Hasta La Gadget!

Success is a subjective notion, if there ever was one. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume the higher you are on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the better you’re doing. In case you don’t remember the levels from Psych 101, essentially, people can’t be their best possible selves (self-actualization) until lower-level needs are met first. In other words, you can’t be an ideal version of yourself if you don’t have enough food and money to pay the bills, or enough love and esteem to feel good about your value as a human being. So, what can you do to move yourself up the pyramid?

Check out the findings from several studies, which shine a light on what it takes to achieve more in life.

Increase your confidence by taking action.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, authors of The Confidence Code, wrote a stellar article for The Atlantic on this subject. Highlighting scads of studies that have found that a wide confidence gap exists between the sexes, they point out that success is just as dependent on confidence as it is on competence. Their conclusion? Low confidence results in inaction. “[T]aking action bolsters one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed,” they write. “So confidence accumulates–through hard work, through success, and even through failure.”

Broaden your definition of authenticity.

Authenticity is a much sought-after leadership trait, with the prevailing idea being that the best leaders are those who self-disclose, are true to themselves, and who make decisions based on their values. Yet in a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “The Authenticity Paradox,” Insead professor Herminia Ibarra discusses interesting research on the subject and tells the cautionary tale of a newly promoted general manager who admitted to subordinates that she felt scared in her expanded role, asking them to help her succeed. “Her candor backfired,” Ibarra writes. “She lost credibility with people who wanted and needed a confident leader to take charge.” So know this: Play-acting to emulate the qualities of successful leaders doesn’t make you a fake. It merely means you’re a work in progress.

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Improve your social skills.

According to research conducted by University of California Santa Barbara economist Catherine Weinberger, the most successful business people excel in both cognitive ability and social skills, something that hasn’t always been true. She crunched data linking adolescent skills in 1972 and 1992 with adult outcomes, and found that in 1980, having both skills didn’t correlate with better success, whereas today the combination does. “The people who are both smart and socially adept earn more in today’s work force than similarly endowed workers in 1980,” she says.

Train yourself to delay gratification.

The classic Marshmallow Experiment of 1972 involved placing a marshmallow in front of a young child, with the promise of a second marshmallow if he or she could refrain from eating the squishy blob while a researcher stepped out of the room for 15 minutes. Follow-up studies over the next 40 years found that the children who were able to resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow grew up to be people with better social skills, higher test scores, and lower incidence of substance abuse. They also turned out to be less obese and better able to deal with stress. But how to improve your ability to delay things like eating junk food when healthy alternatives aren’t available, or to remain on the treadmill when you’d rather just stop?

Writer James Clear suggests starting small, choosing one thing to improve incrementally every day, and committing to not pushing off things that take less than two minutes to do, such as washing the dishes after a meal or eating a piece of fruit to work toward the goal of eating healthier. Committing to doing something every single day works too. “Top performers in every field–athletes, musicians, CEOs, artists–they are all more consistent than their peers,” he writes. “They show up and deliver day after day while everyone else gets bogged down with the urgencies of daily life and fights a constant battle between procrastination and motivation.”

Demonstrate passion and perseverance for long-term goals.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth has spent years studying kids and adults, and found that one characteristic is a significant predictor of success: grit. “Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality,” she said in a TED talk on the subject. “Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Embrace a “growth mindset.”

According to research conducted by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, how people view their personality affects their capacity for happiness and success. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe things like character, intelligence, and creativity are unchangeable, and avoiding failure is a way of proving skill and smarts. People with a “growth mindset,” however, see failure as a way to grow and therefore embrace challenges, persevere against setbacks, learn from criticism, and reach higher levels of achievement. “Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training,” she writes.

Invest in your relationships.

After following the lives of 268 Harvard undergraduate males from the classes of 1938 to 1940 for decades, psychiatrist George Vaillant concluded something you probably already know: Love is the key to happiness. Even if a man succeeded in work, amassed piles of money, and experienced good health, without loving relationships he wouldn’t be happy, Vaillant found. The longitudinal study showed happiness depends on two things: “One is love,” he wrote. “The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”

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One of the world’s largest paint manufacturers continues to add a toxic heavy metal to products it sells outside the U.S., mostly in poor countries, despite decades of health warnings and ongoing pleas to stop the practice — the latest of which came from the company’s own investors.

