Last year Nelson Mandela left us, Prince George joined us, there was black smoke in Boston and white smoke in Rome.  We saw it, shared it, tweeted and talked about it before dinner.  We celebrated and mourned before morning.  By the time it rolled off the presses, it was passe.  No one heard the news from their newspaper.  That’s great for us, the insatiable public, but for venerable giants like the Gleaner, rumbling along since 1834, the writing is on the Facebook wall—adapt or perish.

By now, it’s old news that print news is dying, inch by precious column inch.  (Witness the Gleaner’s svelte new shape!)  The internet, disruptor of industries, has hit broadsheet media the hardest, since the web is essentially a huge newspaper, transmitting information faster, farther and with more flair than its dead-tree cousin ever could.  Combined with the dominant perception that everything online should be free, the media have spent the last decade squawking that the sky is falling.

But like all Chicken Little stories, it isn’t really true.

Daily newspapers are disappearing like supernova winking into darkness

Yes, dailies are disappearing like supernova winking into darkness, including the 168-year-old News of the World.  Newsweek, the perennial Pepsi to Time magazine’s Coke, lost all its talent and succumbed to its injuries in 2012.  NewspaperDeathWatch.com speaks for itself.  And many of the biggest names in American news—The Boston Globe, The Washington Post—have been sold cheaply.

But where there is death, there is also life.  Out of the inky ashes a new kind of journalism is sprouting all over the web.  The sites are clean, bold and uncluttered, to gain your trust.  The writing is crisp, intimate and direct, to gain your attention.  And the men behind them (and for better or worse, they are all men) hope to make a lot of money by not caring too much about making it.  We’ll meet them in a minute.

News organizations have traditionally concerned themselves with the 3 W’s—what happened, where and when.  But in the age of 24-hr cable news and ubiquitous access to Twitter, that job has been usurped.  So the new kids on the block (and some old ones) have abandoned the 3 W’s for higher ground—how and why.

Ezra Klein, 29, is on a mission is to help us “understand the news”.  He left the Washington Post to start Vox.com.  A typical article : ‘Everything you need to know about Pope Francis’.  Nate Silver, 36, swapped his blog at The New York Times for his own FiveThirtyEight.com, to “make the news a little nerdier”.  His goal?  To bring rigorous data analysis to journalism.  Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald left The Nation and The Guardian respectively to run The Intercept, a place where they can “publish stories without regard to whom they might anger or alienate”.  And all of that is just since January.

There are others.  Marco Arment, 31, started and handed over The Magazine, a publication that trades quantity for quality.  Twitter’s founders made Medium, a publishing platform to “increase depth of understanding”.  And The Times, they are a-changing too, overhauling their site and launching their own explanatory companion, The Upshot, in a few months.

There are 500 million English speakers online, all hungry for news

So, despite the caterwauling, there has never been a better time to be a journalist, and for journalism in general.  At their peak, newspapers in the biggest cities had an audience of a few million.  There are 500 million English-speakers online, all hungry for information, and tens of millions more joining them each year.  With open-source web architecture like WordPress, distribution costs are now near-zero.  Never before in history have so many people been available to so few for so little.

What is dying is not the business of making news, but the business model of the newspaper.  The Gleaner (and every broadsheet) is really a billboard company, selling advertisements surrounded by articles.  The internet, with an infinite supply of ad space, destroyed the scarcity newspapers created, and with it their financial viability.  The question is no longer if traditional papers will die, but when.  Size and geography are irrelevant.  For the first time in 400 years, news houses are competing on a level playing field—the quality of the news itself.  If the writing is good, we’ll find it, read it and even pay a little for it.  If it’s ordinary, we won’t.  May the best mag win.

Blame the Europeans.  Jamaica became a Christian country through the historical happenstance of slavery.  But the nasty reality of how religions spread, via bloodsoaked conquest and genocide, isn’t enough to discredit belief.  Though they might not admit it, many Jamaicans see our indoctrination as a blessing in horrific disguise—a kind of salvation through exploitation.  But as long as we’re looking at the larger picture, you should know that the god the Spanish brought, the one in the Bible, is way too small for the job.

For Christians, God is an eternal supernatural being who created and preserves the world, with a consciousness that loves mankind and actively intervenes in human affairs—hence the value of prayer.  Now, if this tenuous belief is all that’s keeping you from running down Half Way Tree naked and screaming, stop here.  We’re about to go big, then go home.

