Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War



















Again, disgusting and immoral.
























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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Thoughts on Language and Thinking
















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Sunday, August 28, 2011

Dealing with Mold and Mildew in Your Home

My apartment building, including my own apartment, has had ongoing moisture problems, including leaks, floods, and general humidity. This brings mold and mildew...we have even had areas with that deadly black mold that can ruin a home if you don't catch it early enough.

I also want to draw your attention to my earlier article regarding the role of mold and mildew in the allergy and asthma epidemic. Keeping your home free of mold and mildew can reduce (not eliminate) your allergy, asthma and other respiratory problems. I know I used to get a respiratory infection every cold season that wouldn't go away. Once my building solved the leak and moisture problems and I got on top of cleaning and preventing mold, my respiratory problems largely went away.

So over the years I have spent a fair amount of time battling mold and mildew. I would like to pass along the more successful treatments I have found.


Mold and mildew grows where moisture collects. Areas that get damp are likely to get mold. Areas where dampness is chronic, mold will take strong hold and may be hard to get rid of. These are the conditions, particularly within walls, that can cause the deadly black mold that has closed down entire buildings in worst case scenarios.

If you see wet areas, look for leaks and get them fixed. Particularly near walls because moisture within walls are the hardest to deal with and the most common source of mold infestations. If there is a wet area, treat it for mold ASAP...see below for ways to kill and prevent mold. Apply where you can when you see a damp area. Note that bleach is what I list below as the most effective mold careful using this on carpets or fabric since it can damage the color and the fabric.

Dehumidifiers can be useful when moisture has built up. Sometimes, particularly in humid weather, moisture just stays put for days or weeks, which is a guaranteed mold environment. A dehumidifier can help. These are noisy, energy hogs, generate tons of heat, and need frequent emptying. But sometimes they are what you need to do the job. We have only had to use them when there was like a foot of water in our apartment, ruining our floors, during humid weather. But my building uses them in a common carpeted area to deal with moisture and they definitely help. Here's one that is Energy Star Rated, so that would limit the energy use, something you will appreciate if you need to use it for any length of time:

Deal with leaks and dry out damp spots...these are the first line of defense against mold and mildew. But you can also reduce the chances of mold growing by one simple treatment.


There is a safe, simple product that helps prevent mold and mildew. Many products make this claim, but this is the ONLY one I have found that seems to actually help. It is based on sodium carbonate, a simple compound not to be confused with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) which is a related but different compound. Sodium Carbonate (probably the carbonate itself) keeps the mold from being able to germinate and grow. If not washed off it can be effective for weeks. But even if used on shower surfaces it helps reduce mildew growth when used after some bleach treatment (see below under killing mold).

If you can get sodium carbonate itself, you can mix your own solution (see how on

But I found a product I find very effective where everything is pre-mixed: Concrobium Mold Control. Of course this is a more pricey option than mixing your own as described in the link above, but it is easier and I know it works.

Apply this from time to time anywhere that is damp or where you have seen mold before. When mold grows this won't work well alone. Use it AFTER you kill mold as indicated below.


X-14 Professional Instant Mildew Stain Remover is the most effective treatment for killing mold and mildew that has gotten established. This is nasty, bleach-based stuff. But it works!

Generally when I see any mold or mildew on a surface, I hit it with this, let it sit a few minutes, then wipe it off. In general this single treatment gets rid of it. Sometimes a second, longer treatment is needed. NO OTHER CLEANER I have tried works as well as this one for killing mold.

On a more routine level, when the weather is hot and humid and I know of surfaces that we get mold or mildew on, I do a preventative treatment with a plain bleach solution. Take regular laundry bleach, dilute around 1:5 to 1:10 in a spray bottle (be careful what you not reuse a spray bottle that had previously held a non-bleach based cleaner!). Then just spray this on a site you are concerned about, let sit a few minutes, then wipe off. This is far cheaper than the X-14 Professional Instant Mildew Stain Remover. It doesn't work as well once mold or mildew gets established, but it can help prevent mold or clean up the very first growth. Usually I use a more gentle cleaner, like are available through Seventh Generation/, Inc

These gentler cleaners do basic cleaning on all surfaces, get grease, smell better and are safer for kids and pets.

