What Does Success Look Like?

When a "Black Lives Matter" group took over the pavilion in a park to broadcast a message by bullhorn last night, I was reminded of this question an interviewer asked a Black author on the "Book TV" program. I guess I would have answered her question by saying success in a Black neighborhood would look like a well-maintained school, no Pay-Day loan and liquor stores or abortion clinics. The kindly Black man on the "Today" show this morning, who had adopted a "family" of a dozen or so multiracial children would have answered differently. As would Rev. Derrick DeWitt, the director of the Maryland Baptist Aged Home whose residents have had no infections during the COVID-19 epidemic. Jasmine Guillory, an attorney who writes romance novels with Black female lead characters, might judge her success by publication of PARTY OF TWO, her fifth novel. Everywhere on the globe, no matter what your aim is: reforming a police department, feeding a hungry world or living a happy and fulfilling life, before beginning a task, ask yourself, "What will success look like?"

Rocky on the Ropes

No pandemic would send Rocky Balboa or the folks on the World War II home front into a black hole of loneliness and depression. Follow their advice: Get physically fit. Activate you own version of Rocky's raw egg concoction and his run up Philadelphia's Art Museum steps. Grow your wealth. During World War II, Captain America advised citizens to fight for freedom by investing $37.50 in a war bond that would yield $50 in ten years. Today, bonds are sold online at treasurydirect.gov. Discover farming. Pick apples, berries and watermelons at local farms, buy fresh corn at stands along country roads, plant tomatoes in your own Victory Garden and grow flowers to attract the honeybees that pollinate crops. Enjoy home entertainment. Once listeners gathered around the radio to hear a closet full of items tumble out on "Fibber McGee and Molly" or they read comic books in lighted closets during blackouts. Choose from a much wider variety of ways to enjoy home entertainment today. Hone your arguments. While sheltering in place, take time to scroll through social media, listen to talking heads, read up on the issues and then express your opinions in "Letters to the Editor" and elsewhere.

Inform Career Preparation

Lessons from current events and research findings can prevent career preparation mistakes.

     China's President funded facial recognition technology to control the country, and suddenly the coronavirus required masks. In the United States, voters in primary elections discounted presidential candidate Andrew Yang's plan to give $1000 a month to every citizen over 18 years of age. A few months later, they received a $1200 check from President Trump. Research Robert Plomin presents in Blueprint shows genes have an important influence on a child's propensity to excel in certain fields, but some parents risk criminal prosecution to bribe their students ' admission into prestigious colleges unsuited to their normal development.

     Several examples suggest productive ways to think about preparing for careers in the rapidly changing future.

      As world stock markets tumble, Scottish investment firm, Baillie Gifford, prospers. By purchasing stocks in companies whose stock prices fell because  they channeled profits into preparations for online sales, Baillie Gifford willingly sacrificed short term gains for a future when stores would lose out to channels serving online customers. As a high school student, becoming a dependable employee in an unglamourous, low-paying position can be the way to a credit card and a bank loan for higher education or a business of your own. Shark Tank Daymond John spent years working at Red Lobster to help finance his first fashion business.

     Skills are transferable.

     Erik Larson's current book about Churchill tells how Lord Beaverbrook, the head of a publishing empire, became head of England's Ministry of Aircraft Production in World War II. He felt manufacturing executives in one industry could master another, just as knowing the basics of one religion enabled someone to grasp the principles of another faith. This summer, the lucky student interns working at home in virtual positions for one company are gaining the valuable skills needed to fill virtual positions likely to expand in many companies throughout the global business world.

     Walk back the cat.

     Consider how the management structure NASA developed to win the race to the moon, the structure being replicated to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in the US, applies to career planning. Beginning with the objective, do what intelligence agencies do when they are trying uncover a spy. They begin "walking back the cat" to see who had access to the information that caused a project to fail, whom those people knew, and so forth. I don't know if Barack Obama operated this way, but, if he did, he would have said to himself, "I would like to be President of the United States." What should I do? I need to show I can win an elected, high-level political office. I will run for the Senate. Who supports and funds this kind of campaign. Where should I attend college to meet the people who provide that kind of support, and so forth. Whether someone has a clear objective to be an astronaut, a president, a movie star or a millionaire, he or she needs to begin today to: 1) trace back the steps needed to reach that goal and 2) take the first step.

