Category Archives: Writing

Reflections on a Chilly Morning in Late November

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It’s cold in Manizales, a city in the sky set high in the central range of the Colombian Andes, although it dawned hot and sunny.  Well, relatively hot.  It’s about nine o’clock in the morning on the last day of November in a year that has seen the very worst of humanity triumph all over a sad and abused planet.

In Manizales it never really gets too hot or, truth be told, too cold.  Just different ranges of spring although the humidity varies, frequently by the hour.  Still, it’s chilly right now.  Today I’ve layered up: tee shirt under shirt under sweater.  That’s all I need here to escape the chill.  The morning has turned foggy, visibility outside is nil, but it involves low lying clouds more than fog, as occurs when you’re in a city higher than the seven thousand foot mark, an interesting albeit common phenomenon in this city in the sky set amidst mountains usually dressed in myriad shades of green.  The sight is eerily beautiful.  It’s as though the city repented of having woken early and pulled its ethereally fluffy white blankets back up over its head. 

It’s a good day for a fireplace.  For several fireplaces.  We have a small one set high on a wall in the living room but it’s not wood burning, it’s powered by a relatively small propane gas cylinder, not a fireplace Santa would appreciate but very pretty when it’s lit.  Something we seldom do.  If I were to build the perfect house it would be set amidst waterfalls and deep caverns and lakes but near the ocean, and would have fireplaces all over the place, and large rooms with balconies, and the roof would be a park-like terrace full of plants but with a Jacuzzi and would feature wrought iron outdoor living room furniture of sorts, and a wrought iron desk with a glass top so I could work outside, and an outdoor fire pit nearby. 

But, for now, no such luck. 

Still, I can’t complain, I have a large tenth floor apartment that occupies the entire floor giving us a three hundred and sixty degree view of the city and of the surrounding mountains, many clad in snow, and of the neighboring city set below, far below with a tall cathedral set not very far away, and a small park set outside of the front door.  And with a used-book store set aside our lobby.  The city’s cultural center with its large performing arts center is across the street and a block away we have the city’s initial aerial cable transport station, gondolas taking us to the nearby bus terminal and then to the neighboring municipality.  And, two blocks from our front door, a small modern shopping mall.

What I don’t have is my three sons, now all grown; two with children of their own.  They live a continent away in the Global North and I never see them now; well, except every once in a while in a video call.  We’ve lived apart for a very long time now, decades.  I’ve remarried to a wonderful woman, not just attractive but spiritual and intelligent and eclectic, and she fills a lot of the void I’ve created for myself after leaving most of my past behind, as do the wonderfully kind, talented and artistic people of Manizales, and as do my few expatriate friends, traces of my old life, but nothing can replace my sons.  I think of them daily.  And I think of the many, many people I’ve known, some of whom I’ve loved.  Most of them have long vanished from my life but not from my memory.

It’s been a full life, one full of blessing and of challenges, most of which (the challenges) have been overcome.  It frequently feels as though it’s been too full but today, for some reason, it seems hollow.  Perhaps it’s the weather but, although the low lying clouds still have everything covered so that it seems as though the world outside my windows has been erased, a bright spot in the white, a brighter white, seems to be trying to break through.  Of course, eventually it will.  It always does.

So, why does today still feel so gloomy?

It must be missing my sons and the grandchildren I’ve never really gotten to know which sculpts the day in hollow tones.  And the echoes of old relationships turned acrid which, at least from time to time, still cast long and somber shadows.

_____

© 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/.

Divine Quandaries

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Divinity, at least according to followers of Abrahamic religions, involves five essential attributes: eternal existence, the divinity must have always existed and will always exist; omnipresence, i.e., the divinity must be ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; omniscience, the divinity must have permanent and eternal knowledge concerning absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; omnipotence, the divinity must necessarily be all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, the divinity must be omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity.

Other religions, more ancient religions as well as contemporary religions have been more realistic.  Deities, where they existed, were just more powerful than humans albeit not omnipotent, especially when they were plural.  If not ubiquitously omnipresent, they were perhaps not bound by the rules concerning time and space that apply to us and could show up when least expected.  Omniscient?  Not at all, although perhaps they, or some of them, were more cognitively gifted, at least sometimes.  Eternal?  Nope, they somehow came into being, usually sequentially, and in most cases, eventually expired, although the expiration was sometimes temporary.  And omnibenevolent?  Hell no!  They were willful and selfish and prone to emotional outburst.  Hmmm, that all sounds a great deal like the Abrahamic YHWH.

