Category Archives: Sad

Of Fractured Constitutions and Cultural Realities

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I firmly believe that if any president of the United States has ever deserved to be impeached, it would be Donald J. Trump.  He has made high crimes and misdemeanors an art form, primarily those crimes declared to be against humanity at Nuremburg, and he has also rendered the Constitution of the United States a nonsensical decoration.  The latter has impacted the entire system of governance, especially the ill-named Department of Justice.  His claim that he is responsible to no authority other than his own sense of what is moral defines a “dictator”, not in the classical Roman sense, but in the sense of a Führer, perhaps reflective of his German ancestry.  Having said that however, the concept of impeachment has been rendered an abusive and incoherent political football, and not just by the Democratic Party’s two ludicrous impeachments of Mr. Trump during his first term of office but by the equally ludicrous impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton by the Republicans in the 1990s and even by the impeachment of Andrew Johnson following the Civil War.  It is a case of maniacal boys and girls somehow elected to the United States House of Representatives who have been crying wolf for so long that the wolves have taken over.  And if Mr. Trump deserves impeachment for his unconscionable and unconstitutional actions during his second term, what of the Congress that on, a bipartisan basis, has refused to assume its responsibilities, not only with respect to war powers, but with respect to real governmental oversight.  Today’s government oversight hearings are merely polarizing public spectacles of the bread and circus variety, without the bread.  And our judiciary, meant to assure that the foregoing would not occur is and since at least 2013 has been a politicized mess with no respect for laws.

On April 10 of this year, 2026, retired Judge Andrew Napolitano, formerly a conservative commentator on Fox News, published an interesting article[1].  Interesting not only because of its substance but because of its style, one reminiscent of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses and of the method employed by Socrates millennia ago to enlighten his pupils.  It was entirely comprised of questions.  Questions worth reading and questions on which profound reflection is merited.  Questions, in a sense, somehow related to my introductory observations.  The realities reflected in my introductory paragraph and in Judge Napolitano’s article[2] make two things obvious: neither our democracy nor our constitution are functional.  Sacred, yes, just as “Holy Scripture” is sacred to many, but not to be taken seriously.  And they’re not taken seriously.  Neither Holy Scriptures nor our current Constitution, one rendered incoherent through sometimes idealistic but ill-conceived amendments[3].

So, what’s to be done? 

My suggestion, one I and others have made for over half a century, is one political parties of all stripes find anathema[4], the one thing they all agree cannot take place, a new constitutional convention.  They abhor the concept because they uniformly agree that the People assembled as the principal and primary constituent, assembled as “We the People”, cannot be trusted, regardless of platitudes such as “sovereignty resides in and emanates from the People”.  However, our Founding Fathers did provide a mechanism for such an eventuality, one they provided in the Constitution itself.  In relevant part, Article V of the United States Constitutions states “… on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [Congress] shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which … shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes as Part of this Constitution when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress….”. 

As of early 2026, the movement for a state sponsored constitutional convention, one technically known as an Article V convention, had gained significant momentum with the project having been adopted by legislatures in 20 states. To trigger the first-ever Article V convention in U.S. history, 34 states must pass “matching resolutions on the same topic”, 14 more need to do so.  The following are the most likely 14 states to join the project: Iowa (passed in one chamber previously); Wyoming (passed in one chamber previously); North Carolina (passed in one chamber previously); South Dakota (passed in one chamber previously); Virginia (passed in one chamber previously); New Hampshire (passed in one chamber previously); New Mexico (passed in one chamber previously); Kentucky (being actively targeted during 2026); Ohio (being actively targeted during 2026); Pennsylvania (being actively targeted during 2026); New Jersey (being actively targeted during 2026); Washington (being actively targeted during 2026); Illinois (being actively targeted during 2026); and, Minnesota (considered a swing state for the movement).

A real constitution, one binding and enforced and reflective of the popular will, one percolated from below rather than imposed from above or by corrupt elites would go a long way towards depolarizing our divided citizenry and making our government functional rather than dysfunctional[5]. A constitution crafted to make truth in the media a viable option and to make non-interference by foreign powers in United States politics a binding rule, one that prioritized government expenditures so that the “Common Welfare” came first and foreign intervention was banned (as George Washington once urged), one that depoliticized the judiciary.  One resolving the issue of whether or not the United States should remain true to its immigrant roots or discard them and which democratically resolved the issue of whether the United States should return to its federal premises or become a unitary state, perhaps a bottoms up unitary state with most power focused in county governments.  All of the foregoing would go a long way towards achieving and maintain the so called “American Dream”.

Of course, a constitution that does not reflect the popular political culture is useless as the Weimer Republic which gave rise to the Nazis made clear.  Our political culture also needs a great deal of work.  A return to empathy reflective of the so called Golden Rule and to mutual respect recognizing the value of differences of opinion, rather than their ridicule.

I wonder which of the two would be more difficult to attain: constitutional or cultural reform. 

And I wonder if we are not already past a point of cultural no return?
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] Napolitano, Andrew P. (2026):  “Killing & Indifference”, Consortium News, Volume 31, Number 98 — Friday, April 10, 2026 available at https://consortiumnews.com/2026/04/10/killing-indifference/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=19e366d7-5937-4c7b-86ee-1a1624d04b5c.

[2] The main difference between Judge Napolitano’s perspective and mine is that he still believes the current United States Constitution is viable.  I do not.

[3] Calvo Mahé, Guillermo (2023):  “Motley Constitutionalism: a labyrinthine aphorism”; Medium, July 30, 2023 available at https://guillermo-calvo-mahe.medium.com/motley-constitutionalism-a-labyrinthine-aphorism-9270c689f12d.

