Air Force Eliminates Physical Fitness Standards, NASA Thinks Men Are Women

To help celebrate your Dependence Day, this exciting news from our boys---and girls!---and its!---in blue: "The new Air Force fitness test will feature walking instead of running and modified push-ups".

Wait. Don't laugh yet. For this new program has a name:

"The service is experimenting with a 'choose your own adventure' physical fitness test."

Choose your own adventure! Weeeeeee!

And for the final portion of the test airmen would be allowed to choose between push-ups and raised-hand push-ups.

Instead of going up and down like a traditional push-up, the raised hand push-ups allow airmen to alternate lifting their hands up while in the push-up ready position, said Lt. Gen. Brian Kelly, the deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services at Air Force headquarters...

When I was in, back in the 80s, the girls---there were at that time no its---were allowed to do push-ups from their knees. Appropriate enough, I suppose. This was called "Equality."

Now nobody need to anything but walk and raise a hand. Don't diss the walk! Because "some airmen made the interesting observation that the walking test may be more tricky than it sounds." Indeed. Knowing just where to place your feet while moving forward is not always obvious.

Anyway---AHEM:

The problem was that the females were still failing the new lowered standards. As of this date, the Army has not announced what they will do about it, but we can make a prediction.

The new lowered standards won’t be lowered again. They’ll be eliminated. Besides having the ability to breathe, possessing a majority of their limbs, and not being too old, there will soon be no bar to entering the armed forces. Consider they have already eliminated the sanity requirement.

It will be announced that, with today’s advancements in ability to kill foreigners remotely by drones, physical fitness isn’t that important.

The AF's new standard doesn't quite count as pure elimination, but I'm awarding myself the win anyway.

Now from Kip Hansen comes this new novel: Harrison Bergeron---In Space!

Or "New NASA radiation standards for astronauts seen as leveling field for women".

A blue-ribbon panel has endorsed NASA’s plans to revise its standard for exposing astronauts to radiation in a way that would allow women to spend more time in space.

A report by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released on 24 June encourages NASA to proceed with its plans to adopt a new standard that limits all astronauts to 600 millisieverts of radiation over their career. The current limit is the amount of radiation that correlates with a 3% increase in the risk of dying from a cancer caused by radiation exposure---a standard that favored men and older astronauts whose cancer risk from radiation was lower. The proposed standard would limit all astronauts to the allowable dosage for a 35-year-old woman.

The changes are in line with current data and puts women on an equal footing, says Hedvig Hricak, a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “There’s no evidence for significant gender difference in the radiation exposure, and associated risk of cancer,” she says.

The new standard comes as NASA gears up for renewed exploration of the Moon and, eventually, a mission to Mars. The change should remove gender from the list of factors used to decide who gets chosen for those missions, says Paul Locke, an environmental health expert at Johns Hopkins University who was not on the committee. “Women will not be penalized because they are, under the old model, at higher risk,” he says.

Equality is the mind killer. Women, being smaller, are at more risk of radiation-induced cancer than men. Yet this cannot be, because Equality demands women are the same as men.

Therefore, Reality is exorcised, and men are made the equal of women. It's Science!

I've repeated the Equity mantra so many times we're sick of hearing it, but for posterity, here it is once more.

A "disparity" is noted in some outcome produced by some standard. The standard is then eliminated, with those eliminating it saying they aren't doing it. Then they say it was never really needed. Then a new "disparity" is discovered, and we continue the long slide into Hell.

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