Category Archives: Requiem

A Reflection and Introspection on the Day my Mother would have been a Century Young

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My mother would have been a century old today, or perhaps a century young. 

She was born on the 9th of July in 1923 to a complex couple, a sort of Cinderella and her Prince, only the prince was a French physician, albeit of noble stock, and the setting was in the Republic of Colombia, in the Department of Cundinamarca, in a small municipality near Bogota, and Cinderella was a beautiful very young woman, a bright young woman with little formal education (only her step siblings received that) but fascinated by the esoteric and by alternative spiritual philosophies, and those drew her close as the man who was to become her husband was, it was said, clairvoyant.  Unfortunately not clairvoyant enough to foretell his early death, leaving behind a beautiful young widow with two small children, one of them my mother: a little girl with a very long name: María del Rosario de Nuestra Señora de Chiquinquirá Mahé Val Buena (or perhaps Rubiano).  “Mahé” was her paternal last name.  People called her either “Rosario” or, if they were close to her, “Chalito”, but after she emigrated to the United States, most Americans called her “Rose”.  Late in life, for reasons of her own, she legally shortened her name to “Rosal”, Spanish for a rose bush, but that was something I never quite accepted.  Then again, … to me her name was always “Mom”. 

My mother was a very complex person and lived a very complex life, for some reason, usually electing to hide her myriad talents as an artist, a poet, a philosopher, a philanthropist, etc.  While she started her life as a beautiful and vibrant young woman who aspired to the stage, those dreams faded all too soon, and she lived most of her life very humbly, and all too often, very alone.  Still, she was a miracle worker who raised me as though, like my grandfather, I was a young noble and required appropriate training in history, politics, philosophy, chivalry, the arts, equestrian sports, etc.  I still can’t fathom how she accomplished it but I know that everything positive I ever became or I ever accomplished I owe to her.  The bad traits and failures are all my own.

She remained a child at heart all her life and loved watching and re-watching young Shirley temple movies and the Wizard of Oz, and was horrified when, as a teen, I went through an “objectivist”, Ayn Rand phase.  She wanted me to be a man of the people, a champion of the oppressed and certainly not an oppressor.  Fortunately, I outgrew that phase (as I outgrew many others) and slowly but steadily strove to be what she’d hoped.

She and my father were separated when I was very young.  Evidently they had a serious argument over his relationship with his secretary, a relationship he always claimed was innocent, but who knows.  And being naïve, she went for solace to my grandmother who immediately swept us up, sent my mother to the United States and apparently hid my younger sister and me among friends and relatives.  My father claimed to have searched for us, but he claimed a lot of things when I got to know him many years later, things that didn’t appear to be quite true, at least according to the trail of children he left behind, siblings I hardly knew but came to dearly love, after we eventually met.  Nevertheless, my mother loved him for the rest of her life and never said a negative thing about him to me.  Rather, she led me to believe that he’d been a paragon, a mixture of a De Vinci and a Rolando Furioso, albeit in a short, thin package.  Obviously, although saintly in most respects, veracity was not always her strong point.  It was only as I matured and aged that I came to realize that the paragon had always been her.

A century she never sought is what I’m sort of celebrating today, a day on which I’m reflecting on who she was and on everything she did, and not just for me.  My Colombian cousins practically worship her as, regardless of how little she had, on each of their birthdays and on every Christmas, she showered them with gifts, especially after her brother, their father had passed away.  She didn’t love life, but she loved me, and she loved her version of the divine.  She loved him with all her heart, and she longed to reunite with him, perhaps perceiving in the divine a father figure who she associated with her own father, he who had passed away much too soon, but had left her with a very lasting impression. 

She passed away very young as well.  Although not nearly as young as did he.  She was about to turn sixty-seven.  It was the fourth of June, 1990.  My youngest son, Edward, was born six months later.  My second son Alex doesn’t remember her, he was a wee bit more than two years old when she left.  But she bonded with Billy, my firstborn, and he remembers her well, and he remembers her stories about dinosaurs which he loved when little.  And he remembers our trips to visit her weekly towards the end; a four hour ride from Hendersonville, North Carolina, where we lived then, to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where my sister Marina was caring for her.  It was strange having four year old Billy watch her expiring but I wanted him to remember her always, and he does.  Those rides were memorable for both of us, silly rides with silly songs making silly noises in very sad times.

