'Gives notice that it appeals'

'I've given birth. Nothing embarrasses me'

'it'll fill itself up very quickly'

The post How To Remove Cat Urine Smell From Your Whole House: 5 Tips & Tricks by Catster Editorial Team appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. For all the joy they bring into the home, one aspect of having a cat that most owners don’t often appreciate is the smell. Experienced pet parents know it only takes one indoor accident to create a pungent odor throughout the house. With their highly concentrated urine that can readily soak into various hard and soft surfaces, cats have a knack for making a lasting stink. Cleaning cat urine thoroughly and quickly is the only way to keep your home comfortable for the family and guests and prevent future accidents. Unfortunately, these stains present unique challenges that many everyday solutions often can’t solve. If you’re ready for a fresher home, we’ll explore five tips and tricks to remove the cat urine smell from your whole house. How to Remove Cat Urine Smell From Your Whole House 1. Use a Blacklight to Find Old Urine Spots Image Credit: In The Light Photography, Shutterstock We can sometimes sniff out the location of a cat urine spot, but more often than not, the smell seemingly comes from all sides, leaving us wondering where to begin our cleaning efforts. If you’ve been struggling to find the odor’s source, a UV light is an easy way to reveal hidden cat urine marks. How to Use a Blacklight to Find Cat Urine Blacklights or UV lights can be found at most major retailers. Start by turning the lights off, and closing the curtains to darken the room as much as possible. Then, sweep the light over your room. Look for glowing yellow or neon green splatter patterns where your cat may have sprayed or urinated, often along the lower edges of walls or furniture. Once you find them, mark the perimeter of the urine stains so you know the area you must cover with your cleaner. Check for stains where cats might secretly urinate, like behind or underneath furniture or in the back of a closet. Remember that UV light only works on dried cat urine stains, not fresh ones, so they are more practical if the cat pee smell has been around for a day or two. 2. Use an Enzyme Cleaner on Cat Urine Stains Image Credit: Ground Picture, Shutterstock Cat urine is more challenging than most stains, so many of our favorite cleaners typically fall well short of removing them for good. Uric acid crystals and other odor-causing compounds cement into carpet and furniture fibers. Many cleaning products do little more than mask the smell, and even the best steamers and carpet cleaners can often only remove a small portion of the stain. The best way for a pet owner to remove the cat urine smell from the house is with an enzymatic cleaner. Enzyme cleaners like Hepper’s Advanced Bio-Enzyme Pet Stain & Odor Eliminator Spray use active bacteria and enzymes that selectively break down urine components, converting them into carbon dioxide and other harmless compounds that evaporate away. How to Use Enzyme Cleaners Enzyme sprays are pet and people-safe and can work on numerous surfaces without the risk of staining or damage. You only need to shake the bottle and saturate the area. Enzymes break down urine particles as they make contact and continue working until the urine is gone. In many cases, you don’t even have to blot up the cleaner afterward, but be sure to follow the directions on your particular product. 3. Pull Up Carpet If Needed Image Credit: Ground Picture, Shutterstock Measuring the extent of the cat urine is crucial if you hope to eliminate it entirely. You may clean a carpet to remove a stain and smell from the top layer to your satisfaction, but urine that soaks through to the carpet padding or the subfloor will continue pumping out an odor and attracting your cat for repeat performances. The same applies to hard flooring that may allow urine to seep between the cracks. Assess the Urine Damage in Your Carpet Pull up your carpet at the corner and inspect for urine damage in the padding. If the padding is saturated or smells like urine, go another step and check the subfloor underneath. While you may be able to refresh the carpet and remove the cat urine odor, padding is cheap and challenging to clean. Replace any carpet padding that smells pungent. If the damage extends to the subfloor, use your enzyme cleaner to break down the urine. Once it dries, apply a stain-blocking primer over the wood to prevent stains and odors from spreading. 4. Air Out the House Image Credit: Iuliia Pilipeichenko, Shutterstock Cleaning the cat urine stain is the only effective way to eliminate the odor. Still, if your house isn’t even tolerable in the meantime, you have a few options to reduce, if not remove, the smell quickly and conveniently. Start by opening all the windows to get a cross-breeze. Turn on any overhead fans, and set up box fans in the windows to push the smelly air out and pull fresh air in. 5. Sprinkle Baking Soda for Immediate Deodorizing Image Credit: Nick Alias, Shutterstock If you don’t have an enzyme cleaner but want to quickly remove a smelly cat stain, several household staples can provide a temporary refresh. Baking soda is at the top of the list. Sodium bicarbonate neutralizes acidic and basic odor molecules, making it a