From time to time I’ve mentioned that blogging is a reactive or responsive form—I tend to respond to editorials, newspaper columns, op-eds, or other blog posts. Right now there’s just a real lack of anything meaty to which to respond.

I think that’s a characteristic of the protests going on right now in various large cities including Chicago, too. They have plenty to protest against but I don’t see much that could be effected by policy, at least not in my lifetime. These are different from the student protests of the 1960s. They were protesting the Viet Nam War. Pull out of Viet Nam—the protests stopped.

The civil rights protests of the earlier sixties largely ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (and the attendant enforcement).

I don’t think the protesters have noticed how much has changed over the last half century and are looking for some sort of six sigma in policing. That’s not going to happen. We may have gradual, incremental improvement as our police forces become better educated and have more social exposure to black people and Hispanics. There will still be police killings of unarmed young black men.

I try out a lot of new recipes. I’m a good cook, most of my experiments turn out just fine, and, by and large, they’re pretty much what I expected.

But not always. Last night I tried my hand at making sweet potato gnocchi. Suffice it to say that my gnocchi could use a bit of work. They weren’t heinous and tasted fine but they didn’t firm up the way they should have.

I may try it again. I still have one more sweet potato which should be enough for an experimental batch.

I’ve been pondering a remark made by the comic Chris Rock and cited by Stephen Taylor over at OTB. I think it has real merit and I’ll repeat the quote here:

to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

I think there’s merit in that. There are “nicer” white people than there were a half century ago. You only need to look around to see it.

But does that tell the whole story? Isn’t the converse true? I.e. haven’t there been nice white people around for hundreds of years? I think so. My mom and dad were certainly nice in the sense in which I think he means it. Some of what he’s pointing out is simply the result of modern communications and technology. He has more exposure to nice white people than he would have 50 years ago; white people have more exposure to “smart, educated, beautiful, polite” black children. I grew up with those kids so it’s not news to me.

I would also go a step farther. Bigotry doesn’t just take the form of Simon Legree-style cruelty or KKK-style hatred. It has a flip side: paternalism. Whether you’re making excuses for black people or trying to care for them, it isn’t nice. It’s just soft bigotry.

The greatest danger to young black men isn’t white police officers. It’s other young black men. Although I think there’s an argument to be made that’s a result of past racism, I don’t think it’s the result of present racism. The same is true for rates of illegitimate birth among blacks that are higher than those of non-blacks who are similarly poor, rates of substance abuse that are higher than those of poor non-blacks, and lower rates of saving (and higher rates of consumption) than equally poor non-blacks.

That’s the gospel that I see being preached by Tyler Perry. Black men have got to stop abusing their women and children. Racism isn’t making them do it. We need to stop making excuses for prominent black men who do that. Poverty isn’t forcing them. An attitude of disdain for black men on the part of black women isn’t being caused by white racism. Note, too: Mr. Perry’s audience is predominantly black; Mr. Rock’s audience is mostly white.

I don’t know how to solve the problem of racism. I can only hope that time and knowledge triumph and try to act in a caring way towards all people myself. I do know that I can’t solve black people’s problems for them. They must do that for themselves. In a very real sense the most I can do is stay out of the way.

Maybe I’m seeing connections where none exist. After all everything is either positively or negatively correlated.

I think there may be a connection among many of the stories that have been in the news over the last few weeks: the midterm elections, the Keystone pipeline, the president’s executive order on immigration, the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. Here’s the connection I’m seeing.

There is a radical and growing difference of opinion in the United States about the nature of law and the role of government and that difference of opinion has a strong regional component.

Now in the abstract that doesn’t present a problem. That’s how a federated republic works, isn’t it? Different areas with different needs, concerns, histories, and problems work together on areas in which there’s common interest and otherwise leave each other alone.

But that’s the essence of our problem: there are messianic and apocalyptic aspects of both sides in the difference of opinion. It would be one thing if they could agree to disagree but they can’t. Not only do they have different opinions but they want to force their opinions on those with whom they disagree.

What’s the evidence that either the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson or that of Eric Garner in New York was due to race? I mean actual evidence rather than merely the fact that the police officers who killed them were white and they were black. If your position is that any interaction between any white man and any black man is necessarily affected by racism, that’s a pretty radical position.

It’s not just a question of theoretical interest. In order for federal civil rights suits to succeed you’d need to be able to prove racial animus in these particular cases rather than racism in general.

I have no doubt whatever that there are racist cops out there or that some of the killing of blacks by white police officers have had racial motivations. I’m just not so sure about these particular cases.