A recent government decision allowed PPG Industries to ignore a shareholder proposal to remove lead from its industrial paints, in a move health advocates call potentially “precedent-setting.”

Nine organizations that own shares in PPG Industries, the world’s second-largest paint maker, filed a shareholder proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late 2014 asking PPG to come up with a plan for the eventual phase-out of lead from all its paints. Industrial paints are the major holdout for the company, which has otherwise largely removed lead from its products. Industrial uses include bridges, building components, pavement markings and cars.

Cans of leaded automobile paint are stacked up on store shelves in Cameroon. (Occupational Knowledge International, Copyright 2015)

In the proposal, investors highlighted the neurotoxic, developmental and cardiovascular risks to children and adults from exposure to lead paint, not to mention economic effects like an estimated $977 billion in lost productivity.

On February 26, the SEC said that PPG could disregard the proposal and legally avoid voting on the matter at their annual shareholder meeting, which took place in April.

“Companies don’t like these votes,” Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of the nonprofit Occupational Knowledge International, told The Huffington Post. (The nonprofit has advocated with PPG’s shareholders on the issue.) A majority vote by shareholders, while technically only advisory, will often pressure a company to pass a resolution, Gottesfeld explained.

The SEC ruling “has serious implications for any future actions shareholders may want to take in regards to similar issues,” he added. The ruling appears to be a policy change from prior SEC decisions touching on environmental issues.

The SEC declined to comment on why it issued the so-called no action ruling, but in its decision the agency said there was “some basis” for exclusion of the shareholder proposal under a federal rule relating to “ordinary business operations.” In other words, the agency agreed with PPG that the decision on using lead paint is related to the kinds of products the company sells and is, therefore, best reserved for the company’s management.

But industry critics argue that lead is one part of a product’s content, not the product itself — and it’s far from an irreplaceable ingredient. “Alternatives for lead additives in paint have been known for over 150 years,” Gottesfeld said. PPG itself developed a metal primer for use as a lead substitute in automobile paint, for which the company received the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greener Chemicals Award in 2001. The EPA called the replacement “100 times safer than lead at typical levels of use.”

“Given pigments and driers that do not contain lead are now widely available, there is no need or justification to intentionally add lead compounds to paint,” Diana Abrahams, a spokeswoman with AkzoNobel, told HuffPost in an email. Her company, the world’s largest paint manufacturer, completely phased lead out of their products worldwide in 2011.

To be fair, PPG recently agreed to use lead-free alternatives in architectural or decorative paints made for sale anywhere in the world, after selling leaded house paint in Africa as recently as 2013.

But the shareholders’ proposal focused on the lingering inclusion of lead in industrial paints. Those paints “generally have lead concentrations that are up to ten times greater” than house paints, Gottesfeld wrote in a recent article. And the lack of regulation in many countries means it’s difficult to be sure industrial paints aren’t actually used in homes, schools or hospitals. Furniture, toys and other consumer products can also be coated with these industrial paints due to weakly enforced or absent regulations. Products containing lead can find their way on to U.S. store shelves as well.

Lead-containing paints make up less than 1 percent PPG’s products sold, according to Mark Silvey, a company spokesman. But Gottesfeld and Lewis said this figure could be misleading depending on how it’s measured. The company’s sales include many non-paint products, like synthetic papers and precipitated silicas for tires and battery separators.

At greatest risk for health hazards are the workers involved in making, applying or removing paint, who can also carry the toxin home on their clothing. Industrial lead paint can also pose a danger for people living near factories, car repair shops or bridges — places where the paint is made, applied or removed. In the early 1980s, the sandblasting, scraping and repainting of the Mystic River Bridge in Boston, Massachusetts, left “street after street heavily contaminated,” noted Bruce Lanphear, a professor of environmental health expert at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

“There will be more of these kinds of environmental disasters, as well as ongoing contamination of the environment with lead — which is very difficult and costly to get rid of,” he said. “With very little consideration for human health or the environment, this company is basically externalizing all these costs on to the public and on to countries that don’t have regulations to protect them.”

