DO CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN?

Elliot Ackerman suggests they can help ... or hinder.  "There is nothing emasculating about being deliberate with your appearance. In fact, to do otherwise is unmasculine and childish."

We might still have John T. Molloy offering such advice.  Let Mr Ackerman offer reinforcement.

Men are on the rise. Kamala Harris’s Brat Summer led to Trump’s Bro Fall. But so many of these “manosphere” dudes look like clowns. Leaping tech titans in too tight—or too baggy (looking at you, Zuck)—T-shirts. Political appointees with American-flag pocket squares. Do you blow your nose into Old Glory? And do I really need to mention Senator John Fetterman—who isn’t a tech bro, but still—who thought the inauguration a fitting venue for a hoodie and shorts? C’mon, bros. Do better.

That might be reading too much cultural change into the election returns, which is an annoying tic of the coastal cosmopolitans, irrespective of their politics.  His advice, though, can be distilled into a short take.  "And if you are in fashion today, inevitably, you will be out of fashion tomorrow. Style is different. If done right, it lasts forever."

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR MATERIAL.

Fifteen years ago, it would be work I wouldn't lack.

Last week, Our President and Japan's new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, held a meeting in Washington that concluded with a cordial joint statement.  "President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru held their first official meeting today in Washington, D.C., where they affirmed their determination to pursue a new golden age for U.S.-Japan relations that upholds a free and open Indo-Pacific and brings peace and prosperity to a violent and disorderly world."

GENERAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPENSES.

The latest Northern Star "Faculty Spotlight" highlights a deanlet, Vicki Gerentes, NIU’s director of Fraternity and Sorority Life.  I wonder if any indirect cost returns finance her office.

“I have a senior associate director who’s with me and then a graduate assistant. The team of three is responsible for making sure that we have a wonderful program for students to be able to join. We manage rosters and provide grade reports to each organization as well. Between my staff and I, we each oversee two councils. I’m advising the National Panhellenic Council and the Panhellenic Council, but we both meet with every single chapter in some way.”

“We’re here to support the students, we are here to find ways that help the students in this process. My role is just to make sure that we have a really strong and great community. If there is an opportunity to have the Center for Greek Life, that by the time it gets there, that it’s just something that enhances a wonderful program. I’m here to make sure that experience is well supported, that we have staff members and resources that can help you work through challenges.”

Over the years, university administrators have toggled between working with the Greek-letter organizations and turfing them out.  The current posture appears to be "working with."

“There was a task force put together to help revitalize Greek Life, so a lot of administrators, students and alumni came together and put together this ultimate report after lots of conversations, lots of listening sessions, about how we can take Greek Life into the next phase. That hasn’t quite been funded yet and totally launched, but the land is there and there are secured plans for what it could look like.”

Curiously, for a faculty spotlight, there's little mention of faculty participation in that plan.  But there are plenty of other deanlets and deanlings to get to know.

“I think I’m just a new person, right? A lot that is really just learning more about the university, how we do things here, what kind of forms do you fill out in order to oversee certain things, which offices manage different programs and support students in different ways. It is a lot of relationship building and you can’t meet everybody in a day. It is a lot of time that I also have to spend, not just getting to know them [the students], but also colleagues, peers, the campus and the greater area.”

Whether that will pay off in increased enrollments and graduations is yet to be determined.

BOUGHT-OFF DEMOCRAT VOTERS IN THE FACULTY LOUNGE?

Our President's recent actions to reduce indirect cost recovery rates on government grants have surely provoked the research-industrial complex.

In a Friday night move that quickly drew howls of protest from the U.S. biomedical research community and a legal challenge, President Donald Trump’s administration announced it is immediately reducing by at least half the so-called indirect cost payments the National Institutes of Health (NIH) makes to universities, hospitals, and research institutes to help cover facilities and administrative costs.

A 15% indirect cost rate will now apply to all new and existing grants, NIH said in a memo from its director’s office. Typically, about 30% of an average NIH grant to an institution is earmarked for indirect costs, according to NIH’s notice, but some universities get much higher rates. In 2023, NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, spent nearly $9 billion on indirect costs; the change would likely leave research institutions needing to find billions of dollars from other sources to support laboratories, students, and staff.

