Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 So ... Eric Bolling is think of running against Rep. Tom Rice (R - SC). This, if it happens, will be one of those intra-part fights where some GOP-er primaries an incumbent claiming that he is a Republican in Name Only. (Wow, the initials spell the name of an animal -- one that looks sort of like a reduced elephant -- I never noticed that before.)  Rice, pictured above, represents the northeastern corner of the state, which includes Myrtle Beach. He has a very conservative record, but (gosh horrors) voted in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump the second time.  So: who is Eric Bolling? Almost nobody. Bolling was an ardent Donald Trump supporter on Fox News who was fired from that network after an investigation into the "dick pics" he had been emailing to female colleagues. Now he is looking for something else to do with his life and the 7th congressional district of SC may be just the ticket. I think a Billing versus Rice primary might be a battle of wits between un...

A final observation on Postrel's 2003 book on the aesthetic age. Here we get to the politics of it. On the municipal level, she gets to score some points at the expense of the busybodies of building and planning codes and the busier bodies who live and breath to enforce them, and who make up their own additional rules in the process. She takes as a case study here the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, of which she writes: "Mount Pleasant does have lots of explicit design rules -- no neon, for instance -- but the board's critique is open-ended. If members don't like glass block or ceramic tile, they say so, even if the city has no law against either material. An architect who wants his plans approved will bend his client's budget, tastes, and aesthetic  identity to  suit the board. all the more so if he expects to submit future plans to the same board." With the result, she says, that the various streets of Mount Pleasant all end up looking the ...