[4] And that includes third parties like the Libertarian and Green parties and many others.

[5] The term “dysfunctional” is not synonymous with non-functional, it implies functionality but in pain.  “Non-functional might well be significantly better as the late Judge, Gideon J. Tucker noted in a 1866 decision when he wrote “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session”, a quote later made famous by the late, great author and social commentator, Mark Twain and comedian Will Rogers.

An Easter Sunday Reflection in 2026

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It’s Easter Sunday in 2026; a holiday the diverse branches and twigs of Christianity (there are so many of them) can agree on given that it’s based on the Hebrew version of the lunar calendar rather than on the calendars established by Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII.  It’s a strange holiday this year, a year that is a sort of culmination in a cycle of genocide, ethnic cleansing and orchestrated Islamophobia that has disclosed that international law and human rights have always been illusions, perhaps more accurately delusions, and that the purported hopes of a certain Hebrew carpenter and civic leader from Palestine for equity and decency have, for two millennia, been used as a diversion to facilitate control of humanity by the worst among us.  War in the name of peace, hatred and polarization in the name of love and inequity in the name of equity and justice. 

My Christian friends, or at least many of them, too many, shrug their shoulders at the foregoing and note that humans are imperfect.  Then, in too many cases, they enthusiastically support obvious evil cleverly disguised as patriotism. 

I am not a believer in the divinity of Yešu the Nazarene but I am a believer in his message of social justice and his golden rule and so, every holiday dedicated to him is for me, a day of shame. 

I wonder if it will ever be any different.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Irony by the Dawn’s Early Light

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Many decades ago, actually, in 1984, a film, Red Dawn[1] was released.  It was directed by John Milius from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kevin Reynolds and starred Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey with supporting roles played by Ben Johnson, Darren Dalton, Harry Dean Stanton, Ron O’Neal, William Smith and Powers Boothe.  The film impacted me a great deal in a number of different ways.  It instilled a great deal of empathy in me for people I’d been taught to view as uncivilized terrorists, for people I’d been taught I should despise and hate and who were subhumans not entitled to human rights (even though none were represented, even indirectly, in the film).  But it also made me wonder how the United States citizenry would actually react were the United States ever to be successfully invaded and conquered by a foreign government.  Little did I know at the time that such conquest had already taken place, albeit imperceptibly.

The film dealt with a takeover of the United States by foreign communist forces, Soviets and Cubans as I recall, acting under a United Nations mandate during a major internal crisis, and of the refusal of a small segment of United States civil society to accept foreign domination, even if it was purportedly well intentioned.  The film, as history has demonstrated, was inversely prescient as well as revealing.  The roles, in reality, are and have always been the obverse of reality where it is the United States and its allies that have been and are the invaders and occupiers and looters virtually everywhere.  Something the United States inherited from the British and the French.

The emotional irony involves the profoundly empathic justification generated by the film for the resistance, one with which United States’ citizens viewing the film emotionally bond not realizing that such resistance mirrors resistance against United States colonialism and imperialism all over the world.  Che Guevara, of course, comes to mind but so do the members of Al Qaeda and Isis who resisted the US conquests in the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine, and today’s Iranians, and the Cubans and Nicaraguans who have been resisting the US for more than half a century.  And Chileans in 1973, and Argentinians in the 1970’s and today, Panamanians, and Grenadians, and Haitians, and Yemenis, and Libyans, and Syrians, etc., etc., etc.

In today’s context, internally, given the current situation within the current United States, the film leads has led me to reflect on how far from reality John Milius and Kevin Reynolds strayed when they wrote the screenplay given that current history exposes a United States occupied and looted by Fifth Columnist[2] “Israel Firsters”, bought and paid for by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”), a United States whose citizens, for the most part, be they politically Democrats or Republicans, accept domination by (rather than resist) a tiny foreign power that uses money to fuel its occupation instead of bombs and bullets (those are reserved for use elsewhere), a situation where many (and at the federal level, most) United States elected officials receive the bulk of their income “sort of” from abroad. Where elected officials in many instances receive many times their official salaries in the form of political contributions but also in the form of highly paid post-retirement consultancies and stipends, from AIPAC and its billionaire allies.  My use of the phrase “sort of” reflects the irony (and irony is an oft repeated term in this article) that the funds used to make such payments (some would refer to them as bribes) come indirectly through a devious route from the pockets of United States tax payers whose taxes then to Israel and the “defense” industry (against which Ike, in his wisdom, once warned us[3]) and through them to select investors who then contribute a portion of their “winnings” to AIPAC, which then recirculates a portion of them (everyone needs a bite of the proverbial apple) to the servile “civil servants” who authorized their misdirection in the first place.  Sounds a lot like a shell game doesn’t it?  But a shell game with consequences far worse than mere small time peculation. 

Even worse perhaps, at least in the context of the film’s premises, many active and retired United States military and police personnel wholeheartedly support the looting of the United States and the commission of genocide, ethnic cleansing and wars of conquest, at the expense of United States tax payers, violating every principle they purportedly hold dear, applauding the wholesale murder of journalists and medical personnel and educators as well as the wholesale slaughter of women and children.  It is even worse from my perspective because some of them have been my classmates and are people I have long loved and admired and believed to be profoundly honorable as well as patriotic.

It makes me wonder whether the film was an intentional satire ridiculing who the populace of the United States thought they were.  After all, the United States, building on the framework initiated by Woodrow Wilson in Hollywood during the purported war to end all wars (with George Creel as his handyman), has always appropriated the heroism of others as its own. Witness the perception in the United States that it was primarily responsible for victories in World Wars One and Two when the reality was far, far different[4].  Or the purported bravery of United States aviators murdering thousands of civilians from miles in the sky or safely ensconced in videogame style bunkers as they rain down death on civilians below.  Those are not mirrors into which we enjoy gazing.  We prefer the illusory Hollywood spectacles where United States’ Davids destroy foreign Goliaths against impossible odds.

