A Camaro web site had the article Tricks to see oil level on dipstick after fresh change?

PERFECT solution, and so simple!

Got out the powder, pulled out the dipstick and wiped it off lightly. Powdered both sides and tapped it on the edge of a trash can to get off the excess (just left the finest film on it). I wiped the powder off from the middle of the hashed section down to the tip, and from 1/2″ above the full mark up. This left about 1″ of dipstick with the film on it. Slid it in, paused, pulled it out….Boom! The part to the top of the fill line was “gone” and the part over that was there, clear as can be. Level was just right (whew!). What a great solution. When you see how much powder is actually left on the dipstick after you tap it and wipe the top and bottom, you will laugh. It is such a tiny amount that there is no way it would be possible to hurt anything. I’ll do this again any time I have a question in the future. I love the forums!

I looked this up because I had just experienced the problem.  I have had difficulty seeing oil on a dipstick before, but this time was really bad.  I did just have the oil changed, but I wanted to check anyway.  I could not see any oil on the dipstick.  Tried four or five times, but couldn’t see anything.  I thought, “Well, I could just ignore the evidence, after all, I just got it changed.”  Then I thought, “Well ignoring what I plainly don’t see would be rather foolish”.  So I poured a quart of oil in, and checked it  again.  I still couldn’t see anything, but I thought that was the last bottle of oil I had in my trunk, so I might as well take a chance.

I got back home so I could search the web to see what other people have done to solve the problem.  A little Gold Bond powder later, I found that I hadn’t needed that extra quart of oil.  So I guess, I’ll just let the engine blow it through my rings and gaskets until the excess oil is gone 🙁

The Daily Kos has the article Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz Forgot to Procure TedCruz.com L.O.L.

Screen shot of tedcruz.com

Go see the website,TedCruz.com, for yourself, and give it some traffic.

I may have to delete this post should Ted Cruz eventually gain control of this web site.

Politicus USA has the article In Blistering New Report Bernie Sanders Exposes The Gimmicks And Fraud In The GOP Budget.

The Senate Democratic report exposed the real goals of the Republican budget:

Many of the Republicans’ cuts are left intentionally vague – clearly because they do not want to be associated with a budget that eviscerates programs that define who we are as a nation. In fact, some of the Budget Committee’s Republican members have told reporters in recent days that they want their plan to be deliberately vague, allowing them to avoid the criticism that was leveled on the Ryan budget when it was released last Congress. These members don’t want to own a budget that proposes tax reform that would dramatically shift wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich. And they don’t want to be forced to defend a budget that strips health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, putting working families one illness away from financial collapse.

However, it is clear the Republican budget would do all that and more.

This article has a link to the report on The Senate Budget Committee Blog.  Who knew there was a blog?  It appears to be something invented by Bernie Sanders.  I am impressed by how he is using social media very effectively to get his message out without having to depend on the lame stream media.  One might actually be able to  run a successful presidential campaign in 2016 wwith the help of these techniques.

By the way, here is a link to the report of the report.  Here is a link to the actual document ROBIN HOOD IN REVERSE: HOW THE REPUBLICAN BUDGET PLAN IS A GIFT TO THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS AND WILL HURT THE MIDDLE CLASS, SENIORS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT.

Politico has the story Hillary’s trade dilemma.

Union groups, including the AFL-CIO labor federation, also have deep concerns about the prospective trade pact with Japan and 10 other countries in the Asia-Pacific that, along with the United States, represent more than 40 percent of world gross domestic product. They fear the deal will encourage companies to move more jobs overseas, suppressing wages in the United States.

Clinton, as Obama’s secretary of state, is closely associated with the agreement, which could grow to cover 21 economies in the region, including China. “Our hope is that a TPP agreement with high standards can serve as a benchmark for future agreements — and grow to serve as a platform for broader regional interaction and eventually a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific,” she wrote in October 2011.

This article is a good description of one of the reasons that I would never vote for Hillary Clinton for President.

The excerpt above is also a good example of how Politico mischaracterizes the opposition to TPP. If you search for all the mentions of TPP on my blog, I don’t think you will find me worrying about the jobs shipped overseas.  My main concern is that TPP gives international corporations the right to overturn our laws without having to go before our legislature or even our Supreme Court.  Doesn’t that seem to be a bigger issue to fight against than even sending jobs overseas?

Of course, there is also the issue of giving “Big Pharma” unfair monopoly protection for their “patented” drugs and using the guise of the seemingly admirable goal of “protecting intellectual property.”  If intellectual dishonesty is one of the intellectual properties that President Obama is trying to protect, then he is doing a good job.

Naked Capitalism has the article SEC’s Andrew Bowden Regulatory Capture Scandal Hits the Major Leagues with Los Angeles Times Column.

In yet another confirmation that blogging is not dead just because Andrew Sullivan got tired of doing it, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik picks up the Andrew Bowden story that Yves broke.

Lest you forget what this story is about, here is another excerpt from the above article.

Quoting Hiltziks’ regular Business section column, “The Economy Hub”:

As for “close contact and familiarity” between individuals and their regulated businesses, one need look no further than a March 5 appearance at a Stanford conference by Andrew Bowden, the SEC’s director of examinations. Financial blogger Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, a former investment banker and management consultant, writes that Bowden “reveals himself to be captured to an embarrassing degree. His remarks about the industry aren’t merely fawning…. Bowden comes uncomfortably close to the line of offering to play the revolving door game at an unheard-of level of crassness, putting his son, and by implication himself, into the job market at an industry conference.”

