Category Archives: Protest

Ironically: In Defense of the Filibuster

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Unfortunately, not a satire

I have been a long-term critic of the “filibuster”, an antidemocratic legislative concept requiring supermajority approval for legislation and other functions assigned by the United States Constitution to either the House of Representatives or the Senate, although it has long been abandoned in the House and heavily diluted since the Obama presidency in the Senate.  But an open mind can be a dangerous thing, at least to long held and calcified perceptions.  And as the saying goes, “the proof lies in the pudding”.

My change of opinion, cautiously, is based on an analysis of the consequences of the destruction of judicial neutrality orchestrated by former president Barak Obama in order to mold the federal judiciary in his egoistic image, something he accomplished, at least temporarily.  The so called “nuclear option” to accomplish the foregoing was invoked in November of 2013 when the Senate Democratic majority led by Harry Reid used the procedure to eliminate the de facto 60-vote rule for judicial nominations (other than with respect to nominations to the Supreme Court) which permitted the Obama administration to pack the judiciary with judges willing to follow his lead and that of his Democratic Party on a large number of issues of interest to them.  As was foreseeable to any objective observer, when the Democratic Party lost control of the Senate, in April of 2017 the nuclear option was invoked again, this time by a Senate Republican majority led by Mitch McConnell to also eliminate the 60-vote rule for Supreme Court nominations, permitting Republicans to balance Democratic control over the federal district and circuit courts through a strong majority on the Supreme Court comprised of justices favorably disposed to Republican priorities.  The result during the Democratic Party’s Biden administration has been a totally politicized federal judiciary with proposals to make it even more politicized by increasing the size of the Supreme Court’s membership to counter its current GOP majority, and packing it with blatantly pro Democratic Party jurists.

As a result of the foregoing, every branch of the federal government is now riddled with political operatives with little interest other than in the accumulation and preservation of power and in sowing related financial benefits for their wealthy patrons, unfortunately, primarily by ever increasing military and intelligence expenditures justified by clandestine operations at home and abroad, bringing the world ever closer to nuclear annihilation, for fun and profit.  And that seems true regardless of which major political party controls the government because the electorate has little real choice in for whom or for what it votes, candidates being preselected and preapproved by an informal alliance among powerful interests which have riddled the federal bureaucracy and the judiciary with moles loyal to them (what some call the “Deep State”).

While the foregoing has been true in the United States for many decades, perhaps even centuries, it became utterly obvious when the Deep State briefly lost control during 2016.  That year, both left and right wing branches of the electorate, disgusted with omnipresent political corruption and ineptitude and the threat of perpetual war, simultaneous revolted.  The Democratic Party’s calcified establishment was attacked from within by populists who rejected attempts to found a Clinton dynasty, while the Republican Party’s similarly calcified establishment was attacked from within by populists who rejected attempts to further the already established Bush dynasty.  While, with the tacit betrayal of left wing populists by their erstwhile leader, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party crushed its populist wing, traditional Deep State Republicans led by the Bush brothers, John McCain, Mitt Romney and others lost control over their nomination process and saw political chameleon Donald Trump (a former Democrat, a former independent, a former follower of renegade politician Ross Perot and a best friend of Democratic Party leaders Bill and Hillary Clinton) somehow capture their presidential nomination, and then proceed, against all odds, to trounce the Deep State’s great white hope, Hillary Clinton, in the electoral college. 

Because Mr. Trump opposed the bipartisan traditionalist state of permanent belligerence and sought to dismantle NATO (which he deemed anachronistic after the end of the Cold war), to reduce defense spending and to close foreign military bases, the Deep State was forced out of its comfortable, money-lined closets to engage in a four year guerilla war against Mr. Trump, aided by all of its minions, including many in Mr. Trump’s administration and the GOP, as well as in the politicized judiciary and federal bureaucracy.  Mr. Obama had planned well for such a contingency.  The counter Trump insurgency became blatant in the controlled corporate media as well as in the monopolistic social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, etc.) which, by curtailing participation by Mr. Trump and his defenders, manipulating and engaging in censorship, distorted the free flow of information many hoped the Internet would guarantee.  Such manipulation of information as well as related manipulation of the electoral process in state’s controlled by Democratic Party governors assured Mr. Trump’s political defeat in the 2020 presidential elections, as well as Democratic control over all branches of government (with the possible exception of the Supreme Court).

The efforts were so successful, at least temporarily, that inept Deep State favorite and renowned plagiarist Joseph Biden, was successfully nominated by the Democratic Party, again quashing its populist wing (with the collaboration of its leaders) and then, in a controversial election with loud assertions of electoral fraud, managed to install Mr. Biden as president.  Objectors were promptly attacked as traitors (unlike those who objected to the results of the 2016 election) and fiercely prosecuted by a vengeful Department of “Justice”, political imprisonment no longer viewed unfavorably by the United States bureaucracy or the docile corporate media.

That democracy is a mere illusion in the United States is obvious, but then, even fully fledged real democracy is no guarantor of good governance, or of justice or of equity.  Just ask the followers of classical Greek philosopher Socrates, whose principal admirer, Plato, developed the antidemocratic philosophies which place the state over all, insisting that only the good of the state promoted the good of its subjects.  A philosophy very much in line with that of the Deep State and its minions, although its results undermine that platonic premise.