Again, ironically (that word again), the United States utterly corrupt leaders and brave but naïve military men and women are standing by and indeed assisting in the looting of their three-hundred-and-fifty-million co-citizens by the most evil selfish and depraved ten million people the world has ever known.  So while those ten million enjoy free health care, free education, subsidized housing and alimentation and unbounded military weaponry, all paid for by overworked and underpaid United States taxpayers, none of those benefits exist at home.  Horrors!!!  That would be socialism.  But apparently, paying for socialist programs is fine as long as we are not tainted by benefitting from them.

Irony indeed reigns. 

All of the foregoing is massively supported in the United States by Christian Zionists cheering on the end of the world so that Jesus can return and consign those ten million who they currently hail and support as well as many innocent Jews to perdition, … after Jesus returns. 

How sick is that?

Israeli Zionists know that and scoff.  How can a Jesus consigned to boil in pools of feces in the Hell to which Zionists are sure he’s been consigned ever return at all?  He’s as securely disabled as are the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims that Zionists have been able to “eliminate” since the blessed year of 1948.  1948; ironically (again), the year when Eric Arthur Blair, writing as George Orwell, first published his seminal dystopian novel, 1984.

So, “Red Dawn”. 

Enlightening in a sick way to the few who can see and who care about morals and justice and equity and peace but, fortunately for the powers that be, those few are an insignificant lot, more like gnats, troublesome but not all that dangerous thanks to the blinded mases who keep cheering for their captors and for the Fifth Columnists who lead and purportedly protect them.  “Rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air by the dawn’s early light” a nice turn of phrase by a vehement supporter of slavery, one that all citizens of the United States, even the descendants of former slaves, are expected to revere.  But nowadays we can safely note that they’re our bombs and our rockets raining down on others (through our “generosity”) as they once purportedly rained down on Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s harbor.

In the film, one aspect touched me was when Ron O’Neil, playing the role of Cuban Colonel Ernesto Bella, spared captured United States’ “freedom fighters”, having become disgusted by his senseless role in the subjugation of others.  A role not echoed by very many United States “patriots” today.  But one can hope.  One can hope that at some point our military, if not our political leaders, will come to their senses and awake from the somnambulant nightmare in which they’ve permitted not only our country but our world to be placed.

That Red Dawn was released in “1984”, the year when Eric Arthur Blair predicted that our world would have attained its current form may have been deliberate, but probably was not.

It should have been though.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] See superficial description of the film on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn.

[2] See description of Fifth Columnists on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column

[3] “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  President Dwight David Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (January 17, 1961), at https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address.

[4] The casualties suffered by the major participants in World Wars One and Two were as follows:  The Soviet Union/Russia suffered the highest losses in World War Two (22–27 million) and 2 million deaths in World War One.  China experienced 20 million deaths in World War Two, mainly civilians due to Japanese occupation.  Germany suffered about 5.5 million military deaths in World War Two and roughly 2.7 million in World War One.  The United Kingdom lost only 383,600 deaths in World War Two but 886,000 in World War One.  On the other hand, the United States only lost 416,800 deaths in World War Two and 116,000 deaths in World War One.

Brief Reflections on Extraordinary Men Rising from Very Humble Beginnings: The Case of Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

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Ever since I can remember I’ve been an admirer of Leonardo da Vinci, the bastard son of Ser Piero da Vinci d’Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido, a successful Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi.  Leonardo was apparently born in either Anchiano, a country hamlet near the Florentine commune of Vinci, or in a house in Florence, part of the ancient Italian region of Tuscany, owned by his father, in either case, seeking privacy to hide the illegitimate birth.  His mother may have been an Arab or Chinese slave although a book published by Martin Kemp and the archival researcher Giuseppe Pallanti claims that she was born in 1436 to a poor farmer, was orphaned at the age of fourteen and gave birth to Leonardo da Vinci at the age of sixteen, after which she purportedly had five other children with a different man, also a poor farmer. Leonardo was initially raised in relative poverty by his mother and her husband but eventually Leonardo came to enjoy a positive relationship with his father’s family, especially with his uncle and grandfather, although perhaps not with his father who was too busy with business matters.  Consequently, he only received a very basic and informal education in writing, reading, and mathematics, although his artistic talents were recognized at an early age and emphasis was quickly placed on their development.

It is telling and very worth considering that from such inauspicious beginnings perhaps the world’s most universally talented man arose and to ask ourselves how many other multifaceted geniuses born under comparable circumstances never had the opportunity to attain their potential.  In my own life I’ve known a number of men and women who fit that characterization.  In this regard, the world owes a great debt to Andrea del Verrocchio, an Italian sculptor, painter and goldsmith who was a master of a workshop in Florence and who apparently accepted Leonardo, first as a studio boy but when he turned 17, as an apprentice, setting him on his path to greatness, first as an artist and then, … well, as a universal genius. 

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci is one of my greatest heroes, but I admire him less for his myriad successes than because he attained them despite the humility of his origins.  One thing I have always found incomprehensible however is the fame of his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, and the worshipful claims concerning the subject’s beauty, and especially her smile.  To my perhaps jaded and certainly inexpert tastes, she is not even particularly attractive and as for the “enigmatic” nature of her smile, I find nothing at all special about it, especially when compared to my wife’s.  I assume many other husbands, boyfriends and fathers share my perspective and that some may also share my curiosity.  What most troubles me however concerning the Mona Lisa hysteria is that it obscures Leonardo’s truly great achievement, having risen from such humble beginnings to such stunning heights without the intervention of martial opportunities and successes, the more usual route to success for those born of humble origins.  One wonders how many people who might eventually have proven to be a new Leonardo we trash as we expel those desperate to become part of our society and who ask only to be permitted to work and grow among us?  “… [g]ive me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore …” indeed.