The article cites a number of suggestions:

Things You Can Do

Readers, here are a few things you can do, right now, to keep this story in the public eye.

Putting this story on my blog is but one step that I am taking.

See my previous post Bank Super Lawyer, Rodgin Cohen of Sullivan & Cromwell, Says Regulatory Capture is a Myth where I gave secondary mention to article that is the main topic of today’s Naked Capitalism article.

Reuters has the story U.S. should rethink U.N. funding if Palestinian resolution approved: senator.

The U.S. Congress should reconsider funding for the United Nations if the Security Council approves a resolution on Palestinian statehood, Republican Senator John McCain said on Sunday.

Now here is something that Senator McCain and I can agree on.  The U.S. should consider increasing its funding to the U.N. were it able to pass a reasonable resolution on Palestinian statehood.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may actually have done us a favor by finally giving us a reason to stop blocking the Palestinians from getting U.N. recognition as a state.  If Netanyahu and hawkish American Senators think the way to get cooperation from a foreign country is to impose tough sanctions, maybe it is time to try this “successful” strategy on Israel.

I suppose Reuters own article Iran rejects ‘bullying’ as West stresses unity in nuclear talks can be used to show how successful this can be.

Iran’s top leader voiced mistrust on Saturday of U.S. efforts to reach a nuclear deal, even as Washington and its allies spoke of real progress and urged Tehran to take “difficult decisions”.

With just 10 days remaining until an end-of-March deadline for a framework agreement, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denounced U.S. “bullying” in the negotiations and repeated Tehran’s denial that it was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.

It seems that we have come to a consensus that bullying in the schoolyard needs to be stopped.  What do we teach our kids when we show them that we believe in bullying in foreign affairs?

Here is an excerpt from the book Ethics, Liberalism and Realism in International Relations that shows how some “elite” diplomats think.

To me, this shows why “elite” diplomats are very dangerous.  When you have disdain for “ordinary” morals, what constraints do you have at all? I fear that President Obama, Secretary John Kerry, and Secretary Hillary Clinton have all been infected with Henry Kissinger’s theories of diplomacy.

Google translate couldn’t handle this, but a regular Google search could.

noun: Weltanschauung; plural noun: Weltanschauungen

a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group.

Zeebiz has the article Magic Leap has done it again; releases new video.

Magic Leap, recently released a video titled ‘Just another day in the office at Magic Leap’, that has some pretty big implications, and is hands down the most exciting thing we’ve seen in a while.

Unlike the Zeebiz article, I actually include the video under discussion.

Where is the cgi mouse?

Short List has the article World’s First Commercially Available Flamethrower is Here.

Thanks to Randy Howard Katz for posting this on Facebook.

I remarked to him:

You Californians just don’t know what ideas over 100 inches of snow can give you. This is exactly what I was thinking about. Someone told me that you can get a flamethrower at Harbor Freight. Just don’t use it on your roof to clear ice dams.

By the way, I just went online to Harbor Freight, but could not find a flame thrower.

Facebook is just a fount of knowledge. Emin Gün Sirer answered my questions about flamethrowers.

He provided the link to the article on the xkcd web site. There are a lot of fascinating calculations in the article, but I will just pull out one that is relevant to the use of a flamethrower.

Gas mileage in the US is often measured in “miles per gallon” of gasoline. With your flamethrower guzzling fuel, your mileage would be about 17 feet per gallon.

I have an 11 gallon tank that I use to supply my snowblower, generator, and lawn tractor. That would give me 187 feet before I had to go to the gas station according to the above calculation. That’s about ⅔ of my driveway.

As for using a nuclear reactor to melt the snow, the article had a nice graphical way of showing what would be required.

The New York Times gives the piece by Paul Krugman the headline Trillion Dollar Fraudsters.

The Daily Kos article that refers to this piece headlines it Paul Krugman is a Must-Read Today (Again).

My comment on The Daily Kos has the title Krugman Finally Wakes Up.

Bill Black, New Economic Perspectives, Naked Capitalism, and others have been shouting about this for years.  Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are but two of the politicians who recognized this problem years ago.

When Krugman denounces the Clintons for their part in this, then I might believe he is sincere.

There is not much wrong with Krugman’s article, and he does slip in the following:

Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.

A fact that I have been trying to point out on this blog for a long time.  In fact I have posted about this several times in the past few days.

I knew when I made my previous post, Do Not Sign the petition, Do Not Be a citizen co-sponsor of the People’s Budget, that this budget would be hawked relentlessly. Well, I can tell people “no” almost as often as they try to sell it.

The National Priorities Project has this posted on Facebook.  Here is their innocuous looking poster.

Unfortunately, this budget also promotes the myth that increased federal spending in one area must be paid for by cuts in another area. This is as if a country that is sovereign in its own fiat currency could ever run out of its own money. For that reason, I cannot support this people’s budget that legitimizes the myth’s that the oligarchs want us to believe.

A budget should promote a healthy economy, full employment, and decent standard of living for all. Under these conditions, the deficit will take care of itself. The deficit should never be used as a primary measure of the success of an economic policy.

As proof that the oligarchs do not believe the myth that they want us to believe, consider the following: even Republicans tell you that when you want to go to war to support the military/industrial complex, deficits don’t matter. By their perverted logic, deficits are only a roadblock if you try to spend the money on anything that you do not blow up in the act of using it. To put it another way, the Republicans seem to believe that you should never go into deficit to actually help anybody lead a decent, peaceful life.

Perhaps the “People’s budget” is what happens when you let budgets be created by amateurs, or by people who believe in myths, or by amateurs who believe in myths, or by oligarchs who will promote their myths one way or another.