While scientists have warned of lead paint’s hazards for more than a century, new evidence of its potential impact continues to emerge. Over the last few years, the number of health issues linked to lead exposure has risen, while the amount of exposure found to trigger those problems has dropped.

“Even at very low levels, we see evidence of lead’s damage to children’s brains. Not only is there no apparent threshold for the affects of lead on IQ or learning, the lowest levels of exposure result in the greatest relative detriments,” he added. “And it’s not just children.”

Research suggests that adults exposed to low levels of lead may be at increased risk of chronic kidney disease, hypertension and death from heart disease. There are even hints of potential links to Alzheimer’s and ALS.

The U.S. itself has not formally restricted lead content in industrial paints. However, regulations for public works projects — which followed a 1978 ban on leaded house paint — have generally eliminated the addition of the heavy metal to paints used domestically. The same is not true in much of the developing world, where any rules concerning lead paint remain rare.

Silvey, the PPG spokesman, told HuffPost in an email that PPG paints “comply with all applicable legal standards in the markets where the paints are sold.” He added that the company “looks forward to continuing its dialogue with shareholder proponents on this topic.”

But the shareholders are frustrated with the SEC’s apparent policy tilt in February, which contradicts the agency’s previous actions, said Sanford Lewis, the attorney representing the nine shareholders. The SEC recognized in 1998 that matters “focusing on sufficiently significant social policy issues . . . generally would not be considered excludable.” This policy seemed to hold through previous proposals from Dow Chemical, Union Camp and Baxter International shareholders related to environmental health threats from those companies, Lewis said. In each proposal, the SEC found that environmental impacts were not excludable, and each resulted in the phase-out of certain product materials.

The February decision made no reference to the SEC’s 1998 policy. “It would be kind of hard for them to actually state that lead paint and public health is not a significant public policy issue,” Lewis said.

Cathy Rowan, director of socially responsible investments for Trinity Health, one of the shareholders behind the proposal, called the SEC’s decision “disappointing” and “very concerning.” The group of nine plans to strategize this summer on how best to reengage PPG, she added.

“Trinity is seeing impacts of lead paint poisoning in many communities which it serves,” Rowan said. “Be it lead, be it BPA, be it brominated flame retardants, these environmental concerns are also business risks to companies.”

In a 2013 trial, three paint makers were ordered to pay more than $1 billion for the removal of lead paint from older homes in parts of California. The judge found that the companies had marketed the paint while knowing it was harmful to children.

“Companies at least have to recognize they could still be held liable,” said Lanphear, the environmental professor. “They should be concerned about that, if not the public health implications of selling a poisonous product.”

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Frontline’s new episode “The Trouble With Chicken,” which premiered Tuesday night on PBS and is now streaming online, is pretty much as close as the food safety world has ever gotten to its own “The Jinx.”

Like HBO’s mini-series on alleged murderer Robert Durst, “The Trouble With Chicken” investigates, with careful research and damning interviews, a lethal mystery that spans decades and states across the country. But the killer in this documentary doesn’t wield a knife or a chainsaw. It isn’t even a person. It’s a type of bacteria: salmonella Heidelberg, which sickened hundreds of people in two major outbreaks in 2004 and 2013. Both of them stemmed from chicken sold by California-based poultry producer Foster Farms.

Both Foster Farms outbreaks received ample media attention when they occurred. But the nature of breaking news coverage kept most people, even food safety watchers, from being able to understand the full story behind them. And “The Trouble With Chicken” shows, in 53 minutes, what a compelling story it is.

The documentary begins with a portrait of one family that was affected by the second of the two outbreaks. In October 2013, the 18-month-old son of Arizona residents Amanda and James Craten ate chicken from Foster Farms and came down with a serious salmonella infection, one that spread to his brain and caused a potentially fatal abscess. An emergency craniotomy — which involved cutting open his skull to allow doctors to access his brain — saved his life, but left him in a life-threatening coma.