versatile all-natural deodorizer in countless situations. Baking Soda for Fresh Urine Stains Baking soda is notably helpful as an initial attack for wet pee marks because it absorbs moisture as it deodorizes. When sprinkled on a fresh urine mark on a carpet or fabric, it will soak up the stain rather than push it deeper into the material, as you might do when you blot stains with a cloth. When you catch the stain in time, baking soda can save your carpet padding and subfloor until you can apply an enzyme cleaner. If you’re out of baking soda, you can use cornstarch or clean cat litter for a similar effect. Baking Soda for Old Urine Stains Baking soda also makes an excellent quick fix for dried urine marks raising a stink. The cat urine smell will often recede but appear days, weeks, or even months later if it gets wet again. High humidity and liquid spills saturate the embedded uric acid crystals, causing them to refill the whole house with the smell. Sprinkling baking soda on old cat urine will deodorize it while drawing away the moisture that causes the compounds to reactivate. It may not be a permanent fix or enough to keep your cat from smelling it, but baking soda can save your nostrils in a pinch. How to Use Baking Soda to Deodorize Cat Urine Stains Image Credit: Dragon Images, Shutterstock Sprinkle a generous amount of baking soda over the cat pee stain. Depending on the extent of the stain, let it sit for at least 30 minutes or longer to absorb the odors and moisture. When dry, vacuum the powder. Ideally, powdery materials like baking soda should be vacuumed using a wet/dry vacuum with a HEPA filter. Fine particulate matter can damage the motor on a conventional vacuum and may escape the grasp of a standard filter, causing more issues to solve. Final Thoughts Cats are known for occasionally making trouble, and nothing they do will foul up the home more than a noxious urine odor. The smell is unexpectedly tricky and persistent, leaving many of us ready to throw in the towel and call a professional. While extensive damage may need expert intervention, following these tips and tricks to remove a urine smell will give you the best chance of overcoming the issue with minimal effort and maximum satisfaction. Featured Image Credit: Pixel-Shot, Shutterstock The post How To Remove Cat Urine Smell From Your Whole House: 5 Tips & Tricks by Catster Editorial Team appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

The life and legacy of Hugh Hefner cannot be undressed easily. The man behind Playboy created the "ideal woman" for 60 years. At the same time, he fought for gender and racial equality. Critics derided Hefner for his exploitation of the female body for profit. Friends and family praised him as a generous and caring soul. Here is the complicated but true story about Hugh Hefner; how he was loved... Source

A few things in life are certain: death, taxes, and the Left trying to control the Supreme Court. From demanding the unnecessary addition of more seats or limiting the justices’ terms, relentless propaganda that certain justices and their decisions are “corrupt,” creating fake ethical “scandals,” openly threatening individual justices, and more, the Left wants the court under their thumb. That’s old news. The only new thing, if you can really call it that, is that President Joe Biden, according to news reports, will soon endorse a few ideas that have been around for years. Biden says he now supports limiting Supreme Court justices’ terms and imposing an “enforceable” ethics code. Remember when he appointed a commission in 2021 to explore Supreme Court “reform” ideas like these? Does he want us to think that, after three years of silence, it’s just a coincidence that this announcement comes on the heels of his June 27 implosion during his debate with former President Donald Trump? This is nothing more than classic misdirection. Biden has not been able to shake even his own party’s questioning his ability to lead the country. His interviews with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on July 5 and NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday did nothing to calm the chaos. And so, we see the bizarre spectacle of an incumbent president running for reelection wanting people to focus on anyone else. What about those “reform” ideas that Biden now says he supports? How long a justice serves has never been the problem. It’s what a justice does once appointed that matters. As such, Supreme Court term limits are a solution in search of a problem. Though a few scholars think Congress can impose term limits by statute, the better argument is that it requires a constitutional amendment. America’s Founders obviously knew how to limit the length of terms: They did it for the president, senators, and House members. They didn’t do it for federal judges, allowing them to serve during “good behavior”—that is, until removed by impeachment. Unlimited terms for Supreme Court justices were one of two deliberate steps to address the political manipulation of the judiciary that, the Declaration of Independence says, was one of the reasons we broke from Great Britain. It’s unlikely that such a foundational feature of the constitutional design could be changed on a legislative whim. The main term-limit proposal would eventually have presidents appointing a Supreme Court justice every two years. Do we really want to see the kind of disgraceful disparagement of Supreme Court nominees that we’ve seen in recent years much more often? That kind of treatment is certain to continue since its cause—the kind of justice being appointed, not how long that justice would serve—would remain.  