kids who had been languishing in temporary, often unstable homes while their biological parents tried to kick a drug habit or find housing.

The legislation also created bonuses for states that facilitate adoptions. Since 1998, the federal government has doled out more than $639 million in these rewards.

But the law’s largely unintended consequence was to make incarcerated parents, who now spend well more than 15 months on average behind bars because of the tough prison sentences of the same era, more vulnerable to losing their children.

According to the Marshall Project analysis, at least 32,000 incarcerated parents since 2006 had their children permanently taken from them without being accused of physical or sexual abuse, though other factors, often related to their poverty, may have been involved. Of those, nearly 5,000 appear to have lost their parental rights because of their imprisonment alone.

No significant racial disparities were found in the relative rates at which these parents’ rights are terminated. But given that African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated--1 in 10 black children have a parent behind bars, compared with about 1 in 60 white children--this phenomenon affects them in outsize numbers.

Family court cases are complicated, all the more so when parents are incarcerated. Inmates are by definition absent, and they sometimes have a history of other child-welfare disputes. Whether to terminate their parental rights is a multifaceted decision made by judges on a case-by-case basis, and the legal grounds for doing so vary by state.

Yet the ways that other parents with child-welfare cases can stave off that outcome--spending time with their children regularly, showing up for court hearings, taking parenting classes, being employed, having stable housing and paying child support to reimburse the government for the costs of foster care--are all next to impossible from confinement. Corrections departments are not obligated to drive inmates to family court, and county child-welfare agencies rarely have the resources to bring children to faraway prisons for visits with Mom or Dad.

Judges, in turn, sometimes make the life-altering decision to terminate imprisoned parents’ rights without meeting them.

“There’s an impression among some in our community that incarcerated folks don’t deserve to have a family,” said Judge Anthony Capizzi, immediate past president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Malissa Gamble, a Philadelphia mother of two, went to prison for nearly 15 months in 2003 on a parole violation stemming from a charge of receiving stolen property. Within weeks of her release, there was a hearing scheduled to consider terminating her parental rights.

At one point, the judge said, “The mother in this case is not available because she is incarcerated,” according to Gamble.

“No she’s not! The mother is sitting right here! I’m here!” she said she shouted from her seat in the courtroom.

Because Gamble was freed in time to make it there, she was able to keep her kids.

Amanda Alexander, executive director of the Detroit Justice Center and a senior research scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, sees the dichotomy between what’s best for parents and what’s best for kids as a false one. The child-welfare system, she said, certainly must find young people a stable home. But it should also help their mothers and fathers stay in their lives in a productive way, along with siblings and other relatives.

“In most cases, kids are better off by all kinds of metrics when they have a relationship with their birth families,” she said.

Dorothy Roberts, an expert on race, gender and family law at the University of Pennsylvania, said the underlying problem in the child-welfare system is decision-makers’ bias against poor parents, especially incarcerated mothers of color. The just thing to do as a society, she said, would be to better support these families with affordable housing, food assistance, drug treatment and child care, including in prisons.

“Instead of actually responding to the struggles of poor families ... we’ve decided that it’s simpler to take their children away,” she said.

At the very least, said Corey Best, a fate so stark as losing one’s children should not be irreversible.

In 2004, Best was in a bad place: a New Orleans jail cell, facing an aggravated battery charge after getting in a fight with a drug dealer. Before then, he said, he had been close with his 3-year-old son, Corey Jr., practicing counting and reading with him before bedtime. But based on Best’s history of substance abuse and arrests, plus his six months of incarceration and the resulting lack of contact with his son, his parental rights were terminated.

“I needed drug treatment and services to be offered to me while I was in jail,” said Best. “But I love my son.”

Best, 45, has been sober for more than a decade and is a successful consultant and public speaker on child welfare. But he still isn’t allowed to contact Corey Jr., whose teenage years he has only glimpsed on Facebook.

Each year on his son’s birthday, he buys a card, writes a thought or aspiration, and places it in a special box. Corey Jr.’s adoptive mother, who declined to comment for this story, indicated through a friend that she might be willing to introduce the boy to his biological father, but only after he turns 18.

Meanwhile, Best said, he’s devoting himself to his second son, Corvin, an artistic and athletic 9-year-old who loves making paper airplanes.

“Maybe this is God’s way,” he said, “of showing me some kind of redemption.”

[atticusblog2016-blog]

New Post has been published on Atticusblog

New Post has been published on https://atticusblog.com/why-does-hollywood-keep-equating-beauty-with-virtue/

Why does Hollywood keep equating beauty with virtue?

Vail Reese is the world expert on movie characters’ pores and skin situations. The San Francisco dermatologist can inform you whatever you need to know approximately scars, birthmarks, tattoos, Jon Hamm’s vitiligo and the Austin Powers adversary Fat Bastard’s more nipples, a spoof of the identical condition on Christopher Lee’s murderer in “The Man With the Golden Gun.”

For a long time, Reese’s internet site, Skinema, has chronicled those abnormalities, which, he argues, too often appear on villains. For example, in the movie “Grease,” he writes, “Pretty boy Travolta . . . Musically drag races . . . The appreciably zits-scarred ‘Crater-face.’ ”

Reese sees how such conventions affect his very own sufferers. “It’s no longer simply, ‘Am I going to look quite?’ ” he says. “It’s, ‘Are humans going to judge me?’ ”

His paintings is a peek into how Hollywood equates classical beauty with virtue

From Disney romances to James Bond awful guys to comedians making amusing of Stephen Bannon’s face. Despite some progress, films and TV nonetheless lazily perpetuate a belief we now not believe: that looks correlate with an individual. When many in Hollywood are combating for greater range and against stereotypes of a wide variety, ought to that fight encompass kinds of our bodies and faces?