But when it comes to getting mold and mildew, I break out the bleach or the X-14 Professional Instant Mildew Stain Remover because they work!

After you have used one of these treatments to kill mold or mildew and have washed it away, you can increase the time before mold or mildew comes back by applying Concrobium Mold Control or homemade sodium carbonate solutions (not as effective, I think, but cheaper) and letting it sit. Together these treatments are very effective. You still have to repeat from time to time (at least once a year when things get hot and humid, often every month or so in humid weather), but in combination these work better than anything else.


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Saturday, August 20, 2011


Sierra Club


















When I won the one even knew who I was...I'd appeared out of nowhere to beat the candidates and now I was the opponent to Bob Dornan. Well, when he found out who I was he described me as a dream candidate to run against. "She can't beat me," he told the Orange County newspaper, the OC Weekly. "Bob Dornan [I guess like Bob Dole Dornan refers to himself in the third person] is a father of five, grandfather of ten, military man, been married forty-one years. She has no kids, no military, no track record. I win."























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Ancestors: Who's your great great great great grandpappy?

Race, ethnicity, culture, family...all important to people. But usually we think of these things completely separate from reality.

I have been reading several books that together have put some of this into perspective. Each of us are part of the whole sweep of human evolution, and we are all related in a very real, genetic way.

This man might be your ancestor:

(Ramesses II, king of Egypt, 13th century BC)

Yep, I bet lots of people today could, if only we had all the information, trace their ancestry back to this man. I would guess somewhere in the millions of people today are his descendants.

Go back far enough and we are all related. This is a fact. Or, more precisely, every little piece of our DNA ultimately derives from a common ancestor that can be traced back to some specific time and place.

This has most accurately and famously been done with our mitochondrial DNA. This DNA is something we all get from our mothers, so it is a strictly maternal descent. Men contribute nothing to it. In 1987 an amazing paper in the Journal Nature presented an analysis of modern mitochondrial DNA to show that all human beings can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a common ancestor living in East Africa some 100-150,000 years ago. At that time some 20,000 anatomically modern humans were around.

Interestingly, studying mitochondrial DNA of modern humans indicates that African Bushmen have some of the oldest patterns of mitochondrial DNA around. The rest of us moved away and lost some of the mitochondrial diversity that was maintained in the Bushmen. It is probable that the divergence of the ancestors of the Bushmen and the ancestors of the African Pygmies may be the very first ethnic division in human history since we first started diversifying after mitochondrial Eve. Note: both names are considered derogatory, but no other good generic names are available...Bushman and "Forest People" are considered somewhat preferable because they imply a connection to the environment these people have lived in for millennia, but Bushman and Pygmies are the commonly known terms.

A similar analysis using modern Y-chromosomal DNA (traced only through the male lineage) showed that all men alive today can be traced back to a common grandpappy in East Africa some 60-90,000 years ago. Yep...Richard Simmons and Mr. T are both descendants of the same man.

Truth is, you can do the same kind of analysis with ANY piece of DNA in the just is much harder to do than with the mitochondrial or Y-chromosomal DNA. But statistical analyses have shown that all of us can trace our DNA molecular patterns back to some 86,000 common ancestors. Those roughly 86,000 people, from different places and different times (though mostly probably from Africa since that is the place of our common descent) are our shared genetic heritage.