Still, to be fair, omniscience and ubiquitous omnipresence would seem possible if one eliminates time and space, treating them as illusions.  If time did not exist, then eternity would be either irrelevant or merely a natural state.  Perhaps in that context, since nothing would really exist, omnipotence might also be possible although not all that potent. But omnibenevolence is subjective although, in the absence of time and space and anything at all (other than perhaps, a sentient singularity), it might well be either irrelevant or natural, there being no choices to make.  In the foregoing context, an idealized divinity such as that imagined in Abrahamic religions might be possible, but only until time and space arrived, only until decisions became, not only possible, but necessary, even if any such decisions were merely illusions.

So, where does that leave us? 

Perhaps pondering on the nature of quantic phenomena and how they might impact the foregoing.  As I understand it, everything and anything is possible at a quantic level, sort of like the concept of chaos where, rather than consider it a negative, chaos is merely the confluence of every possibility; however, quantic activation would require an observer which would create a sort of bootstrap cosmogony.  Kind of like the ones were it is the worshippers who create the worshipped.

Or would that involve cosmology?

_____

© 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/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day 2025

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I am drawn to the concept of giving thanks rather than asking for boons from the divine.  It was something I felt strongly at times of spiritual longing while I was still more of a traditional believer, times long gone.  I am still drawn to the concept, albeit in a more generic form while concurrently more specifically.  While reflecting on towards what and towards whom my thanks should be directed.

A deity is evoked by most for purposes of giving thanks on this holiday, at least in the parts of the world where I’ve lived, in Europe and in the Americas.  It is an Abrahamic deity worshipped by three antagonistic branches, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that deity is purported to possess five principle unique attributes.  He (the deity is identified as masculine for the most part) is eternal, he has always existed and will always exist; he is omnipresent, i.e., he is ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; he is omniscient, knows absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; he is omnipotent, all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, he is omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity. 

I guess, if we humans did not exist, if our world did not exist, the concurrence of such attributes might conceivably be possible.  But we do exist, our world exists, and evil certainly exists and, on this Thanksgiving Day, evil seems to predominate, especially in the so called Western World.  And that evil seems to emanate directly from the purported Abrahamic Holy Land in the Middle East.

Today and for many years, decades really, It has been difficult, actually, impossible for me to be thankful to that incoherent complex of attributes that purportedly constitute “our” deity.  Or to believe that such an entity exists.  The three attributes most impossible for me to reconcile are the “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.  When effective, logic, a premise based form of analysis that purports to lead to accurate conclusions, could accept an evil or amoral omniscient, omnipresent omnipotence; or, it could accept an omnibenevolent, omnipresent and omniscient but impotent reality.  But not the confluence of all three attributes.  In general, the logical exercise in which we claim to believe and which we use, or more accurately, misuse and abuse, rarely works because, when its conclusions are put to the test and fail, rather that reexamine the premises and the analysis which led to the deficient conclusions (as tested against reality), we rationalize and make excuses.  We do so with respect to our Abrahamic concept of divinity by introducing the concept of purported “free will”, an oxymoronic absurdity when its exercise is subject to horrific and perpetual punishment.

The Abrahamic faiths are, not surprisingly given the forgoing, fratricidal, albeit usually sequentially so.  And hypocrisy reigns among at least two of them, Christianity and Judaism, the polar aspects of Abrahamic religion with Islam, strangely, being the bridge between them but, frequently, the most despised, belittled and calumnied by the other two. 

