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Chicago insists a legal weapon permit holder must have a signed affidavit from a firearms instructor affirming that he or she completed a training course, including at least one hour of gun range training. Chicago simultaneously prevents its residents from meeting that criterion in the city they live in. Yes, that’s right: The city demands gun range training to own a gun yet bans gun ranges at the same time. Well, not all gun ranges. The already existing ranges for government employees at the local Postal Service, Federal Reserve (!), and border authority offices are still in business.

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As gubernatorial candidates, Republicans Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio campaigned hard against federal stimulus money for high-speed rail projects in their states, dismissing it as useless big-government spending that would cost their states much more in the long run than the job gains they’d see in the short run.

Both men won. Today, they faced the consequences.

The Department of Transportation yanked $1.2 billion from Wisconsin and Ohio high-speed rail efforts and redirected it to other states that want to move forward, especially California, which got half that money, $624 million. Unlike the voters of those two Midwestern states, Californians elected a Democrat, Jerry Brown, as their next governor.

You cross the Big Boys, they punish you.

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Today Susan Collins continued her career long practice of duplicity by reneging on her agreement with her caucus and voting for cloture on the pressing subject of legalizing buggery in the Armed Forces. A vote that failed.

The problem with our moderates is not only that they don’t believe in anything not even in the sanctity of their own pledge to their caucus.

That’s what being a RINO is all about: A Democrat in a Clever Plastic Disguise who gets to pretend to be a Republican in public, being sure of a welcome from those idiots in the Republican party who think that labels actually determine the nature of a thing rather than the other way around. The people who need to be expunged are not the RINOs but those ‘pragmatists’ who tolerate them.

Read it.

If even Slate magazine sees it as a problem, you know it’s really a problem.

This immense imbalance has political consequences. When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side. Imagine if George W. Bush had tried such a stunt—every major newspaper in the country would have run an op-ed piece by some Nobel Prize winner asking how the guy who prohibited stem-cell research and denied climate change could have the gall to appear on a program that extols the power of scientific thinking.

Indeed. The Left prides itself on being the smartest guys in the room, even while embracing obvious loonies like environmentalists and animal-rights wackos.

Paul Carr at TechCrunch has an unconventional perspective.

Both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate involved scandalous information that almost nobody knew. “Cablegate”, on the other hand, involved cables that were routinely shared between members of the US government and armed forces, and trusted figures from friendly nations.

Thousands – maybe millions – of people had access to the cables – which, as openness goes, is pretty impressive. Hell, even a lowly Private like Bradley Manning – the junior soldier with a grudge against the American military who allegedly leaked the documents to Wikileaks – had access to them. Now, however, thanks to Wikileaks, all of that is likely to stop. What’s also likely to stop is the routine documenting of casual conversations, the candid sharing of opinions between allies – and a whole bunch of other acts of openness which if Wikileaks actually meant a word it said, the organisation should be all for. And for… what? So that millions of us who had no real business – beyond a basic prurient interest – in knowing what conversations are being had behind closed diplomatic doors could feel important. Well, great. Responsible openness’ loss is a few million busybodies’ gain.

Read it.

This actually says something very profound. The one who is ‘challenging socially-constructed hair norms’ is, in technical terms, a ‘dork’. Norms exist for a reason. Those who ‘challenge’ them aren’t being bold and independent, they’re being sociopathic. Like tattoos and piercings, they make a fashion statement: ‘I’m on the lunatic fringe, and I intend remaining on the lunatic fringe. Feel free to ignore me, unless I’m in a group, in which case I represent an algae bloom in the gene pool’.

Read it.

More hand-wringing about the disappearance of things of no possible interest to anyone whose academic career didn’t depend on it.

Read it.

No doubt Thomas Friedman, famous New York Times columnist, is standing by to cheer them on. After all, the Chinese know so much more about democracy and good government than Americans do.