Noah Craten eventually made a full recovery, but in “The Trouble With Chicken,” Frontline reporter David Hoffman tries to figure out why he became sick in the first place.

The major villain in the story is, of course, Foster Farms, the biggest poultry company on the West Coast. The documentary reveals how Foster Farms resisted making significant improvements to its food safety plans during and after its outbreak in 2004, despite repeated warnings from the FDA and the Oregon Department of Health. Hoffman argues that the company’s refusal to reform led directly to the second outbreak of salmonella Heidelberg.

More galling still? Foster Farms also reportedly refused to take action for more than a year after the 2013 outbreak began, because its executives insisted that epidemiological evidence didn’t conclusively link its chicken to the outbreak, which ended up sickening more than 600 people over 16 months.

Foster Farms executives refused to speak with Hoffman for “The Trouble With Chicken,” though, so he ends up focusing much of his outrage on the government officials and policies who failed to prevent the 2013 outbreak, or even stop it once it became obvious.

The documentary’s equivalent of the famous interview with Robert Durst in the finale of “The Jinx” is interviews with two high-ranking USDA officials, Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack and Food Safety Inspection Service administrator David Goldman. They both squirm when Hoffman asks them tough questions about their actions. The most jaw-dropping moment comes when Hoffman asks Goldman what punishment Foster Farms was handed for its gruesome food safety record.

“There’s no specific action that I’m aware of,” Goldman says after a pause.

Vilsack tries to defend the USDA’s actions by saying that the organization was restrained by its lack of authority. But when Hoffman notes that food safety crusader Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told Vilsack to ask for more authority, and asks why he didn’t, Vilsack can’t give a satisfactory answer.

“Well, right now, our focus has been primarily on making sure that our regulatory systems are what they need to be,” Vilsack says.

There’s so much more in the documentary, though: a riveting account of the epidemiological detective work that tied Foster Farms to the outbreak, a look inside an industrial chicken producer, a damning history of American food safety regulations. There are even, amidst incompetence and inaction, a few genuine heroes, like DeLauro and famed food safety lawyer Bill Marler. It’s a must-watch for anyone who eats chicken, anyone who cares about food safety and anyone who likes compelling documentaries. Everyone, pretty much. Still not convinced? Watch the trailer above.

If you’ve already watched “The Trouble With Chicken” and want to learn more about Foster Farms and food safety in general, one good place to start would be Lynne Terry’s major feature on the outbreak, published in the Oregonian earlier this month. A warning, though: If you watch the Frontline episode and read her piece, you’re not going to want to eat chicken for quite a while.

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As far as immigration rhetoric goes, Hillary has created what can be called a seismic change in the rhetorical field on the issue. This has sent everyone from other candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, to even the current White House, scrambling as they attempt to either change, clarify or reinforce their current position.

While there was much said, and most of it was the safe sort of “hard-working immigrant” rhetoric that is essentially “political fluff,” considering where we are in the very long 2016 race, she did say a lot of things that turn into political liabilities if not acted upon.

Perhaps the most important quote from Hillary’s meeting with Dreamers was “… if Congress continues to refuse to act, as President, I would do everything possible under the law to go even further [than President Obama].” When Hillary was talking on this, she was referencing DAPA and DACA, and talked about how “There are more people with deep ties and contributions to our communities who deserve a chance to stay.”

Building on her theme, she called for “a simple, straightforward, accessible way for parents of Dreamers and others with a history of service and contribution to their communities to make their case and to be eligible for the same deferred action as their children.” This could potentially allow for some of the more sympathetic cases that don’t quite qualify for DACA or DAPA to remain in the country, and could potentially cut down on forcing immigrants to be unnecessarily detained in one of the GEO Group’s detention facilities.

Hillary then made points on the detention system:

I also am very worried about detention and detention facilities for people who are very vulnerable, and for children. I think we could do a better job if we kept detention to people who have a record of violent illegal behavior and that we have a different approach for people who are not in that category, and I don’t think we should put children and vulnerable people into detention facilities because I think they’re at risk, their physical and mental health are at risk.