Take Christianity for example.  It was purportedly founded by followers of a gentle and loving Hebraic Palestinian from the small town of Nazareth during its Roman era but in reality, the religion as it has almost always existed was the creation of a misogynistic Hellenized Jew, Saul of Tarsus who eventually used a more politically convenient Roman name, Paulus.  The original Nazarene variant was centered in a small communist community in Jerusalem led by a certain James, cognamed “the Just” and comprised of the original disciples and apostles of his brother, a certain Yešu (today Latinized to its Hellenic variant, Jesus). The bastard Pauline variant quickly deformed into a traditionalist hierarchical control mechanism used to accumulate wealth and power, so much so that it eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Today, “evangelical and other so called Christians have completely rejected the communist economic premises of the original followers of Yešu, in part, because of the distortion of a statement by the founder of modern communism, an atheistic Jew, Karl Marx, to the effect that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, a statement contextually related to Marxian dialectic theory concerning economic evolution rather than to criticism of religion by which he meant that, at a certain point in economic history, religion was essential to survival making terrible conditions tolerable in the way that modern medications and medical treatments aid in our survival.  Through distortion and manipulation, modern Christianity, at least in the United States, has become the opposite of what Yešu espoused.  It has become a selfishly capitalistic, xenophobic philosophy apparently enamored of mass murder under the guise of capital punishment and perpetual war.  Judaism has also undergone drastic devolution with a significant component splitting off into an atheistic political Zionist variant espousing genocide, ethnic cleansing and even rape as a legitimate control mechanism for dealing with non-Zionist dissidence.  To those Abrahamic variants, Thanksgiving Day has become a de facto celebration of injustice, inequality and inequity, but that is something the original celebrants of the holiday in New England, the religiously intolerant Puritans would likely have ascribed.

That version of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, the one celebrated today, Thursday, November 27, 2025, is not one I can subscribe to, although I do enjoy some of its incidentals, like football games designed to draw our attention and energy away from our quotidian problems.  Thus, while in my moments of most intensely positive feelings towards divinity during a time long ago when I accepted the traditional Abrahamic version of divinity as possible, back when I gave thanks to “whatever gods may be” (a phrase from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley), today, my attitude is profoundly different.  Today, my thanks are limited to more tangible subjects.  To people I’ve known and to people I’ve never met but admire.  To those among the subjected and abused and downtrodden and tortured and maimed and killed who struggle to protect those they love and to stand for principles of equity and justice and compassion and generosity and peace, today something that applies most clearly to the Palestinian victims of Zionist genocide as it once stood for the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, or to the Armenian victims of Turkish genocide, or to the indigenous victims everywhere of European genocide.  To all the economically deprived parents who work constantly to provide for their families as best they can.  To the Quixotic who struggle for “the right” against invincible odds, knowing that they themselves will never see the fruits of their labors.  But also to those who, for whatever reason, earned or not, I just love.  Those special people who were my classmates at the Citadel, and those fellow Citadel graduates who preceded and followed me, the same being true with respect to the now long departed Eastern Military Academy.  But also to my former students and colleagues everywhere. 

Today I give thanks to and for my family, especially my late mother Rosario and my late grandmother Juanita and my late aunt Carola.  To the many fellow travelers in the quest for a more equitable, more just, more peaceful, more compassionate, more peaceful and more loving world; those I know and who I can call friends as well as those with whom I am only acquainted and those who I’ve never met but who I know exist, have existed or will exist.

That seems a great deal for which to be thankful, even in these truly terrible times where orchestrated polarization for fun and profit regardless of the cost is the rule.  When the United States I love, indeed most of the Global North, is ruled from abroad by an ethics free elite.  Perhaps it always been this way.  But perhaps, the wonderful has always coexisted with the horrendous among the strange life forms who now refer to ourselves as humans.

So, … about the poem “Invictus”, one of my favorites.  It seems appropriate to close out these reflections by sharing it, albeit reformatted into a more narrative, rather than verse format:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.   In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.   Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.   Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet, the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

 
Thank you William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903).

_____

© 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/.

Reflections on Poetry and on the Nature and Uses of Prayer

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Sam Hamill

It came to me as I read indigenous reflections written in 1976, almost half a century ago, by Arthur Amiotte, then an artist and teacher who lived among the Teton Sioux in South Dakota, that I have never understood the nature or functions of prayer.  Not strange given how few if any priests or pastors or rabbis have ever grasped them.  Prayer had always seemed superficial to me, ritual repetition of sounds directed at one or more beings to whom we seemed little more than insects, inferior objects to be scorned and disdained, albeit in a strange and twisted, masochistic way, loved as well. 

An observation attributed to a gentle Nazarene whom the Hebrews and perhaps the Romans may have tortured and perhaps hung or crucified has always made a great deal of sense to me: his suggestion that direct communion with the divine, without ritual or intervention, without prayer, was really the only legitimate and effective means of touching divinity but, reviewing Arthur Amiotte’s indigenous reflections, something I’ve been doing while concurrently reading the probably fictitious writing of Carlos Castaneda (fictitious not being synonymous with useless),  another alternative occurred to me.  Ironically occurred to me who, if not an atheist am at best a panentheist.  It came to me in the form of an epiphany: Prayer may well have a positive purpose but it is unrelated to the ritual repetition of sounds the meaning of which few really consider as they utter them, and fewer still understand. 