The foregoing frequently leads me to reflect on the reality that when people are not assisted in attaining their potential, it is not only they who suffer, but the whole world, and on the stupidity and cupidity of those who oppose state assistance to the most humble among us.  We certainly desperately need a world were the most humble can attain their full potential, a concept which the Athenian philosopher Plato referred to as an essential component of “justice” and understood as essential for optimal societal development, the common welfare and attainment of the best possible world.  Something which, despite the millennia since Plato, his mentor Socrates and his student Aristotle contemplated how to attain justice, we are very, very far from attaining.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Pandora’s Box, Chemical Warfare, Thomas Hobbes and the Israeli-United States State of Nature

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‘Intentional Chemical Warfare’: Toxic Black Rain in Tehran after US-Israel Bomb Oil Facilities, article by Jon Queally published on March 8, 2026 in Common Dreams:  “These attacks on fuel storage facilities amount to nothing less than intentional chemical warfare against the Iranian citizens.”

Murphy’s Law and the purported Law of Unintended Consequences sometimes coincide and they may have done so when the United States and Israel bombed Iranian petroleum facilities creating a toxic chemical rain that seems to have violated the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction which purportedly entered into force on 29 April 1997.  Israel has signed the treaty but has not ratified it (although it has, as it does with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, accused others of its abuse and with the help of its proxy, the United States, has sought to have other countries punished for its purported violation). 

The foregoing is not surprising as both Israel and the United States now feel that they have the right to violate International Law at all levels with impunity.  But, in this instance, they may have bitten off more than they expected.  Chemical weapons (and biological weapons as well) are not difficult to manufacture or to put into play and having opened Pandora’s Box (figuratively, it was an amphora, not a box) it may be that other states or even non-state actors will also decide that International Law is not a norm binding on them, certainly not on them but not on their adversaries, and may decide that when treaties are not honored, they certainly do not apply with respect to protecting the violators.

Until now both Israel and the United States have enjoyed absolute impunity in their violations of international law assassinating and kidnapping foreign heads of state, blatantly stealing other countries national resources, imposing illegal blockades and embargoes, attacking, invading and destroying foreign cities and towns, even engaging in blatant genocide and ethnic cleansing but, until now, there seemed now viable means for the victims to strike back.  Strike back at the United States and Israeli homelands, not just defensively.  But when you place an adversary in a position where it has nothing to lose, the consequences can be terrible.  That has not been the case in modern history, until now.  There have always been the protections provided to the vanquished under International Humanitarian Law and International Law, but those concepts have proven to be delusory illusions.  Even the Nazis refused to violate very international norm.

So what now?

Chemical weapons, mass poisoning, etc., are seemingly on the table but the real horror, the one likely to wipe us out, is the one apparently recently experimented with under the guise of the Covid 19 pandemic, something many feel was a trial run by the United States, Israel and their allies.  And that is biological warfare.  And biological warfare can quickly spin out of human control.

The sixteenth century English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, used the concept of a primordial State of Nature as an illustration of a lawless society, one without any rules other than strength, the kind of society to which both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump allude from time to time and one which their ministers and followers seem to fully embrace.  The State of Nature was a metaphor for a time where only the strongest ruled and ruled with impunity, but Hobbes noted that even the strongest had vulnerabilities, they had to sleep, and thus a rules based society emerged.  That society has now, in large part, broken down. 

Both the United States and Israel act as though they can engage in any kind of conduct, regardless of how depraved.  And in that they, especially the Israelis, enjoy widespread domestic support.  But cheap and easily deployed biological and chemical weapons may change that equation leaving us to wonder what species will replace us after our extinction and whether, eventually, some successor species will evolve with the ethical and moral instincts necessary to assure their survival.  Something we, or at least enough of us, seemingly lack.

The Armageddon that Christian Zionist pray for may be on the brink of arrival, albeit not quite in the manner they expect.  If Jesus does return, he may well return to find nobody home.  
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on the Unprovoked but Predictable United States and Israeli Attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran on the 28th day of February, 2026

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Shades of December 7, 1941, but in reverse.  And again, of the Nazi Holocaust, but in reverse.  This time it’s the United States that is the villain, as are Zionists and as is Israel.  Indeed, a more objective historical analysis of the causes of the Second World War and of the history of its protagonists would call into question just who the historical purveyors of genocide were.  Think of the indigenous population of the United States, think of the genocide against Africans and East Indians perpetrated by the British and the French and the Belgians, or more historically, of the genocide perpetrated on the Canaanites, and on Jericho, and on so many other peoples as reflected in the Tanakh.  Perhaps reality has just become a bit more clear, a bit more focused.  And reality is not all that pretty.

It’s difficult to put into words the infamy involved in the latest United States’ collaboration with the pedophilic, genocidal regime which has obviously taken control over politics, governance and communications throughout the so called Western World.  The actions undertaken by the United States and Israel on that infamous day at the end of February in 2026.

On December 7, 1941, less perfidious actions by the Empire of Japan against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor were labelled “a day that would live in infamy” by then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But sneak attacks during negotiations have become the norm for the United States, in each instance, based on obvious lies, but not involving United States’ interests nor United States territorial expansion, just the sacrifice of the lives of United States citizens and of millions of innocent victims to further the ethnic cleansing, genocidal and expansionist goals of the worst people in modern history, worse even that the Nazis whom they emulate.