She’s been gone a long time now.  Thirty-three years, a month and five days.  And I think of her often.  I keep the plastic box which for a brief time held her ashes on a shelf in front of my desk, a box I’ve filled with little things I thought she might find meaningful: my sons’ baby teeth, an old bathing suit each wore in turn, my eldest son’s high school identification card, a cell phone my college roommate, now deceased, once gave me.  And taped to the box is a photocopy of a brief article in our local paper here in Manizales, I paper for which I write from time to time, an article with a photo of her, wishing her well as she moved to a new country.  An article almost three quarters of a century old.

I glance at that picture often, and I keep it close to me so that the pain of her passing lives on but morphed into something beautiful and positive, something that gives me courage and hope when I most need it, and an example to follow when I’m tempted to stray from the paths she sowed so carefully for me.

Happy birthday Mom, and thank you for being you, and thank you for everything you miraculously did to make me who you hoped I’d be.
_______

© 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

With a Paradoxical Whimper of Sorts

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Looking at cosmogony logically, at least from my perspective, it seems that the end of our universe, … as we know it, is fathomable.  The how at least, if not the when, and it would involve everything everywhere being swallowed into an ultimate universal black hole which had swallowed all other black holes, which had swallowed everything before them, regardless of expansion, so, in a sense, the oscillating universe theorists of yore would unexpectedly be proven right, in their instincts if not in their conclusions.

Of course, that is not a complete end, not the entropic end once envisioned, but a variant thereof, one where black holes form, eat each other in involuntary mergers, or perhaps, happy marriages, and like our own merger mad neoliberal moguls who want to own and control everything, regardless of the cost or danger of nuclear annihilation involved, eventually leave no remnants, except, perhaps, the residue of their own infinitely bloated singularity.

Then again, we don’t know what ultimately happens to black holes, or whether their opposite compliments, theoretically possible at least according to mathematics, “white holes”, would merely start everything over again, or what the consequence of Stephen Hawking’s concepts of information and radiation leakage from black holes might entail.  Which brings us to possible postulates by other physicists such as Planck and DeBroglie and Schwarzschild, i.e., that as black holes “radiate” information, their mass decreases, and, as their mass decreases, they emit greater and greater quantities of informational radiation, causing more and more and faster and faster evaporation, eventually causing them to shrinks to around the Planck mass (the smallest mass possible) where their DeBroglie wavelengths become equal to the Schwarzschild radius.  An infinitely great yet tiny amount of radiation free of information and at that point, perhaps gravity free as well.

Well, in our universe, at any rate.  The rest of the multiverse probably poses other quandaries and promises.

I wonder how AI (artificial intelligence) will fare in the foregoing information-free scenario.
_______

© 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

Ledatic Eht

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A vale behind the veil, another side of somewhere
a place
where all who’ve come before us eventually venture.

Where the Boo, another face of God, sits in genteel judgment,
an unlit cigar
clenched firmly in his jaw,

… welcoming home his lambs.
_______

© 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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/.

The True Meaning of Life and all that Rot (Literally; or is it “figuratively”?)

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Philosophy is an interesting human concept, our very own innovation designed to concurrently enlighten and befuddle us.  It both opens our minds and channels them into narrow calcified tunnels with light so distant as to become virtually invisible, and hence, rendering real knowledge ungraspable.  At least that’s frequently the case.  But not always.  Take the “meaning of life as an example.  Is it really as complicated and unfathomable as we´ve made it?  Or, is it rather simple and basic?  Based on the following hypothesis, you be the judge.

Sooo, about the “meaning of life” about which we[1] humans spend so much time wondering and, with regards to which, we spend so much time bemoaning the absence of answers.  At least some of us.  At least during certain stages of our lives (for example, during the onset of puberty at adolescence, then as we approach midlife crises, then as we approach what we refer to as our third or golden years, and finally, as we face transition beyond the veil). 

I think I may have found it (it being “the” answer), at least as far as “we” humans are concerned, but, notwithstanding the conclusions of Douglas Adams (wherever he is now that he’s passed beyond the veil), it has nothing to do with the number forty-two.

I would warn readers that the answer’s a bit humbling and hardly grandiose.  Rather, it’s quite utilitarian, although still rather important.  And it applies narrowly and specifically to only one of life’s realms, thus other forms of life have other primal purposes since, when we ask what the purpose of life is, we are referring to the purpose of life and its meaning among we humans.  Accordingly, the answer lies there. 