The universe is huge.  Really, really huge.  So huge that Earth-scale measurements, like miles, are too tiny to be useful.  We have to invent something new.  Light, the fastest thing there is, travels at 300,000 kilometers a second.  That’s a bit less than the distance to the moon, so you could say the moon is roughly one light-second away.  The sun, at 150 million kilometres, is about 8 light-minutes away.  The next closest sun, the Proxima Centauri star, is four light-years away.  Imagine that.  When you see its dot above you tonight, those rays of light left Centauri in 2010 and are only just arriving, despite zipping the distance of the moon every second of the way.

There are more stars in the cosmos than grains of sand on Earth

Now consider the entire night sky, a twinkling canvas of stars.  They are hundreds of light-years away, so remote that the light we see was born before Galileo.  Those distant stars are still our bosom buddies compared to the universe.  Our Milky Way galaxy, a hundred thousand light-years across and containing 400 billion stars, is only one of thousands of galaxies in a space so incomprehensibly vast that light travelling for ten billion years is only now reaching our powerful telescopes.  There are more stars out there than all the sand on all our beaches, and ten trillion planets in our galaxy alone.

An eternal, supernatural being could create such a mind-boggling universe, but Christianity asks us to go a bridge too far, and ascribes elevated significance to man, a speck on a rock in a swirl in the cold cosmic wilderness.

There are exactly two possibilities, neither of which bode well for the faithful.  One is that of all the countless planets, only ours has life, in which case you have to wonder why God would bother to put such a small biped in such a big cage.  We’re not even in the center of our solar system, which is on the outskirts of the massive Milky Way, which is haphazardly dropped in our supercluster of galaxies, so our address is irreconcilably arbitrary for creatures as important as Christianity wants us to be.

In an universe so vast, the God of the Bible makes no sense

The other option is that life is not, in fact, unique to Earth, but thrives in alien species on any number of planets scattered throughout the universe.  Since God must have fashioned them too, our privileged position (made in his image, ruler of all creatures and so on) evaporates as we get demoted to one amongst many lifeforms.  In either case, our puny existence in the grand cosmos makes a mockery of Scripture.

Now to state the obvious.  The Christian god was imagined when our horizons were much closer, when we were literally at the center of our world.  Restricted to what our eyes could see, the heavens appeared to revolve around us, including the sun and moon and stars, just like a souvenir snow globe.  We can forgive those gnostics for thinking small.  But it’s past time to break free of ancient limitations, and imagine a god as big as the universe, whose epic scale humbly reminds us life is only what we make of it.

Two weeks ago on Nationwide, discussing the accuracy of the Bible with poet Mutabaruka, pastor Conrad Pitkin and journalist Ian Boyne, I said, “It’s not for me to demonstrate that reality is reality. The onus is on whoever claims something ridiculous to provide evidence that it is [real].” In the studio, I winced—’ridiculous’ sounded dismissive, ‘fantastic’ would have been better. Stupid. I’d left an opening for a sharp debater. Mr Boyne latched on right away in his verbose style, calling for “epistemological humility” from all involved.

That’s a mouthful, so let’s digest it slowly. Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. It’s about what we know, and how we know what we know. For instance, you can know from swatting tables that 12 x 8 = 96 without knowing how to multiply. You can design bicycles without being able to ride one. You can use an octopus to predict the winner of the World Cup and end up right for the wrong reason. There are all sorts of limits and quirks to knowing, once you know where to look.

Underneath the big words, Mr Boyne was calling me arrogant to dismiss Bible miracles because, gee, you never know. Maybe God did beat us to artificial insemination, and split the Red Sea before we split the atom. Maybe my scientific worldview—my way of knowing things—is too limited to see the larger truth about God. And that possibility, Mr Boyne posits, should humble us all.

Is arrogance ever justified, or are all ways of knowing equal?

Time to fess up. Mr Boyne was correct—I was a bit cocksure. But here’s the really interesting question. Was my arrogance justified, or are all ways of knowing equal?

When science goes up against religion, it sounds like a fair fight between people in white coats and people in white robes. It’s not. Science, from the Latin root for (surprise!) ‘knowledge’, is basically asking a question, trying to answer it, and then telling other people. Those people ask more questions, and the process repeats, over and over and over, weeding out bad ideas from good over time. That’s all. Science, to be succinct, is thinking. It’s problem-solving. And it’s taken us from the mud to the moon.

If you’re religious, and you grapple with questions about where the world came from, why you’re here, or how to live well, congratulations, you’re doing science. You’re thinking. Suggesting God is the answer to those questions is still science. In the absence of more questions, it’s worth a try like anything else. Sticking your fingers in your ears so you don’t hear those questions—known as faith—is where it goes wrong.