Good governance while not reliant on democracy, is dependent on its acceptance by a majority, both of the citizenry, and of society’s political and economic leaders, and that cannot exist in a society as polarized as the United States has become since Barak Obama’s 2013 brainstorm to limit the filibuster.  The filibuster forced consensus by giving the political minority in a two party dictatorship a veto over the selection of members of the federal executive and judicial branches, and that resulted in a sense of comity, a scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours realization that, at least between the two major parties, made it unlikely that power by one or the other would be perpetual.  The United States had experimented with one party government in its youth, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Federalist Party was overwhelmed by Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans (the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party) but it quickly broke up into factions from which eventually emerged first the Whigs, and then the GOP (largely based on antipathy to the dominant political figure of that epoch, the Trump-like populist, Andrew Jackson).

So, I am forced to acknowledge two things:

  • First, that the experiment in democracy has proven a failure, not just in the United States but everywhere.  Indeed, the truth is that it has not really been seriously attempted since the communist Jerusalem Community formed by the apostles of Yeshua of Nazareth following his crucifixion, an experiment dashed when Saul of Tarsus found it more productive to coopt that Jewish sect than to destroy it, and became Paul.  The verisimilitude of democracy seems omnipresent, useful as an illusion to permit the citizenry to blow off steam, just as it does with sports fandom and other forms of popular entertainment, but govern. 
  • Second, that government has always been a forum for elites, regardless of its form, whether monarchy, empire, theocracy or republic. 

Those are “just the facts”, as fictional detective Joe Friday used to demand in the ancient television program Dragnet.

The unpleasantly pragmatic conclusion? 

That in a two party dictatorship, government through consensus is the only option for minimizing destructive polarization and thus, that for now, only if the consensual concept of filibuster is reinstated and amplified are we ever likely to reintroduce civility and a modicum of efficacy to our government.  More’s the pity.

Of course, a real solution would involve transition from a two party political system to a multi-party system such as is present in most of the world, with legislative seats allocated based on the percentage of the popular vote attained (instead of single member, first past the post systems), but that would imply a more effective verisimilitude of democracy depriving political elites of total control and thus, anathema.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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 Nature of the Historical Political Spectrum in the United States

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It is not surprising that given today’s truth-free, all fake all the time narrative expositions, there is a complete lack of clarity in the United States as to what people on the left of the political spectrum believe. Or on the right. Or on the non-existent center. Everything centers on the need for government to continue to financially squeeze its citizenry for more and more of its hard earned earnings to pay for more and more weaponry leading to more and more profits for the defense industry, big pharmacy, the financial sector, etc. But understanding the nature of political theories is probably important, should a functioning democracy with accurately informed rather than merely manipulated voters, be a goal. Sooo, in an effort at a bit of clarification, perhaps essential for our survival, I offer the following:

With respect to the left wing of the political spectrum, popular ignorance is due to two principal factors:

What beliefs are those that are really espoused and sought by the leftist wing of the political spectrum? Fundamentally, that everyone has dual natures: as individuals, on the one hand but concurrently, on the other, as integral parts of collectives, including structural collectives such as families, local communities, regional communities, the state, mankind, etc., and thematic collectives such as churches, religions, philosophies, political alignments, etc. An essential corollary of such beliefs is the realization that such dual natures will frequently appear to be in conflict, and that in resolving such conflicts, the first stage is to seek a way to reconcile them so that both will be respected, but, that in the event the conflict cannot be reconciled, that collective interest should prevail, something the fictional Star Trek character, “Spock”, defined as “… the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Libertarians reach the opposite conclusion, holding that individual rights trump collective rights when the two cannot be reconciled.

Based on the foregoing, the real left postulates the following policies, many of which are shared by many among the real right and others:

  • First, rejection of conflict resolution through violence at all levels, from interpersonal through international. Thus leftists are anti-family violence, anti-death penalty, anti-”cruel and unusual” penal sanctions, antiwar; opposed to large military budgets and to international military alliances and to establishment of military forces abroad.
  • Second, that in conjunction with the foregoing, equality of opportunity regardless of inherent characteristics (such as gender, race, religion, national origin, social class, etc.) is essential as is equity and justice tempered with mercy.
  • Third, that freedom of expression, regardless of the merits of what is expressed, is essential and consequently, that censorship is rarely if ever justified, and, as a corollary, that we should strive to maintain open minds, accepting that what we think frequently changes, and that admitting our mistakes and learning from them is essential to progress. Thus, that listening is an essential corollary to espousing.
  • Fourth, a concept related to the third, that social interaction requires that empathy trump polarization and that disagreements be dealt with transparently but respectfully, especially avoiding calumny and ridicule.
  • Fifth, that the principal role of the collective known as the state is to “provide for the common welfare through a social safety net including access to education at all levels, access to all necessary health care, provision of superior infrastructure, provision of unobtrusive domestic and international security, and provision of a system for equitable conflict resolution, free of corruption, inefficiency and nepotism.