In that instant of epiphany, it came to me that ritual prayer does have a role and a meaning and a use and a purpose but that it is very different from the meaningless collective rote exercise that takes place on designated days at designated hours in designated places under the leadership of designated men and sometimes, although rarely, designated women.  It is, or perhaps, better stated, it should be, an isolated, personal reflective instrument that properly tuned and used can lead to introspection, contemplation, meditation and self-examination, all in a quest for insight, perhaps totally novel insight, and through such insight, to both elucidation and pragmatic solutions. 

That makes sense, or made sense to me; finally.  Prayers, correctly used, can be catalysts for internal communication in which, perhaps, a spark of the divine (if a spark of the divine exists within each of us, as some among the Gnostics tend to believe), may, at times, be present.

“Poetry” Sam Hammill (a great friend, a great poet and a great translator) once told me “is meant to be spoken and heard”.  As much as I admired him and still do (though he is long gone), I did not agree.  For me, reading poetry rather than listening to it permitted me to transcend the music of the words in order to wrestle with the layers of meaning involved, not all of them layers the author intended.  In that sense, it seems that poems are “written on mirrors”, i.e., they have different meanings for everyone who really delves into their depths based on the reader’s personal experiences, context and perceptions.  I’ve shared my observation with another poet I admire but who is as different from Sam, in many but not all ways, as two poets can be.  Sam was a big man, a former United States marine, with a booming voice, an adventurer in every sense, while the second poet, Carlos Mario Uribe Alvarez, is a fairly diminutive and soft spoken Colombian, but one who annually gathers poets from all over the world to declaim and share perspectives in the sky-high Andean city where I’ve now lived for almost two decades.  Despite their differences, as is the case with many poets, they both share a taste for variety in women, each of whom they love in their own way, and for strong intoxicants, whether drunk or inhaled. 

As it was for Sam, poetry for Carlos, at the numerous events he organizes, is an oral exercise.  I dutifully attend the readings performed by earnest and talented artists who have profound truths to share but I get little out of the readings.  Indeed, I’ve urged that each reading be preceded by contextualization and a sharing of the motives and reflections and introspection that gave birth to each poem presented.  Sam would have argued with me.  Carlos agrees, but seemingly superficially.

I now feel the same way about prayer after my epiphany.  But perhaps that’s just me.  Writing and reading call to me much more than does listening to prayers or poetic expositions.  Reading permits me to dive and delve and reflect while writing seems a means of communicating with my inner self, with the me who’s been and the me that may someday be, and perhaps, at times, with echoes and shadows of divinity that have made their way, if not to me, at least towards me.

Interesting.  But perhaps not novel except for those of us who have been long misled by Abrahamic delusions.  Perhaps my epiphany is an echo of something lost by those of us who have misplaced things that our ancestors understood well and perhaps used and perhaps some among us may still understand and practice it, albeit alone and in personal places in a manner such as that of which that gentle Nazarene once spoke.

Thoughts on a pleasant autumn day high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
_____

© 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/.

Of Butterflies and Bibles

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I’ve frequently wondered as to what motivated the inept linguist or translator who turned the word “flutterby” into “butterfly”.  That usually brings to mind (at least to my mind) the inept Catholic “saint”, Jerome of Stridon, who made a mess of his Latin translation of the Greek version of the Hebrew Tanakh.  Poor Lucifer, demoted by the purported saint from the Roman god of truth and light into a rebellious archangel and the patron of evil (a role that belonged to a Hebrew “entity” whose name was Hel-El).

Flutterby is obviously the correct term to describe the fluttering, flying insect, often beautiful, that has nothing to do with butter but is stuck with that appellation. I don’t suppose Jerome was responsible, he knew nothing of English, but who knows.  The absence of knowledge never stopped him.

And as to the “Latin” version of the Bible on which the St. James and other mistranslations are based, what can one say other than perhaps, …

… “Oy Vei”!

_____

© 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/.

Reflections on a Conceivably Inept Creator

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Reflecting on religion this morning, specifically on the Abrahamic variants to which most of my religious friends adhere, friends I profoundly respect and generally find to be genuinely good people, it came to me that they appear to consider their creator inept. 