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In what Japan said was an unprecedented show of force two ‘submarine hunter’ Ilyushin-38 jets from Russia’s Pacific Fleet circled the biggest joint US-Japanese military exercise in history for several hours in an apparent attempt to gather intelligence.

Memo to the Crust: Just because they aren’t (formally) Communists any more doesn’t mean that they’re our friends.

Read it.

Certainly that’s how it turned out after this year’s general election in Australia. That resulted, as over here, in a hung parliament, the first for more than 70 years. As here, the incumbent Labour Party lost the vote by most meaningful measurements (they ended up with the same number of seats as their conservative rivals, and under Australia’s version of the AV system a considerably smaller share of first preferences). The three independent MPs who found themselves kingmakers all came from rural constituencies, whose electors appeared much happier with the idea of a centre-right government than a centre-left one. But that did not stop two of the three from throwing in their lot with Labour, allowing the seemingly humiliated Julia Gillard to remain as prime minister. The rationale was straightforward: they were able to get more out of her, in the form of money, jobs and all the other little titbits of power that a government has at its disposal. They also believed that her relative weakness made her a more trustworthy partner: she was less likely to cut and run, because she had much more reason to be frightened of the voters. And luckily, being politicians (and Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable.

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Nothing brings back the sixties like students getting kicked away from the public trough.

The occupation began at a ‘What Next?’ meeting on the day of the second student march when a group of UCL students voted to take over the Jeremy Bentham Room (students at SOAS had gone into occupation two days before). A general meeting was then held to draft their demands. The most important, and most often repeated, is that UCL’s management issue a statement ‘condemning all cuts to higher education’. They also want things they might be able to get: for the university to pay UCL cleaners the London living wage, to bring outsourced support staff in-house and to change the composition of the university council to get rid of the majority of corporate, non-UCL members (they’d like a quarter each of management, students, tutors and support staff). Decisions are made by consensus – ‘better than democracy’ a first-year undergraduate explained – at two lengthy daily meetings. Students are divided into working groups according to their talents – IT, media, process (analysis of how the occupation itself is working) – but there’s no leader, everyone insisted. An email account, Facebook page, website and Twitter feed were set up overnight and messages of support started to come in from people like Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and Billy Bragg; comedians came to tell jokes, bands to play, novelists to read their books, tutors to give seminars. On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged tax evasion. And on the day of the march itself, another delegation was sent to Trafalgar Square, while tweeters back at the occupation offered tea and biscuits to anyone running away from the police.

I wonder how they would cope if they were just left to sit and rot for a year or two? It’s not as if anybody needs them or their campus buildings. They might even serve as a tourist attraction. ‘Come see the student demonstrators! Like Madame Tussaud’s, only they move and smell bad!’

Proof positive that environmentalism is just some wierdo pagan religion.

Does this raise your consciousness about how mankind is harming the planet? Or does it just creep you out? We report, you decide.

Check it out.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Yeah, that U.N. really helps.

Read it.

Read it.

She wrestled with accepting a smaller settlement than she considered fair. Then a lawyer referred her to Balance Point Divorce Funding, a new Beverly Hills lender that offers to cover the cost of breaking up — paying a lawyer, searching for hidden assets, maintaining a lifestyle — in exchange for a share of the winnings.

In October, Balance Point agreed to invest more than $200,000 in Ms. Pont’s case.

“It’s given me hope,” Ms. Pont said. “I don’t view it as a loan; I view it as an investment in my future. They are helping me to get what is rightfully mine.”

Read it.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

It’s bad enough that the U.S. government is using junk science to destroy the American economy; nothing will do, apparently, except that the rest of the world has to be screwed as well.

Todd Zywicki has some good points.

Justice Scalia notes (in a Matter of Interpretation if I recall correctly) that what is striking about the 19th Amendment is how quaint it seems that in order to give women the right to vote it was thought that you actually had to amend the Constitution in order to bring that result about.  Today, of course, someone would just file a lawsuit and have the judges order that result.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

You are a state governor dealing with a strike of state employees. To end it, you must offer them something. One possibility is to raises their wages. Another is to agree to a more generous pension plan.