Clearly leftist beliefs are utopian but leftists much prefer the utopian to the dystopian.

While those on the right of the political spectrum, those who are labeled conservative, would seem to be the principal opponents of those on the left, that perspective is inaccurate. Real conservatism is a procedure-based philosophy rather than one based on specific policies and its goals frequently coincide with those on the left of the political spectrum. Conservatism is premised on a profound respect for consensus as a decision making mechanism, but consensus that takes into account the opinions of those who have preceded us as well as those yet unborn. Consequently, the decision making process is characterized by inertia, making change difficult to attain and thus, solutions to problems difficult to implement. Respect for tradition is an essential aspect of conservatism and that sometimes leads to perpetuation of mistakes and to an inability to deal equitably with changed circumstances, leading to calcified social and economic relationships. On the other hand, it also prevents erroneous policy deviations and promotes the attainment of long term, strategic goals.

Libertarians are a difficult to place on the political spectrum. Their underlying philosophy is based on the primacy of the individual and a deep distrust for accumulated political power, refusing to delegate any but a bare modicum of sovereignty to the state. Consequently, they are perceived socially as leftists but economically as rightists, even insisting on adherence to the “gold standard” as the basis for monetary policies. Like leftists, libertarians are anti-war, anti-foreign interventions, welcome unfettered immigration, oppose large expenditures on the military and oppose infringements on individual liberties and criminal sanctions for “victimless crimes but, like many conservatives, are opposed to taxes for collectivist social programs. They were once a growing independent political movement in the United States and may still be the largest non-major formal political party, but their energy was zapped when many of their leaders were coopted into the “Liberty Caucus” of the GOP.

Minor leftist parties are numerous, but like cats, seemingly impossible to shepherd and thus, largely ineffectual. The minority status of the foregoing has seemingly been made permanent through what they refer to as the corporate media’s “conspiracy of silence”, i.e., the deliberate policy of ignoring their candidates and policies as a result of which they are virtually unknown to the United States electorate, and that, even when they are noticed, they are ridiculed or vilified (for drawing votes away from the corporate media’s preferred candidates). Ironic given the United States’ electorates’ dissatisfaction with both major parties and the predominance of voters who reject being identified with either.

The real adversaries of the left, libertarian and right wings of the political spectrum are political pragmatists, those without any real beliefs but a strong imperative to accumulate and perpetuate power (political, economic, social and cultural). Being free of principles, truth and consistency are not obstacles to the realization of their goals and thus they freely advocate principles which they have no intention of implementing, if such advocacy advances their quest for power. Consequently, they can proclaim admiration for democracy, pluralism, liberty, equality, equity, justice and peace while, through their actions, utterly subverting them all. Power and the quest to accumulate anything and everything appear addictive and, as with most addictions, ignore long term consequences in favor of immediate gratification. Thus, they are reactive rather than strategic. The lack of principles make pragmatists operationally flexible, especially if they attain control of the means of mass communication and access to the principal sources of capital. That confluence equates to dictatorial political power in societies that base their political systems on the appearance of democracy. Such operational flexibility permits political pragmatists to coopt collectives from both the right and left wings of the political spectrum, as has occurred in the United States, and prior to that, in the United Kingdom, and, like viruses, to propagate their power almost unchecked. To them, dystopia is just fine (as dystopian authors like George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Yevgeny Zamiatin, Kazuo Ishiguro and many, many more, have warned).

In the United States, there are only two major political parties and neither is leftist. The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP (Grand Old Party, although it is by far, the younger of the two), is a meld of right wing conservatives and libertarians with Deep State pragmatists while the Democratic Party is died in the wool Deep State pragmatist, but presenting itself as progressive and liberal in order to maintain its deluded power bases. How deluded is exemplified by the reality that most African Americans vote for the Democratic Party, no matter what, regardless of the historical nature of the Democratic Party as the political party that opposed emancipation, which promoted the Ku Klux Klan, among other politically aberrant movements, as do feminists, regardless of the misogynist conduct of many of that party’s leaders ( e.g., the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, etc.) and as do members of the auto-denominated LGBT communities.

One wonders at the naivety of the United States electorate, a collective generally comprised of decent people who espouse ethical and moral values, tend to be hard working and generous. But then, history teaches us that people with noble traditions can empower virtual monsters, as occurred with the German nation which from the world’s most socially progressive people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, permitted the rise to leadership of the Nazis, and the Jewish nation, one of the world’s most enlightened populations from which evolved today’s Jewish State Zionists. In each case, emotional manipulation overcame deeply rooted principles, as has occurred in the United States since the start of the twentieth century.

One wonders if the reverse can somehow be attained, i.e., whether an emotionally manipulated people can overcome the historic victories of the political pragmatists who now rule them by becoming cognitively aware of the realities concerning those who cultivate political, economic and social power through the quest for their votes.

Unlikely, I know, ….

