In Florida, You Can't Use Your Own Solar Panels In A Crisis.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-18/florida-you-cant-use-your-own-solar-panels-crisis

Time changes all the things.

Students offered extra credit to determine their level of "white privilege."

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/36904/

It's better than pineapple pizza:

https://twitter.com/TheRealAsswolf/status/909617803895857154

In Florida, You Can't Use Your Own Solar Panels In A Crisis.

That's due to the stupidity of mandating you tie your solar panels into the grid. This is why whole home generators have a transfer switch: it isolates your power generation from the rest of the grid. If it isn't isolated, there is a very real possibility that you'll send power back out, up to a transformer, and send stepped up power down the line.

To the lineman who is trying to reconnect a line that he's been told isn't energized. *zap*

Students offered extra credit to determine their level of "white privilege." ~ Heitak at September 19, 2017 5:44 AM

"I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented....?" Music of my race? Well, I'm of Irish and German extraction, so I should be looking for Riverdance and polka? No luck here.

Let's see, rock and roll is based on the blues (black), Jazz was invented by black people, rap is black, R&B/Soul is black, and gospel is based on old spirituals (black). Even the whiter-than-white country music has its roots in blues and gospel.

That leaves opera and classical (both of which have had numerous black participants, BTW). Try finding the classical/opera section in your local music store, if you can find a music store. It's tiny and poorly-stocked.

So, no. No "white privilege" here.

Not teaching basic civics has borne fruit. Quick, name the five enumerated rights of the First Amendment.

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/half-americans-dont-know-free-speech-guaranteed-right

Yes, but were will we get such staff once BernieCare passes?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4896782/Britain-begging-qualified-doctors-staff.html

Well, I'm of Irish and German extraction,
____________________________________________

What a surprise. So are two of my close young relatives (I think), while I am not. (On top of that, to my knowledge, while there's plenty of classical music in their house - and classic rock, they have no real interest in Riverdance or polka, if at all.)

Different subject. I found this op-ed by Deborah Tannen, the wonderful Georgetown linguist who wrote the 1990 bestseller "You Just Don't Understand."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/opinion/language-female-friendship-mothers.html?mcubz=1

First paragraphs:

I was looking forward to having my friend Tamara over for dinner last year, since she had hosted me and my husband many times. But it didn’t turn out as I’d expected. Tamara kept trying to help in various ways, like retrieving items from the kitchen or clearing items from the table. Each time, I told her to please sit down, that I didn’t want her to help. But then she’d be up again.

At one point, when she rose from the table and made it into the kitchen, I grabbed her arm and pulled her back. It was done good-naturedly, with humor, but I was genuinely rattled: I felt that she was insisting on being a co-host in my home.

Normally I would have laid my frustration to the vagaries of human behavior and said nothing. But because Tamara is a good friend — and because I was writing a book about women’s friendships — the next time I saw her, I told her how I’d reacted.

Tamara was surprised, but she also recognized her behavior and its source. She told me about a recent dinner at her parents’ home. When the dinner ended, she got up and cleared the table, though her mother told her not to. She washed the dishes, as her mother chastised her, saying, “Stop it!” Then she cleaned the kitchen, to the tune of her mother’s admonitions that she shouldn’t. And when she was done, her mother said, “Thank you.” Then she added: “You never listen to me. And I’m so glad you don’t.”

From her mother, Tamara learned that “I don’t want you to help” really means “You are a guest and shouldn’t help so I appreciate it all the more when you do.” My mother tended to say pretty much what she meant, so growing up, I had learned to take her and others at their word.

Though my mother died in 2004, she is the one whose voice comes out when I speak, and whose speaking style shapes how I hear others’ words. The same is true for Tamara, as I learned when our styles clashed...

(snip)

One of the comments pointed out that these different styles of communication can have serious implications in other situations, unfortunately.

Here's a more lighthearted one.

stacey texas 55 minutes ago:

"Well, I am of Eastern European decent and get in trouble for my communication style all the time here in Texas, where one is expected to say the niceties before you say what you actually want/need to say, I basically forget to do that a lot and just want to express what it is I need to tell them."

How to make friends and influence people, Jerry Brown edition.

"They're both kind of very similar. You should check out the derivation of ‘Trump-ite' and ‘troglodyte,' because they both refer to people who dwell in deep, dark caves," Brown said in remarks reported by Politico.

http://freebeacon.com/politics/california-governor-trump-supporters-cave-dwellers/

Very interesting clash of views in the current National Review. The cover story is "The Little Nazis: Kevin D. Williamson on the Childish Alt-Right."

BEFORE you get to that story, there's an ad, on page 21, for the brand-new edition of R.F. Doyle's 2006 book "Save the Males." (Not to be confused with about half a dozen other books of that name, including columnist Kathleen Parker's 2008 book, which many MRAs consider to be inadequate.)