But what are our premises?  After all, every well thought out answer starts with premises.

Well, interestingly enough, there seem to be just three.  First[2] we have to acknowledge that we humans are part of the animal kingdom, or at least evolved therefrom[3]; second, that the animal and plant kingdoms are both an innovation of our joint forefathers eukaryotes; and third, that those animals possessed of alimentary canals which process ingested nourishment into waste, are our direct ancestors.  There!  We’re set.  Sort of.

Based on the foregoing, the reality with respect to the meaning of life, or perhaps, more accurately, our lives, is that the primary and perhaps sole purpose and function of the denizens of the branch of the animal kingdom of which we’re a part was supposed to be, according to nature (our progenitor), the proliferation of vegetable species, most importantly fruit, beyond their normal range.  That was to be accomplished through the combination of our innovative freedom of movement, compared to the plants we were digesting, and our excretionary functions.  Consequently, we were not “forbidden” to eat the fruit of life, but, as Eve would in no uncertain terms conform, impelled to do so, and to digest it, and having digested it into a compost that included seeds and the fertilizing agents necessary for propagation, excrete the residue to spread vegetable life far and wide.

The plant and animal kingdoms (all multicellular animals), of course, constitute only two of the five currently recognized living realms, the others being fungi (moulds, mushrooms and yeast), protists (amoeba, chlorella and plasmodium) and prokaryotes (bacteria and blue-green algae) but in the context of our foundational inquiry, we are only concerned with the first two, and with respect to those, original purposes soon became complicated and convoluted, perhaps resulting in our current confusion and despair.

While our original purpose for existing as part of the living realms was clear, the animal kingdom duchy (sort to speak, or perhaps principality) of which we are part soon deviated as carnivores insisted on intruding onto the alimentary premises which the vegetable kingdom found imperative, and rather than consuming plants and fruit, especially fruit, they insisted on a form of primordial cannibalism and expanding on that, we humans evolved into omnivores, consuming anything and everything that did not consume us first.  But that was not enough for us, we then degraded the importance of our excretions.  Indeed, we disdained and contained them through nonproductive (at least from the vegetable kingdom’s perspective) purportedly salutary practices, such deviation from our primary purpose having been erroneously premised on cultural misinterpretation of our role, our “prime directive” as Gene Roddenberry might have put it, and then, of course, misdirection.  Since then, we’ve invented myriads of fields of reflection and introspection trying to rediscover the purpose we ourselves rendered, if not obsolete, at least anachronistic.

Following the hypothesis that no good deed goes unpunished, at least for long, the animal kingdom, duchy of which we are a part, through the intervention and innovations of we humans, has and continues to conquer and devastate our creators in the vegetable kingdom, indeed, in all five of life’s realms, which may be the source of the rumor spread by Friedrich Nietzsche to the effect that “God”, whoever or whatever that was (hint, it’s obviously nature) is dead, although Nietzsche was merely projecting nature’s future.

Interestingly, the foregoing also implies another epiphany, one that involves the identity of the “adversary, to whom some humans unfairly refer in their purportedly sacred writings as Lucifer, or Satan, or Shaitan, but which more accurately, was a certain Hêl él[4].  In fact, if the foregoing is accurate, the adversary was in fat not some deviant archangel but rather, a certain Robert Thom, the Scott[5] who initiated sewage treatment in the city of Paisley[6]; the clearest and most expansive example of the law of unintended consequences. 

If only plants could speak what stories they could tell. 

Sooo, … about artificial intelligence …!
_______

© 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  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] I know, I know, it should be “us”, but I don’t really like the way “us” sounds in this context, and, … I am the author, with all rights to “poetic license”, sooo, “we” it is.

[2] I know, I know, … again.  “Premises, premises”, but what can we do without them.

[3] The “derived therefrom” phrase preemptively addresses arguments insisting that we are qualitatively different than animals.

[4] Look him up, it’s worth it.

[5] I hate to admit that the English may have been correct when some postulated that the devil was most certainly a Scott.  But evidently, at least in this one instance, it appears they were on to something.  I guess the axiom that no one is always wrong may, in fact, be somewhat correct.

[6] Although the Minoan civilization of Crete and the Roman Empire used underground clay pipes for “sanitation” purposes.  So perhaps the identity of the “adversary” is all too securely hidden.