But one can hope.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

Perhaps Thinking of Picking up the Pieces is the Only Option Left

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On February 10, 2023, Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published an article in one of the few reliable English language sources of information, Consortium News, entitled “Making Taiwan the Ukraine of the East”.[1]

To those of us infected with Cassandra’s curse (disregarded precognition), it is clear that the United States Deep State, through the Democratic Party, it’s political puppet, and the corporate media, it’s propaganda arm, is determined to provoke a nuclear holocaust, which for some reason, it believes that it can win at a cost it deems reasonable, regardless of the price we as individuals will have to pay or its long term impact on our planet.  It does so through constant provocations we would never accept, including clear acts of war against both the Russian Federation and the Peoples’ Republic of China.  Witness, for example, the recently disclosed United States-Norwegian military attack on the Nord Stream pipelines and the United States targeting of missiles it supplies to the Ukraine against Russian positions. 

As this article makes clear, a similar campaign of intolerable provocation is being directed at the Peoples’ Republic of China in order to provoke it to assert its sovereignty over the province of Taiwan through the use of force, against which, the United States and its allies could then respond as they have in the Ukraine.  Or perhaps more blatantly and more directly in the hopes of ending the economic threats to a neoliberal world order premised on the fiat dollar’s supremacy.

That the positions under international law (an illusion at best most respected in its breach) are reversed in the two cases (the Ukraine and Taiwan) is irrelevant, as is logic and morals, and perhaps, most importantly, common sense.  The golden rule has no place in Deep State calculations and actions. 

The Deep State’s tools involved and their NATO counterparts are all too quickly leading us into disaster, and most American voters, with their eyes tightly shut, their ears safely plugged and their heads in the sand (if not in a darker and more olfactorily unpleasant orifice), appear unwilling, or perhaps, now that democracy is clearly just an illusion, unable to reverse the lemming-like trend towards planetary destruction.  Perhaps though, if the non-Anglo-nations of the Southern hemisphere can maintain our independence and exercise decent, independent judgment, we may survive to pick up the pieces, and learning from the Northern Hemisphere’s incredibly idiotic mistakes, perhaps avoid them in the future.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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 link to the article at https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/09/making-taiwan-the-ukraine-of-the-east/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=32b91ed8-54a5-4708-809c-f23fb608c353.

A Brief Rant in Support of Kurt Vonnegut’s Warning 62 Years Ago

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Can you imagine a system of quotas in sports because African American stars represent more than 12.8% of all players (12.8% being the African American percentage of the American population), and requiring that talented black athletes be excluded from participation in favor of less talented Caucasians? Latinos (I’m one), represent 18.7% of the United States population; should we be limited to that percentage of roles in athletics, art, politics, journalism, etc. Should any of us be passed over because of racial quotas, or religious quotas, or gender quotas or quotas based on national origin or political perspective.

The quota system, for example, the one now omnipresent in the entertainment industry (and others, e.g., politics, the military and commerce), the quota system now imposed on all of us by Cancel Culture-Identity Politics-“Woke” overseers not only utterly destroys meritocratic quality but is a huge insult to the groups it claims to defend, necessarily implying that they have no merit, artistic or otherwise, without patronizing interference from virtue signaling “moral superiors”.

Kurt Vonnegut warned against the world we now live in in his dystopian 1961 novel, Harrison Bergeron which featured an all-powerful, “handicapper general” whose task it was to impose equality by reducing everyone to a lowest common denominator. Not all minorities are so lacking in self-respect as to accept that premise.

Prejudice is not something that should be tolerated and being deprived of opportunity based on one’s inherent characteristics such as race, gender, nationality, religion or political perspectives is odious and should be rejected, but so should imposition of mediocrity in the name of equality.

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.

Observations regarding the decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the case of the Patriotic Union (a political party) versus the Colombian State

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Today, January 30, 2023, I am proud to be a Latin American, the place where, perhaps more than in any other part of the world, there is a supranational institution truly dedicated to the protection of the rights of our population and its members against the corruption, ineptitude and violence of the governments which, for centuries have managed our countries under the direction and in the service of foreign powers. The truth is that today, when hypocrisy and falsehood reign throughout of our planet but especially among those countries in the northern hemisphere which proclaim themselves exceptional and morally superior, perhaps only in Latin America is real progress being made in the great battle (perhaps started at the beginning of the French Revolution) to achieve respect for the dignity of the individual, the dignity of minorities and the dignity of those who are different or believe in ways different from those established by elitist traditions. Respect for the dignity inherent in a world at peace where the sovereignty, dignity and rights of others are respected.

A horrible injustice, the torture, murder, calumny and genocide perpetrated by prior Colombian governments against the Patriotic Union and other social, cultural, civic and political movements has been, at least acknowledged, and some blame has been somewhat assigned, albeit directed at a Colombian State that under its recently elected center-left government (the first in Colombia’s history), has initiated profound attempts to effect change. But real justice calls for external processes with respect to those foreign countries responsible for so many barbaric episodes in our continent (and elsewhere), and it calls for internal processes that really establish the responsibility of the specific individuals involved in these crimes and the responsibility of their families who enjoyed and continue to enjoy the benefits illegally stolen from their relatives’ victims and from the innocent Colombian people. Processes with real consequences, consequences similar to those imposed by the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II, although those cases were almost entirely hypocritical, as were those who organized them but exempted themselves from answering for their own massive crimes against humanity, the “Allies” which were already planning similar crimes against billions of future victims through neoliberal economic policies enforced through neoconservative military and clandestine means.