Hollywood: Do Hollywood Actors No Longer Exist To Distract People?

When someone desires to relax, they might emerge as looking for a film to look at, and there are going to be a number of ways for them to do this. For one aspect, one ought to cross and watch something on the cinema.

This can also then imply that they may need to wait for a little even as, and this will be because they’ll need to journey a little manner away. But despite the fact that it was simply the road, they could still await the following showing.

Another Option

What might be even less complicated is in the event that they have been to go online and to discover something to flow on their device. Through doing this, they won’t need to head everywhere and neither will they want to attend.

This is then going to make it less complicated for one to watch a film or a chain every time they feel love it. Even so, one can also most effective prefer to look at something every now and then, and it’s far then no longer going to be something with a view to take over their whole life.

Other Priorities

Naturally, one goes to have activities that are greater crucial, and in the event that they failed to be aware of these things, they would quickly pay the fee. There goes to be their career and what they’ll want to for this to head within the right course.

And, at the side of their want to consume proper and to exercise, they could also have a family to look after. But in the event that they have not got a family, there may be the effort and time that they may need to position into their relationships.

Current Affairs

When it involves staying updated with what’s taking location around them and the arena, it’s miles going to be a terrific concept for them to spend a certain quantity of time looking into what is taking the region. Reading a paper or reading about what the mainstream media say online is going to be one manner of doing this.

What could be even better would be if they have been to now not simplest look into what goes on here, but to also question what they come across? In addition to this, one should inspect what’s taking region within the opportunity media.

Critical Thinking

It might seem like the waste of time to look closer to this cause of statistics while one could honestly listen to the mainstream media. However, there are masses of examples of whilst this supply has lied and engaged in their own ‘fake information’.

Privileged to Be Empowered

We live in a global that needs our exceptional normal

To make sure that we embrace the spirit that makes it all feasible requires consciousness refocus and refinement. Drive is essential and needs to have direction. Drive without course will maintain you going nowhere. The benefits that come together with privilege include a fee. The fee of privilege is measured by using the depth of your efforts. Effort equating to end result isn’t always a physics or math hassle. There are the ones so one can equate privilege with having all of the greatest matters that existence has to provide. I could not disagree. Having substance is not a bad factor. Substance does no longer assure the existence that became meant for you though. Perception is a key. How you spot things determines your religion. When your substance is the byproduct of your efforts it defines who you’re and what you are a product of. When you consider it’s viable you’re on the proper track. Mark 11:24 “Therefore I inform you something you ask in prayer accept as true with which you have received it and it’ll be yours.” The price of empowerment is well worth the funding.

When you believe in you, achievements are the herbal profession

Every plant started out with a seed. Nurturing that seed ensures it will develop. Mathew thirteen: eight states “Still other seed fell on good soil, in which it produced a crop 100, sixty or thirty times what became sown.” The subsequent verse is, “he with ears allow him to listen.” You are as crucial as you need to be. Your efforts should be severe and actual. To be convicted in what you believe and that perception is primarily based on what is internal you and what lifestyles have taught you is energy attained thru faith and effort. Faith without effort isn’t religion and effort without faith will preserve you spinning your wheels. Universal regulation teachers simply as correct as it can be it may be just that terrible. Intellect and free will allow us to choose. Situations or situations do not outline you. It’s what you pick to do about the one’s conditions and instances that define you. Life has offered extra items than we recognize we’ve. The street to realizing and acknowledging these presents is our opportunity to ahead those presents. The greater we agree with the extra we open ourselves to obtain. The greater we get hold of the extra privileged we grow to be by continuing to pass that present on.

American Beauty Semiotic Analysis

American Beauty, through its use of symbols and the

Identify of the movie itself makes us have a look at the characters and their philosophies (American dream, their ideas of achievement, splendor, and so forth.) each as they are and as they’re perceived. No one within the film is real as they appear. In the stop the creepiest (Ricky) is the nicest, the success wife is an unstable soil, and the American beauty is alternatively simple.

The crimson rose petals, which appear several times at some point of American Beauty are a symbol of love, sensuality, and vitality. However, it is crucial to notice that at some stage in most of the film the pink roses are implicitly an illusion. The purple roses within the context of an illusion come to face for a sugar covered reality.

By sugar coating, I simply that which covers up the herbal stimulation (flavor, sight, contact) via “sweetening” it. In all, however, one of the scenes, the purple puddles are around Angela masking her bare body in a manner which makes whatever lays underneath, that much more engaging, through the usage of sensual reds and the sexiness of mystery. Not to say extreme spectacles which frequently accompany Lester’s dream scenes.

After Lester reveals out that Angela is a virgin and by no means what the concept she became he is going out to the kitchen and picks up a picture of his circle of relatives. As Lester appears at a photograph of his family saying “guy oh man…” a busy of purple roses(exact to the ones shown earlier) are shown for about 5 seconds. These roses in contrast to all proven previously are actual, no longer a dream. Also unlike the roses proved earlier they’ve associated with his own family and not Angela. In this context, the roses do not constitute sugar coating but real love, sensuality, and vitality. Seconds later we see a puddle of pink blood. Shortly when we experience, via video montage that’s Lester’s life flashing before his eyes, the love, sensuality, and vitality which the photograph represented.

The topic of factors not being what they seem is not removed to Lester’s view of Angela

Several times throughout the film Carolyn says You need to venture success always to in the end emerge as a success. Lester also comments to Ricky’s Dad that his marriage”…Is only for display.