That all of the foregoing is applauded and facilitated by Christian fundamentalists mainly in the United States, Israeli firster despite Zionist disdain for Christians (who Zionists loathe and as to whom they claim a god given right to expectorate) is not just sickening but amazing.  However, Christianity, at least in its Pauline version, has always been hypocritical, but rarely has it been so self-delusional, subordinating its interests to those of the people who most despise them, those who claim that Yešu was the black magician bastard child of a prostitute (see, Toledot Yeshu).

It all once again proves the accuracy of the Orwellian premises published in 1948.  All of them.  Self-delusion is as prevalent as the delusion imposed by the Zionists who have attained control over virtually the entirety of United States and Western media, both official and social, just as they acquired, or at least rented, both major United States political parties in the United States through AIPAC and in the United Kingdom through the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (ZF), and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).  That more and more United States citizens and citizens of countries in Western Europe are awakening to the foregoing, especially among the young (including young Jews who ought never to be confused with Zionists), may not be enough and certainly will not be timely.

A large segment of the population in the United States, including people I’ve loved and admired and with whom I was educated, people with whom I once felt I shared values of decency and morality and equity and justice, are delusionally applauding the actions of the United States and Israel, having somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary, become convinced that Iran was the power mad international villain set on conquest.  It makes me understand, at long last, how the peaceful and socially aware German people became Nazi supporters, able to look in their mirrors and admire what they saw.  But that understanding brings no solace. 

The sins of the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump administrations against even the semblance of human decency and especially of the values the United States purports to represent, are eradicable and if history is a guide, may all too soon come home to roost.  Certainly the reputation, even if illusory, of which former president Ronald Reagan once spoke, the metaphorical “shining city on a hill”, has been utterly destroyed, at least among the people of the world, if not among their leaders. 

February 28, 2026, a day that will live in infamy indeed.

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Zionism, Antisemitism, Jeffrey Epstein and the Purported Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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No matter how frequently stakes are driven into the heart of the claim that all Jews are part of a sinister plot to enslave all non-Jews, a plot intricately woven into the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which seemingly refuse to die[1], related suspicions and rumors resurface.  It is worth analyzing why.  Most recently they are resurfacing on a worldwide basis as a result of the impunity with which Israel has conducted a campaign of land theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine as well as throughout the Middle East, a campaign that has lasted, not since October 7, 2023 but during the past three quarters of a century; but now, even more given the ghastly revelations concerning the depredations of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices, almost all of whom were devout Zionists.  Recent related events have exacerbated the problem due to the facility with which Israel has manipulated the United States, and indeed, most of Western Europe since the end of the Second World War to engage in a series of armed conflicts in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf[2].  Indeed, the roots of that issue precede the First World War, you know, the one that was originally referred to as the War to End All Wars, and the role in all of the foregoing of a small group of Jewish atheists (sort of an oxymoron) and Christian adventists (with a small “a” to distinguish them from the denomination of that name), both identifying as “Zionists”.

The so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” have been characterized as fraudulent for over a century.  They were likely initially written by Russian anti-Semites to slander Jews. Ironically however it seems that Zionists[3] may have used at least some of the suggestions contained therein as mechanisms to become the world’s most powerful group, one reveling in related impunity.  Disturbingly, Zionists actions now reflect some of the most horrific calumnies attributed to Jews during past millennia because Zionists in Israel engage, not only in genocide and ethnic cleansing, but apparently in the ghoulish harvesting of human organs from involuntary “donors”, in the wholesale murder of women and children and have praised rape as a legitimate instrument of social control.  An indicia that not all Jews are Zionists and indeed, that many strongly oppose Zionist atrocities was recently illustrated when the Israeli army’s chief legal officer, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, resigned and was subsequently arrested (earlier this month for leaking a surveillance video that evinced the brutal rape of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military detention facility during 2024.

What an irony. 

Unfortunately for non-Zionist Jews who reflect real traditional Jewish values, while the Elders of Zion, at least as reflected in the purported Protocols, may well have been fictional, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) certainly is not nor are the numerous Zionist billionaires whose atrocities are reflected in the so called Epstein files.  Nor are AIPAC’s Zionist counterparts in the United Kingdom which destroyed the political career of statesman Jeremy Corbin, replacing him with Keith Stammer, and in France, gave us Rothschild protégé Emmanuel Macron and, in Germany, Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz as well as German Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen in the European Union.   

In the United States, AIPAC exercises de facto veto power over all the presidential and most of the Congressional candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties, choices most voters would rather not support, but the AIPAC controlled portion of the national media constantly convinces us that there are no other choices and manages to keep us too divided and polarized to do anything but accept AIPAC’s dictates, no matter the cost to us in taxes diverted for Israel’s benefit, or the cost in human lives lost or destroyed, both here and abroad in senseless military adventures and interventions.  Zionist media control is growing as illustrated by the recent acquisitions by Larry Ellison and his son David, two of the world’s wealthiest billionaires[4] and passionate supporters of Zionism, of Israel and of AIPAC who have recently consolidated their media influence through a series of strategic moves, most notably through the Paramount-Skydance merger which provided them with control over the Warner Bros. Discovery and its CNN news network and a significant portion of TikTok’s U.S. operations, one of the few social media platforms that have previously permitted broad uncensored criticism of Israel.  Furthermore, the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence, especially as used in Internet browsers and search engines now also “coincidentally” censors comments deemed “unfairly” critical of Israel, AIPAC or Zionism in general, an area in which the Ellisons have also recently invested heavily.

