Minerva Translations & Language Services - OnPoint Research

Minerva Translations & Language Services

OnPoint Research - Articles and Posts

Honorable Organizations, Companies with Toxic Managers, and Employees’ Awareness of Their Own Worth

This article was published on LinkedIn in June 2025.

Recognize principled companies, avoid organizations with toxic managers, and focus on your own self-value.

Excerpts –

The Good News: Honorable Organizations Exist and Distinguish Themselves

Good managers and others with similar roles contribute to an organization’s growth and image. They display competence and may be an inspiration to others. In a leadership role, they bring the vision forward and foster a culture of collaboration. Well-functioning teams benefit from a sense of belonging and provide highest productivity levels.

Honesty and Integrity | Best practices | Culture and accountability
Mental energy and motivation | An open-door policy
Emotional Intelligence training and conflict management

The Bad News: Toxic Managers in Less Principled Organizations

They are unexceptional individuals with a mediocre degree of knowledge and abilities; their inadequate behavior may have psychological roots, as they often suffer from narcissism or have psychopathic traits. The presence of toxic managers is detrimental to a well-balanced and healthy work environment.

Federal and state legislation that protects employees’ rights is crucial for fair and responsible procedures. Ill-devised decisions contribute to diminished integrity and unjust practices.

Toxic Managers’ Characteristics

Self-serving behavior usually manifests itself as a form of “intoxication” with power and a thirst for validation through authority.
Low emotional intelligence is the inability to have self-awareness and self-regulation, demonstrate empathy, and effectively work with others.
Abusive acts, undue influence, and manipulation are used to control employees.
Compulsive micromanaging may become a borderline compulsive-obsessive personality disorder. Toxic managers undermine employees’ competence and autonomy, while also destroying the expected psychological safety.
Disruptive actions foster divisiveness and provide contradictory directives. They negatively affect morale and move the goalpost of the required performance.
Intimidation, revenge, and punishment destroy a productive and positive work environment and trust.

From The Personal Realm to Organizational Harm

Some organizations do not have a sound policy in place to address the issue of misuse of authority. Bad behavior is not necessarily framed as disruptive conduct, since toxic managers are often allowed ample decision-making power and rarely face consequences. This may be the case for companies with rigid hierarchical structures. Power stratification is considered an advantage for the maintenance of power differences and the status quo.

The culture of an organization may also determine the types of people it attracts.

The presence of toxic managers is deleterious to a positive organizational vision and its values. In the long term, an establishment that keeps toxic managers on its payroll begins to lose credibility and trustworthiness.

Employees’ Awareness of Their Own Worth

Recognize your own value.
Distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
Pursue your personal wellbeing.
Accept that envy and resentment exist.
Understand the importance of records gathering.
Keep an open mind with future employers.

Pedagogic and Course Structure Adaptations in Communication and Criminal Justice Courses

This narrative was published and then reviewed in 2024 by the High Impact Teaching and Learning Practices (HIOTLP) offered by the Gardner Institute in 2020.

The project stemmed from a study during the Covid-19 crisis, examining the adaptation of pedagogical approaches to teaching strategies in the synchronous/asynchronous context of virtual learning for adult students enrolled in higher education degree programs.

An associated presentation was delivered at the Conference on Academic Research on Education in 2020. An updated presentation was offered in an academic context in 2024.

Excerpts –

Using a qualitative direct observational method, and through a purposeful sampling process, participants from a homogeneous context were considered to reduce the opportunity of extreme variations.

Communications and criminal justice courses involve the acquisition and the refinement of critical, creative, and practical thinking abilities. The challenge in assisting students achieve a superior level of performance in these three areas was overcome by utilizing a framework of change that primarily covered pedagogic and course structural changes.

Supporting principles were gathered from Gagne’s Conditions of Learning and Knowles’ Active Adult Learning Concepts.

From preparation to self-actualization through developmental endeavors, the students were introduced to a variety of guided activities that allowed them to implement a process of metacognition expanding from the experience at hand and the necessary regulation practice.

Research outcomes showed [the students’] enhanced ability to synthetize contents, an increase in creativity, and a betterment in critical thinking skills geared to cases analysis and problem-solving.

National Crime Victims’ Rights Week

This article was published on LinkedIn in April 2025.

Excerpts -

National Crime Victims’ Rights Week (NCVRW) is from April 6 through April 12, 2025. This is the time to recognize and honor the victims and survivors of crime, along with the people who offer critical services for the same.

Brief History and Legal Milestones

For centuries, society did not identify and characterize the harm inflicted by criminal actors and the laws reflected the lack of consideration towards the people affected by the phenomenon. The focus was on the perpetrator of the crime under the common belief that simply punishing the offender would somehow positively affect the victims’ healing process. “The forgotten [persons] of the system” was finally applied to victims per the 1970s Crime Victims’ Rights Movement. Over the course of the years, advancements have been made in the legal and legislative arenas.

To name a few:

The 1980 Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights in Wisconsin
Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991)
The Violence Against Women Act of 2000
18 U.S.C. § 3771 Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) of 2004
H.R. 9444 - Courtney Wild Crime Victims’ Rights Reform Act of 2022
In progress, in 2025: H.R. 909 - Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act.