Rebirth of Self Worth

As summer approaches in the Northern Hemisphere and the coronavirus diminishes (We hope.), neighborhoods can expect to witness blocks and blocks of yard sales and mini-entertainment venues. Sheltering in place is providing an opportunity to examine the contents of closets, cabinets and drawers; to rediscover old family recipes; practice musical instruments, dance moves and baton twirling; paint a picture; knit and build a bird house or a bookcase out of wood. Also, a backyard garden or community plot can lead to sales of flowers and produce, such as tomatoes and lettuce.

     With neighbors walking from yard to yard in the sun, hungry shoppers will need grilled hot dogs besides lemonade. Custom sunscreening can join facepainting at a "service station." And entertainers can set up lawn chairs and sell tickets to 15-minute shows of magic, sock puppets, dance, and band concerts performed in costumes.

     At yard sales, kids learn to talk to customers, negotiate prices, make change, keep an eye on the cash box and look out for shoplifters.  Shows offer children a wonderful chance to organize, price and prepare signs for their performances.

     When my friend's 7-year-old saw her making a to-do-list before beginning her virtual workday at home, he wanted one too. As a result, he makes his own bed, sorts his wash by white and colored, puts all toys away except the one he is playing with, reads a book to his little sister, brushes the dog, writes out or draws what he would like for lunch, watches a certain TV program at 9 am, dusts the living room and helps unload the dishwasher.

     I see that the Whirlpool home appliance manufacturer, according to trendwatching.com,  sponsors #ChoreClub to give parents ideas for engaging children ages 2-11 in life skills as well as
 learning activities. Pairing socks becomes a matching game, cutting a pizza teaches fractions and learning Spanish involves a scavenger hunt for household products that print directions in two languages.

     Between running yard sales and entertainments and mastering essential adult skills, growing up in the COVID-19 pandemic might not be so bad for kids (and parents).

Look Beyond One Right Way

A review of a new book about the US artist, Alexander Calder, described how he employed physics in the service of art. Reading this, I was reminded that my sister, who has an art major degree. looked at a drawing of the coronavirus and saw a similarity with the look of the Times Square ball that drops on New Year's.

     Science, it seems, also could be employed in the service of art. Picture how the motion of constantly copying genes could be expressed the way Calder incorporated motion in his art.

     Every field can be expressed in art. If employees were encouraged to design and decorate their cubicles, the idea of dressing to express on casual Fridays might lead to occasional happy hour tours of minimal and exuberant art in employee spaces. Consider the variety of ways food can be arranged on a plate; how politicians around the world express their policies in the green, pink, yellow and red-white-and-blue graphics on their campaign posters; and how the pattern of interstate roads moves the eye across a country like the lines on a Mondrian painting.

     "(I)t is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self," said British psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott. Viewed this way, laughing at and ignoring an individual's creative spirit stifles growth and development. Hitler may not have been a great artist, but wouldn't humanity have been better off if he expressed himself in art rather than in creating the "final solution"?

     Family life could be much fuller and much more satisfying, if each member were encouraged to create. It is easy to laugh at a relative's out-of-the-box ideas and creations, but during the coronavirus lockdown, we have seen the joy of family members taking videos, dancing, singing, playing musical instruments, taking photos out of windows, painting, cooking, reciting original poems, sewing colorful protective masks, and tailoring outfits for pets. Some people have the confidence to never doubt themselves, but being laughed at is enough to discourage the creativity of most.

       Finally, observation helps nurture creative expression the way my sister connected seeing  a drawing of COVID-19 with the Times Square ball. When Calder awoke on the deck of a ship one day, he saw a red sunrise on one side and a silvery moon on the other. In the solar system, he realized two very different phenomena are related, just as the moving parts and shapes on his mobiles would   be connected later.

     Encouraging observation and nurturing creative expression beyond one already established right way of doing something can benefit self, family and maybe even humanity.

China-Mongolia and the Deaths of Race Horses in California

Many aspects of global life illustrate how connected the world is. As preposterous as a connection between China, Mongolia, and last year's deaths of 23 horses at California's Santa Anita racetrack  seems, it is a connection worthy of  investigation.

