Ants!

 
This is ant season in the San Francisco bay area. Everybody’s got them, including me. Why are ants such a problem at this time of year? First of all, it’s the rainy season, and ants don’t like to get wet. Like you and me, ants cannot breathe under water. Ants would prefer to be in a dry place, like your apartment, rather than a wet ant nest. Ants also don’t like to get cold. In winter, they would prefer to be in a warm place, like your apartment rather than a cold ant nest. Ants are amazing and resourceful creatures, which explains why they have been on Earth, essentially unchanged, for millions of years. Ant nests are complex and wonderfully engineered structures. Ant nests have chambers that are warmer than the outside air, they have food storage, sleeping, and nursery chambers, and they build drainage systems throughout their nests to take away rain water from the chambers in which they live.

So, how do you get rid of ants? First of all, you must take away their source of food. As long as ants can get to an easy meal in your apartment, you will never get rid of them. Ants can get into cabinets, closed boxes, and garbage cans. They have no difficulty climbing up walls and kitchen cabinets. If you have ants, put your food in containers that they cannot get into. For example, transfer breakfast cereal from boxes to jars with tight fitting lids, zip lok bags, or store the cereal in your refrigerator. Take out your kitchen garbage frequently. Keep your floors and countertops free of food. A stale crust of bread can feed a whole colony of ants for a week, and the whole colony will come to get it.

OrangeGuardSecond, spray places where you see ants with Orange Guard. This product can be hard to find in stores, so if you don’t have it, come to me, and I will give you a free bottle. Most brands of ant killer contain worrisome chemicals, like arsenic. Orange Guard is the only ant killer approved for use by the state health department for use in restaurant kitchens. That is because it is non-toxic, at least non-toxic to people. The active ingredient is orange peel oil, which is very toxic to insects. Oranges produce this oil in their peels in order to prevent insects from boring through to get the juice inside. Orange Guard kills ants instantly, and any ant that crosses an area that you previously sprayed with it will die immediately. Your apartment will smell like oranges for a day or two after you use the product, but your ants will quickly disappear.

The Myth of Nazi Efficiency.


I teach history at a junior high school in Orinda. I talk to my students fairly often about widely held historic myths. Some historic myths are harmless, but others are dangerous. When people believe that a historic myth is true, they will sometimes act on that myth with terrible consequences. I think this will be a big year for historic myth making. This is a presidential election year, and presidential candidates are always a major source of historic misinformation – especially when talking about people in the other party.

One of the most persistent and dangerous of all historic myths is the myth of Nazi efficiency. According to this often-told story, the Nazis were ruthlessly efficient. The logic of this myth is that since the Nazis were not constrained by moral considerations, they were able to maximize economic production through a system of slave labor and confiscation of resources. I have heard this story all my life, and I know people who believe that it is true. While the myth of Nazi effciency sounds logical, it is completely wrong. The Nazis were not ruthlessly efficient; they were just ruthless. For the Nazis, economic efficiency never came first. Proving that their racial theory was correct always came first. As a result, a lot of competent workers and managers were removed from their jobs by the Nazis simply because they weren’t ‘pure Aryans’, a term that was never clearly defined. These people were often replaced by incompetent Nazi party members simply because they had ‘Aryan Certificates’ proving their ‘racial purity’, not because they knew how to do their jobs. Incompetent Nazi party officials took positions of power throughout German industry. Graft, cronyism, nepotism, and bribery were so rampant that the economy of Nazi Germany was never really on a wartime footing. Throughout the war, German factories continued to produce luxury consumer goods for people with money or party connections. Incredibly, many German aircraft and tank factories operated from 9 to 5 and were closed on weekends right until the end of the war. In the United States, on the other hand, the aircraft factories never closed. They operated 24 hours a day, every day, 7 days a week. In Nazi-controlled Europe, trains and airplanes badly needed by the German army were used throughout the war to transport luxury consumer goods to Germany from the occupied countries, including perfume from France, lobsters from Norway, and stolen art from all over Europe. Trains transporting Jews and others to death camps had the right-of-way over troop and ammunition trains headed for the front, and millions of Jews Poles, and Russians with valuable job skills, like doctors and engineers, were simply murdered. After the war was over, economists from the United States, England, France, and Russia went to Germany to study the Nazi economic system. They all returned home with the same conclusion – there was nothing to learn from the Nazis about how to run an economy. The reason that the myth of Nazi efficiency is so  dangerous is that the people who believe that the myth is true think that the way to stimulate a stagnant economy is to ‘go Nazi’, and that is a terrible idea!