“It is … vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead,” NIH wrote in the memo. The new rate brings NIH into line with the maximum indirect cost rates allowed by private foundations, NIH stated, and is higher than the minimum 10% indirect cost payment NIH says it is required to provide. “This rate will allow grant recipients a reasonable and realistic recovery of indirect costs,” the memo stated.

Unless there is a "The Secretary shall issue ..." provision in legislation establishing the Institutes, such a change might require an Act of Congress.  The tussle between Republican presidents and federally funded researchers, however, has been going on for a long time, with "government efficiency" being the most recent talking point.

REDUCE THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT.

Federalist contributors Jonathan and Paige Bronitsky unleash a polemic.  "‘New Urbanists’ Want To Bulldoze The Suburban American Dream."  I suspect it's part of a Militant Normal pushback against California's nanny-state (excuse the redundancy) politicians taking advantage of the recent Los Angeles fires to impose their vision of urban renewal on Altadena or the Pacific Palisades.  But they have something more general in mind.

Picture this: a four-story residential building perched atop an artisanal coffee shop and a yoga studio, its micro-apartments stacked like shoeboxes in the name of “sustainability” and “resilience.” Now picture something else entirely: a pristine, master-planned community where every house has a front porch, the streets are lined with picket fences, and everything looks as if it were plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting — except there are few if any houses of worship, the zoning codes are suffocating, and the price tag ensures only the elite can afford to live there.

These are the two faces of New Urbanism, an ideology that, masquerading as “traditionalist,” conservatives have tolerated for far too long. On one end, you have high-density urbanism, where developers — in cahoots with machine politicians — cram as many people as possible into apartment blocks, eliminating cars and personal space under the guise of environmentalism and a sense of community. On the other, you have the faux-traditional, highly regulated enclaves of Seaside and Celebration, Florida, prohibitively expensive and ironically more artificial than the suburban developments they criticize.

It used to be those four-story buildings with apartments (or perhaps the proprietor) living above the storefront occurred as a matter of course.

There were no streetcars along Milwaukee's Ogden Avenue back in the days of The Milwaukee Electric Lines, and the tower block closer to the lake is newer construction; whilst tower blocks of about the same vintage as that three story building with residences perched atop something (part of the first floor is the church annex) are a short walk from this corner.

FOURTH TURNINGS ARE LIKE THAT.

What Zero Hedge's Jeffrey Tucker describes as "The Most Dramatic Narrative Shift In Modern History" is what one expects when the old saecular order shatters.

It's been a long time in coming.

When voices left, libertarian, and right raise similar objections to an established order, might that order be in trouble?

That voices left, libertarian, and right see different ways to replace that order, suggest troubling times might be ahead.

It's a time when the existing social order loses its legitimacy, it's a Fourth Turning, even if people don't use that terminology.

IT'S STILL COLORED WATER IN A BLUE CAN.

Not too long ago, Miller Lite and Bud Light trashed their value proposition with Normals, provoking a boycott that I was quite willing and able to go along with.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday, and the only team to have won three consecutive NFL titles remains the Packers.  Anheuser-Busch bought air time ostensibly to make amends with Normals.

Free Press contributor Anson Frericks elaborates.

The ad, which features Shane Gillis, Post Malone, and NFL great Peyton Manning having fun at a wild barbecue,fueled by bright-blue cans of Bud Light beer, is no ordinary TV commercial. With its almost cartoonish celebration of masculine excess, the spot communicates two conventional beer-commercial messages: Bud Light is fun, and Bud Light is for guys. What makes it notable, though, is a third point, one it communicates only by implication: Bud Light is really, really sorry.

Bud Light is still trying to make up with the customer base it alienated on April 1, 2023. On that day, a brand that had been the top-selling beer in America for over two decades launched a social media campaign that would rock its customers, and not in a good way. Starring a transgender activist, Dylan Mulvaney, it celebrated Mulvaney’s first year of “girlhood.” Bud Light even sent Mulvaney a personalized can to mark this milestone date in Mulvaney’s transition from biological male to transgender woman, which millions had already followed on Instagram and TikTok.