I am proud to be a citizen of the newly evolving Colombia, although I am extremely embarrassed by the Colombian State of the past. And I personally deeply regret that I was not in Colombia during my formative years, working, as were the members of the Patriotic Union and other truly civic groups (many of whom paid with their lives), to attain the justice and common welfare that every Colombian deserves. Like so many other Colombians and Latin Americans, my family fled the violence orchestrated elsewhere, and I, as a six year old, became a member of the Latin Diaspora, only returning fifteen years ago after a life abroad.

We can do little to change the past, but we can learn from it, and as the Jews constantly urge (although unfortunately not through example), we can do everything possible to avoid the past’s mistakes. That, at least, seems to be what the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ decision and related orders directed at the Colombian State demand. In furtherance of such goals, all Colombians and all Latin Americans can join the Patriotic Union and the numerous other social, cultural, indigenous, Afro-descendant and related political movements, and with the many victims of our unjust (until now perpetual) conflicts, to finally begin to extinguish violence, to extinguish impunity, to extinguish inequity and inequality, to extinguish injustice and intolerance towards those with different perspectives, to hold those who govern us accountable for their corruption and ineptitude, and to assure that our supposed public servants (too many of whom believe that they are superior to those to whom their duty is really owed) come to understand what just what a “servant” is.

January 30, 2023: a day upon which to reflect and a day on which dedicate ourselves to creating the Colombia that we all deserve. A day to always remember. A day for understanding the complex emotions we should be feeling, a synthesis of pride, elation and joy, intractably intertwined with shame and remorse and dedicated to doing better in the future, much, much better.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Another Missive from Troy’s Cassandra

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A rant in e minor sharp

While doing research on a “reflection on sentience, self-awareness and their possible existence in non-biological forms”, I came across the following information, admittedly in a Wikipedia article (a starting point for research rather than a reliable source).  I share it because so much of the information we receive lacks context, perhaps deliberately, in order to manipulate such information for electoral, rather than merely political purposes, i.e., to manipulate us into perpetuating specific power blocs, in most cases, apparently, neoliberal systems using neoconservative tactics for their own selfish ends, regardless of the costs to others (the Ukraine being today’s most glaring example). 

Because of the nature of the following information, I hasten to indicate that I am very environmentally conscious and not a climate change denier (admittedly phrasing designed to rebuke and belittle those who deny the existence of climate change).  I am admittedly a true leftist (not the faux variant of purported liberal or purported progressive so often referenced by the corporate media and most traditional political parties today) but I do not react with my eyes tightly shut and ears carefully plugged so that my mind can remain tightly closed. 

Anyway, … according to the following quote from a generic article on the evolution of our planet (which can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth):  “It is estimated that 99 percent of all species that ever lived on Earth, over five billion [of them ] have gone extinct.  Estimates on the number of Earth’s current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million are documented, but over 86 percent have not been described.  However, it was recently claimed that 1 trillion species currently live on Earth, with only one-thousandth of one percent described.”

We humans today are for the most part antievolutionary in our own interactions, in our ethics and in our morals, rejecting nature’s postulates concerning “survival of the fittest” which have been historically espoused by fellow humans we find reprehensible (most recently the Nazis and their “ilk” (admittedly a negatively charged description).  Thus we reject discarding the infirm and handicapped and seek, through social means, to level the playing field apparently established by nature, seeking, for example, to eliminate the relevance of health, gender and racial differences.  We are also seemingly antievolutionary with respect to avoiding natural factors that lead to species extinction in the animal and vegetable realms. 

I admit that, emotionally and intellectually, I am in accord with those antievolutionary beliefs.  But, the information cited above concerns me.  I have to admit that we, who claim to love Gaia and respect and seek to protect nature, seem to be doing so in total opposition to historical “natural” tendencies, in essence, having decided that we know better than nature, and that we are more moral than nature, and that our role in the scheme of things, is to correct nature’s erroneous tendencies, a job we are not doing very well, perhaps, because rather than having attained a real consensus, we are hopelessly polarized, pulling in myriad opposing directions, and, like confused lemmings, seemingly heading desperately towards our doom as a species.  Perhaps a doom that nature will relish.

Still, I love our species and, as an individual, intend to do what I can to avoid what, to an outside observer (were there any), would seem our obvious fate should we prove unable to somehow drastically change directions.  That leads me to reflect that most of our current philosophies and strongly held beliefs need a fundamental reevaluation, one based not on what we wish were true, but on unvarnished truth. 