Even the religious prefer the epistemology of science (knowing by thinking) to that of faith (knowing by trust). If we gathered hundreds of Jamaican pastors to discuss emigration, none of them would suggest asking God to open a land passage between Mobay and Miami. Why not? Because everyone knows—from science—it won’t happen. If Reverend Pitkin seriously suggested splitting the Caribbean Sea, the other pastors would think he was crazy.

When facing dogma, humility becomes a liability keeping bad ideas on life support

He’d also be holding up progress, and that’s the real issue. When we need a solution, people who can’t distinguish between the improbable and the impossible are worse than useless—they stop the rest of us from moving forward. If an idea can’t survive interrogation, it should perish. And anyone who wilfully ignores the expiration date should be excluded from the conversation. When facing dogma, humility becomes a liability that keeps inferior ideas on life support.

Say we’re building a highway. You want the route to go through Kellitts and I want it to go around. Being humble helps us hear each other’s rationale. But if your argument includes that Jesus agrees with you, at that point it’s best for me to bypass you and the town.

Excessive humility also threatens existing knowledge. The presence of evolution, for example, is still hotly debated even though there’s nothing sensible left to discuss. Tolerating ideas like intelligent design, after science disproves them, makes it harder to push the boundary of our knowledge by turning it into a line in the sand. In the end, the most arrogant position of all is refusing to admit when you’re wrong.

A scourge has swept our great nation.  A disgusting way of living has infiltrated our homes and churches, perverting the minds of even our precious children.  At the heart of this wicked, sinful behaviour is a particular segment of society—limp-wristed, fashion-conscious, high-voiced art lovers traipsing around with shaved legs and armpits.  They’re out in public, everywhere you look.  You know who I mean, right?  Women.

The scourge I’m talking about is homophobia, the extreme fear of our gay friends and family members that makes us commit acts of unspeakable cruelty.  These acts, though perpetrated by us men against other men, are ultimately about women.

In 2006, Time magazine called Jamaica ‘the most homophobic place on earth’

What exactly is the problem?  Simply that we are, Time magazine chides, ‘the most homophobic place on earth’, a country where our gay brothers and sons live a shadowed life under constant threat of exposure and assault.  Last year, Dwayne Jones was stabbed and shot to death by a mob for cross-dressing and dancing with a man.  A UTech student was chased by his peers and beaten by the security guards with whom he sought refuge.  Dancehall music, the pulse of the nation, is still laced with poisonous lyrics advocating violence against homosexuals.  How bad is it?  Until recently, more Jamaicans sought help from Immigration Equality, an American asylum group for gays, than any other nationality.

Why do we have such a vicious collective reaction to harmless individual behaviour?  Because men are afraid of other men—straight men.  ‘Homophobia’, says sociologist Michael Kimmel, ‘is the fear that other men will reveal to us and the world that we are not as manly as we pretend.’

Imagine a perfect Adonis—tall, fit, rough and rugged, flush with cash and virility, whisking nubile models between New Kingston and Norbrook in his oversize pickup.  Secure at the top of the masculinity pyramid, he watches the rest of us jockey for position and female attention below.  Some of us shield our own insecure spot by dislodging others (“real men don’t cry, wuss”).  The lower down we are, the more desperate our infighting and need to climb becomes, and the more naked our displays of machismo (motorcycles, dancing) to impress women.  Those of us at the bottom, emasculated by equally stinging prejudices of class and colour, lash out at the best remaining target—gay men.  In a place like Jamaica, with so many dispossessed, that attack metastasizes into widespread bigotry and deadly mob violence.

The solution, as for so much else, is education.  Most Jamaicans (abetted by Christian authorities with borderline malicious intent) remain ignorant of the basic facts about sexual orientation.  Well, here they are.

We don’t know its genetic origin, but we do know being gay isn’t a choice

Homosexuality isn’t a choice.  Let me repeat that.  Being gay is not a choice, as study after study after study has documented, examined, tested and proven.  (If it was, who in their right mind would choose to be gay in Jamaica?)  What’s more, humans are only one of thousands of documented species that exhibit same-sex pairings, including cats, dogs, goats, horses, monkeys, birds and in a wonderfully appropriate touch, our own common house lizards.  Somehow I doubt they’re picking a lifestyle.

Science hasn’t yet found specific genes responsible for homosexuality, but we do know a lot else.  Male sexuality is more fixed than female, somewhat hereditary and quite likely already in place at birth.  Women related to gay men tend to be more fertile, which partially explains how homosexuality persists even though gays usually don’t have children.  And a clever new study by economists suggests our current best guess, that roughly one in ten of us are attracted to our own sex, may be underestimating the true number by as much as half.  Which means all of us—yes, even you—have gay or bisexual friends.