Higher wages will come, at least for the next few years, out of your budget—and there are a lot of other things you would like to spend the money on. Higher pensions will be paid, almost entirely, from the budget of later governors. It looks like an easy choice. And, since you aren’t the one paying, there is no good reason for you to be stingy in your offer, especially if being generous might end the strike sooner and buy you future political support from the currently striking union. Follow out the logic of the situation and one can see why many U.S. states currently face serious budget problems, in part due to very generous employee pension plans.

Read it.

For some reason I just can’t see a language as an appropriate subject for a ‘major’. I suppose they actually mean the literature of the language, as ‘English Major’ is actually shorthand for ‘English Lit Major’.

Read it.

Al Qaeda has gotten to the sharks.

Read it.

It’s been said that, as a productive civilization devolves, society will become ruled, not by law, but by special interest groups—each competing with one another to seize control in order to feed on the carcass of society. The more a civilization moves toward collectivism and devolves, the more citizenry will turn to tribalism—fighting over, like a pack of jackals, whatever scraps are left (or thrown to it by an all-powerful government). Eventually, society will get to the point that it will be controlled by whichever tribe (or pack) has the greater number, the sharpest teeth, the biggest club or largest gun.

The Other McCain speaks for me.

He lost me at “not”:

“We are not going to deport 11 million people,” Gingrich said Thursday as he kicked off his first forum on Latino issues. “There has to be some zone between deportation and amnesty.”

We are also not going to be able to kill or capture every terrorist in the world, but we don’t go around proclaiming that in public, do we?

What Newt is saying here is simple: Surrender.

The problem with politicians is that they get hung up on practicality and always let it trump principle. Whether we can deport 11 million people is a speculation without any evidence to support a determination one way or another (How will we know unless we try?); the point being lost sight of here is that it’s not a binary decision, i.e. the choice is not between ‘deport none of them’ and ‘deport all of them’, with nothing in between. Let’s deport as many as we can catch, and live with the fact that every one we deport makes our situation better.

Read it.

Thieves in Britain are using Google Earth to target lead roofs on Church of England buildings to sell on the lucrative metals market, a Church spokesman said. About 8,000 insurance claims have been made for lead theft worth about 23 million pounds ($35.93 million) during the past three years, Church estates commissioner Tony Baldry said during a debate in Westminster Hall this week.

Quasimodo is never around when you need him.

On the other hand, if some guy is on top of your church stripping the lead off of it, isn’t that going to be rather obvious?

Read it.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

Which just underscores the notion that environmentalism is just a form of neo-paganism. Imagine the uproar if a U.N. official had said a Christian or Jewish (or Hindu or Buddhist) prayer? (Not that a U.N. official would do such a thing, of course).

Read it.

AIDS forgotten? Sure, like Sarah Palin is forgotten.

Koop’s 1988 “Understanding AIDS” report, mailed to every household in the nation, was aimed at democratizing a disease with specific  risk groups caused by extremely specific risk factors. A heterosexual couple appears in the first picture, with the first captioned image that of what  appears to be a lesbian saying AIDS is also a woman’s disease. Lesbian-to-lesbian sexual contact as a risk factor? “To date there are no confirmed cases,” declared a 2008 CDC report 18 years later.

Today American black males have 30 times the HIV infection rate of white females.

Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the nation’s sixth and 14th-leading causes of death of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.

And no, it’s not homophobic to point out that AIDS is essentially 100% preventable while none of these other diseases is preventable at all.

Heterosexual men have a greater chance of getting breast cancer than AIDS. So I care about AIDS the same way I care about skate-board-induced quadriplegia: Dude, it’s your Own Damed Fault.

And guess who it’s being hinted should pay for prescriptions for the nation’s entire population that engages in high-risk activities? Yes, give and give generously. Uncle Sam insists.