This, and her saying that we should have representation for the children that wind up at the border, are a bit of a departure from her notedly harsh rhetoric on sending the border children back as soon as a responsible adult in the family can be located in the past.

These centers Hillary referenced have horrible conditions where every corner on detainee health and welfare is cut to provide a larger margin of profit for the corporation, typically the Corrections Corporation of America or the GEO Group.

There has been arbitrary use of solitary confinement for offenses like not speaking English, patterns of unchecked violence from guards with no accountability, maggot-infested food, background checks so poor they have enabled pedophiles to guard (and sexually molest) teenage girls in facilities, and this is just a few items on a list too long for this article.

Anyone who focuses on LGBT and women’s rights within immigration have heard how the conditions in detention facilities are even worse for them: LGBT people are about fifteen times more likely to be raped while in one, and there has been a mothers’ hunger strike in Karnes center after a string of sexual assaults from the guards. This facility is only one of many known for rape problems that are part of a multi-billion dollar detention industry that spends tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Dept. of Homeland Security, as well as donates at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates on both sides of the aisle (though with so much dark money, I would wager it’s in the millions).

This industry has shown, time and time again, that it does not care for the human rights of those in their facilities.

That is why it was particularly welcome when Hillary started talking about the bed mandate and private detention centers:

I’m not sure that a lot of Americans know that the detention facilities for immigrants are run by private companies, and that they have a built-in incentive to fill them up. That there is actually a legal requirement that so many beds be filled. So people go out and round up people in order to get paid on a per-bed basis. That just makes no sense at all to me, that’s not how we should be running any detention facility.

Lastly, however, Hillary reminded us a bit that she is running, decrying a “second class status” that other countries have which we should not. This was seen as a thinly-veiled shot at Rubio and Bush, who are talking about offering some status short of citizenship to undocumented immigrants in the country.

In the cynicism of politics, we need to consider the source: Hillary Clinton just got a primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, and either is or should be trying to mess with the GOP field: putting pressure on Jeb to move further to the left on immigration while Walker can continue to jump rightward and fire up an anti-immigrant base that can hurt Jeb, the most likely general election opponent, during the primary.

For a politician like Hillary, going on the record is a strong sign that she intends to follow through. While the plans are still quite vague, it is still very early, and we will have a long time to drag out details.

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WASHINGTON — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, says he disagrees with the Pentagon’s assessment that climate change is a national security concern.

The Pentagon released a report in October that assessed the national security implications of climate change. “Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning,” wrote former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in the forward to the report. “Our armed forces must prepare for a future with a wide spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks and probabilities to ensure that we will continue to keep our country secure.”

But Johnson said at an event in Sherwood, Wisconsin, on Saturday that he did not concur with the Pentagon’s analysis.

“I disagree with that assessment,” Johnson tells a questioner at the event, which the Democrat-aligned political group American Bridge 21st Century captured on video. “We’re sitting here in Wisconsin. Twenty-some thousand years ago this was covered by about 5,000 feet of glaciers.”

“I do not deny climate change,” he continues. “The climate has always been changing.”

He goes on to say that he thinks the United States “shouldn’t spend a dime addressing it because our limited resources are spent better elsewhere.”

Despite Johnson’s take on the issue, there has been growing concern in the national security community about the threats of climate change, including sea level rise and migration caused by droughts or food shortages. The Obama administration’s national security strategy document released in February lists climate change as an “an urgent and growing threat.” And the Center for Naval Analyses called climate change a national security concern last year in a report that included a forward from former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who served under President George W. Bush, and former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Johnson has made similar arguments before, alleging “the science is far from settled” on climate change, and has accused groups that work on the issue of waging “an environmental jihad.” He has also previously denied being a denier, stating instead that he doesn’t “have a belief one way or the other.”

“Ignorance is bliss and it probably helps Ron Johnson sleep at night,” said American Bridge spokesman Ben Ray. “But the fact that the chairman of Homeland Security thinks the risks of climate change are irrelevant sure doesn’t help the rest of us.”

Johnson’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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