You’d think it unnecessary to say this to slave descendants, but discriminating against people for something natural and unchangeable isn’t cool.  The explosion in activism and awareness in recent years is not an epidemic of homosexuality, but rather a welcome step towards openness and equality for people who have always been there, and always will be.  My friends of every orientation defy stereotype and are at times wonderful, vivacious luminaries and selfish, capricious asses.  But we’ll never see the full rainbow of gay humanity until we take a straighter look at ourselves.

It’s a choice that affects who we marry, what we do, where we live, and how we dream, yet few of us ever think about it—do you accept the world as handed to you, or seek to change it?

What’s around us seems pretty permanent—streets and stores, doctors and dancers and decorators, buses and books and biscuits and bank accounts, misery and mirth and mystery and mischief and murder.  It’s a big, messy, complicated universe, and the easiest thing, the obvious, practical, pragmatic thing, is to fit in.  Go to school.  Make friends.  Listen to your parents.  Fall in love.  Get a job.  Make more friends.  Fall out of love.  Buy a car.  Fall in love again.  Move.  Rent a place.  Get married.  Get promoted.  Have a kid.  Buy another car.  Have another kid.  Mortgage a house.  And so on.

Trouble is, after about eighty years of this pablum, you die having affected few and changed nothing.  Proof?  Every funeral.  Your legacy is hot, stifling boredom—a grandchild waxing about your smelly chair to apathetic half-strangers.  That knowledge, the long foreshadow of future heart failure, should galvanize you.

There is another way.  Cheat death through your ideas.  Almost everyone in the history books, from Ayn Rand to Zeno, got there with their mind.  And by their example, accepting the world is a useless strategy.  Progress is born of dissatisfaction.  If you want to be somebody, start with a long, hard, discerning look at the world, or at least your tiny corner of it.

Steve Jobs hated his phones, which led him to the touchscreen and app ecosystem that has transformed our daily lives.  Jimi Hendrix was chronically restless, trapped by genre and form, which made him extend his instrument to the amplifier.  Dead at 27, he continues to influence musicians today.  Constantin Stanislavski filled notebooks tearing down his own theatrics, out of which sprang the ‘method acting‘ that fills movies a century later.  He wrote: “the task of our generation [is] to liberate art from outmoded tradition, and to give greater freedom to imagination.”

Indeed, this is the goal of every artist, scientist, writer, philosopher, anyone who wants to move us forward and make her mark.  Liberation.  Exploration.  Freedom of the imagination.  In his new TV show ‘Cosmos’, American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gives us the straightest path there: “Test ideas by experiment and observation.  Build on those ideas that pass the test; reject the ones that fail.  Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and question everything.”

Over the last six weeks this column has explored Tessanne-mania, childbearing, the Vybz Kartel trial, the Oscars, poverty and the Bible.  Many have engaged these essays, but a minority of readers, at varying levels of umbrage, have hurled a self-defeating response: “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all!”  It breaks my heart, but they’ve got it exactly backwards.  If anyone should stay silent, it is those amongst us so feckless they offer only mindless praise.  (Brand Jamaica!  God is God!  Blarf snarf!)  We have become a nation awash in sycophants, expert at elevating mediocrity and eliminating dissent.

Criticism, paradoxical as it may seem, is a deep form of affection.  Would you rather nine friends who always say you look great, or one who tells you to ditch the flats, swap the earrings and, wrinkling her nose, reminds you to brush your teeth?  Far from an outrage, unblinking honesty is to be cultivated; it is the province of every unspoiled child.  We stop speaking out because we learn how to curry favour and influence instead, and call it growing up.

Every human being deserves dignity by default, but no idea does.  It must be earned, by laymen and laureates alike, through exposing itself to the light of critique, and surviving.  This column is intended as a breeding ground for larval ideas, not just the ones I put forth, but the thousands more that spring up in responses and conversations around the country.  Nothing should be out of bounds—not sex, not God, not whatever bundle of beliefs you’ve kept carefully wrapped in darkness.  Look out.  It’s a brave new world, but it’s ours to change together.

Let’s assume there is a God.  What’s more, let’s assume he’s everything he’s cracked up to be—omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.  Nothing misses Big Daddy, am I right?  Outasight.  He is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, the lion and the lamb, the dog’s bollocks and the cat’s pajamas, the only witness to every event in the history of the planet.  No problem.  Well, just one tiny nitpick—with such an impressive resume, what was so fascinating about a bunch of squabbling Arabian goat-herders?

