Air Force Adds Six Months of Hard Labor to Basic Training

Photo by Staff Sergeant Desiree N. Palacios, via Wikimedia

Anyone who has served in the military, or is close to someone who has, knows about the often strong rivalries between branches. The Marines consider themselves the most serious and disciplined, often butting heads with the Army over this argument due to the similar missions the two branches have undertaken in recent decades. Most of the time, however, the Air Force gets the worst wrap for being too relaxed and too comfortable for their members to be considered real warriors.

Having had enough of the criticism, and being heavily annoyed by the bickering between the Army and the Marines, General Rand of the Air Force, commander of the Air Education and Training Command, took action. He’s declared that recruits joining the Air Force will be required to complete six months of hard labor in the sulfur mines of the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia for the first phase of their basic training regiment.

Rand said, “I originally transferred to the Air Force from the Marines, so I know about all the asinine comparisons. Everyone is judging the quality of troops by how terrible the living conditions were and how abusive the leadership was, not on the actual quality of the training. This is my way of saying, ‘Screw all of you, just try and top how idiotic and abusive this training is.’”

Due to the difficult job market and the continued desire among people to join the military, Rand does not believe this will deter people from joining the Air Force. “Once the training is out of the way, we'll still have better living quarters and food than anyone else, so I’m not exactly worried.”

The Army and Marine training commanders did not reply to our requests for comment on this situation, but Rear Admiral White of the Naval Education and Training Command responded with, “Oh, you guys are all so cute.”

Quantum Mechanics Explains How Jobless Rate Has Both Increased and Decreased

Photo by Michael Raphael, via Wikimedia

In the early 20th century, Erwin Schrödinger developed theories to help explain the behavior of subatomic particles. These famously asserted that a particle could exist in two different and distinct states at exactly the same time. Economist and political analysts have recently discovered that a similar condition seems to exist with the unemployment rate in the United States.

“It’s a result of something we call the BPDBI, which manifests especially strong when you have a very polarized President in the White House,” said Sarah Sanchez, a chief political analyst at the New York Times. The BPDBI, which stands for the Bi-Partisan Douche-Baggery Index, is a mathematical theorem that causes the numbers to organize themselves exactly the way each party wants them to, depending on which one is analyzing them at any given time.

When presented in the context of each political party, abstract quantum mechanical computations cause the otherwise absolute values of each variable used to undergo radical shifts. Both parties use the same raw data (DOL unemployment rates, GPD, etc.), but the results from each side are distinctly different. This causes both the Republican and the Democratic Parties to have completely valid and fact-based arguments in their favor. Te result is that the confidence of each party’s supporters is increased and that party polarization and division is reinforced.

“It’s quite fascinating watching the feedback loop,” said Sanchez about the phenomenon. “The greater and greater the BPDBI, the more the jobless rate both increases and decreases. Every time. This is why the Democrats claim the unemployment rate is below 8% and the Republicans claim it’s over 22%. And they’re both right.”

Though not precisely a causal relationship, the increase in the BPDBI has a corollary relationship with the increase of another index tracked by political analysts. The SOII, or the Sick of Idiocy Index, is a number that usually only relates to those that have left both Parties, but in recent years has become more and more relevant to those still entrenched within the two party structure.