I decided to restrict yesterday’s installment to the national divisions theme, and realized this morning that there are all sorts of random items hanging around that deserve some consideration.

Such as…

1. The angry banned commenter who has been leaving comment on various posts like a suspended junior high school student drawing penises on the school basketball court as revenge just wrote this in a comment you’ll never see: “Your blog is basically a torrent of hate speech.” No further analysis from me is necessary, I presume. I occasionally have regrets about banning commenters. This jerk I regret allowing to comment in the first place.

2. Speaking of fractured thought processes, an occasional commenter here wrote a Facebook post criticizing the fact that a male “identifying” as female won the “Miss San Francisco” title. Me, I wouldn’t care if an inanimate carbon rod got the crown, but one of my friend’s critics, a Woke World Warrior, wrote (and later too down) this response: “What impact does this have on your life?” I immediately flagged it as an exquisite expression of dead ethics alarms and the absence of comprehension of the principles of ethics generally. What a wonderful world we would build if we all only cared about conduct that affected us directly and personally! And that is the flaw in the logic behind the question.

3. Here’s an ancient but still common baseball rationalization that drives me crazy, but that isn’t used sufficiently in the real world to justify inclusion on the list. When a home plate umpire makes an obviously wrong strike call, a baseball “color” announcer, usually an ex-player, will say, “He’s been calling that pitch a strike all day. That’s all hitter and players want, consistency. It’s his strike zone today, and as long as it doesn’t change, nobody can complain.” That’s idiotic. It’s like saying, “Yeah, that cop always tickets pedestrians for chewing gum, but as long as he’s consistent about it, it’s OK.” The umpires’ job is to enforce the strike zone in the rule book, which is very specific. They don’t have the authority to decide what is “their” strike zone.

4. How long has this been going on, and how many girls were raped along the way? Japan just expanded the legal definition of rape to “non-consensual sexual intercourse” from “forcible sexual intercourse,” and the legal age of consent, previously at just 13, was raised to 16 years.

5. Trump being Trump. After pleading Not Guilty in Miami to the 37 counts in the federal indictment against him, the former President visited the bakery at Versailles in Little Havana. Versailles is restaurant that candidates often use to attract Miami’s Cuban voters. As he shook hands with admirers, Trump was heard to declare, “Food for everyone!” Then he left, before anyone could order anything.

6. This high school needs to be taught about moral luck. The Philadelphia High School’s principal warned graduating students that if anyone in the crowd cheered, shouted r laughed when they were called to receive their diploma, that student would be denied the diploma until after the ceremony. This was enforced against four students, including 17-year-old Hafsah Abdur-Rahman, who did a short and barely noticeable jig on the way to receive the document. Some in the crowd laughed at her exuberance, and in the video below, the principal can be seen telling her she is being punished.

If the girl had done nothing and someone had cheered or laughed, she would still have been denied her diploma. A “don’t dance or else” edict would have at least made the punishment dependent entirely on the conduct of the student.

The School District of Philadelphia apologized after the epidode was reported by TV news, saying: “The District does not condone the withholding of earned diplomas based on family members cheering for their graduates. We apologize to all the families and graduates who were impacted and are further looking into this matter to avoid it happening in the future.”