This was not an April Fools’ Day prank as some believed, but a serious effort by the world’s largest beer company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, to “rebrand” its product.

What happened next was not amusing.  Anheuser might have gone woke as much to placate institutional investors who got their latest management fads from the World Economic Forum as to expand its market appeal, say, to the Diet Coke demographic.  But market tests, as ever, have steep grading curves.

On April 1, 2023, the ESG bubble popped. And Anheuser-Busch was caught holding the pin.

The reaction to the company’s partnership with transgender biological male Dylan Mulvaney was the culmination of America’s growing frustration with corporations shoving progressive politics down customers’ throats. The transgender issue was a hot topic. And a divisive one. Did most Americans care how people dressed or identified? No. But sex-change surgeries for kids were a different matter. Sixteen states had recently passed laws regulating the practice. Twenty-five states had banned biological males from competing against biological women in K–12 sports.

And Bud Light and the Jarrett regency handed Donald Trump a winning issue.  Then, notes Red State's Ed Morrissey, their advertisers overcompensated in their apology.

This made no impression among my friends at the party, as most of us were having too much fun socializing to pay much attention. If we had seen it, it would have produced gales of laughter, and not in the way Bud Light intended. Rather than return to the usual focus on friends and parties, Bud Light instead chose to parody men by making their masculinity ridiculous.

The nadir of this overcompensation was the sequence with the leaf-blowers used as phallic symbols while [careful, Ed, CAREFUL!] uhhh ... ejecting Bud Light out of excitement. The positioning of the tubes is anything but coincidental and would have made Freud himself blush. (In fact, check his grave; he might still have blushed.) That sequence starts 18 seconds into the ad, which seems just a tad premature, no? The whole thing looks like something Heinerscheid would have cooked up as her idea of toxic masculinity.

Whatever.  Captain Ed concludes,  "The message is clear: political correctness and The Shrieking of the Progressive Karens are dead."  And Bud Light is still colored water in blue cans, and attempting to sell it to dumb guys is still a thing.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE PARKING.

Streetsblog brings word of the passing of Donald Shoup, who made a research career out of that insight.

Donald Shoup, the author of the groundbreaking The High Cost of Free Parking and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, passed away last Thursday evening, February 6, 2025.

Shoup earned a doctorate in economics, and brought that training to his studies of parking policies. The High Cost of Free Parking demonstrated how urban parking policies, especially low-cost or free parking and minimum parking mandates, were damaging cities economically and culturally.

The High Cost concludes with three solutions to the dilemma, which have been adopted to at least some degree by cities across the country: charging fair market prices for curb parking, returning parking revenue to the neighborhood where it was collected for community investment, and removing off-street parking requirements for new development.

Shoup committed decades to researching flawed fundamental assumptions that governed minimum parking requirements, clear writing to educate a wide audience, and engaging decisionmakers with how his findings should shape policy.

His message was simple, although at first few wanted to hear it. “Parking is free for us only in our role as motorist--not in our roles as taxpayer, employer, commuter, shopper, renter, as a homeowner," he would point out. "The cost of parking does not cease to exist just because the motorist doesn't pay for it.”

Indeed.  As P. J. O'Rourke quipped about health care, wait until you find out what it costs when it's free.  Professor Shoup refrained from referring to traffic jams and parking hassles as road socialism, perhaps to be polite to urban planning types of a more socialist bent, and yet, in pointing out the follies of treating parking as an entitlement, wasn't he doing exactly that?

Parking spaces are productive assets, and ought be priced accordingly.  It's not so much the lack of pricing that contributes to the high cost of free parking, it's the rules that dictate how many spaces be provided that do.  Like much else that I lament, it began with good intentions.  "Motorists would circle the block, seeking limited curb space to park their cars, contributing to congestion. Thus mandatory parking minimums were born, a well-meaning initiative meant to ease traffic."  The good intentions broke down, though.  Parking mandates that assured drivers of a place to park wherever they went encouraged more driving, until the roads and then the parking lots got congested, and eventually something had to give.