Given the Jeffrey Epstein related horrors being revealed daily which include not only pedophilia but unimaginable vampiric blood drinking rituals and cannibalism by world economic and political leaders, it seems to many people all over the world that we are in a hopeless downward ethical and moral spiral and that instead of the perpetual peace envisioned by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, we are trapped in perpetual war engaged in primarily to generate profits and that, to a great extent, that downward spiral is led by Zionists.  And that such downward spiral continues with circuses, if not bread, keeping us carefully anesthetized, circuses like sports and television programs and cinema and concerts, and fake news.  Arenas where we can futilely rail against each other, wasting our energy but somehow feeling as though we’ve won something, perhaps even as if someone had heard us and acted. 

And “someones” have seemingly heard us, and they have acted, just not who we think or in the manner we hoped, and certainly not in the manner we need.  But the foregoing does not mean that terrible the status quo will continue without meaningful opposition.  Increasingly, younger people all over the world, the United States and Western Europe, many of them Jewish, are protesting against the perpetual war we have been involved in seemingly forever, including against the genocide, ethnic cleansing and massive violations of human rights being orchestrated by the government of Israel, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany.  A number of countries have taken affirmative actions to minimize the new holocaust taking place by filing complaints with the International Criminal Court in Rome and with the International Court of Justice, as well as by formally recognizing the existence of a Palestinian State and by restricting or even breaking off relationships with Israel.  While such opposition, to date, has been no match for the political, financial and cultural power amassed by Zionists, both Jewish and Christian[5], and by the billionaire class in general, perhaps the all-pro consummate politician, Abraham Lincoln, had a point when he asserted that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”, and to an extent, that hypothesis may be proving at least partially accurate.  However, the growing reaction to Zionist atrocities and abuses is not without significant danger of its own.  It may well lead to abuses as malign as those it is initially seeking to eliminate.  Rather than a temporary moral and ethical awakening, it appears that a reactive increase in the age old immorality of antisemitism is also occurring.  And that solves nothing.  It never has.

It is essential therefore to forcefully acknowledge that neither AIPAC nor Zionism in general represent all Jews and indeed, to note that Zionism was founded by atheists rather than religious Jews, and that Zionists, rather than being descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or even of the Jews who inhabited Palestine at the dawn of the Common Era, are, for the most part, descendants of Turkish, Kazhar and Russian converts to Judaism who today primarily comprise only one segment of Judaism, the Ashkenazi.  And it is also essential, notwithstanding the insistence by Zionists that they represent all Jews and notwithstanding the reality that the creation of Israel in Palestine against the wishes of those who had inhabited those lands for millennia was a travesty, especially in light of the judgments of the Nuremburg Tribunals, it is critical to acknowledge that Jews and Judaism have been a force for decency and tolerance for millennia and have positively contributed a great deal towards Western civilizations. 

As an aside, it is incredibly frustrating and sad that the three branches of the Abrahamic faiths have proven so internecinely fratricidal and that, rather than sharing Abram of the Sumerians as their founder, they all seem to be offspring of the mythical Cain.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] I most recently reencountered references to the purported protocols in an Instagram post I found at https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOko_JjjmpG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link (but which may have been removed).  That post led me to write and share these observations.

[2] Recent revelations, although circulation has been limited due to de facto media self-censorship, indicate that a great deal of Zionist power may be the result of blackmail and extortion activities targeting political, military and business leaders such as those which have been attributed to the abuse of underage girls and boys orchestrated by Jeffery Epstein, possibly acting on behalf of the Israeli Mossad and perhaps even United States, British and French intelligence agencies. 

[3] Note, it is essential to emphasize that not all Jews are Zionists nor, as described above, are all Zionists Jews.

[4] Studies indicate that while the Jewish population in the United States is approximately 3%, Zionists represent 40% of its billionaires.

[5] There may well be more Christian than Jewish Zionists, especially among “fundamentalist” Christians in the United States.

“Heil” Rather than “Hail” to the Chief

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The United States finally has a Führer!

It’s been a long time coming.  At least since the administration of William Jefferson Clinton.  And at each stage it has become seemingly worse but the sad truth is that is has just become a more and more obvious reality.  Donald J. Trump is just a more blatant and more honest version of Joseph Robinette Biden. Then again, perhaps today’s United States Führer is really Benjamin Netanyahu (well, really Mileikowsky, but that’s another story), and he has probably been the Führer since before he even became prime minister of Israel.

The United States Constitution has been illusory since the Civil War, evolving from a confederate structure to today’s unitary state in all but name, and unitary in the dictatorial sense, where the semblance of separation of powers is only a sad delusion.  Today’s system of governance in the United States of North America (as we in South America prefer to call it), both domestically and internationally, has become one that emulates Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, a corporatist state in training with plenty of billionaires surfing happily in the current president’s wake.  I don’t state that as an insult but rather an acknowledgement that all power has become concentrated in the presidency, something that occurred historically in ancient Rome when the Republic morphed into the Empire.  The judiciary has become subsumed at the highest level and although numerous members of the federal judiciary at the District and Circuit levels remain loyal in their decisions to “they who appointed them” now, given the composition of the Supreme Court, that is at best a stalling tactic.

One of the most repulsive aspects of “fascism” (the sociopolitical and economic philosophy common to Nazis, Zionists and today’s United States rather than the meaningless pejorative aphorism used to describe political enemies), in addition to its proclivity for genocide, ethnic cleansing and the quest for lebensraum, is how it turns decent people, moral people, into willing accomplices.  Fascism is democratic, it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t.   Mussolini, Hitler, Netanyahu and Mr. Trump (as well as Messrs. Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden) all enjoyed broad popular support from the electorates which, for whatever reasons (and the reasons were and are diverse), their members had been led to enthusiastically espouse.  Not that there wasn’t opposition to fascist governments then and now but thuggery by masked agents of the state, masked to assure the anonymity essential for impunity, took care of that in each case, and violently so.  Interestingly, fascism (as well as other related systems) relies heavily on a sense of outraged victimhood and purported moral and xenophobic ethnic superiority as essential unifying elements.  And the foregoing describes todays United States and its idol Israel, to a tee.