The cover story starts on the next page. BUT...when you get to page 26, here's what Williamson says:

"...Andrew Anglin is the founder of the Daily Stormer, a now-defunct neo-Nazi website that served as a clearinghouse for alt-right white nationalism and also as a bellwether for its aesthetic. The above complaint, written for some reason as though it were lines of verse, is his confession, his apologia pro sad little vita sua. The Daily Stormer has been disappeared from the Internet by the Corporate Powers That Be, but Anglin is still moping around.

"Anglin is more frank about the Nazi stuff than is Spencer, and once wrote that he asks himself 'WWHD'—'What Would Hitler Do?' But get what he means by that: 'I ask myself what Hitler would do if he'd been born in 1984 in America and was dealing with this situation we are currently dealing with and also really liked 4chan and anime,' he writes. Anglin, like Spencer, says that he thinks it is important for the alt-right to forgo the old style of 'White Nationalism 1.0,' as he puts it, and try to be, in his word, 'cool.' But what you really find in Anglin is the cultural intersection that is the home to the alt-right, the nexus between the transgressive and provocative politics of white identity and the saddest and uncoolest and cringiest of all American social movements: the men's movement. It's easy to make jokes about how all this fringy rage is just the natural outcome of a bunch of 4chan geeks who couldn't get laid in a sex-doll factory, but their own rhetoric and discourse continually returns to that theme. It is an ancient story: The sons of the effete white ruling class feel emasculated in comparison to the swarthy high-testosterone primitives from...that part gets kind of interesting, inasmuch as there was a time when the American WASP felt sexually intimidated by Asians, Jews, and Italians, though it is the mythic sexual rapacity of the African that has most kept them up at night.

"Muppet News Flash: A bunch of under-employed anime nerds marching with tiki torches in rage-fueled sausage fests have trouble with women.

"After the protest in Charlottesville—in which a woman was murdered by a white nationalist—Anglin advised his fellow knuckleheads to go out to bars that night, because 'random girls will want to have sex with you.' One wonders whether Charlottesville is home to very many women who are quite that random. The men's movement has moved on from Iron John and suburbanite drum circles and virile weeping and all that business, and its new spokesmen are the pick-up artists, whose appeal to men (put an asterisk there) such as Andrew Anglin is pretty obvious. Like Islamic jihadists promised an eternity with a harem of virgins, white-identity jihadists believe that they can elevate themselves through conflict and confrontation and, by proving their value to the tribe, finally get some nookie.

"'We want a war,' writes Anglin.

"He is barely five feet tall.

"But everybody is ten feet tall on the Internet, and that is why the Internet is where the alt-right really lives, one big online group-therapy session masquerading as a political movement. A few sad specimens will occasionally sally forth into the public square in Charlottesville, Boston, or Dallas, and there will always be an opening for a charismatic racist such as Richard Spencer, who holds a position in American life that once belonged to David Duke and to George Lincoln Rockwell before him. Some roles in our common life are passed down from generation to generation..."

(snip)

It'll be interesting to see how this clash between MRAs and conservative non-MRAs plays out - if anything happens at all.

As someone named Brendan said in 2009:

"Men don’t collaborate as a gender. Women do.

"Psych studies from the last ten years indicate women have four times the propensity to prefer same-sex affiliation (not sexual, just affiliative) than men do. Women relate much more strongly to other women as a group. Men compete with other men. Men affililate in groups corporations, sports teams, communities, etc) for purposes of competing with other groups of men (and women). Men do not collaborate as a class when it comes to women—not at all. This is the precise reason the men’s groups are so weak — men compete against each other generally and even more strongly when it comes to men/women issues in particular. This is why the men’s movement has been, and will remain, weak."

Oops, sorry - forgot to provide the link!

https://www.nationalreview.com/sites/default/files/nrdpdf/20170911.pdf

Trump doing the right thing, again.

I see Fox News is reporting that Pelosi was run out of her address on DACA by a bunch of people demanding open borders, chanting 'all of us or none of us!'.

Oddly, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, HuffP and MSNBC are not reporting the incident.

Anyway, back to the Trump Is Evil narrative, which is still in progress.

Shiver your timbers and avast your hearties, it's International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrrgh!

Arrrrr.

And from the "We Are So Screwed" files:

The Federal Reserve is setting America up for economic disaster

Some out-of-this-world race-mongering:

Believe In Aliens? You’re Probably Racist

Interesting commentary on immigration jurisdiction:

Fed Judge Rules Trump Admin Can't Withhold Grants to 'Sanctuary Cities'

> If it isn't isolated, there
> is a very real possibility that
> you'll send power back out

Thank you IRA. Sometimes we very badly want to believe there's missing information in this freak-of-the-day stories. I'm surprised this engineering wasn't mentioned in the Zerohedge piece.

It's a freaky story nonetheless: The people who want ever-more government can't ever see stories like this to understand how private interests pull the levers.

It is a political mess, but not necessarily an engineering one.

You can certainly put a box on the house that only allows power to flow in and not out. Which solves the safety issues. But people don't want to be isolated so they can sell their power to the power company. A company that doesn't even want their power. Not to mention how much that power should be valued at.

Hence politics.