The Bible, for the six billion of you who’ve never read it, is the definitive account of God’s obsession with the Iron Age land allocation of the Middle East, and the sky-high bill he ran up chatting with its inhabitants.  Clearly, it was his insecure teenager phase, which explains why he imitated the cool gods.  Zeus, Jupiter, Ra, Odin and Huitzilopochtli all had pet civilizations; why not Yahweh?  Maybe that’s why the world turns—it’s leftover momentum from that big spin he gave us, before his fat metaphysical finger landed on Persia.

Modern Christians tend to jettison the Old Testament like an early rocket stage

Whatever his reasons, he got very hands-on, spiting, smiting and Canaanite-ing his way to glory.  From leaving the sprinkler on for Noah to lighting the match in Gomorrah, God was living every generation like it was his last.  This angsty, adolescent God of the Old Testament poses a big problem for modern Christians, who tend to jettison it, like an early rocket stage, in favour of the more palatable New Testament.  You know, The Bible II—featuring Jesus Christ, superstar!

No matter how you slice it though, God wasn’t hiding behind mysterious ways.  He was large and in charge, knocking down Jericho and knocking up Mary.  But for the last forever, including all of visually recorded history, we’ve got…  nothing.  Nada.  Niente.  A couple of bleeding statues and Mother Teresa.  If this is the same guy, he either has the Guinness record for brooding silences, or them Israelites were some lying mother-farmers.

Which between you and me—a chasm of reason and evidence—is the truth.  Like the other 129 million books man has created, the Bible is just something people wrote to make sense of the world.  Nothing more, nothing less.  And when you’re ignorant of meteorology, medicine and macroeconomics, it’s tempting to reach, like Michelangelo’s Adam, for God.  They didn’t have David Attenborough and the BBC to explain plagues of locusts.

The Bible is the longest game of Chinese Telephone we’ve ever played

The Bible, far from being etched in stone, is in reality a somewhat arbitrary collection of stories originating from the 2nd century AD.  Collated from several sources, copied repeatedly by hand, translated from Hebrew into Greek into Latin into English, edited and annotated, reinterpreted and reinvented along the way, subject to the whims and politics of priests, kings and priest-kings for two millenia, it’s the longest game of Chinese Telephone we’ve ever played.  Whatever authority it started with has been diluted from wine into water.  Even today, the gospel truth depends on your denomination, with some texts accepted, some conveniently rejected, and others, like the Dead Sea scrolls rediscovered in 1948, simply forgotten.

And the source material was nothing to write Homer about, what with people turning into pillars of salt.  The original authors put local laws and embellished oral histories to papyrus—stories of migrations and famines, rules on cattle and women—and took licence with the rest.  For that reason, the Bible is a fascinating document, imperfectly preserving the beliefs and myths of bygone Mediterranean society.  Unaware we would later invent bookstores, it tried to be everything at once—genealogy record, celebrity biography, historical account, lifestyle guide and Lentil Soup for the Soul.

As for stories of Jesus, just as no religion now can compete without a website and a Twitter feed, no religion then could compete without a charismatic godman and some decent miracles.  All the cornerstones of Christianity—shepherds and stars and a manger, virgin mother, Sunday worship, twelve disciples, dream communication, symbolic eating of flesh and blood, the cross, resurrection during the winter solstice and so on—were borrowed without apology from older sungods and contemporary paganisms.  Those religions and deities, like Mithra, Glycon and Osiris-Dionysus, were beaten in the marketplace and then faded away, leaving the chronicles of the victor to become the bestselling book of all time, still moving 100 million copies a year.

Read the Bible if you want.  But for God’s sake, don’t put any faith in it.

It’s an embarrassing but inescapable truth about Jamaica—most of the time, we’re a complete mess.  From arresting criminals to developing industries, diversifying exports to simplifying taxes, creating wealth to erasing intolerance, Jamaica lags behind much of the world.

Our GDP per capita is less than half the global average.  According to the Statistical Institute of Jamaica, almost one in three men and one in two women in their early twenties can’t find work.  Forty percent of all the jobs in the country are in farming, fishing and car repair.  Construction and tourism provide a quarter of the rest.  And those hard-baked jobs pay about J$11,500 a week, not enough to afford the computer to read this article.

How did Jamaica go from prosperity in 1814 to such poverty today?