Calcium: a very strange introspective rant

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Achilles, Zoroaster, Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyas, Gaius Iulius Caesar, Yeshua the Nazarene, Karl I of the Carolingians (Charlemagne), Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert E. Lee, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Pepe Mujica, Francis I (maximum pontiff among the Catholic): some of my “hysterically historical … sort of “friends”, or at least I’ve hope they would have been among my friends if I’d enjoyed the privilege of having known them.  They are perhaps portrayed bit hyperbolically by their biographers, at least as initially depicted to me, but I really identify with them.  On some level.  Or, … well, … with how they were been presented to me by our weird communicative media complex (you know, teachers, journalists, historians and best of all, novelists), mainly since that’s how they seemed when I sort of first “met” them.  Virtually of course.  That changed in time.  They changed when, through my own research, it seemed to me that I’d gotten to know them better, more accurately, more profoundly.  When, as a historian of sorts, I’d somehow been able to grasp their more complex realities, but then, that’s only what I perceived and reality was (and probably is) different, perhaps much different. 

Maybe.  ….  But even so, … first impressions tend to stick notwithstanding subsequent evidence, whether involving reactive affection or disdain.

We humans are like that.  Well, except perhaps for my late and sainted mother.  Once our minds are made up about just about anything; once we’ve decided what to believe our minds are very, very, very hard to change.  That, to some extent, explains sports fans, and political perspectives, and, unfortunately, history as well.  And long lost loves, and simmering enmities.  And loyalties.  All “for better or for worse”, as expressed in aspirational traditional marital vows; although, perhaps, more frequently, much more frequently, for the worse.

We tend to calcify our beliefs, although we prefer to refer to the process as crystallization.  Crystals seem more attractive than calcium.  We clearly have wonderful powers of self-aggrandizement through delusion and rationalization.  The concept of American Exceptionalism, a variant of the Hebrew concept of the Chosen People and the Nazi concept of the superiority of the Aryan peoples are prime examples.  As is the European concept of the “White Man’s Burden”.  Or our democratic delusion that if enough of us are wrong, everything will turn out right.

It seems amazing that we ever accepted “reflections” as accurately portraying anything, preferring not to see ourselves as we are but as we wish we were.  Which of course explains, to an extent, the popularity of plastic surgery and girdles, and well, clothing (as well as the nudity taboo), and, on an emotive sense, the popularity of psychotherapy and perhaps, although it would seem oxymoronic, of purportedly self-reflective psychoanalysis.  It’s a wonder we have no taboo concerning mirrors.

All of the foregoing, during strangely lucid intervals (or at least intervals which, for some reason or other I perceive as lucid), makes me wonder what I’m really like, what I really look like, who I really am and just how close to accurate what I perceive of as reality really is.  Then I wonder just how lucid I’ve been as a write this, and whether it’s something I’ll ever re-read, or, for that matter, whether anyone else will ever read it. 

Then I picture alien anthropologists from deep in the future, perhaps just short of the instant when entropy finally wrestles gravity to a draw, finding and, after long and usually fruitless efforts, finally deciphering what I’ve written, and wondering, perplexed, just who and what we were.

Something we probably need to do ourselves, while we still can.
_______

© 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  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/.

Windfall Profits, the Defense Industry and the American Tax Payer:

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Reflections during another Memorial Day

The fulcrum on which political decisions are leveraged and the world’s future mortgaged is inherently tied to the welfare of investors in “defense” industries, of their senior executives and directors, and secondarily, the welfare of ancillary industries and businesses that profit from war and the threat of war, and if war and the threat of war are constants, then investments in “defense” industries are predictably secure.  Something the commander of allied forces in the Second World War and later, president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower begged us to avoid.  To the extent related government expenditures are not carefully monitored and waste prevails, so much the better.  That millions subsidize such profits with their lives in diverse parts of the world is merely “collateral damage”, at least to those not suffering such consequences, directly or indirectly.  And of course, on this Memorial Day, we recognize that such casualties are not only innocent foreigners, but also the bravest Americans, those who, believing that their service is essential, volunteer to put their lives and welfare on the line.