I frequently write concerning the fallacies of popular beliefs concerning the nature of “logic”, interpretations where “logic is perceived of as a method of proving accuracy, when, in truth, it is just the middle of a quasi-mathematical equation that may be reflected as follows: premises + facts x logic = conclusions.  If any of the components are defective, the equation is not only useless, but dangerous.  The two elements most likely to be defective are premises and facts.  But even when defective, it has a self-correcting empirical aspect, if we just face reality.  If the “conclusion” arrived at does not pan out despite the accurate us of the logic component, then we know that either the premises or the facts were inaccurate, and we should acknowledge that we need to go back to the metaphorical drawing board.  Unfortunately, that is something we as humans are loath to do, having an almost instinctive aversion to admitting we’ve been wrong.  Mistakes, when recognized and properly analyzed, are the best tools for approximating verity, they are the best teachers and probably our most valuable experiences.  But they are a tool we ignore, which leads us as a species to where we find ourselves: a myopic race towards a suicidal dead end.

That may well be what one of our most brilliant and flexibly minded geniuses meant when he described insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.  Something especially dangerous in what passes for democracy but which is in reality, merely a means to keep us pacified while the worst among us keep us controlled.  Imagine a purported libertarian system where opinions are tightly controlled through censorship purportedly essential in a quest for accuracy?  Well, perhaps “imagine” was a poor choice of words.  That is exactly where our currently trendy, “woke, feel-good, virtue-signaling cancel culture has us.  And, we will never find new alternative solutions to our myriad problems by closing as many minds as possible, by punishing and ridiculing alternative viewpoints, by destroying what passes for history in favor of narratives we find more palatable.

One of the things that I find most frustrating in our quest to resolve our problems is that there is no dearth of viable solutions, only of the will to implement them.  Solutions are, like many useful inventions, patented, not to be used but to be warehoused in a suicidal quest for a profitable income stream; a delusional pivot towards living for the moment and, as French King Luis XV is reputed to have said: let our descendants face the storm, something Luis XVI and his family certainly experienced during the French Revolution.

It is vastly understating the case to describe our current means of communication through corporate and social media as “problematic”.  It is the poison designed to destroy those best able to lead us towards equity and justice and peace and sustainable economics, and thus those mediums are all too likely to assure that we will not be around all that much longer, that we won’t be around to muck up nature’s slow but steady pace towards its own goals and aspirations, with or without us.

Something on which to ponder as we are collectively drawn along to our own perdition.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

None are so Blind, as They Who Refuse to See: … a rant of sorts …

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It seems like the “Mother” of all conspiracy theories, but Tucker Carlson’s article and television episode “The Deep State Removed Nixon, The Most Popular President Ever, to Cover up CIA’s Murder of JFK” smells accurate.

Conspiracy theories bloom like weeds when the information we’re provided lacks credibility and when information we ought to have is nowhere to be found.  Hiding facts is the hallmark of successful conspiracies, but loose ends seem to echo endlessly.  The argument that no definitive evidence has been judicially found to be accurate when the judiciary refuses to investigate, makes the echoes ring louder and louder and sometimes even frees bits of what would be evidence, but for the foregoing negative imprimatur, from the shadows.

Few events fit the foregoing description more than the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but strangely, those in the public arena who most claim to have loved him seem most willing to accept an official narrative reminiscent of Swiss cheese.  I lived through the event and played a role in a requiem mass for the assassinated president held in New York City’s Episcopal Cathedral, St. John the Divine, during that awful November in 1963.  I was also a young adult during the Watergate affair and, at the time, one of my law professors was former New York governor Mario Cuomo (Andrews’s father).  I recall being surprised at the time as the most ethical person I knew, then professor Cuomo, a Democrat, cast doubts in class on how the corporate media was handling the scandal.  I also recall how massively popular Richard Millhouse Nixon was before the corporate media and his political cronies orchestrated his destruction.   I recall that rather than being the right wing conservative that history, calcifying media accounts, has portrayed him to be, he was a real progressive in foreign affairs, attaining peace with both Russia and China, and that domestically, he championed progressive programs we have yet to attain, including universal health care, and a universal guaranteed income (which he referred to as a negative income tax), and that during his administration, cabinet level departments dealing with education and the environment were first introduced.  I also know, having lived through those times, that he was hated and feared by the Democratic Party, having politically “stolen the Deep South” and resented by members of his own party, the GOP, because he promoted people in his administration from outside the traditional channels of power.  Nixon certainly was not close to perfect and he was probably justifiably paranoid with racist and anti-Semitic residue, something from which most leading Democrats and Republicans at the time also suffered.  And he cursed and used bad language in private (as if that was unusual in politics).  But he was not close to the corrupt monster most people today are taught to despise, sort of a prequel to how a really unpleasant former president is treated today (perhaps more deservedly so).

I recall the foregoing today because Tucker Carlson, an extremely popular journalist in an age when most journalist are despised and mistrusted, has openly articulated in the above referenced article what many, many ordinary citizens have long suspected, both with respect to the assassination of JFK and the removal of RMN.  And based on my experience, something similar was involved in the failure of the Jimmy Carter presidency.  If true, if accurate, and those are big ifs, it would be devastating confirmation of what a fourth president, JFK’s predecessor, warned as he left office. 

Dwight David Eisenhower warned us to be beware of the military industrial complex, what we today know as the Deep State.  And if that’s true, and if the cancerous Deep State has metastasized onto the federal judiciary, as seems to be the case, then we find ourselves temporally entering portals that advise us to “Abandon All Hope”, as so many authors of dystopian literature have long warned.

