The Rigid/Fluid Problem

I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.--Lincoln



We put an old dryer out for the garbage guys but it was gone by six a.m..
Mom had quite a day. She went to West Virginia to find office space for the merger/buyout she is brokering, then watched as a guy drove toward her down a narrow street in Pittsburgh with his back door flapping open. (It hit her car but there was little damage.) She then went to a board meeting for a nonprofit where an expected board revolution did not occur.
The Pirates are becoming embarrassing. They probably will react symbolically and fire Hurdle, as if the players and their development were not the problem.
Our most competent nurse is leaving.

Walmart Inc has sued Tesla Inc., saying solar panels supplied by the electric car maker were responsible for fires at about seven of its stores, according to a lawsuit filed in a New York court on Tuesday.

Interest rates on long term bonds are dropping. Pundits cry "Recession!" But there are no vacuums. The bond rates in Europe are negative; why couldn't our rates be dropping because European bond investors are moving money into higher yielding American bonds?

If Omar and Tlaib can boycott Israel, why can’t Israel boycott them? (I stole it.)

If we ignore the top 350 CEOs running the largest US firms as outliers,  the average CEO of a typical firm in the US doesn’t earn that much more than the average dentist ($174,000).

Insurers are expanding their Affordable Care Act plan offerings for next year, with the once-troubled business now generating profits, even as the overall individual-insurance market has shrunk.(wsj)

Conservatives, alongside libertarians (with the strange exception of presidential candidate Gary Johnson), have argued that a baker should not be required by law to design and sell custom products for same-sex weddings to which bakers have conscience-based objections. The Supreme Court agreed.  With that in mind, I fail to see how it is not hypocritical or inconsistent at the very least for conservatives to turn around and argue that while the Christian baker can choose not to bake the gay couple’s cake, Google and YouTube should not be free to choose how they moderate their platforms and which content they allow on those platforms.--deRugy

From Issues & Insights:

The global warming alarmists, who have seized and now control the narrative — because, like a child who won’t stop crying for a toy he can’t have, they refuse give up — have a credibility problem. Actually, they have several. The public will eventually forget about them all, though, just as it has overlooked the mistakes by those who predicted other catastrophes that never arrived, such as Y2K, the new Ice Age, acid rain, mass human starvation, overpopulation, peak oil, and the Silent Spring. After all, humans have been watching Doomsday prophets fail throughout history. They’ve been so common we hardly notice them.

NB: Issues & Insights is a website launched recently by the journalists behind the Investor’s Business Daily editorial page.

I'm not sure this is a good idea. Dr. Neal Kassell — the man who performed surgery on Biden three decades ago following two brain aneurysms--dismissed fears about the 76-year-old Biden's mental faculties, noting that he's "as sharp as he was 31 years ago" and assuring people that the hemorrhage and subsequent operations did not result in any brain damage.

In 1485, in the last major battle of the War of the Roses, King Richard III was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, the earl of Richmond. 

                   The Rigid/Fluid Problem

Trying to overturn--or even tweak--biology is a tough, uphill battle. Our open-minded culture is, however, giving it a go. The following is a good summary of the quandary, from Perry:

A progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man’s love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian’s love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can’t just be erased at will. The second, which many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.