Why such grotesquely favorable treatment for AIDS? Partly it’s simple inertia. But much is because a huge AIDS bureaucracy now exists, with vast numbers of organizations and their employees voraciously feeding at various international, national, state and privately funded troughs.

Read it.

No one other than Barack Obama and the Kremlin care about START.

But we should. We should also care that the Senate GOP, thanks to the “skillful” negotiations of Jon Kyl (R-AZ), have decided to sell us down the river to Moscow in order to temporarily avoid the Obama tax increase.

The sad part is that we could get the Bush tax cuts extended even without selling out our national security.

Actually, one could just set up a template ‘Senate GOP Sells out X for Y’ and run with it pretty much every day, substituting appropriate values for X and Y.

The problem with compromising with ‘progressives’ is as follows:

What they get: They get to do A.

What we get: They don’t get to do B, C, D, E, and F.

Thus each ‘compromise’ leaves us worse off and them farther toward their objective, until they win and we lose.

Let’s not even go there.

Read it.

Rep.-elect Tim Scott (R., S.C.) said Wednesday that he’s not going to join the Congressional Black Caucus.

“While I recognize the efforts of the CBC and appreciate their invitation for me to caucus with them, I will not be joining at this time,” Mr. Scott said in a statement. “My campaign was never about race.”

Thereby cementing the CBC’s position as an explicitly Democrat organization. (We already knew that it was an explicitly racist organization.)

Read it.

Well, that’s a relief.

The ones who do hate the rich, the article explains, are journalists and professors jealous that their college and private school classmates are making so much more money than they are.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Bloomberg reports:

Citigroup Inc., recovering from its $45 billion bailout in 2008, is in advanced talks to hire former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Orszag, 41, may take a job in the New York-based firm’s investment-banking division, the people said, declining to be identified because the discussions are private. An announcement may come as early as today, one of the people said.

Notice that he’s going to take “a job.” It doesn’t tell us what kind of job because it doesn’t really have to. The important thing is that he’s on the payroll. What skills does he bring to the table? He’s a smart guy but one thing he brings is his ability to call people in the White House and the Fed and have them return his call.

Read it.

And yet: Which of us has not been tempted to do the same?

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‘Stand back, everyone. I take very large steps.’

My question is: How come they all dress like girls?

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Mr. Obama is sending his Attorney General to Switzerland to lobby for the World Cup. Yes, apparently the most important job for the American Attorney General is to make sure we get a soccer tournament in 2022.

Check it out.

A red-faced headteacher has apologised after a school report containing 14 spelling mistakes and grammatical errors was sent to a parent by a form tutor. Plain English campaigners slammed the error-laden email and said the teacher should be sent back to school herself. The school report errors are revealed just days after the government’s education secretary Michael Gove called for teachers to crackdown on poor spelling and grammar.

Apparently British teachers aren’t any better than American ones.

Read it.

Ever since Willett, there have been two groups of people who are unhappy with the existing arrangement. Some would like to return to GMT, the country’s natural time zone, all year round – but they have never put forward legislation to this end and such a move is, in any case, no longer permitted under an EU directive.

Sounds like a good reason not to belong to the EU.

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It’s no wonder wind energy is so expensive; it’s not the cost of erecting the windmills, it’s the cost of hiring all the former government officials to get the windmills approved! The conclusion I reached about the Maine situation bears repeating in the Rhode Island case: If this were all being done by an oil company there’d probably be a much bigger uproar, but because it’s wind, it has an image as “clean” energy.

Read it.

Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.

Yet another excellent reason to avoid Facebook.

Read it.

The troubled “Hobbit” film project has become mired in a race row after reports that a British woman of Pakistani heritage was told she was not white enough to take part as an extra.

This is not a matter of ‘race’ (what ‘race’ are Pakistanis?), but one of ‘color’ (for which ‘race’ is the politically fashionable surrogate), and this requirement is directly related to the job. Next they’ll be demanding that Othello be played by a lesbian Latino in order to promote ‘diversity’.