Ironically, most of the United States electorate is aware of the internal fascist problem (though they have no idea what fascism is) but they have been successfully polarized so that the principle of “divide and conquer” is effectively used to completely blunt such realization.  At the federal level, the United States political system is not democratic in any sense, it was designed to create the illusion of democracy but without democracy’s impediments to control by political and economic elites.  Moreover, a two party dictatorship was imposed through legislative favoritism so that at the federal level, it is virtually impossible to attain public office unless one is sponsored by either the ill-named Democratic Party or the equally ill-named Republican Party.  In reality, they are two sides of the same coin and the coin is owned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which not only funds approximately 90% of all federal elective officials but destroys any candidate who rejects its dominance, in each case, through massive expenditures that in an ethical system would be identified as “bribes”.  Those voters whose allegiance is pledged to the Democratic and Republican parties clearly see the fascist tendencies in the other party but are certain that their own party is pristinely patriotic and dedicated to the ideals pursuant to which the United States was purportedly founded, i.e., democracy, liberty, justice under law, etc., although few have any idea what such ideals mean.  Thus, the fascist cancer has successfully invaded and conquered the United States body politic, … now apparently terminally.

That fascist leaders (e.g., a Führer) behave in a manner that any normally aware person would recognize as insane apparently poses no problem.  Indeed, the insanity of the Führer’s conduct is an asset, at least in the beginning, as opponents, having no idea how to deal with it, initially acquiesce to numerous ludicrous demands, demands that all too often have horrific consequences.  Demands that become incrementally more ludicrous until all aspects of organized civil conduct are replaced by the Führer’s personal morality of the moment, something that Mr. Trump personally clearly and unequivocally specified when faced with challenges based on international, constitutional and ordinary legal impediments.  Had he a bit more historical acuity he probably would have quoted French King Luis XIV by adding “L’État, c’est moi”!

It is amazing to me, and very disturbing, that so many career military officers in the United States who I have known for most of my life and who I respect and admire, men who have taken an oath to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States”, now take umbrage at the observation by a retired senior military officer and current member of Congress that members of the United States armed forces “must not obey illegal orders”.  That was the crux of the law imposed by the United States and its allies on the entire world immediately following World War Two through the decisions of the Nuremburg tribunals, decisions against the leaders, civil as well as military, of the defeated Nazi regime.  Hypocritical decisions, that’s true.  The United States and its allies had engaged in conduct at least as evil as had the losers in that conflict and the decisions were based on purportedly prohibited ex post facto “legislation”.  But at any rate, those decisions have proven farcical, especially with respect to the Zionists who were so active as judges and prosecutors in such tribunals but whose descendants today claim that “international law does not apply to them”.   And by extension, it cannot apply to their chief enablers, primarily the United States, but also the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Fifth French Republic.  Indeed, to any of the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

So we now live in the Hobbesian “State of Nature”, one essential for functional Führers where, as enunciated recently by a senior United States official, this time against Denmark, one of the United States own allies, that “only might makes right”.  And the chickens have come home to roost, as they tend to do.  The bullying of other countries is now not only all inclusive but it is now being applied to citizens and nationals of the United States by heavily armed, anonymous, poorly trained uniformed thugs, members of an evolving constitutionally proscribed virtual federal police force, and the states be damned.  After all, states rely on the Constitution first put into effect in 1791 for their authority, and that Constitution is now a zombie….

At best.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Paradoxical Reflections as 2025 Morphs into 2026

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Dateline, January 4, 2026

For many historians the assassinations of Roman reformers Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE and of his brother, Gaius Gracchus, in 121 BCE, both tribunes of the plebs who pushed for agrarian and social reforms against powerful Senate opposition, marked the end of the Roman Republic, at least in constitutional terms.  The rational system of governance represented by the Republic broke down after that with the dictatorships of Marius and Sulla, and then the triumvirates of Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius (self-denominated Magnus), and Marcus Licinius Crassus until Octavian Caesar initiated the Imperium a century later. 

In the case of the United States of North America (a more accurate name than the United States or the United States of America), constitutional order, at least involving the constitution usurpatively adopted in 1789, first broke down in 1861 with the war between the states (now usually referred to as the Civil War except among conservative Caucasians in the South where it is known as the War of Northern Aggression), being thereafter replaced by a militarily imposed new constitutional order which was, in turn, more legally replaced during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson by a new antifederalist centrist variant through adoption of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th amendments, amendments which, because they virtually destroyed the Constitution’s federalist premises, could well be considered unconstitutional constitutional amendments as described by Professor Richard Albert of the University of Texas’ School of Law.  But the end of any semblance of constitutionalism in the United States entered its death throes, as did the concept of international law, during the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton in 1992, culminating in their absolute demise during the second term of the presidency of Donald John Trump.  By that time, most of those who, upon assuming office in the United States, whether civil or military, took an oath to “defend and protect the Constitution of the United States” in truth were dedicated to serving the dictates of the de facto Führer, a more accurate term for the dictatorial presidents of the United States that started with Mr. Clinton and reached a high point (so far) with the presidency of Donald Trump.  They (the de facto führers), in turn, along with most of the bureaucracy and the members of the United States Congress, owed their loyalty to the unelected, secretive, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which bought most of them with monetary contributions and “favors” and which in turn owed its fealty to the Hobbesian Zionist Israeli government.