These are great numbers and indicate how closely related we all are. But once humans started moving out of Africa, that common genetic heritage diversified. We started splitting into ethnic and cultural groups, and possibly even started evolving apart at one point. It has often been assumed that humans have been evolving slowly since modern humans (Homo sapiens) first evolved around 150,000-200,0000 years ago, plus or minus some tens of thousands of years. Interestingly, this places the mitochondrial eve near our evolutionary origin...probably some tens of thousands of years after we became anatomically modern Homo sapiens. But the humans of 150,000 years ago weren't quite what we are today. Physically they would pass. But culturally, and presumably in terms of how the brain worked, was different. Stone tools made from our earliest tool using ancestors, Homo habilis, some 2.4 million years ago up to even Homo sapiens, tended to be slow to change and tended to be similar over wide areas. This doesn't mean things stayed the same throughout that period. Far, far from it. Over nearly 2.4 million years things changed a lot, but the pace of that change was slow and regional variation was small. Then starting sometime around 50,000 years ago, well after we physically evolved, something changed. Suddenly there were many more innovations in tools and far more regional variations. Complex culture seemed to suddenly evolve. Art started to evolve, culminating in the Cro Mangon culture art of Alta Mira and Lascaux. (As an aside, one theory, though one I consider shaky so far, is that the modern Basque are fairly direct descendants of this Cro Magnon culture...there is some genetic evidence for this, but...). Some kind of goddess or fertility cult seemed to start to appear, with widespread appearance of carved female figures called Venus figures. And people started spreading out over the globe. To me it seems like we suddenly evolved imagination starting around 50,000 years ago. Was it a change in our brain structure? Was it a breakthrough in language? No one knows.

Humans of other species (Homo erectus, Neanderthals) had left Africa before then. But they didn't contribute to our modern genes as far as anyone can tell. There is still a chance that some tiny part of our genetic ancestry is from Neanderthals or Homo erectus, but so far there is not one shred of evidence to support that. And we have isolated some Neanderthal DNA to use to try and look for common DNA patterns.

Evolution is driven by two things: population size (since the larger the population the greater the genetic diversity) and distance (since larger population distribution allows greater divergence). It used to be thought that once we evolved to be Homo sapiens we largely stopped evolving. Recent data shows this isn't true. It seems that around 5000 years ago human evolution, because it had reached a critical size and large distribution over most of the globe, suddenly sped up. We can't tell if we are diverging more than ever now, or once again, perhaps due to the bridging of those large distances through modern transportation, we are evolving slowly. The techniques used can't see events closer than, say, 5000 years ago. I suspect that as empires grew, steppe nomads swept across continents, and transportation improved, genetic exchanges increased across our entire population, more or less, to counter act the speed up in human evolution. However, some pockets of people in places like Australia and New Guinea would have been largely genetically isolated for millennia up until around the 18th century. So perhaps any slow down in the pace of human evolution would only have started a few hundred years ago. This means that for our early existence, from 150,000 to 5000 years ago, population size was small enough and our global distribution narrow enough, at least early on, that we were evolving slowly. Things sped up 5000 years ago, but my guess is slowed back down once sailing ships started reaching every corner of the world.

Then we come to a level of ancestry that most of us can understand: can we trace specific ancestors. Truth is, even fairly recently, a recent as a few thousand years ago, we can all trace our ancestry back to a fairly small population. In fact, in rare cases, large chunks of the modern population can trace to specific famous people. For example, Ramesses II was Pharaoh of Egypt in the 13th century BC. He was the greatest, most powerful king of Egypt ever. And Egypt controlled a wide empire. Ramesses II drew wives and concubines from all over: the Sudan area, Egypt, the Middle East. Maybe even from Greece and Turkey. He had more than 50 recorded sons and more than 50 recorded daughters, and this probably doesn't count children sired on slaves or through affairs. His children and grandchildren filled the top ranks of the nobility, military, diplomatic corps and priesthood. Further out, many of his great great grandchildren may have settled outside Egypt as soldiers, traders, scribes, etc. Some think almost every native born Pharaoh of Egypt after Ramesses II probably could trace their ancestry SOMEHOW back to Ramesses II. I would go further. I would say a significant chunk of people living around the Mediterranean today just might have a piece of DNA that can be traced back to Ramesses II. Perhaps even those Jews who supposedly left Egypt during Ramesses II's reign may just have had some people who "knew" an son of Ramesses II.

