Last week I came across an article entitled “Growth May Be Good for the Poor - But are IMF and World Bank Policies Good for Growth?”. The answer as usual is, it depends who you ask. However the following chart surprised me.

How old is the universe? The latest data suggests approximately 15 billion years. Or at least that is the amount of time science says has elapsed since the so called ‘big bang’, when an infinitesimally minute point of singularity exploded into a 10 billion degrees hot fireball and gave birth to the universe. But how did this point of singularity come into being? How long did it exist before it exploded? And what caused it to explode?

An Australian expatriate recently told me that the biggest problem at his plant was workers “thinking in patois.” In his experience those who could not speak understandable English usually could not think logically. While those who spoke English well were generally efficient employees.

“Boxing” George Foreman once said “is the sport to which all others aspire”. Meaning that all competition between men really is sublimated fighting - an assertion proven true every time football, basketball, or baseball players lose their tempers and start throwing punches.

Last year the human genome “Book of Life” project confirmed what every intelligent person already knew, that there is no scientific basis for the concept of race. Only a fraction of the three billion letters in the human genetic code differ among individuals, so biologically we are all 99.99% the same. Persons from different ethnic groups can be more genetically similar than individuals within the same group, and there is more genetic variability within Africa than outside it. Meaning that from a biological perspective all of us are Africans, either residing in Africa or in recent exile.

A few months ago while watching a James Bond movie I crankily grumbled to my girlfriend that this stuff was an insult to people’s intelligence. Every 007 film had the same tiresome plot - a sinister villain of immense wealth and power planned to unleash an unspeakable disaster on the civilized world and bring it to its knees. Yet nothing even remotely close to this had ever happened in real life, or would ever happen. Fiendish cleverly villains like Dr. No and Goldfinger who have a grudge against the world and continually plot to destroy western civilization simply do not exist.

Planes crashing into skyscrapers; huge exploding fireballs; towering buildings collapsing; billowing clouds of black smoke; crowds running in panic down the streets – surely we had seen this all before in countless disaster films.

Maybe it has something to with the way financial institutions are run in this country, but Jamaican bankers seem rather fond of the ‘benevolent dictatorship’ concept. A few years ago it was then CIBC head Al Webb making the call. Now it is BNS boss William Clarke suggesting it as a possible solution to Jamaica’s problems.

America is the land of hype, but the presidential race between Al Gore and George Bush surpassed all advanced billings and was indeed the closest, most exciting and strangest election in living memory.

“History” stated Thomas Carlyle “is but the biography of great men.” Leo Tolstoy disagreed completely. “In historical events great men — so called — are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event.”