What’s a beautiful banana-boat republic to do?  Two hundred years ago, Jamaica was the richest colony in the British Empire by a distance, and its citizens, like Simon Taylor and Thomas Thistlewood, the most wealthy.  Falmouth famously had running water before New York.  How did we go from such prosperity in 1814 to such poverty today?  Why is Jamaica so poor?

It’s the billion-dollar question, one the best and brightest social scientists have been chewing on for decades.  Here’s the most influential living economist, Robert Lucas: ‘Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia?  If so, what, exactly?  Once one starts to think about [it], it is hard to think about anything else.’

It’s easy to know what makes a market healthy—just write down what the First World does.  Modern economists agree that balancing state budgets, suppressing inflation, allowing free trade and investing in infrastructure is the way to go.  But what’s good for the country is not necessarily good for the government.  In a democracy, where politicians only last a few years at the top, it makes more sense to spend as much as you can, protect the interests of powerful friends and skimp on infrastructure apart from big, prestigious projects.

Still, with selfish people in power everywhere, why do rich countries stay rich and poor countries stay poor?  In 2001, a Turkish economist, Daron Acemoglu, solved an amazing, disturbing piece of the puzzle.  He discovered that he could predict the current GDP of 70 countries, including Jamaica, by looking at the mortality rate of white men in the 1800s.  Wait, what?  How in the name of Paul Bogle are those two things even related?

Wherever Europeans succumbed to disease, they didn’t bother to set up strong institutions

It turns out that wherever European colonizers survived in large numbers, like Australia and North America, they imported the rule of law from home.  But where they mostly succumbed to disease, like much of Africa and the West Indies, they didn’t bother to set up strong institutions.  Instead, they set a precedent of grab-and-go, short-term, extractive policymaking that persists, like the viruses they feared, to this very day.  Out of many, one example—inefficient bureaucracies that encourage and even tolerate widespread corruption.

Tim Harford, yet another economist, explains ‘development is thwarted because the rules and laws of the society do not encourage projects or businesses which would be to the common good.  The small amount of education and technology and infrastructure [in a country like Jamaica] could be much better used if the society was organized to reward good, productive ideas.  But it is not.’  By contrast, America’s patent system, effective courts and venture capital paved the way, as much as the literal investment in highways, for a good idea like FedEx to flourish.  In turn, FedEx created the delivery network for Amazon, whose supercomputers now enable Netflix, and the virtuous cycle continues.

This is all very depressing, because it suggests the problem of poverty operates on a scale larger than anyone’s lifetime, that as a colonized people we were predestined to struggle far past Independence, and that we are our own worst enemy in implementing solutions.  But depression is not despair.  We have to find a way to align the short-term interests of our elected officials with the long-term interests of the economy.  How to do that remains unanswered, but with the world’s best and brightest on the job, it’ll probably only take another two hundred years.

A century ago, America’s film industry was like our telecoms industry, a gold rush enabled by exciting technology and unbridled greed.  The workers at the bottom—carpenters, electricians, painters—had already unionized.  The prospect of the more expensive talent—writers, directors, actors—demanding huge pensions, health benefits and residuals threatened to stem the obscene flow of profits.

What MGM head Louis B Mayer and the other movie moguls needed was a way to prevent another union, some kind of pre-emptive organization that would solve labour disputes internally.  Plus, this body could pump out good public relations to counterbalance the scandalous headlines for which the famous were infamous.  But how to get the creative egomaniacs to join?  What bait would prove irresistible?

Thus the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was born (named to fake a permanence it has since realized), along with their annual awards ceremony, first held as a private dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 1929.  The presentations lasted all of 15 minutes.

What began so long ago as a bunch of old rich white men from California has morphed over the decades into… a bunch of old rich white men from California.  The Los Angeles Times sniffed out almost all of the 6,000 Academy members in 2012, discovering that fully half are over 60, three-quarters are men, and a shocking 94% are white.  If you assembled them all in a room today, it would look like the most racist, sexist, parochial organization in America.

These are the people who vote on the movies each year.  Sorry to ruin the magic, but when a movie gets nominated, it has more to do with idiosyncrasies than excellence.  The nominations are occupationally segregated—writers nod writers, editors nod editors, and so on.  If you’re an unloved genius (and since geniuses make everyone else look stupid, most are), you can languish without recognition.  Daring but obscure films get overlooked, because nobody nominates a film they haven’t seen.  And biases persist because membership is by invite only, so existing members naturally invite like-minded friends.  Good luck, young black women.

