In response to the opening item in Impromptus today, a reader writes,

Jay, you say, “A very great deal of political discussion is speculation — informed speculation, maybe, speculation of varying intelligence and credibility, but speculation all the same.”
This made me think back to my days on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. I always asked a friend, an old pro, what he thought of the markets in coming days and weeks. My crystal ball seemed cloudy. He said, “Your educated guess is as good as mine.”
From that day forward, I have smiled at every cocky prognosticator I have come across. It’s all guesswork, with some of it being better informed than other guesswork.

Later in my column, I have a rant about a coming trip to Cuba by the University of Michigan Alumni Association. (“Take advantage of the segregated beaches, restaurants, and hotels! . . . Enjoy a place where a single party rules! Where the media have only one point of view! Where dissenters are jailed and tortured! Where American aid workers are held hostage! And don’t forget the underage prostitution!”)

(That was me, by the way — not the University of Michigan Alumni Association.)

An alumnus of Michigan’s law school writes,

I want to make a guess: There will be little, if any, protest against the association for this trip to Cuba. But what if the association were planning a trip to Israel?
At a family affair a couple of years ago, I met a very nice Canadian couple — he’s a prominent lawyer, she’s a local judge, both Jewish — who found out I’d lived in Israel and stiffly told me they would never go there as long as Israel maintained the settlements. When they found out I was a baseball fan, they enthusiastically told me all about their trip to Cuba and how I would enjoy seeing baseball there.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a neat illustration of the absence of moral sense.