All too soon, as many of us fear, the truth will not save us, nor will it set us free.  Not that it will have arrived too late, it’s always been there.  But, reminiscent of the curse suffered by the Trojan princess Cassandra many millennia ago, too many otherwise decent people just refused to listen.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

A Political Reality Check as we Remember Martin Luther King, Jr., DD

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The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., DD, who we remember and honor today, would, I believe, be profoundly ashamed of us.  He believed in love and empathy, in equity and justice, and in peace.  Instead, we have polarization and perpetual war.  Instead of seeking to remove the chains that bind us, we proudly polish them, in the name of hypocrisy.  We revel in a non-existent democracy, and in non-existent liberty, our freedom of expression is censored so that opinions contrary to those necessary to maintain the hold of the few over the many will be silenced and reality distorted, as we are continuously bled of the little wealth the powerful still do not control.  And like good slaves, we are grateful that it isn’t worse, …  although it is much worse than we believe.

An example: We have become so used to fake scandals manufactured by the Deep State in order to tighten its grip on power that we are in a turmoil over the purported “privately held government records scandal” now impacting Deep State darling Joe Biden, reflexively, declining to think.  The reality is that some “government records”, including those classified as secret, top secret, etc., have always been retained by previous office holders and probably more so by members of the Deep State’s core, the intelligence community.  Of all the recent faux scandals, this may be the most stupid, and that applies to both its Trump and Biden aspects.  The Hillary Clinton aspect has been all but forgotten, as has that which dealt with Barak Obama. 

There are real scandals that should concern us rather than the continuous stream of invented scandals that keep deflecting us from realizing the real source of most of the world’s problems, the Deep State and its penchant for perpetual war in order to shift wealth to the worst among us, no matter what the price.  Those were scandals that mattered to Dr. King, who we purport to honor today as we destroy the legacy which he died to bequeath us.

The Deep State has us utterly polarized and consequently, paralyzed, as we are robbed, killed and maimed purportedly in the name of democracy, liberty and human rights.  Greater hypocrisy would seem impossible.  Wake up, but really, not like the somnambulant cancel culture puppets who do so much to divide us and to deflect us from resolving the issues that most harm us.

Without empathy we will never attain real equity, real equality, real justice, real peace, real democracy or real liberty.  Dr. King had a dream which the Deep State and its minions have turned into a nightmare.  Ridicule, calumny, destruction of historical monuments, hate and disrespect are not the tools that will lead us to the metaphorical mountain from which Dr. King saw the future we and our progeny deserve.

Something to ponder on this anniversary of Dr. King’s birth.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  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 Genesis of a Nebulous New Year

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The first day of 2023, a Sunday, dawned cloudy and foggy in a special city, one set high in the central range of the Colombian Andes, a city for some reason associated with the soul.  The word “nebulous” comes to mind, both for its climactic connotation and for the lack of clarity in which we find ourselves mired as a world.  The colonial “Western” empire formerly led by the United Kingdom and now by the United States has been in its “death throes” for a long time, kind of like a wealthy old relative on her deathbed, on her deathbed for several decades now, one who refuses to die and who seems insistent on wreaking as much havoc and chaos as possible before she leaves, if she ever leaves; one whose once beautiful body has been possessed by a selfish and bitterly jaded specter.  She just can’t help herself it seems, she has to own and control everything, and, except for a tiny few, to hold everyone in bondage.  Bondage which, in a more honest age, would be perceived as slavery.

Not exactly an optimistic perspective as one starts a New Year but the old one has been so utterly controlled by evil, as though Saul of Tarsus, that evil quack, had correctly perceived the coming of an antichrist (even if his timing was a few millennia off).  The Deep State’s own Democratic Party, after more than fifteen years, has finally succeeded in goading the Russian Federation into a war with the Ukraine, that bedeviled and utterly corrupt land haunted by its Nazi past and neo-Nazi present but now firmly under Deep State control, a Deep State prepared to sacrifice the Ukrainian People and to expend the hard earned taxes paid by people in the nebulous West to assure that the world never progresses beyond its hegemony. It’s just too profitable a state of things to permit change as populists from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum in the United States have discovered (the real left I mean, not that simulacrum that passes for the left in the Deep State’s Democratic Party and corporate media).  Odd that the utterly obnoxious and self-centered leader of the populist right is more honest and trustworthy (not that he’s honest or trustworthy, it’s a relative comparison) than the leader of the populist left, but naivety reigns there, which may be why it is not perceived as a real threat by the Deep State.  At least not yet.

Things are bad but, to an extent, pure evil has been forced into the light.  It is now clear that “democracy”, as a political reality not only does not exist but, in all probability, has never really existed.  What has passed for democracy during millennia has only been its convoluted verisimilitude specifically designed to assure that real democracy is never attained.  Then again, democracy is not synonymous with justice, or with equity, and it is certainly antagonistic to liberty and pluralism.  Apparently no political system we humans have tried has even been truly benign, although a few individual rulers may have briefly, from time to time, evaded systemic trends and governed both wisely and fairly.  However, in the end, self-defined “elites” always attain control and once attained, do everything they can to perpetuate themselves in power, corrupting all efforts to effect positive change, or else, “eliminating them” by means camouflaged as fair or else, just blatantly foul.

