Media hype of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight is cloyingly overwrought – an entire news segment was devoted to their protective cups – especially considering each pugilist is a good five years past his prime.  Amid all the depthless blather, one analyst did offer a distinctive insight as to how Mayweather has remained undefeated: “He makes you miss a lot in his fights, but he doesn’t make you miss the same way.  If he made you miss the same way all the time, guys would start timing it and start hitting him.”

And so it is in the course of human history; events repeat, but just disparately enough as to avoid circumvention.  After surrendering 80% of its value, the NASDAQ has once again regained the 5,000 point plateau.  Though the odyssey was fifteen years in the making (I was betting on forever), it took mere seconds for the gaggle of Wall Street analysts to honk-honk-honk that it’s different this time around.  Haverford Trust Co.’s Hank Smith: “We’re not moving into a stage of euphoria by any measure.”  Investment gurus like Smith rest on the fact that the index’s aggregate PE ratio is one-fifth of the incomprehensible levels reached in Y2K, while at the same time composite dividends have quintupled.  Today, they note, companies like Apple, Starbucks and Comcast sell real products to real customers and earn real money.  Furthermore, the IPO market has become far more discerning: Ashley Madison was forced to seek financing overseas when it became apparent that their rota of adulteresses was heavily fabricated.  Back in the late ‘90s, highly valued companies like Pets.com and Webvan had no hope for profitability, while many others possessed not even a viable business plan.  As I queried during the tech bubble: How is it that an Internet company with no revenue can cash out by selling to another Internet company with no revenue?  I’m still not sure, but my broker tells me – despite Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Yahoo!’s purchase of Tumblr – that there’s no cause for alarm.

Unless, of course, you have the misfortune to live in Baltimore.  Events there, as well as in Ferguson, MO, recall the Rodney King riots two decades past that took 53 lives and brought Los Angeles to its knees.  Yet the tolerance for police brutality has shifted over the years; a severe ass whooping will no longer mobilize the urban community, let alone a first cousin with a placard.   No, the bar has been raised to exclude all but the unarmed “person of color” who is executed during a routine traffic stop.  And, as I’ve said repeatedly, this volcanic backlash – including the shooting of cops – while inexcusable, was entirely predictable.  The public has absorbed incident after incident where the unjustified use of lethal force by officers from Philadelphia to Burlington, IA has gone unpunished.  Finally, government officials are beginning to sense the polity’s frustration with litany of lies and cover-ups (e.g., Dr. Carl Ditch, the Iberia Parish, LA coroner ruled that Victor White III shot himself in the chest despite being handcuffed behind his back while seated in a police cruiser) and are tossing a few badges to the lions.

The jury is still our as to whether the arrests of white officers in Pennsylvania, Colorado and South Carolina will placate the likes of Ebony Moniqaue Dickens, Jeffrey L. Williams, or Ismaaiyl Brinsley, but one cannot help but notice that Baltimore’s virulent insurgency swiftly morphed into giddy celebration once prosecutors announced that six officers would be charged with the brutal murder of Freddie Gray who sustained a broken neck while shackled to the floor of a paddy wagon.   In the end, the social contract can only endure if the everyman believes the constraints on his free will apply equally to those above him.  Absent that, we’ll have to come up with the next O.J. Simpson.