The Athenians attitude towards those who provided the armaments for their military and naval forces was wise.  They were required to serve on the front lines.  Not so our own war profiteers, neither they nor their families, except in extremely rare cases, serve at all, being too busy enjoying the fruits of others’ labors.  And most of those who do serve, Albert Gore and George W. Bush being prime examples, do so ensconced in protective cocoons, far from danger, surrounded by photographers so that their purported service can be documented for future use.  The Clintons and the Obamas and the Bidens (Joe and Hunter and Jimmy) and the Trumps were excused from service through the labyrinth of useful loopholes available to those wealthy or influential enough to avoid service, something which needs to be differentiated from the refusal to serve by those opposed to war, and who would never send the children, spouses, siblings or relatives of others to tread where they refused to serve.  Those who declined to serve but on attaining power of any sort, do not hesitate to send others to die or kill, and to suffer and cause mayhem, and to suffer and cause irreparable psychological trauma, are contemptuously referred to by those who served, as well as by conscientious objectors, as “chicken hawks”.  Our country is led by chicken hawks.  Chicken hawks in government, in the “defense” industries and in the corporate media as well.  And the results are predictable.  Profits for the few, massive profits.  But famine and chaos and mayhem and death and destruction for far too many on the other side of the ledger.  Some of them our own.  Some of them the best among us.

This Memorial Day takes place at an interesting time.  There has been hugely hyperbolic debate between the Republican led House of Representatives and the Biden administration concerning the need to raise the national debt limit, an increase once again required, for the 82nd time, because rather than pay for federal expenditures through taxes, to which voters would object and, as a result, might seriously consider what their taxes were being used to fund, it is more palatable, at least for now, to just, well, … borrow the money.  Federal debt financing is done through unsecured borrowing from third parties, largely banks and financial institutions but also investors, foreign and domestic.  Interestingly, the interest paid to holders of United States debt securities is higher than that paid by financial institutions to the Federal Reserve for the money borrowed to acquire such securities, among other things.  Many might wonder why the prohibitions against “ponzi” schemes which the Federal government prosecutes, are not applicable to the largest ponzi scheme of all.

The current direct national debt, that which is disclosed (it may well be substantially greater and does not include state, municipal or local debt), currently stands at almost thirty-two-trillion dollars[1], but the Biden administration insists that it must be increased immediately, if not sooner, and traditionalist members of the Republican Party are in agreement, although its populist branch is  not.  There is a current proposal on the table in Congress to acquiesce to the Biden administration’s demand to increase the national debt during the period preceding the next presidential election (so that it need not be revisited and become a political issue therein), by one-and-a-half-trillion dollars.

Sooo.  Why?

Because the United States government wants to spend the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China into oblivion by funding wars involving the Ukraine, already under way, and Taiwan, even at the risk of a nuclear holocaust, and anyway, that addition to the national debt, like the accumulated debt before it, ends up in the pockets of, well, you may have already guessed the answer from the introductory material above, “investors in “defense” industries, their senior executives and directors, and secondarily, the welfare of ancillary industries and businesses that profit from war and the threat of war”.

And who, you may ask, will pay that accumulated debt?

The answer is interesting and reminiscent of the attitude of French King Louis XV, you know, the one who preceded Luis XVI, who, along with his family and many others, lost his head in the French Revolution of 1789 (which, to an extent, may explain the drastic reaction by the powers that be to the political protests of January 6, 2020).  The answer is, … “who cares”!  At worse, the United States could print the money necessary to pay off the debt, although that would create never before imagined hyperinflation, inflation that would make that suffered in Germany following the War to End All Wars (well, we now call it the first of the world wars) at the dawn of the twentieth century a trifle.  One might recall that the inflation following the first of the world wars led to the rise of fascism in various countries, and threatened to do the same in most others.  Of course, some consider that fascism is currently in vogue among those who most criticized it way back then.

This Memorial Day, as I mourn my many friends and my former classmates who’ve perished in combat during the past six decades (I’m a Citadel graduate), it occurred to me that the answer to our ludicrous national debt crisis is rather simple and does not require a reinvention of the wheel.  It’s called a “windfall profits tax”.  One that should be imposed on those who’ve so profited from the perpetual wars (what would Emanuel Kant think).  You may have guessed the answer again, it’s the same as the answer to the former query: “investors in “defense” industries, their senior executives and directors, and secondarily, the welfare of ancillary industries and businesses that profit from war and the threat of war”.  A tax of 90% on all profits derived from them, directly and indirectly, from whatever sources and wherever derived, until the national debt is paid off, with tax avoidance punishable by forfeiture of all assets and life imprisonment.