They obviously, albeit respectfully, consider the creator to have been incapable of creating a decent product.  Indeed, their worship is full of lamentations concerning how terrible they are and acknowledging that their deficiencies are inherent and unavoidable. Indeed, purportedly not a single one of the creator’s creations have been free from defects except, perhaps, for himself, as incarnated, but then again, can one really be one’s own creation?

Perhaps.

Don’t know why but Ford Edsels come to mind.

Anyway, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” is an obligatory refrain by his creations when engaged in formal worship although, of course, logically, the “culpa” should really be ascribed to the entity, divine or otherwise, who designed such creations, especially if it was omniscient and omnipotent at the time.  Perhaps the refrain should more accurately be: “tua culpa, tua culpa, tua maxima culpa”.

Every time we criticize human fallibility, human frailty, the human proclivity to err against the divine will, we are criticizing, not only ourselves (the divine creation) but also the angelic supervision to which we are purportedly subject.  That concept of divinity posits not only an inept creator but one so full of hubris that it blames its errors on its creations, whether on us directly or on his angelic host, some of which also proved, let’s say … “deficient”.  Nephilim come to mind, as do their fathers.

Perhaps that explains the world in which we live, one where one branch of the Abrahamic faiths, the one involving the creator’s purportedly chosen people, engage, in the creator’s name, in genocide, massive and constant theft, justified rape, etc., (and not only recently, it’s a historical trend), and his more recent adherents in another branch, the Christians (originally Nazarenes and then Cristers) look the other way like the three famous simians who see no evil, hear no evil and certainly don’t expose any evil except with respect to whatever minor transgressions they themselves have engaged in, which they bemoan and chastise, … mainly on Sundays.

My reflections are, of course, blasphemous and heretical and somehow or other, probably evil.  Or, perhaps, the creator would agree that its followers are, perhaps inadvertently, being too critical of their creator.  Being very sensitive to any criticism (consider how it purportedly dealt with its archangel Hel-el, subsequently mistranslated by the abysmally ignorant St. Jerome as “Lucifer”; or how it dealt with almost all of its creations when, in a fit of temper, it drowned them all), … it may be worth reconsidering those aspects of its worship.  Just saying, …..

Still, as Elphaba Thropp, the purported wicked witch of the west, perhaps reflecting on YHWH or perhaps just on water, exclaimed with her dying breath in the 1930s version of the Wizard of Oz (the foregoing name is, however, as envisioned many decades later by author Gregory Maguire): …

“What a world, what a world!!!!”

_____

© 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/.

An Updated Lupine-Related Fable

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Dateline: The Caribbean, Nigeria, Palestine, the Ukraine, Iran, diverse states in the United States of America, etc., November, 2025:

There is a new version of the classic fable of the little shepherd boy who cried wolf. 

In the traditional version, a mischievous young shepherd enjoys agitating the populace with false warnings of an attack by wolves. 

The current version is more complex.

The little boy is replaced by a pompous, egocentric, cranky, cantankerous and unpredictable elder bully who enjoys leading others to believe, on the one hand, that he himself is a very dangerous wolf and thereby tormenting and bullying them into yield to his machinations but, concurrently, he also enjoys playing the role of a harbinger, one warning those who somehow or other believe in him that there’s a distinct probability of impending attacks by other “predators”. 

As in the case of the original little boy, the more recent episodes are, at best, misleading and, to some extent, designed in the hope of creating future realities woven from false narratives.  For a while the incoherently contradictory narratives seem to work. That is, until they no longer do so.  Eventually, they distract from real existential crises in which no one believes, having been habituated by the series of orchestrated fake crises.

Inadvertent self-fulfilling prophecies become fulfilled.

The names have been, while not eliminated, not disclosed in order to protect the guilty, protecting the guilty being the norm in our society. On the other hand, the illustration, well, cartoonish though it may be, it may in fact prove instructive.
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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/.

Reflections on Apples, Karl Marx and Zionist Ethics

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In Abrahamic mythology (which billions treat as revealed truth) Eve, the primordial mother, enabled herself, her husband and their descendants to discern between good and evil, for which, the petulant Abrahamic divinity punished them by afflicting them and all of their descendants with mortality and perpetual misery. 

Strange that it was so essential to the purported Abrahamic divinity that its creations remain ignorant as to the difference between good and evil but, ironically, given Zionist perspectives, both of the Jewish and Christian variant, it seems that those two groups have taken it upon themselves to correct Eve’s indiscretion and lo and behold, evil flourishes, not only in the purported Holy Land but in Europe and North America as well.  And it flourishes purportedly in a quest to re-attain the immortality once lost.  What a strange spiritual philosophy, what a weird (in the original sense of the word) form of spirituality.