     On the books, China's Communist regime outlawed gambling when it took over in 1949. Efforts continue to purge online betting apps, and prison awaits those who challenge Chairman Xi's abhorrence of corruption. Nonetheless, local administrators of state-run lotteries manage to take their cuts, gamblers access online casino apps designed in Southeast Asia, illegal mah jong games hide from overhead drones in China's woods and mountains, and police even had to break up gambling at a cricket fighting tournament near Shanghai in August, 2019.

     Off shore, casinos dominate Macao, a former Portuguese island and now a Chinese Special Administrative Region. In 2017, New Zealand created a Jockey Club to attract Chinese  thoroughbred buyers and to cater to Chinese owners who want to train and race their horses in Australia and New Zealand. When Justify won the Kentucky Derby and the other two legs of the U.S. Triple Crown in 2018, owners from the China Horse Club just laughed after a reporter questioned how racing squared with China's ban on gambling.

     If there is a connection between China and the 23 race horses that died at Santa Anita, it runs through China's landlocked northern neighbor, Mongolia. The historic domain of Genghis Khan's horses and riders also is the current home of dusty courses where hundreds of children as young as five ride bareback in races to win a Russian-made car. When racing was legal in China, owners used to send their horses north to strengthen their bones by grazing in the nutrient-rich  pastures of Mongolia. Reporting on the fatal leg injury that caused the horse, Mongolian Groom, to be euthanized after the Breeders Cup Classic at Santa Anita in November, 2019, Billy Reed mentioned the need to reassess the calcium-building limestone content of the soil and water where many race horses graze in Kentucky.

     As a cause of last year's race horse deaths, in recent months the coronavirus is receiving more attention that the dietary value of Kentucky's pastures, Scientists suspected COVID-19 could pass between animals and humans after researchers discovered pig farmers died of coronavirus in Malaysia. Observers watched bats land on a tree and poop into a vat of pig slop. Tests found the bats carried COVID-19 and transmitted the disease to farmers who had contact with the pig slop.

     The coronavirus that affects humans and the equine enteric (gastrointestinal) coronavirus horses pass between each other are both among the large group of RNA messenger viruses. Since both forms of the virus in horses and humans lock onto cells using the same kind of spikes, transmission between  these species is highly probable. Lack of evidence showing horses and humans exchange COVID-19 at this time may be a function of a lack of testing fecal samples of thoroughbred race horses and the failure to test personnel at Mongolian Stable, who may have shown little or no initial symptoms of the virus.

     In August, 2019, the San Diego Tribune ran a photo showing Enebish Ganbat, a Mongolian who trains horses at Mongolian Stable, kissing Mongolian Groom's face. Such gestures, not unusual among those who love and care for horses, provide ample opportunity for humans and horses to transmit coronavirus to each other. Horses contract equine enteric coronavirus by contact with surfaces exposed to the manure of infected horses or by consuming some of their manure. Therefore,  to prevent contracting coronavirus from a horse, people need to wash their hands whenever they touch anything, such as a shovel or pitchfork, that may have been in contact with an infected horse's manure. Unless humans who have or may not yet show symptoms of COVID-19 wear masks, they may spread coronavirus to horses.

     Before racing resumes at Santa Anita this summer, last year's fate of Mongolian Groom is reason to test the nutrient value of Kentucky's pastures and to test for the presence of coronavirus in the horses that race there.

             

North Korea Taps into the Power of Distraction

Magicians and medical professionals use distraction. Look over there, and while your attention is diverted, something unusual happens or a shot is administered. Distractions are useful, but, beware, they also can be dangerous. In a school lunchroom, one student calls attention to someone coming in the door; an accomplice steals a cookie or two.

     In international relations, countries often need to maintain focus on more than one problem. In my eBook, A Dangerous Mix of Washington Outsiders, I imagined an espionage plot occurring while the U.S. was celebrating the first budget surplus in 28 years, impeaching President Clinton, and preparing for the 2000 elections. My plot is imaginary, but North Korea's recent missile launches are real. Dealing with the coronavirus cannot be allowed to distract world attention from North Korea sending missiles into Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone three times during the month of March, 2020. Because of COVID-19, the Olympic games, scheduled to be played in Tokyo this summer, already have been moved to July, 2021. Canceling them altogether may be necessary, it there is a danger athletes might be killed by a wayward North Korean missile.