Simple, sort of.  At least in a democracy where voters have some awareness of how things work, and why.

A suggestion as we remember those of our fellow men and woman who’ve sacrificed so much, unfortunately, all too often uselessly, on this Memorial Day.

Something on which not only to reflect, but perhaps on which to act.
_______

© 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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  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] Information based on the national debt clock as of this Memorial Day, available at https://www.usdebtclock.org/.

On the Possibility of Divine Contrition

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What if some of what objective alien academics might, on reflection, consider Terran religious myths, turned out to be true.  Consider the two most visible this week: the divine massacre of Egypt’s first born male children at the request of at least one Hebrew leader; and then, a bit over a millennia later, the execution of the purported son of the Hebrew god, again, at the demand of at least some Hebrew leaders.

What if the execution of the Nazarene, Yeshua ben Miriam, or ben Deux, or ben Yosef, depending on his paternity, involved an act of contrition by the Hebrew divinity for the execution, at his command, of so many innocents, and that does not relate solely to the Egyptian firstborn, but to almost all of the human race in the purported Great Flood, and to numerous Canaanites whose land, property and women were apparently gifts from the Hebrew God to the followers of a man from Ur Kaśdim who married his own sister and did not hesitate to generously share her with others (if it was to his benefit), and perhaps, even to the imposition of mortality not only on Eve, purportedly for her sins, and Adam, but on all humanity.

What if, having had over a millennia to reflect, the Hebrew divinity discovered a conscience and decided that his own sins (he was obviously male) required a supreme sacrifice, that of a version of himself? 

That certainly makes more ethical and moral sense than a sacrifice by mankind of a divinity’s son, to expunge the sin by one ancestress of having taken a bite from an apple (or a fruit of some kind, anyway).

Something to consider during the celebration of this week which so reeks of irony.

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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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  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/.

Now What?

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As I write this, I wonder if it will ever be permitted to see the light of day.  I’m certain that access to this article will be subjected to the de facto censorship limiting its spread and access through algorithms designed to limit postures frowned upon by our Internet censors.  But perhaps some brave souls will share it.  Every once in a while we somehow manage to get our messages heard, after which, of course, they’re distorted.

As usual when I write about abuse of the political, electoral and legal systems by the Deep State and its primary tools, the Democratic Party, traditionalist Republicans and the corporate media to impact the electoral options of Donald John Trump, I precede by asserting that I do not care for him and do not intend to vote for him, even as a protest.  But Mr. Trump has been indicted through the machinations of a Deep State tool, one of several local attorneys general and federal prosecutors tasked with preventing him for again running for and again possibly winning the United States presidency. 

The action is unprecedented, not only because it involves a former United States president, but because the purported “crime” involves having been the victim of blackmail and extortion.  But the real reason seems obvious to me.  It seems obvious to many who love peace, to the many who really strive for equity and equality, and for a system of governance based on justice and legality.

Mr. Trump has many negative characteristics but also a few saving graces, and it is the latter which have led the Deep State to take this unprecedented action, an action so polarizing that it once again promotes the prospect that American citizens will feel it is their duty to act in an uncivil, possibly violent manner.  The saving graces all involve repudiation of neoconservative military activities abroad, for example, in the Ukraine and in Taiwan; they involve repudiation of the dangerously anachronistic North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the similar web of offensive military alliances and bases around the world designed to promote and preserve political, economic and military hegemony, even at the risk of nuclear war.  They involve a desire to redirect spending on defense towards improved infrastructure.

Mr. Trump’s posture with respect to the foregoing is neither consistent nor coherent given his dedication to Israeli objectives and his intent to do to the Islamic Republic of Iran what his predecessors did to Iraq, nor given his methodology of governance through arrogance and aggressive posturing on economic issues, but it is deeply threatening to those who rule us through proxies, those who rule us through moles scattered throughout the bureaucracy and the judiciary, throughout what used to be a purportedly free press, throughout international institutions.  That is why a minor league functionary has taken the unprecedented, illegal action that confronts the United States today.  The action which will exacerbate the polarization which led to the events of January 6, 2020, and which, step by step, is bringing Americans closer and closer to another disastrous civil conflict.