She has started a Facebook group called “Hire Hobbits of all colours! Say no to Hobbit racism!”

What an idiot. She ought to be disallowed because hobbits aren’t as shit-stupid as she appears to be.

And 5′ is not ‘the perfect height to play one of Tolkein’s hobbits’; the perfect height to play one of Tolkein’s hobbits is 3′, which any ass who had read the books would know. It’s common these days for journalists to write about stuff concerning which they are grossly ignorant, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to put up with it.

Read it.

The U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran on November 4, 1979, was the start of 444 days which came to define Jimmy Carter.  The U.S. government was revealed to be powerless and the President weak.  Those among us who were alive and conscious during those days have embedded the feelings of helplessness.

There have been many comparisons of Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, focused on the economy.  But the continuing leak of documents by Wikileaks has become for Obama what the Iranian hostage crisis was to Carter.

The Wikileaks folks trot the globe with impunity and funnel documents to the press at will, for the purpose of damaging U.S. relations with other countries, our war efforts, and our intelligence capability.  And we do almost nothing about it.

Read it.

My theory is, that teachers typically come from the left side of the Bell Curve, and smart kids make them feel inferior and threatened. I’ve run across more than a few of those in my time.

And, of course, there’s the Keillor Syndrom: Modern ‘progressives’ are committed to the worldview in which ‘the children are all above average’, so to single some out as ‘gifted’ constitutes DISCRIMINATION of an particularly invidious kind.

The standard, “one-size-fits-all” philosophy of public education has always troubled me.

And rightly so. This is the classic ‘factory school’ in which batch-processed kids are passed along the assembly line like so many cartons of eggs, based on the theory that kids of roughly the same age will have roughly the same cranial abilities — a notion that’s laughable on its face … except that everybody forgets to laugh.

The Globe Life polls on Gifted Education ( Nov. 11 and Nov. 15, 2010) were totally contradictory.  After a story on the social costs to kids of “Gifted” programs, some 56% of the 2,284 respondents opposed “segregation” of gifted kids.  Yet, if given the option, most parents would put their kids in such programs anyway. When asked “Would you put your child in a gifted program?,” some 73% of the 765 respondents replied in the affirmative.

Not really contradictory. When people are asked about airy generalities, they provide the socially-acceptable response. When it comes to their own interests, however, it’s All About Me. This is why rich people who are strident in their calls for ‘increasing taxes on the rich’ don’t send all their Extra Money to the government voluntarily.

Stepping back with a wider lens, highly motivated, academically inclined students look a lot different. Seeking more from your local public school and demanding better can be difficult –and can be easily dismissed as reflecting the “elitist” attitude of the privileged classes.

And we see this in Politically Correct California, where left-wing Crustian parents loudly denounce segregation and the Oppression Of People Of Color and then fight tooth and nail to keep their own kids out of schools that have any substantial number of black or latino kids.

Read it.

Politics leads to really bizarre behavior.

Not sure how I forgot to include this since it was the whole reason I chose to post it, but the affordable housing is mandated by local inclusionary zoning – no developer would voluntarily seek out below-market rents. So essentially the developer was forced to include “affordable” units, which then became the very reason that the community rejected the proposal.

So developers are required by law to include ‘affordable housing’ (i.e. housing cheap enough for the Underclass in this Crustian neighborhood) and then the NIMBYs oppose the development because it would bring masses of Underclass to their community. The profit potential of real estate development must be truly immense if developers are willing to put up with this horseshit.

Power Line is on the case.

Ottmar Edenhofer is one of the leaders of the international global warming movement: he is the deputy director and chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the joint chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 3, and will co-chair the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” at the upcoming summit in Cancun. On November 14, he was interviewed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His explanation of the current goals of the climate change movement was illuminating:

“First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”

And there you have it. Straight from the horse’s ass.