It’s never too early to start thinking about the next election. Now that the dust has settled on the 2014 midterms which have essentially undone the transformation of American politics produced by Franklin Roosevelt, here’s something to chew on about the 2016 election. The following U. S. Senators up for election in 2016 will be over 75 at the time of the election:

or, said another way, three of the incumbents are Republicans and four are Democrats. If re-elected they would all be over 80 at the end of their terms. Don’t be surprised if some of them decide not to seek re-election or are unable to seek re-election for reasons of death or infirmity.

A field with fewer incumbents will really change the dynamics of the election.

In all of the demonstrations, riots, editorials, op-eds, blog posts, and general outrage against first the grand jury decision in Ferguson and then the grand jury decision in New York, I still have yet to see a prescription that would have prevented the deaths of the two men at the hands of police officers that spurred all of the outrage to begin with.

The decision in the case of the death of Eric Garner in New York throws cold water on one prescription, a prescription endorsed by the White House, to have police officers carry body cameras. Mr. Garner’s death was videoed. The experience in New Orleans whose police force has been equipt with body cameras for some time now should be enough to call that particular prescription into question. Remarkably, in many cases there in which police use of force has been questioned, the cameras have malfunctioned.

In my view the most likely benefit that police body cameras will convey will be to the vendors of body cameras.

Chicago has had what is referred to as an “independent civilian review board” that investigated the use of force by Chicago’s police for some time. The board is dominated by former police officers and tends to rubberstamp the police versions of incidents. I believe that will inevitably be the case for all such boards for institutional reasons. It’s no solution.

There is an old dictum in the law that goes back at least 150 years and probably much farther: hard cases make bad law. The killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are both hard cases but for different reasons. The circumstances of Michael Brown’s shooting by a police officer are contested and the claims of those who say that Mr. Brown was murdered by a police officer are not supported by forensic evidence.

In the case of the death of Eric Garner, if I understand New York law correctly, to have supported the charge of manslaughter against the police officer who killed him the grand jury would have had to determine that the police officer’s actions were either intentional or reckless. The grand jury couldn’t support either finding.

The only prescription I can think of that would have categorically resulted in different outcomes in both of these cases is if all homicides or at least all police homicides were prosecuted as crimes. I don’t think that would increase the total amount of justice in the world.

Finding causes about which to be outraged is easy. Identifying effective solutions is hard. The frequent retort of “Well, it’s a start” can be used to justify an infinite stream of ineffective strategies and every policy has its own unforeseen secondary effects.

A question occurred to me the other day. What was the first record album you purchased with your own money?

I only purchased a handful of records when I was a kid. I never purchased a 45 single and I don’t really remember the first record I ever bought. I don’t believe I’ve ever purchased a pop or rock album.

I’m confident that my first album was either a folk or jazz album, either a Limelighters (at one point I owned all of them) or a jazz album, most likely Brubeck’s Time Out.

Whatever it was it has long disappeared. That’s something that happens when you have siblings.

What was the first record album you purchased with your own money?

I couldn’t resist throwing at least a little cold water on the good jobs report. My fundamental position is that time will tell and one good jobs report doth not a trend make. While I rejoice in the good jobs report I think we need to consider it more closely.

I’ve already mentioned my first cavil: we’ll need to see jobs reports like last month’s for a good two years before we reach the previous jobs peak. How likely is that to happen?

According to the NBER, the official scorekeepers on recessions, roughly 84 months have elapsed since the last peak in the economy. In the post-war period only three business cycles have seen expansions longer than that: the expansion that began in 1961, the expansion that began in 1982 (the Reagan boom), and the expansion that began in 1991 (the dot-com boom). Does this feel like any of those periods to you? Me, neither.

Average post-war duration from trough to peak has been 54 months.

Also, consider the graph at the top of this post. It depicts oil prices from 2000 to the present. The current spot price is below $71 per barrel. There is a non-conformist theory of the Great Recession that says that buying houses you couldn’t afford, credit default swaps, and so on were all sideshows and the real cause of the Great Recession was a rapid increase in the price of oil. The Saudis won’t keep the taps open forever. Even if they wanted to they can’t.

There is a folk tale, made popular in the movie Patton, that in an official Roman victory celebration, something only granted by the Senate to the greatest victor or vir triumphalis, the victor paraded through Rome in a chariot but stationed behind the vir was a public slave who whispered in his ear, “You are not a god.” That’s the little voice I’m referring to in the title of this post.

Or, as Han Solo put it, “Great kid. Don’t get cocky.”