It makes some of us wonder at what motivated Karl Marx to postulate that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, today a deliberately misconstrued reflection as, when it was uttered, opiates were considered a positive blessing that permitted those afflicted with painful diseases to survive, rather than, as suggested by critics of Marx’s economic and political perspectives, as a criticism of religion.

The problem with opiates is, of course, that they distort perceptions of reality and make users numb to pain.  Does Zionism do the same with respect to morality and ethics?  Has the reflection concerning divinity by Karl Marx attained added relevance given the current Zionist proclivity for genocide and ethnic cleansing, for theft of Palestinian lands and assets, for rape of Palestinian hostages as a legitimate instrument of control and even for the involuntary harvesting of Palestinian’s human organs and skin, all purportedly in the name of a promise made by their strange divinity, although not to them but to their victims?

Or is it perhaps past time for a new mother Eve, in her gnostic variant this time, to arise and to feed us all apples?
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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/.

The 2025 New York Yankees: a post-World Series analysis

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I became a Yankees fan in either the fall of 1952 or the spring of 1953, … accidentally.  I’d immigrated from the beautiful city of Manizales in the Republic of Colombia with my sister to the United States to join my mother and her new husband on what was then called Columbus Day and had been immediately enrolled in school, a traumatic event as though I was both literate and fluent in Spanish, I knew absolutely no English.  At some point during an absolutely confusing first grade, during physical education, the instructor had lined us boys up and was asking us which our favorite baseball team was.  It was in Miami Beach which was, at the time, primarily a strange blend of Cuban immigrants (before Castro) and Jews, mainly from New York.  I was a Colombian of French and Spanish descent, adopted into a Greek household so I was a sort of anomaly.  I was third in line for the selection of favorite baseball teams and my classmates ahead of me had already selected the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.  The Yankees were the only New York team left and I’d only heard of New York teams so I selected them and have stayed loyal to the Yankees, profoundly so, through thick and thin ever since.  I was so attached to them that as an adolescent, when they lost a game I’d fall ill.  Fortunately, back in the 1950s, losses were rare and championships the rule.  I have followed the Yankees passionately ever since.

I recall the terrible end to the 1960’s World Series when, after the Mick had saved the game in the ninth inning by diving back to first base on a line drive, Bill Mazeroski ruined the year for me with his walk off home run in the bottom of the inning.  I was fourteen at the time, a freshman in Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, and I’d been watching that inning on a television in an appliance store along with a small group of other students on a street corner on my way home from school.  But then came 1961. 

At the end of the decade, the Mick was gone and the Yankees’ glory days soon morphed into an epoch of disappointment, Joe Pepitone and Phil Linz never panned out, nor did Tom Tresh.  Those were the days of Sandy Alomar (senior) and others whose names no longer spring to mind, and I suffered through them with the Scooter somehow keeping my spirits up; I recall the thrill of returning to .500 baseball.  Those were not good times, the CBS years, but somehow, they were not as depressing as this millennium’s Yankees, perpetual also rans, except for 2009, but especially since the arrival of Aaron Boone to join Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner at the helm.  This period has been more depressing, perhaps the absence of Phil Rizzuto at the mike and on the screen has something to do with it, and the lack of honest evaluations from most of the other announcers.  And it has lasted so long and seen a much greater breakdown, one involving tradition as well as performance, and perhaps it0s been aggravated by the difference in attitude between George the father, for whom the Yankees seemed held in trust for the fans, and Hal the son, a businessman interested primarily in merchandise sales and profits.

So, … 2025, … like 2024 and … 2023, and … 2022, and … 2021, etc., going back to 2010, was supposed to be the year of the 28th pennant, but it turned out in a manner reminiscent of Charley Browne trying to kick a field goal while Lucy pulled the football away at the last moment, or, like being a New York Jets’ fan suffering through another Jets season since we promised the Divine that if he gave us Super Bowl III, we would never ask for anything again.

Anyway, … the foregoing is context for what follows: an analysis of sorts of the 2025 season and perhaps one more attempt at that field goal, trusting Lucy one more time.

