There's an old Jewish saying of encouragement when things are going wrong: "You still have your health!"

I have said it before and I will say it again — Thabo Mbeki was the best president in the world at the time of his sacking.

I’ve always been fascinated by what exactly it is that makes anyone want to act to help anyone else.

Apartheid made some things easier for those of us who were disenfranchised, and one of those things was the choice of careers.

To be a player in the intellectual economy, one either became a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher.

Last week, one of my employees was found guilty in a disciplinary hearing and dismissed by the hearing chairman. The employee appealed the decision which means it falls upon my shoulders to decide whether he stays or goes.

Citizens of the United States of America go to the polls on Tuesday, 6 November 2012. For those of us who live in the real world, it's not necessarily obvious how that simple fact can impact on events in far-flung corners of the globe.

Did you ever stop to think about the right to work? Did you ever stop to think about the right to have a job? Did you ever stop to think about the fact that those are two entirely different things? Did you ever stop to think about the fact that you cannot have one without destroying the other?

Over the past days, at least nine people have died in clashes at Lonmin's Marikana mine in the North West province — two police officers, two security guards, three protesters and two other men. Two of them were hacked to death with pangas.

Stories like this fascinate me.

As a nation, our ability to make informed decisions is only as good as the information we are given.

For example, if our grandparents knew that long term exposure to asbestos would lead to malignant mesothelioma, we would not have used the stuff in building our houses.

Time, someone once said, is mortality. It struck a chord with me because I had not until then considered that time has no meaning to an immortal.

Think about it: if you were going to live forever, you would be under no pressure to want to accomplish anything.

Neil Armstrong's death this week resurrected that thought process.