Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 This looks like a mess.  Peruvian police raids property of former electoral chief amid irregularities in elections So ... Peru has a two-tiered system of electing a President. In the first round, there is a free-for-all, with dozens of candidates.  If no one gets 50% + 1, the two top vote getters from that round run against each other in the second. Much like California's Governor's race.  The first round took place on April 12th.  Various snafus delayed some of the voting until the next day and snafus in the counting since then have been legion. It is clear as I wrote this that the largest vote total was the one that went to the daughter of a former President, that is to Alberto Fujimori's girl, Keiko Fujimori.  It is not at all clear who will be running against her. But the cliffhanger or "who came in second" isn't what is generating the headlines in Peru right now. Nor are they generated by the complicated nature of the Fujimori family's political lega...

I begin this year, as I seem to begin each year, with three calendars. I have a new desktop/appointment calendar from American Express; a month-by-month wall calendar advertising the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and a day-to-day calendar atop my dresser filled with trivia regarding a television program, The Big Bang Theory. The AMEX calendar, as is its year-by-year custom, tells me to travel to various exotic places where I can use my blue card to go into debt. Among the locales highlighted this year: Cancun, Mexico;  Oslo, Norway; Cusco, Peru. In connection with the latter, we're told amidst space for mid-September 2015 appointments that visitors to high-altitude Cuzco should keep well hydrated and avoid heavy meals and alcohol. Got it. The Red Sox calendar gives the stats for different players each month, starting in January with Jon Lester, Pitcher, #31. Lester also gets a very dramatic photo portraying him in full stretch, mid-pitch.  If you're curious, he was born...