2025 has become the year of the Dodgers, the first repeat World Series champions since the Yankees in 1999 and 2000.  The Dodgers 2025 World Series triumph was largely based on the performance of the series’ MVP, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, once more highlighting the ineptitude of Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman who was too “frugal” to sign him, although perhaps that was Hal Steinbrenner’s decision.  Not only is the Cash Man’s decision making, at best, poor, but because of his legendary hubris, many excellent players prefer not to play for the Yankees, all things being even.  Which means even overpaying will not always draw them I, and neither Hal nor the Cash Man are fond of overpaying as, when they have, it’s usually been a huge mistake.  The Cash Man’s hubris is especially evident during negotiations with existing Yankees’ players, a prime example being his mistreatment of Derek Jeter during contract renewal negotiations.  Cashman’s “let prospects rot on the branch” approach while overhyping them has also been a disaster, notwithstanding a huge payroll, a payroll paid for, not by the Steinbrenner family but by the fans who make Yankees’ owners a fortune year in and year out.  The new Yankees’ motto seems to deal, not with excellence and tradition, but with what purported “real fans” will buy at the Yankees’ stores, especially email and online mail-order offers. 

That Aaron “speak no evil” Boone is the Yankees’ field manager makes things worse.  His ineptitude was highlighted again in this year’s World Series by the performances of both the Blue Jays’ and Dodgers’ managers who, while not perfect, demonstrated excellent managerial knowledge and instincts rather than reliance on a by the (analytics) book approach.

As for the future, the Yankees seem to have players currently on the roster and in the minors enough to win without major trades or free agent signings, a good thing, but we’ll see where that gets us.  The only current free agent I’d like to see resigned is Cody Bellinger because of his 1st base/outfield versatility.  And it’s certainly time to bring up Spencer Jones. 

My two cents, and, … I know, I know, worth exactly that, especially to Yankees’ management where fans only matter as cattle of sorts.
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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/.

On the Confusing Nature of Contextualized Instants and Other Anomalies

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According to one system used to measure the passage of “time” (whatever that is) and to identify events that occurred during that particular stream, one among many events once stood out.  Well in truth almost an infinity of events stood out at least with respect to the entities with which this reflection deals but, for the nonce (another sort of vaguely defined unit of “time”) we intend to deal with some specific events that they somehow deemed crystalized.  The author uses the plural first person pronoun, not in the royal sense, but rather, as a means of including both the author and the readers in the assertion.  Anyway, we will attempt to reflect on an undefined, perhaps undefinable specific series of related events, albeit only after we engage in an effort to place them in a somewhat coherent temporal context (again, a concept related to “time”) albeit using the limited form of communication available to our protagonists.

Diverse series of somewhat related events have seemed interesting to the strange carbon based biological composites which, at the “time” about which we are reflecting, inhabited a satellite revolving around another satellite and with a satellite of its own (as will be explained below) who considered themselves the pinnacle of natural evolution as well as the beneficiaries of particular attention from beings ironically superior to themselves, or at least of one such being which some among them believe to be a deity.  They believe themselves to be sentient and, not just sentient, but special, although, to be honest, they subdivide themselves into a myriad of subgroups and each subgroup considers that only it is special and that all the other virtually identical subgroups, at least with respect to their biological composition, are inferior.  Incoherent, we agree, but we are just doing our best to describe related contextualizing phenomena.  

One of the units of “time” (a concept they cannot quite define but which they use all of the, well, time), is a period they refer to as a year; i.e., the “time” it takes the satellite of a “star” (a “star” being a very large spherical continuous nuclear explosion) inhabited by them (the satellite), the “star being known to them as “Sol”, among other names, and the satellite they inhabit being referred to by many of them as “Terra”, among other names, “among other names” because they have apparently (despite ancient legends concerning a time prior to the destruction of a great tower) never been quite been able to agree on appropriate nomenclature …. 

Oh my, we’ve digressed so much in an effort at contextualization that we’ve assuredly confused the reader’s train of thought, so, we’ll sort of “reboot”: … “a year” is the term they use to refer to the approximate amount of “time” it takes their Terra to complete one circumnavigation of their Sol.