If the Academy Awards really are a backward, haphazard affair, how did it become such a big deal, behind only the Super Bowl in American television viewership?  Simple.  Because the TV networks and the movie studios are the same companies, with a shared profit motive.  Fox and 20th Century Fox share a parent.  CBS is part of National Amusements Inc, which also controls Paramount.  NBC and Universal are sister companies.  And ABC, current Oscars telecaster, is housed under The Walt Disney Company.  They pull out the stops at the awards so you pull out your wallet at the cineplex.  As for the global audience, cable TV has proved a far more insidious occupying force than any general’s wet dream, pulsing America’s soft power into every living room.

The Oscars, far from the movie Olympics they’re inflated to be, are more like your local Sports Day, with the same aging guardians, traditional beliefs and meaningless trophies.  It’s a big ad for Hollywood interrupted by smaller ads.  That’s fine for Americans, but you should know better.  There’s a whole world of cinema out there, every bit as emotive, explosive and exhilarating as the latest Yankee fare.

India makes more movies and sells more tickets than the US (easy with 1.2 billion people), and its stars, like Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor, are just as arresting—check out ‘Talaash’.  Nigerian films dominate the Saharan subcontinent.  Japan, Hong Kong, China, Britain, France, Italy and Scandinavia all regularly produce high-quality films, which Hollywood pilfers and remakes, literally banking on your ignorance.  Best Picture winner ‘The Departed’?  That was the kick-ass Hong Kong action flick ‘Infernal Affairs’.  Trade in this year’s nominated ‘Captain Phillips’ for the superior Danish suspense, ‘A Hijacking’.  And don’t even bother with the pending American version—see the Norwegian thriller ‘Headhunters’ now.

Film critic Andrew O’Hehir says it best: “Most people… consume a limited range of entertainment products, sold to them by a few large corporations, for the same reason they eat food that makes them sick. It’s all they know about. Beneath an umbrella of unlimited freedom, they are offered a constricted array of predigested selections, and persuaded that they do not like things they have not tried.”

This Sunday, don’t fall for the ‘American Hustle’.  Skip the Oscars, hop onto Netflix, and let ‘The Hunt’ begin.

Here’s what you need to know—dancehall artiste Vybz Kartel, born Adidja Palmer, is on trial for murder.  Arrested at the height of his lucrative international career, he has been legally incarcerated for thirty months awaiting the decision now before the court.  While eleven souls determine his innocence or guilt, in the court of public opinion a larger trial is simultaneously taking place.  The defendant?  The justice system itself, charged again and again with inefficiency, corruption, and prejudice.  Call it a labouring class action suit, on the books forever, with two million plaintiffs.

For our disenfranchised majority, who may lack the income, literacy or leisure time to read opinion columns, social commentary arrives via dancehall music, which speaks just as eloquently, in our dominant language, and for free.  Super Cat, Shabba Ranks, Bounty Killer, Ninjaman, Buju Banton, Beenie Man, Elephant Man, Sizzla, Busy Signal, Mavado, Vybz Kartel—a long line of lyrical preachers for whom, as often as not, prison is just a waystation on the road to immortality and a house in the hills.  They speak—powerfully, poetically, presciently—for and about the people they leave behind without leaving them behind.

To arrest an artiste is thus to martyr them, to muzzle a voice validated by millions.  Hundreds storm the Supreme Court bastille each day, clamouring for the release of their self-appointed ‘World Boss’.  On the cover of his book, ‘The Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto: Incarcerated but not Silenced’, Mr Palmer poses as civil rights icon Malcolm X.  And his Twitter account channels anti-establishment sentiment to 76,000 followers: “This is a classic case of the system vs ghetto, [the] poor [and] dancehall” and “The war [between us and] Babylon is over 400 yrs old [and] we still a [fight]”.

This gnawing sense of injustice is responsible for our current hydra, where corruption and criminality snake from the alms house to Gordon House, and threaten to choke our society.  A failed government, according to landmark sociologist Max Weber, is one unable to maintain ‘a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence’.  Let’s review the state of our state.

Swaths of Kingston are run by area dons through equal parts fear and benevolence, leaving Members of Parliament a choice between collusion and impotence.  Removing these garrison leaders instigates civil war, as in the bloody extraction of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in 2010, when uniformed officers faced armed opposition from the people they are sworn to protect.

For their part, our police force continues to be more force than police, killing 255 men, women and children last year.  The comparable number for all of Britain?  Zero.  British ex-cop Hamish Campbell, now Assistant Commissioner of the Independent Commission of Investigations, says “there is a widespread belief that the [Jamaican] police are killing people who can’t otherwise get to the courts”.