Read it.

The problem with unions is that they’re run by people who have all the foresight of a cave fish. They’ll always take a dollar today even when it will cost them (and everyone else) ten tomorrow.

Read it.

What environmentalists fail to grasp is that fossil fuels are buried treasure, and that treasure is not going to stay in the ground: someone’s going to dig it up. Government regulators may try to prevent that, but when you’re talking about billions of dollars (and the tax revenue that generates), people will find a way.

This is an eternal blind spot for environmentalists: people respond to incentives, and they won’t necessarily respond to regulations in the way that regulators think they will. That’s how the Endangered Species Act led landowners to destroy habitat to prevent the government from making their land worthless. That’s how incentives for electric cars wound up creating free golf cart sales to the well-off. That’s how subsidies for new efficient refrigerators led to more people having two fridges instead of one. That’s how helping to create the corn ethanol lobby (originally as a gasoline additive to address summertime carbon monoxide emissions) has led to an entrenched rent-seeking industry that engages in massive environmental despoliation. And now, once again, environmentalist actions lead to more, not less environmental damage. Will they never learn?

Turns out, there’s an app for that.

Everything was gone — all her contacts, photos and even the phone’s ability to make calls.

It was only after she got home to Silicon Valley that she found out that her phone had been killed by her employer, a publishing company.

Someone in the IT department had sent out what’s called a “remote wipe,” a kind of auto-destruct command that’s delivered by e-mail. The wipe was done by mistake, and Stanton wouldn’t have been surprised to see this kind of remote control on a company phone.

But this iPhone was hers.

“It was my account, in my name [and] I’d paid all the bills,” Stanton says. “It didn’t make any sense to me that somehow work could get through AT&T, who I thought controlled my phone, and could completely disable the phone and the account.”

The phone doesn’t need to download any new software. All that’s necessary is for the phone’s user to configure it to receive e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange Server — the kind most big companies use.

Once that’s been set up, an IT department has the capability to wipe the phone and turn off functions like Bluetooth, the Web browser and even the phone’s camera.

Read it.

You know it had to happen. Besides, ‘shop’ is something that Third World countries do, these days.

Read it.

Read it.

Doctors who own independent practices sometimes band together to provide a bulk offering of services, at a collectively negotiated rate, for third-party payers such as large health insurance carriers. These groups are called “independent practice associations,” or IPAs, and they’ve been around since the 1950s. IPAs provide tangible value for physicians and patients alike: Doctors get a middleman to deal with the insurance bureaucracies, and patients get access to a wide range of health care providers at discounted prices. But thanks to the ever-expanding mission of antitrust regulators, the associations are also under constant attack from the federal government.

And these are the people that the Obamanation want to run our health care. Sweet.

Read it.

So Chen, 30, is one of an increasing number of mainland Chinese women who are taking advantage of a loophole in American law to travel to the United States to give birth.

“Most Chinese women who go to the U.S. to give birth do so for their child’s future, for the education, and for the work possibilities. And that’s true for me, too,” says Chen, who is cautious and does not to want to reveal her identity.

“We just want to give him more choices in life,” Chen adds.

Better hurry up — Democrats are working frantically to reduce the choices Americans have.

Jerry Pournelle discusses the TSA kerfuffle.

The purpose of the TSA is to make it clear that Americans are subjects, not citizens; at least it has operated as if that were the mission from its beginning. The X-Ray machine are expensive, and I suspect that if you trace the profits made from the government’s buying them you will find paths to lobbyists involved with those who made the policies. Given the profits involved, I would not be astonished to find that donations to al Qaeda from people who make profits from those machines. Stranger things have happened.

There is a story that one chap stripped to his underwear. They required him to put his clothes back on before doing the pat down. I don’t know if that story is true, but it certainly would not be astonishing. It’s just routine, Ma’am. This is the new normal. You wanted change, didn’t you?