The result, both domestically and internationally, was a return to what philosopher Thomas Hobbes had once described as “the State of Nature”, not a benevolent environmentally friendly status but one where brute power was the only reality that mattered.  In both cases, the Roman and that of the United States, indeed, in that of the entire global state system, the demise of constitutional government, in each case based on superficial principles of liberty and democracy, experienced a gradual, unperceived death which, by the time it had become permanent, was virtually ignored, unmourned by the vast majority of the populations they were meant to serve. 

Unbidden, the ancient Trojan prophetess Cassandra comes to mind as I write this, and the political prophets Aldous Huxley and his former student, Eric Arthur Blair (writing as George Orwell) as well, as do the warnings in the farewell addresses of presidents George Washington and Dwight David Eisenhower.  But all to no avail. 

In this world, evil, greed, impunity and hypocrisy seemingly always triumph.  At least where collectives are involved.  It turns out that collectives, meant to foster collaboration in the quest for mutual benefit instead serve as means for the most ruthless and selfish among us to concentrate power, facilitated by our fatal individual naiveté and immense capacity for self-deception.

As I all too frequently end my reflections nowadays, I again see Elphaba Thropp (albeit in her earlier 1930s incarnation in the film, “The Wizard of Oz”) slowly melting after having been inadvertently doused with water by the ingénue, Dorothy, with Elphaba desperately declaiming: “what a world, what a world”!

Welcome to 2026!

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Solstice Day, 2025

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Today, December 21st, 2025 we experience a solstice, really two: the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and the Southern Solstice in the South with the longest day and shortest night.  In Colombia, which straddles the equator, in its southern regions it experiences the Summer Solstice, at the equator, well, perhaps nothing at all, all days being equal, and to the North, the Winter Solstice.  As in so many other things, Colombia has it all.

Like the equinoxes, to me the solstices are days for introspection and reflection and more, so than New Year’s Day, days for refocusing and resolutions.  Our world is in terrible shape, chaos and injustice reign in a replica of what philosopher Thomas Hobbes described many centuries ago as the “State of Nature”, a phrase having nothing to do with sound ecological practices but rather, with chaos, injustice, lawlessness and impunity.  The reality is that our world has seemingly always functioned (dysfunctioned would be more accurate) this way but, we have always been successfully deluded through false and fanciful narratives into believing that there are good guys on one side who believe in truth, justice and equity, and bad guys on the other who believe in nothing at all but power and pleasure for themselves.

Historians should know differently, as should journalists, but they don’t, or they don’t care because they’re an integral part of the problem.  Reflecting on how genocide and ethnic cleansing and the quest for lebensraum have become fashionable in Western and Central Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon world, rather than anathema (as we were told following the Second World War), I’ve come to doubt everything I was taught concerning World War Two and World War One, indeed, about the American Revolution and the American Civil War, and which I then, in turn taught others.  There were no “good guys” in any of those “conflicts”, only evil politicians and sacrificial victims on all sides, sacrificial victims who along with their families provided the fuel to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

In what we refer to as the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, being seen as the good guys seems existentially important despite the hundreds of millions of people who have been slaughtered through our elective wars and through our colonialism, purportedly a “burden” imposed on us in order to raise our cultural inferiors to our intellectual and moral heights.  The Romans of two millennia ago, prior to their conquest by Christianity, were just as selfishly aggressive as are we in the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, but they were much more honest.  They had no problem at all in being seen as the bad guys but, truth be told, we have easily surpassed them in savagery and in a lack of respect for legal institutions, all the while insisting that we do what we do in the name of justice, liberty, decency and democracy.  In the name of our Abrahamic god. 

We are masters of hypocrisy.  For example, followers of the Christian branch of the Abrahamic triad abhor the economic theses on which their religion is purportedly based, which ironically coincide with the premises underlying communism, i.e., not only political, social and economic equality and equity, but a dedication to lift up the poorest and most humble among us while preventing the accumulation of massive wealth by the few (remember the camel and the eye of the needle).  Among the followers of the Judaic branch of that triad, people who for millennia were victims of intense social and legal injustice, post-eighth-century Eurasian converts today purportedly acting in the name of all Jews have become oppressors and mass murderers in an apparent quest for political and economic hegemony.  The Islamic branch meanwhile looks on: Palestinians (descendants of real Jews) are sacrificed while wealthy Arab leaders pretend to care but at best, do nothing and at worst, secretly collude with Christian and Zionist Islamophobes.  Ironically, the atheists among us are those most inclined to avoidance of state sponsored murder and most supportive of equity, equality and social justice.

Reflecting on the foregoing on this day of solstices, a movie from the late nineteen thirties, the old movie version of the Wizard of Oz, one of the first to use color, comes to mind, specifically with reference to one of its final scenes.  The scene in which its purported villain, Elphaba, the fictional Wicked Witch of the East, exclaims (after she was accidentally soaked with water by the heroine, and began to melt), “what a world, what a world”!  That metaphor was certainly prescient, not only with respect to today’s world, but to our world since significantly before history was first recorded, perhaps since we first evolved as purported Homo Sapiens.

Anyway, … enough reflection and introspection.  What about resolutions?  Is there anything we can do to change the inequity that surrounds us? 

Well, maybe not.  But we can at least try.  The strange thing about we humans is that in large collectives we tend to be horrible while individually, although some of us are indeed horrible, the majority are decent albeit incredibly gullible and all too ignorant.  Thus, perhaps the first thing we need to do is to help each other shed our blinders by realizing that virtually everything we’re taught is false and then, by following our more humane instincts, for example, the so called Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, rather than its perverted analog, “do unto others whatever you can get away with before they do it unto you”.  Perhaps then, hopefully blinder free and well intentioned, we can reject leadership by all those who seek dominion through violence and deception, and who follow the creed of perpetual greed and perpetual war, albeit in disguise.

Anyway (again), … these are my reflections after a good deal of introspection on a shortest day and a longest night high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.