As to an ethics code, the Supreme Court has been following one for decades and, as of last fall, has one of its own. The Supreme Court is subject to the same federal laws governing financial disclosures and recusals as lower federal court judges. That’s not good enough for the Left, because it doesn’t allow for direct manipulation of the Supreme Court. That’s why Biden and congressional Democrats want what they call an “enforceable” code. The Supreme Court, however, was created by the Constitution—you know, the one Biden and members of Congress take an oath to support and defend—not by Congress. As a result, Congress’ authority over the Supreme Court is much weaker than over the lower federal courts that it creates. Congress has no more authority to impose a scheme for manipulating the internal workings of the Supreme Court through such an “enforceable” code than it does to change the protection of judicial independence provided by unlimited terms. Legislation introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., S. 359, shows what an “enforceable” code looks like. It would allow anyone to file unlimited complaints of “misconduct” over virtually anything that a Supreme Court justice does. Every complaint would have to be investigated by a group of lower federal court judges—the very same judges whose decisions the Supreme Court reviews. The bill says nothing about how those judges are supposed to discharge their own judicial duties while investigating incoming complaints. The Left has often characterized Supreme Court decisions, or opinions by individual justices, in terms that could easily be characterized as “misconduct” in such a scheme. That’s what Biden and the Left mean by an “enforceable” ethics code, a scheme that would allow liberal partisans to formally attack opinions written by justices they dislike not just as legally unsound, but as improper misconduct. It’s hard to imagine a more direct assault on the judiciary as an institution and on the separation of powers. This idea to make the Supreme Court the bogeyman by endorsing well-trodden ideas for changing the Supreme Court no doubt came from Biden’s campaign team. The left-wing fringe of his political base has been clamoring for such things and so perhaps this serves to keep them energized for his candidacy, rather than grumbling about wanting a replacement. But how this would attract political independents who otherwise might not support him is anyone’s guess. If Biden thinks that this move has no downside, he’s wrong. Adding to the Left’s campaign to demonize Supreme Court justices and decisions that don’t fit the Left’s politics would only further undermine the public’s understanding of how the judiciary works and its perception of the court’s legitimacy. Claiming that justices who do not disclose information they are not required to disclose are unethical or corrupt simply misleads the public. Then-Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1993 description of a now-discarded legal doctrine is how Biden is now treating the Supreme Court: “It is there to scare us … when we wish it to do so … . Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.” Biden may think he needs the Supreme Court to scare the voters, but he will only end up making our fellow citizens, perhaps permanently, doubt the court’s integrity and will weaken their faith in the rule of law itself. The post Biden Needs a Supreme Court Bogeyman appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, discussed the government and military's alleged role in driving censorship on social media platforms by investing in AI technology. At the National Conservatism Conference on July 9, Benz addressed how the American censorship enterprise got its start and how the government began investing in natural language processing, a new AI-powered technology to censor entire “narratives” online. Specifically, Benz said that censorship mechanisms can be traced to the Obama administration’s efforts to counter terrorist groups in 2014. “ISIS was said to be recruiting on Twitter, and so the military developed a technology called Natural Language Processing, pouring tens of millions of dollars into this AI technique to be able to determine all the words you say on the internet, everything you post on Twitter, everything you post even on YouTube, that gets transliterated in speech to text,” Benz said. The Origins Of NATO's Role In Internet Censorship pic.twitter.com/vHot2emQmW — Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 16, 2024 Using this new technique, social media companies can track and ban millions of posts at a time, meaning “entire narratives” can be suppressed, the anti-censorship advocate warned.  Benz said that the impact of these weapons on the censorship industry was the equivalent of the creation of nuclear weapons in warfare. “This is why I refer to these AI superweapons as ‘weapons of mass deletion.’ …They did for internet censorship what weapons of mass destruction did for war.” Benz also iterated how a web of NATO-affiliated groups reportedly funded a gargantuan industry to wage what is effectively an unconventional form of warfare upon the citizens of NATO countries. NATO funded these technologies both directly through members’ militaries and also indirectly through organizations like the American National Science Foundation.  Benz said, “Almost every major player in the censorship industry is funded by the NATO trans-Atlantic military alliance whether directly through the military institutions or indirectly such as military pass-throughs like our National Science Foundation, which has in its charter mandate that 15 percent of its funds have to go towards national security-related technologies and these misinformation or pro-democracy programs, which fund $100 million of censorship institutions here in the US every year are all filtered through that.” As part of its misinformation and “pro-democracy” efforts, the National Science Foundation issued millions of dollars in grants to university programs that designated ordinary Americans as needing reeducation. In one case, NSF gave a $750,000 grant to the University of Michigan so that UM could develop an AI tool to scan social media posts and determine whether said posts constituted “misinformation.”   Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

Bloomberg News made no mention of its founder’s relentless ESG-tied pressure campaign as it lamented DEI defeats at John Deere and Tractor Supply. In a July 16 article, Bloomberg News reporters Simone Foxman and Michael Hirtzer responded to a John Deere decision to abandon some of the radical DEI policies exposed by podcast host Robby Starbuck. The article completely neglected to mention that their boss has slapped ESG scores on thousands of companies in a massive push to shame them into compliance.  The Bloomberg reporters lamented that John Deere is “pulling back from diversity measures in the face of conservative criticism, the second agriculture-related company in less than a month to bend to such pressure.” After explaining the largely successful campaigns against DEI at John Deere and Tractor Supply, Bloomberg News took a swipe at John Deere by delving into a Department of Labor suit against the company.  John Deere’s announcement came a week after Starbuck posted a video exposing how embedded DEI was in the machinery manufacturing company. Starbuck denounced the company for, among other things, pressuring employees to state their pronouns, allowing men in women’s bathrooms, sponsoring a Pride event for children and segregating employees based on race and gender. Disturbingly, John Deere also provided insurance coverage for the genital mutilation and chemical castration of both adults and children.  While there were major omissions in John Deere’s statement, the company made some significant promises to become less ideological, pledging to audit “all company-mandated training materials and policies to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages.”  John Deere also denied that “pronoun identification” and “diversity quotas” were official company policy, but promised to root out these practices where they appeared. In another significant change, the company stated that “we will no longer participate in or support external social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.”   The company’s investment page still has a link labeled “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion,” but this link leads to a page that has zero mentions of any of these three terms.  The tractor company’s partial capitulation follows a complete public renunciation of DEI by Tractor Supply on June 27. Foxman also lashed out at Tractor Supply for giving up DEI. Foxman prominently highlighted a call by John Boyd, the head of the National Black Farmers Association for the CEO of Tractor Supply to resign. Neither article mentions the role of Bloomberg News owner Michael Bloomberg in pushing radical policies like those uncovered by Starbuck at Tractor Supply and John Deere. After the publication of Bloomberg’s 2022 Impact Report, the company bragged that Bloomberg had created ESG scores for 5,500 companies, making clear that this was an effort to separate the “leaders” from the “laggards” for investors.  As if this significant push to embrace eco-extremism, racially discriminatory DEI and gender theory wasn’t enough, an employee of Bloomberg made clear that these ESG scores aren’t just neutral information for investors to consider.   Katrina White, a Bloomberg Sustainable finance associate, explained how Bloomberg’s ESG scores translate into activist pressure, at a Bloomberg summit in 2022.  White noted that investors will notice when companies fail to meet “interim targets” for environmental goals before stating that her department “will be tracking” this type of information. She said, “We are going to be putting out research on this, and you know companies are increasingly going to see their stakeholders say, ‘You set this target. Where is the actual progress toward it? Um, where’s your clean energy procurement? Uh, where are your carbon offset retirements?’ Etc.” Conservatives are under attack! Support businesses that share your values or at least understand that they serve customers and employees rather than radical ESG pressure groups such as the Human Rights Campaign.