That's from my review of The High Cost, and Professor Shoup's final commentary, in Streetsblog, continues the theme.  "Free parking has a veneer of equality, but it is unfair."  Under other circumstances, that's Friday short take material, isn't it?  The continuation is instructive.

Crowded curb parking is a great opportunity disguised as an insoluble problem. Almost like urban alchemy, parking benefit districts can transform a parking shortage into public services. Such districts can be politically popular, financially successful, environmentally sustainable and socially just.

Finally, here’s a thought experiment: If you live on the Upper West Side, would you prefer free public transit or free curb parking on your block? If you don’t own a car or park off-street, you will probably want free public transit.

Put another way, a neighborhood sovereign wealth fund, with the royalties distributed in the form of farecards?

Maybe the best thing is for the government to go away.

Here's where that nasty bid-rent curve gets in the way.  On the one hand, rent gradients are steeper if transportation costs are higher; as a consequence there's "no affordable housing" downtown.  On the other hand, if transportation costs are lower, rent gradients are less steep, but the affordable housing is still at a distance.  It's likely, though, that land markets subject to fewer zoning and parking constraints will allocate resources more efficiently than the outcome the Wise Experts have saddled us with.

That might be a stretch for students of urban planning, and yet, once urban planners start thinking of their streets and parking spaces as productive assets, their minds might turn to relying on markets more generally, whether or not a neigborhood quango is enforcing the property rights.  R. I. P.

MORE BUZZ-KILL FROM SAM PIZZIGATI.

He could have left well enough alone.

About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then—in football and America.

The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.

Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.

But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.

Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.

The Packer and Chief players of that first NFL-AFL Championship Game had to start their off-season jobs, such as Jimmy Taylor's wreck-diving work in the Gulf, two weeks later than previously.

1929, 1930, 1931; 1965, 1966, 1967.

The standard is still five titles in six attempts in eight seasons.

Last night, the Philadelphia Eagles dashed the hopes of the Kansas City Chiefs, who were the first team to qualify for the Super Bowl after winning the previous two.

Packer Nation has been paying attention.  "Vince Lombardi's Packers say don't call Chiefs' quest for 3 straight titles a first."  In fact, one of the players who helped set that standard notes the "five titles in six attempts" matters.

While the Packers do feel slighted, they also respect what the Chiefs have accomplished these last few years with coach Andy Reid, quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce.

“First of all, yes, it does bother me,” Hall of Fame guard Jerry Kramer said in a phone interview. “I'm aware of it. I'm not crying. I'm not hysterical. I'm not having a fit. But there's a little resentment there. But when I look at the Kansas City Chiefs and I see the quality of play and I know the coach from Green Bay and I watch Mahomes and Kelce, they're doing everything well. They are a great football team. I understand that and I appreciate that and I know how difficult that is.”

Even if the Chiefs do win Sunday for their third straight championship and fourth in six years, the Packers still hold something over them. Green Bay also won NFL titles in 1961-62 and is the only team with five championships in a seven-year span.

“We’ll have to start talking about five out of seven,” Kramer said. “They still have a little hill to climb. I've gone from three in a row to five out of seven. I hope they do it, really. My life has been complete. I've had a wonderful ride.”

Bill Belichik, Tom Brady, and the Patriots combined for six titles between 2002 and 2019, with their only opportunity for a third straight appearance coming in the 2006 season, when the Colts beat them out to beat the Bears.  The year after that, the Giants beat them.

Kansas City will not be able to achieve five in seven years, starting with their 2020 title and two more in 2023 and 2024 as they just had their sixth.

Might it be harder to get to the top of the pro football hill these days?  Quite possibly, with the longer regular season, free agency, and larger, stronger players giving their best.  But until the record-keepers reset all records to "Super Bowl era" or "sixteen or more games in a season" Packer Nation will be heard from.  They still aren't: during that Philadelphia drubbing of Washington to get to the Super Bowl, reporters invoked both Elroy Hirsch and the 1940 Chicago Bears when the subject of rushing touchdowns came up.

LONG CHANCES SHORTEN LIVES.