     North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who failed to see any progress on a nuclear deal with the U.S. in 2019, resumed missile testing shortly after 700 legislators met for the country's Supreme People's Assembly. The size of the meeting also indicates North Korea, which had imposed a national lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19, is no longer concerned about large congregations.

     What U.S. attention is focused on Korea is devoted to figuring out how to share the cost of military defense spending with South Korea and the virus-related cancellation of joint U.S.-South Korean military drills. Those preoccupations also avoid concern, not only about North Korea's missile tests, but also about the World War II reparation claims that undermine cooperation between U.S. allies, South Korea and Japan. The lack of Russian and Chinese sanctions needed to control North Korea's nuclear ambitions also is overlooked.

     At stake is more than a couple of missing cookies. 

   

Threats to Olympic Sites

Insurance companies feared financial losses if the coronavirus caused the cancellation of this summer's 2020 Olympic Games in Toyota. As it turned out, the games were rescheduled for July, 2021. Violence, including World War II, that marred the noble purpose of the games in the past, could again be a factor next year, if North Korea continues to launch missiles toward Japan.

     Environmental threats from pollution and climate change also have had an impact on the Olympics. Debris in the waters off Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before the 2016 summer Olympics worried open-water swimmers and skippers in boating events. High winds delayed skiing events and kept spectators off the slopes at the 2018 winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

     Despite efforts to switch away from fossil fuels and plant trees to control the sand and dirt blown south from the Gobi Desert, athletes at the 2022 winter Olympics in China could face a breathing, as well as a competitive, challenge at events in Yanqing and Chongli, north of Beijing. During winter, heating homes and factories increases pollution in an area that suffers year round. Smog is likely to obscure views from the 4-story tower built in Yanqing to give visitors to the Olympics a glimpse of the Great Wall of China.

     Since the fur from four goats is needed to respond to the fashion industry's demand for one cashmere sweater, grazing goats turned the Mongolian steppes north of China into a desert no longer capable of protecting Beijing from wind-blown sand. To stabilize top soil, the government removed up to 700,000 villagers in northern China from land designated for planting trees. However, at the same time climate change reduced rainfall in arid areas, many non-native trees planted in China required more water and worsened water shortages. An attempt to plant shrubs needing less water is underway. In any case, it is hard to know if China's new trees and shrubs will be ready to shield 2022's Olympic athletes from the Gobi Desert's blowing sand. According to Congbin Fu, the director of the Institute for Climate and Global Change Research at Nanjing University, growing forests is a long-term process that "can take several decades or even 100 years."

Wash Away Dangerous Germs

Nurses wearing gloves sprinkled them with glow-in-the-dark powder and went about their work. In the dark, they could see the powder ended up everywhere, including on their faces, the same way germs spread.

     As the number of world travelers increases, so does the opportunity for diseases to travel from people and hospitals in one country to another. Superbugs with super names, like methlcillin-resistant Straphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), are most dangerous. They resist the antibiotics that usually can cure bacterial infections in wounds, blood, and the gut, for example.

     Using antibiotics to cure a virus, such as coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is actually harmful. Not only are they ineffective against viruses, but they also help build up resistance to the best drugs for fighting bacterial infections.

     Viruses are extremely tiny. They consist of a packet of DNA or RNA messengers within a protein and fatty-like envelope that does not dissolve in water. Some viruses, such as COVID-19, include spikes able to fasten themselves to living human, animal, and plant cells. Although viruses cannot exist outside a living host cell, once their chemical compounds penetrate and infect a cell, they compromise the cell's immune system. Unless an antiviral drug stops them, virus-infected cells can each reproduce a million copies ready to infect more hosts.
 
     It is all too easy for children (and adults) to transfer germs that can remain harmless on skin and around nostrils into their noses and mouths where they cause disease. Prevention can be relatively easy, if hand sanitizers are accessible in handy locations. Children who are around animals especially need to wash their hands, and even doctors need to be reminded of the need to wash their hands between routine patient contacts.

     Earlier posts stress the importance of reducing resistance to antibiotics by using these drugs sparingly. See "Global Search for New Antibiotics" and "Diseases and Cures Travel the Globe."