The Clinical Aspect

Victimology is considered a subfield of criminology. From a clinical psychological standpoint, the field of victimology is involved with studying the traumas the victims have experienced.

Victims of crime undergo psychological harm by reliving the dramatic details of their experience, whether in the clinical setting or during legal proceedings. Furthermore, plea bargain cases may prevent victims from being adequately heard.

It is also crucial to recognize the distinction between the impact of a crime and the effects. Impact refers to the “perceived intensity of the effects plus their duration from a victim’s (subjective) viewpoint.” This is an indication that both the effects and the impact may vary depending on individual victims and circumstance.

Some Recommendations

Life skills can be affected by traumatic experiences. Aside from the acquisition of basic skills and new approaches to navigating through various personal and professional areas, victims need help with readjusting to life in society in a post-victimization phase.

So, why should we honor the victims and survivors of crime? Because it is the right thing to do in a civilized society. Because it is not only important to bring to justice the perpetrators. It is crucial that we continue to support legislation and programs that bring back a sense of safety and set forth a path to healing.

VAERS data: More people have suffered brain injury from COVID vaccines than from all other vaccines combined over the past 30 years

The Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) ‘vaccine' has been linked to an alarming increase in brain injury cases. Data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in 2022.

Read the article here

Dr. Roger Hodkinson on Heart Damage, Blood Clotting from mRNA Injection

Myocarditis means inflammation of the heart muscle itself and pericarditis means inflammation of the sack surrounding the heart - Dr. Roger Hodkinson

(February 17, 2022)

Watch the video

The Risk of Covid-19 Vaccines

Dr. Vernon Coleman warns of the current and future dangers of these 'vaccines'.

(First published on March 14, 2021)

Watch the video

Working Our Way Towards Significantly Decreasing Meat Consumption

September 2019

Revised August 2020

I want to encourage us all to stop being dependent on animal flesh for nutrition or, at least, work on significantly decreasing its consumption.

We keep reading about meat recalls, salmonella and other harmful factors, farm-raised, GMOs, contaminated food from China, torture leading to slow death.

Yet, we continue to display shock at the news.

Why do we continue playing the meat industry’s game at our expense? The meat industry has no compassion towards animals. It gets rich off the flesh and blood of innocent creatures. What makes you think that it would take a strong interest in our wellbeing?

Stand out in the crowd of gullible masses. Honor your body and life. Honor the body and life of animals.

From a health standpoint, a main concern is the link between red meat consumption and heart disease, as discussed by Stanley Hazen, MD, PhD, Vice Chair of Translational Research for the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in 2014.

Watch this 2018 video. Dr. Heather Fields, an internal medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic, provides interesting elucidations on epidemiological studies and the issue of correlation with high blood pressure, some types of cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Carnitine, a nutrient found in red meat (also added in some energy drinks), may trigger a series of reactions by microbes residing in the gut area and is metabolized to trimethylamine-N-Oxide (TMAO) – a compound linked to clogged arteries or atherosclerosis. This compound may affect the function of blood cells (platelets), which regulate clotting responses to strokes and heart attacks occurrences. TMAO increases the opportunity for age-related weakened functioning of the blood vessels’ lining (vascular endothelial dysfunction) in healthy humans and laboratory mice.

Iron intake and nitrate/nitrite were the focus of a study by Etemadi et al. (2017) and reported in an article in the British Medical Journal. The participants to the study consumed various types of meat. The investigation aimed at establishing the link between consumption and the probability of an early mortality. The results confirmed a higher incidence of an early death, primarily in association with red meat consumption. White meat consumption appeared not to cause the same conclusions. However, the authors also pointed out that only recently people have become more used to processed white meat and that, for that reason, there would be a need to collect more data on this phenomenon before attempting a determination. There was, however, an increase of the onset of Alzheimer disease in people who ate processed white meat.

Additional attention has been given to the link between (red) meat consumption and the onset of a series of chronic diseases: Colorectal cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Areas of study include the compounds already present in the meat (such as Heme-Fe or Heme Iron), compounds developed during processing and preparation of the meat, and digestive chemical processes (i.e., TMAO).

Heme Fe is part of a protein attached to an iron atom in a porphyrin ring. Although more research needs to be done to establish the exact link between Heme iron’s activity and the onset or development of chronic diseases, De Smet, Demeyer, and Van Hecke (2018) indicated that its involvement in metabolic processes affects gastric health and the degree of inflammation opportunity. Heme Fe is found in many types of meat, as well as animal-based iron supplements. A high intake amount may be linked directly to cardiovascular diseases, colorectal cancer, and other gastrointestinal conditions.

Insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) is an anabolic hormone responsible for normal bone and tissue growth and development in young people. In adult age, however, a high level of IGF-1 may disrupt the regular cell division process and lead to the production and metastasis of cancerous cells. The consumption of animal protein appears to increase the levels of this hormone.

Current Board Member and Public Relations Chair

Logout Edit page