Online trainwatching has become way more convenient in the last couple years, with several networks of cameras making arrangements to place them on buildings with a trackside view. There might be promotional considerations involved with the host eateries.

Every so often, a motorist applies for a Darwin award.

When it's a tie at the level crossing, you lose.  These motorists avoided that rundown feeling.  The train made an emergency stop, and Austell, Georgia, including the crossing with the other railroad, was tied up for a few minutes while the train pumped up and any required inspections took place.

Cross crossings cautiously.

DO THE PACKERS LIKE THE CHOICE OF SLOGANS?

Red State contributor Teri Christoph is less displeased now that "End Racism" will be replaced as the end zone slogan during the Super Bowl with "Choose Love" and "It Takes All of Us."  Her characterization?  "Only marginally better."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We need the expertise of our faculty.  "Contemporary assessment is a tyrannical regime and a scourge of the college professor."  Professors, exercise your stewardship.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

THANKS, BARACK.

Barack Obama might have goaded Donald Trump into seeking the presidency the first time.

Long before that happened, though, his Obama Care web site failed miserably.

No worries, comrades, there's an executive order for that.  "The [United States Digital Service] was an Obamacare office created to make government software better. They were essentially software development for the bureaucracy."

All Donald Trump had to do was change one word.  "Trump renamed the United States Digital Service (USDS) the United States DOGE Service which even kept the acronym the same. Not only did repurposing an appropriate existing department allow Trump to ensure there was funding for DOGE without having to fight with Congress - he also ensured its legality."

There's been some pretty good staff work going on between November 6 and January 20.

Trump has power to set priorities for Executive branch departments but there are limits. In the case of DOGE, Trump clearly had a team of lawyers looking at ways to accomplish this goal legally.

USDS was already there and funded for the specific purpose. 44 USCS Chapter 36 is the law that facilitates much of USDS. It is generally about developing tech for the government. This means that focusing on efficiency and evaluating the entire government through the lens of the IT that runs it is not really substantially altering the agency - just its focus.

There's more at the link, including a libertarian prayer at the end.  "I don’t like that this has to be done and think the executive branch has far more authority than they should. That said, this order was very well done and Trump and Musk have really done a good job strategically here."

Perhaps, somewhere, there are congressional Democrats who are figuring out that giving Barack Obama powers without review simply gave Donald Trump those powers.

THE WORLD THE TRACTION COMPANIES MADE.

It looked a lot like the so-called fifteen minute cities.

Picture living in a bustling neighborhood where all your friends, basic needs, and even your job are reachable by a quick walk or bike or bus ride. (Something many people experience, possibly for the first and last time, on college campuses.) In such a city, parking areas may have been reclaimed as urban greenways, chance encounters with neighbors might be more common, and small local businesses would proliferate and thrive.

This vision is sometimes referred to as “the 15-minute city,” a concept pioneered by Franco-Colombian scientist and mathematician Carlos Moreno. It means basically what it sounds like: Instead of expecting residents to get in their cars and drive long distances to work, run errands, and take part in social activities, cities should instead be designed to provide those kinds of opportunities in close proximity to where people live, reducing overdependence on cars and increasing local social cohesion.

Just what we need, a new sort of intelligent design to undo the effects of a century of not-so-intelligent design.

“It’s an invitation to reinvent our lifestyles and urban practices to build a better future, where sustainability, equity, and well-being are at the heart of our concerns,” Moreno writes in the book. I spoke with Moreno over Zoom and e-mail about the growth of the 15-minute city concept, some sources of backlash, and whom he hopes to reach with his new book.

Sure.  Chant the right worship-words and hope for the best.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE A FEDERAL CASE OUT OF IT.

That used to be a schoolyard expression somebody would deploy to defuse a situation.  It's relevant to situations that arise in adult life as well.

Perhaps it is time for the people who run the theaters to rethink their business model, which seems to be based on upselling at the concessions, and endless commercials. Nearly half an hour of previews? Seriously? We're already doing the theaters a favor by purchasing tickets and their popcorn, and we can tolerate the high prices intended for popcorn lovers at the concessions.  When the scheduled start time for the feature is 1.30, start it no later than 1.35.  Don't make me wait until two.