There is one case where this kind of connection is just about proven. DNA analysis has shown that 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million people, are direct male descendants of Genghis Khan. In essence a Y chromosomal pattern (hence only traceable through the male line) was found in this percentage of the population, mainly in the vast area conquered by the Mongols (from Russia to Korea), which could be traced back to the area of Mongolia at the right time in the 13th century. SOMEONE at that time and place who had many children and grandchildren is the ancestor of 16 million modern men. The person known to fit this profile is none other than Genghis Khan. This doesn't really PROVE Genghis Khan was the ancestor of all these people, but it strongly suggests it. He had many children and grandchildren who spread through the bulk of Eurasia and were very powerful for a long period of time. They raped and married and had large families. It is virtually certain that this really does place Genghis Khan as the direct ancestor of 0.5 percent of the male population in the world.

There are almost certainly many other prolific and powerful individuals who have contributed significantly to the modern gene pool. There is no way to know if Ramesses II is one of them because it is much harder to trace back that far with as much certainty as tracing back to the 13th century. But a similar analysis COULD be done to find if a similar chunk of modern humans can trace back to someone in the area of Egypt in the 13th Century BC. But Ramesses II probably fits the profile almost as well as Genghis Khan. Many people who derive from the Sudan, Egypt, Libya and the Middle East have pieces of DNA that came from Ramesses II.

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Saving Money While Fueling Up in Southern California

Sierra Club

Want to save money on gasoline? Conserv Fuel is the station we have found saves us money. If we are buying regular gasoline, then they are usually cheapest around for gas, though only if we are in the neighborhood. But if we have a Flex Fuel car, we can buy E85 fuel, which at Conserv Fuel is WAY cheaper than regular gasoline anywhere else, so it is in our best interest to go out of our way to go to Conserv Fuel gas stations.

My wife and I don't own a car. We live in NYC so only use public transportation. But when we visit my family in California we rent a car and when we can we take the opportunity to rent alternative energy vehicles. We have rented an all-electric RAV4 (LOVED it), a biodiesel VW (loved it), hybrids (not as good as they once used to really get 50 mpg, now they aren't nearly as fuel efficient as they were), and most recently a FlexFuel car.

A FlexFuel car can take regular gasoline, but it can also take up to E85 ethanol. We liked this because the carbon footprint is less, it relies on domestic fuel more than foreign fuel, and it is on average about 40 cents per gallon CHEAPER than regular gasoline. So we could reduce our environmental impact a bit, help the American rather than Saudi economy, and save money.

Both in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara we used Conserv Fuel stations, an independently run gas station that in some locations also offers alternative fuels. Even their regular gasoline is cheaper than the nearby competition, and when they offered it we bought E85 for our Flex Fuel car. Out near the Salton Sea we had to rely on Arco stations (which is actually BP but USED to be a reasonably good company) for E85, but it was still a much cheaper option compared with regular gasoline...and avoided the whole drilling crap.

So if you want an independent gas station that is cheaper than most, and PARTICULARLY if you have a Flex Fuel car so can buy their super cheap E85 (compared with ANYONE's gasoline), patronize Conserv Fuel.

Conserv Fuel Los Angeles:
11699 San Vicente Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90049
Phone: 310-571-0039

Conserv Fuel Santa Barbara:
150 S La Cumbre Rd
La Cumbre Ln
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
Phone: (805) 964-0938

Don't get me wrong...even using ethanol for fuel has its problems. But it is much better (and cheaper) than gasoline. And Conserv Fuel is a better gas station option than the corrupt, big name companies., Inc

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Evidence of the Holocaust










































Further testimony can be found here:

More confessions by perpetrators can be found here:







The abstract of that study:


The concluding remarks from that study:





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