These peculiar and extremely conceited beings further subdivide the “year” into days, the time it took Terra, the satellite they inhabit, to complete one revolution around its axis, and then further subdivide their perception of times into units smaller than days known to them as hours and seconds and milliseconds and nanoseconds, etc., as well as into units larger than days which they refer to as weeks and months and seasons.  Months and seasons are related to the orbits of a satellite of Terra, which these entities, who believe themselves to be sentient, sometimes refer to as Luna (among other names).  Weeks?  Well, they really have no logical basis (but they could if the “year” were divided into thirteen, rather than twelve months, and each month further divided into four, seven day weeks instead of into a variable number of days ranging from twenty-eight to thirty-one). In that case, a day or two would be left over and would be deemed outside of the normal calendar designations of months and weeks, perhaps being designated holidays, for example, New Year’s Day and, every four years, Leap Day. Why months are arranged as they currently are is difficult to say which is not the same as saying that such somewhat irrational albeit purportedly sentient beings do not have myriads of rationalizations to explain their incoherence.  Oh my, a double negative, … confusing.

At this point, it probably makes sense to identify the author of this reflection.  Not exactly an easy thing to do but essential if we’re ever to get to the point.

The author is a confused member of the protagonists in this reflection but knows that “he” is confused.  What, the reader may now wonder is a “he”?  Well, these entities subdivide themselves into two major biological categories, male and female, although lately (another concept related to time involving proximity, “proximity” being a concept related to something referred to as “space” but which could, by analogy, also refer to “time”), a number of these entities have been refusing to acknowledge such categories and refer to themselves as, among other things, non-binary, or else, just somewhat arbitrarily switch their biological characterization to a variant of the other category to which they refer as “their culturally perceived gender”.

Perhaps the foregoing will lead the reader to understand why the author perceives of himself as confused.  So confused in fact that he has completely lost track of the nature of this reflection and as to why he has been writing it and as to just what series of events he had hoped to memorialize when he started writing this reflection.

Contextualization can be so confusing!  It seems that the author has lost himself amidst shifting eddies of time and space flowing somewhere hidden deep within what passes for his mind.

Ahhh, fortunately, perhaps, or perhaps not, clarity, or something akin to clarity seems to engulf him and he recalls that when he started writing this reflection he had been speculating on the nature of what some among his contemporaries referred to as divinity, and on how different perspectives were with respect to that strange but seemingly transcendental concept, and then, that he had been wondering about the nature of “surety”, not in the sense of one who stands for the obligations of another, but in the sense of certainty, acknowledging that his interpretation of that term was based on linguistic analysis rather than custom and that language was utterly inefficient in that respect, as opposed, perhaps, to numbers.  And that as he started writing, he had started to reflect on the nature of “knowledge” which, in terms of absolute accuracy, seemed as unattainable as infinity, and he considered the probability that all we had, really, were opinions, some of which we held very strongly, and then he had recalled a philosopher, David Hume, who had wrestled with related speculations and had concluded that absolute truths might or might not exist, and that as humans we could at best approximate the practical semblance of truths by developing what he called “conventions”, useful vehicles which we could, for a time, treat as “truths” but knowing that at some point, their seeming verity might well prove an illusion but how, over time, “conventions” became calcified so that, to most people, they became unassailable truths for which they were prepared to fight and to kill and to die, although “to kill for” was certainly favored over “to die over”.  And then, he had become distracted with the concept of prepositions, wondering how a “convention” had evolved in the English language, really a hodgepodge combination of diverse linguistic traditions, to the effect that it was improper to end a sentence with a preposition.  Certainly a much safer “convention” than the diverse religious “conventions” among the fratricidal Abrahamic religions which declared any failure to firmly consider related “conventions” absolute truths were what they referred to as “heresies”, and that heretics had to be eliminated, justifying genocide regardless of commandments that abjured homicide.  And then he recalled how, as a very young teacher, he had taught a course on comparative religions which he had expanded to include comparative mythologies as neither he nor his students could establish clear boundaries between the two concepts and how, after decades of research, he had come to perceive all organized religions, especially the Abrahamic variants, as more mythic than those belief systems that he and his students had once considered ancient superstitions.  Not a comforting thought, so he had returned to speculating on the nature of time and space which had doubled back to the concept of “conventions” and thence, to this strange reflection.

And the author wonders, first, whether anyone will ever read this reflection and, if so, what the reader or readers will make of it.  And what they will make of him.  And whether or not he will be embarrassed if anyone who knows him will attribute it to him.

Then he decides that perhaps it’s “time” to end this strange reflection.

“Time” he wonders, just what is it?  Not just how it’s measured.  And then he speculates on whether time can exist without motion and then, finally (another concept related to time), while wondering whether syllogisms had anything to do with silliness, he seemingly stops writing ….

At least for the nonce.
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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/.