It should be clear that the current political paradigm is premised on a meld of electoral fraud and electoral manipulation through withholding accurate information, in place of which, fiction disguised as news is offered as gruel for the masses, of course spiked with propaganda disguised as information, and even spectator sports, used as means of misdirection emotions that might otherwise lead to addressing uncomfortable realities.

In that context, “nebulosity” seems a downright positive concept. 

Thinking about it, an air of nebulosity seems, at least to me, to pervade the all too accurate dystopian literature of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley (his French teacher at Eton) and Kurt Vonnegut.  It pervades Tolkien’s Mordor, into which we seem to be morphing.  However, nebulosity would seem to imply the possibility of an escape and I don’t recall that being the case in any but Tolkien’s novels.

What a negative manner in which to start 2023, but then again, we have the results of the recent purported elections in the United States as a catalyst.  The phrase “two wrongs don’t make a right” comes to mind, but United States voters are at best mired in a system designed as a quest for lesser evils (which, by definition, are always evil), never considering that evading evil is an option.

On the other hand, the global south may be waking and at least attempting to cast off the neoliberal chains which, through neoconservative pressure, have shackled it, seemingly forever.  Many Latin American countries are doing their best to veer to the left, although the Deep State’s own intelligence communities, freed of any restraints by the Biden administration, are waging a frequently successful rear guard action, most recently in Peru and Argentina, with fifth columns artfully planted in legislatures and judiciaries everywhere else.  Hell, that’s even true in the United States.

Which all makes for a probably all too interesting 2023.  “Interesting” in terms of the Chinese curse which wishes on its enemies “interesting times” in which to live.

And speaking of China, …. 

Well that’s a similar topic best left for another day.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  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 Black Friday: 

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Sports versus Team Fandom – A sort of Ode

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has become an important commercial holiday, both to those who sell as to those who purchase, although it is also a reflection of the reality that prices have been unjustifiably high, at least in terms of equity and decency, than they ought to have been all year long.  Consumers are easily manipulated but no consumers are more easily manipulated and abused than sports fans, those “fanatics” who shell out trillions of dollars in attendance and viewing costs, memorabilia and incidentals, while the recipients (owners, not players) seem to snicker, and generally, to ignore them.

Being a fan is generally a passionate but passive activity, with frustration the most obvious aspect, especially when one is a team fan and the ownership views the team as business, rather than a hobby.  Consider the current New York Yankees as an excellent illustration.

When father George was at the helm, he was an owner and a fan concurrently, and, although a businessman, the fan aspect was paramount.  Indeed, he treated the massive ongoing investment in the team by the fans as a trust, and it was to the fans that he felt that owed the highest loyalty, although he was also loyal to the players and former players from whom he demanded so much, in so emotional a manner.  Even those he’d mercilessly bullied.

His son Hal, as in almost anything and everything, is a negative of his father whom he does not respect but from whom, everything he has, was inherited: a typical second generation syndrome.  Calm and profit oriented, the Yankees, to Hal, are primarily a vehicle operated for the benefit his creditors and investors, and it is to them, rather than to fans or players, that his loyalty is rendered.  And his chief advisor and operating officer, the aptly named Irishman, Brian Cashman, is his ideal henchmen.  Randy Levine, the Yankees president seems to be a seldom seen illusion, and apparently likes it that way.  While an extreme example, the model is not unique.

Yankees fans, the ideal illustration of “team” rather than “sport” fans, are for the most part, a masochist lot.  Vocal, emotional, passionate and pretty well informed, but kept at bay, carefully, by management trolls who infiltrate their social networks to support management decisions, suggesting that fandom is a permanent state whose prime virtue is loyalty to ownership.  In essence, Team fandom, in the view of ownership and its trolls, involves a sports variant on the “my country right or wrong” slogan that led the Germans to morph from liberal social leaders of the nineteenth century to the obedient masses who watched their values destroyed in the first half of the twentieth.

Team fandom is a strange but effective means of social control, diverting attention away from issues that really impact society and thus permitting a tiny elite, which now includes billionaire owners who also disproportionately exercise control over just about everything, to rule us all just as surely as if they collectively wore Sauron’s one ring.  But it is so addicting, that, notwithstanding acknowledging the foregoing – I’m a passionate Yankees’ and Jets’ fan.

Being a sport fan is quite a bit more rational and hardly masochistic at all.  One does not care who wins, only that the sport is brilliantly played.  It is much less passionate than team fandom and many team fans can enjoy that passive distraction too, when “their” teams (not theirs at all, fandom is not democratic) are not involved.

Fandom, a diversion that lets off steam so that the issues that impact our real lives can be safely obfuscated, manipulated and controlled.  Machiavelli would be proud.  He’d probably approve of Black Friday as well.

Go figure.

Anyway, Happy Black Friday!
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2022; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) 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.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.