It's not yet a federal case, although in Connecticut there oughtta be a law.

A new law could force movie theaters to list the actual start times of features allowing viewers to skip lengthy commercial intros.

The bill was proposed by Senator Martin Looney of New Haven, Connecticut on January 21.

The legislation would, 'require that each movie advertisement or listing include, and separately list, the scheduled start time for (1) the movie trailers and advertisements that precede the advertised or listed movie, and (2) the advertised or listed movie.'

Looney says he put forward the bill as a way to save his constituents' precious time after being contacted by disgruntled members of the public.

'It seems to be an abuse of people's time,' Looney told the Register Citizen. 'If they want to get there early and watch the promos, they can.

'But if they just want to see the feature, they ought to be able to get there just in time for that.'

The reactions are instructive.  "Several movie theaters including AMC, the world's largest movie theater chain, already include disclosures which state that audiences should allow around 20 minutes for commercials."  I wonder if somebody at AMC heard me.  "I once sent Carmike a letter detailing these things ... it was after my feature picture advertised for 1.30 started a few minutes past 2, which way exceeds my patience for business necessity.  They have not yet responded.  I have not gone back.  Nor, apparently have many other viewers."  (That Carmike link now takes readers to AMC.)

LET'S ALL GO TO WIGAN PIER.

The freak magnet is still with us.  "I've never fully understood how every sort of exotic preference somehow attaches itself, or gets itself attached, to Marxian thinking."

"Progressives Won’t Help the Working Class by Abandoning Marginalized Groups" does little to enlighten me.

Working class is as much an identity as gender, religious affiliation, immigrant status, place, race, and ethnicity. All of us hold multiple identities. But in the political context, “identity politics” is often a dog whistle for Black and brown communities or members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Political leaders and pundits’ calls to deprioritize communities of color and marginalized groups distort the nation’s power dynamic and risk sidelining voices working to build a more equitable society. Such takes also pretend the far-right offers credible solutions to pressing economic issues while minimizing the critical role progressives play in challenging the systems that drive economic inequality. Any critique of movement or “identity politics” without a power analysis misses the forest for the trees.

That passage does a pretty good job illustrating why critical theory is not Marxian.  "Working class" means alienated from ownership of the means of production.  The populist right never lacks for opportunities to produce white folks with normal sexual appetites who get privilege-shamed in order to "prioritize" those holding more Oppression Olympics medals.  That "power analysis" (I'm using "power" to mean "the ability to direct the action of others," which can mean at the point of a gun, on pain of your job, or by the trading of cash or favors) elides the very real power the human resources department has over an employee's promotion, or Student Affairs has over your Permanent Record.

WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER.

Happy Reagan's Birthday.  "Oh, there are those who say 'today’s GOP wouldn’t nominate Reagan!' – to which I respond with a contemptuous sigh, before telling the critic to listen to 'A Time for Choosing', and tell me who Reagan more resembles; Arne Carlson, or Scott Walker?"

WILD MARY KEEPS ON ROLLING.

Axios provided a cheat sheet describing coming rail transit attractions in Charlotte, North Carolina.  I direct your attention to a vision of the Commuter Rail service.

Charlotte Area Transit System visual retrieved from Axios.

The commuter rail service will be called the red line, with the streetcar called the gold line, a light rail or bus rapid transit service proposed as the silver line, and the existing light rail service called the blue line.  (As long as there is a red line and a blue line, what are the sweater colors of the Hurricanes?)  The authority also propose a new rail station to "replace the outdated Amtrak station" and serve the red, silver, and gold lines.

I doubt there is going to be a stylized fireball on the red line's locomotives, let alone a BL2 on the head pin.

ENOUGH OF THE PEACE PROCESS ALREADY.

I took some stick on social media for mocking Hamas as the only entity that could turn beachfront property into a slum.  "Never mind that Hamas could have avoided all the trouble by, oh, not attacking that music festival in the first place, or, once they figured out the Israelis were serious, returning all the prisoners, surrendering the ringleaders, disbanding their government, and inviting the Kuwaitis, who have some experience with beachfront property, to be trustees for Gaza."