Some among the American people seem to be waking up to the reality that democracy in the United States is an illusion, too many perhaps.  And the Deep State will not tolerate such independence, not again.  It is hell bent on preventing the miscalculations that led to the disastrous 2016 presidential and Congressional elections, disastrous at least from their perspective.  And no price is too high to pay to avoid them, especially when it is We the People who pay the price, not those who rule us.  Who rule us as though they were the proud owners of Tolkien’s one ring.

Julian Assange sits rotting in a British prison, thanks to the Deep State, in that case including Mr. Trump.  The real criminals, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bush’s and the Bidens (and I don’t mean just Hunter and Jimmy), are free to loot, plunder and cast the world into chaos; a world suffering from the blights of inflation and recession everywhere, and from the violence of the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace.  And I’m not at all certain that We the People can do anything about it.  It may already be too late. 

It is certainly way too late to stop the madness through the prophylactic means the Constitution was adopted to provide, means such as limiting the war powers to Congress, an institution which, for more than a century, has abdicated its most important responsibilities, both with respect to peace, and to foreign affairs, and to the wise use of our tax dollars.  And I’m not certain that there are any other constitutional options still open. 

Many of us seriously question the legitimacy of the electoral process, some, because of recent events, but others because the United States has always been a duopoly, a faux democracy with the electoral system rigged in favor of two principal players, both ultimately controlled by the same people.  That leaves us no options that most of us find acceptable, certainly not those options brewing under the surface among left and right wing armed thugs who consider themselves patriots.

So, … “now what”, as Troy’s Cassandra might ask, after having warned us of what was happening for so long?  As Julian Assange might ask, or Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning, or as the small group of independent journalists exiled from the major media constantly remind us.  Or as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and myriad other authors of dystopian novels illustrated for us.

Now what?
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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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com.  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 Day Designated Internationally to Honor Men

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It’s March 19, 2023, a Sunday and a day purportedly designated internationally to honor men, but as a holiday, it’s sort of a flop.  It’s not a great day for florists or restauranteurs, or for retail sales or for holiday bookings.  But perhaps it’s meaningful if we take a moment to recognize our less fortunate male brethren.  And there are so many.  And holiday’s all too often, rather than being happy days, are those most filled with regrets, and nostalgia, and melancholy.

So, … today, I’m thinking of all of the men who work diligently to support and protect their families, but who are deprecated for not spending enough quality time at home, and of those men who, through no fault of their own, have been sundered from their families and have lost everything they ever accumulated, who are left to live out what remains of their lives alone, and to those fathers who, after an unsuccessful relationship with their wives, find themselves estranged from their children. 

Of course, there’s another side to that dismal coin, men who are appreciated and beloved by their families, loved by their wives and admired by their children, but sadly, in today’s dysfunctional world, they’re the exception rather than the norm.  And of course, there are plenty of men who, because of their conduct, deserve their fate; but also, too many who don’t.

It’s an issue that’s not impacted by race, religion, national origin or political tendencies, … it just is, and there are few support groups to help these victims cope, nor any entertainment series to highlight the issue, nor any visible champions to highlight and ameliorate their plight, or legislators looking for legal and judicial reforms to resolve the social tragedy they represent. 

Just a few of us who, from time to time, remember and reflect.

Something to think about as this purported holiday fades to grey.

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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 is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at https://guillermocalvomah.substack.com/.  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/.

Once Again, the Ides of March

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It’s March 15, 2023.  Once again the Ides of March. 

Two millennia, six decades and seven years ago, more or less (given Pope Gregory’s machinations with the calendar), Gaius Iulius Caesar was assassinated by a number of the colleagues he’d pardoned multiple times, including his reputed illegitimate son, Marcus Junius Brutus, as he entered the purportedly sacrosanct Roman Senate.  His crime, protecting the Roman lower classes against those who perceived themselves their betters, and denominated themselves the “boni” (the good).

He was a populist and populists are not well regarded by those who seek permanent power by hiding in the shadows and working through moles in the bureaucracy, the military and in the institutions that operate the economy.

Not that he was a paragon of virtue in all respects, especially shameful was his conduct of the so called Gallic Wars, but he was a fascinatingly complex human being, whose heart, at least with respect to the Roman people, seemed to be in the right place.

Except for the absence of a charismatic and effective populist leader protecting the interests of the most vulnerable among us, little if anything has changed today from the world that Gaius Iulius Caesar left us so long ago.
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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/.