Dear Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller,

THE FAMED anthropologist Bronislaw Malin-owski considered the principle of legitimacy a universal sociological law. The crucial determinant of legitimacy in his view was the male's public commitment to his child's mother, not the widely varying concept of legality. So let's dispose of the 'out of wedlock' red herring immediately. What matters is not a piece of paper, but the father's willingness to give emotional and material support to his offspring.

MOST PEOPLE remember two things about the 1966 Commonwealth Games. It remains the biggest international event this country has hosted, and we failed to win a gold medal.

So Jamaica's sweep of the sprints last week in Melbourne brought to mind the phrase "You've come a long way, baby!".

COLUMNISTS KEEP banging on about this Government's corruption and economic mismanagement and its miserable inability to control crime. But the 'Woe is us!' brigade is obviously wasting its time.

So what if Jamaica's murder count went from 414 in 1989 to 1670 in 2005? According to the March 14 Gleaner Bill Johnson poll, '83 per cent of Jamaicans feel safe living in their communities'.

JAMAICA NOW stands on the brink of a third political revolution. If Busta led the 'mental' revolution and Joshua the 'socialist' revolution, Sister P now heads the 'woman' revolution. Since Jamaican women are usually smarter, harder working, and more disciplined than Jamaican men, this is potentially a very good thing. But only if Portia uses her immense political capital wisely.

What would you say

To the coming of a brand new day

When the shadows are falling away

Even from the eyes of yore.

IF THE four most expensive words in the English language are 'This time it's different', the five most dangerous must be 'Anything is better than this'.

I mean, whoever thought that one day people in Iraq would look back on the cruel, murderous regime of Saddam Hussein with anything but horror and disdain?

SELDOM HAS a country been blessed with such contrasting, yet complementary, founding fathers as Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley.

Although distant cousins - itself a blessing as their disagreements seldom rose above the level of a good-natured family squabble - they were polar opposites in nature and outlook. They agreed on rigid adherence to British parliamentary tradition, but diverged on almost everything else.

"THE BEST laid schemes o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley" ­ go oft awry. In politics, where personalities loom so large and the media glare magnifies every mishap and mistake, Robbie Burns' old saw goes double. Take the situation in Israel and Palestine.

DEMOCRACY IS faith in collective common sense. It's a belief that fickle and short-sighted individuals will be wise en masse.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried," goes the famous Churchill cliché. But he also remarked that, "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

What do dancehall deejay Elephant Man and Nature ­ the world's leading scientific magazine ­ have in common? The answer is Robert Trivers, the world famous biologist who was cited in a special issue of Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest thinkers and scientists of the 20th century. Dr. Trivers has lived on and off in Jamaica since 1967, and once described himself as "Jamaican in my soul or spirit". Recently, he and six other colleagues had a cover story published in Nature called 'Dance reveals symmetry, especially in young men'. It was based on a study done in Jamaica which used Elephant Man's Let Dem Bawl as the base music.