Why?  Because our courts are impossibly backlogged, with over 400,000 cases in the queue, some describing acts so barbaric, judges deny bail even though a potentially innocent person will live for years in an inhumane constabulary jail.  To put that jaw-dropping (and officially disputed) number in perspective, if we never added another lawsuit, and cleared ten a day, the last holographic docket would wrap up somewhere in the year 2123.

Yes, our institutions fail, badly and regularly, so most of us have lost faith over time.  But when everyone is watching, as we are now with Mr Palmer’s trial, it’s a rare opportunity to restore that faith in a single deposit.  All of us—rich and poor, defense and prosecution, Babylon and badman alike—are better off when the system works.  When everyone does their job, from janitor to judge, that simple but powerful display of competence has an outsized impact.  It reinforces the social contract binding us in this experiment called Jamaica, and reminds us that we are, imperfectly, out of many, one people striving toward common goals.  It makes us a nation.

As Vybz Kartel offers, echoing Buju Banton and a long line of musical forebears: “The life we live, it hard and poor/ that’s why them fight ghetto yute more and more/ but ‘memba, we go on and on and on”.

Valentine’s Day is here.  That means no matter how your Friday begins, if you have a partner, you know how it’s going to end.

There’s nothing wrong with fooling around.  Armed with condoms, diaphragm, aspirin, Plan B, coconut oil, iTunes, blood tests, two passport pictures and a therapist, it can be downright enjoyable.  But performed as nature intended, sex is the ultimate biological credit card—you splurge for seven minutes, pay nothing for nine months, and then get hit with the mother of all fees for the next 20 years.

Those of you in calcified relationships, or conversely in the throes of infatuation, feel free to tune out.   This is really for the pudgy middle of the Bell curve—you know, regular people.  You’re not in the shape, job or house you want.  You’re drifting and mildly depressed.  You’d be in an early midlife crisis, if you only acknowledged it was the early middle of your life.  And in the pit of your stomach, you know you have to do something about it, soon.

Don’t have children.

On the adorable face of it, a kid seems like the perfect solution.  Instead of putting in the hard work of becoming unique or facing the bleak reality of dead dreams, just use Mother Nature’s Instant Life Purpose (recipe: one egg, one teaspoon semen, bake hot).  In a few strokes, you’ll banish those pesky existential questions forever, since everyone assumes parents are doing the best they can, under the circumcisions.  Sorry, circumstances.

Except for one detail—it doesn’t work.  In the most comprehensive study on the subject, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tabulating an astonishing one million people around the world over six years, researchers from Princeton and Stony Brook University confirmed that having kids doesn’t make you happier.  In fact, in the Caribbean, regardless of age, “those with children… have lower life evaluation”, experiencing the same happiness and enjoyment as the childless, but higher levels of “worry, stress and anger”.  Yet roughly three in four of us, they found, keep spitting them out.

Opposition senator Ruel Reid wants to limit us by law to two children each, akin to China—disturbingly draconian, comically unenforceable and ultimately unnecessary.  Because there aren’t any solid reasons to procreate, and haven’t been since the Bronze Age, when we took extinction pretty much off the table.

Yes, the clock is ticking.  Precious, irretrievable time is slipping away not just for childbearing, but everything on your bucket list.  Learning Spanish.  Living in New York.  Walking the Great Wall.  Having a threesome.  Playing the piano.  Buying that Audi.  You’re way behind, and at current costs, that rugrat will set you back a further J$17,000,000 by the time it graduates high school.  You’re not Michelle Obama; you can’t have it all.  Choose.

No, it won’t save your relationship.  You’ll get a grace period of hot pregnancy sex, and a few years of shared wonder at having created a hairless pygmy.  Look, it gurgles when we feed and poke it!  It must love us!  But it’s a phallic fallacy.  After the novelty and upholstery have worn, you’ll still be the same two incompatible people, only with less energy, time and patience than before.  And adding an underage referee to your fights is a criminally bad move.

Yes, your parents want to be grandparents, and your four-bedroom friends look fulfilled.  It’s a trap.  Existing parents are like the living dead in zombie movies—already bitten, they try to swell their ranks, sending you everything from brightly-coloured novelty vibrators on your anniversary to their own deranged offspring on the weekends.  Don’t fall for it.  They’re trying to feel better about buying bigger clothes for themselves along with the children.  Stay in shape and become their favourite aunt and uncle.  You’ll get 80% of the affection for 20% of the affliction.

If you still decide to extinguish your dreams, torpedo your marriage, and forgo being sophisticated, there is a last resort.  Wait a few years and call me to babysit.  I love other people’s kids.  They’re immature, unvarnished and addicted to Lego.  We’ll get along great.