This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Ex-PH2

  • School is almost out….

    Seth Borenstein, a hippie whiner, wrote an article on how everything is going to pieces and it’s All Our Fault. The guilt trip we’re supposed to be on has not yet hit me, but he is quite adamant about it all. https://www.chicoer.com/2018/06/19/looking-for-signs-of-global-warming-its-all-around-you/

    Unfortunately, his article includes a photo of Venice during a high water episode, which is nothing new in Venice. The city sits on a very ancient marsh, which became a bog, which became a settlement, and eventually, turned into Venice, the city built on water. And Venice is very slowly, but surely, sinking, not experiencing “global warming”. That’s a problem for the Venetians. Right now, they’re in a Very Low Water Level status, and worried.

    There’s also a letter of protest from an upset resident of Chico, who says people who don’t understand science can’t vote and can’t hold public office.  That’s her view, but it violates the US Constitution and the 15th Amendment.

    https://www.chicoer.com/2018/06/24/letter-if-you-dont-understand-science-you-cant-vote/

    Here’s the gist of it:  Why are people still voting for a man who is ignorant concerning proven scientific evidence that we are slowly destroying our home planet by human practices? These are the same type of people who refused to believe the Earth is round and not flat. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

    I propose a new voting requirement. If you aren’t smart enough to understand science you can’t vote and you can’t be an elected official. I am holding Republicans responsible for destroying my planet.      — Nancy L. XxxX, Chico

    She wants to take our basic Constitutional right away from us, despite the additional emphasis provided by the 15th Amendment (and others). In view of her low information level about a bunch of things, and her demand that a science test be passed in order to qualify to vote or hold office, I pulled out all the stops from 4th, 5th, and 6th grade and came up with these general science test questions, which any of us born before 2001 should be able to answer.

    1 – Does the Moon orbit the Earth? How long does it take? Why does it change shape?
    2 – Does the Earth orbit the Sun or does the Sun orbit the Earth? (I made that one up, but it belongs here, just for Nancy.)
    3 – Why do some trees change color in the fall and others do not? What is the difference between deciduous trees and non-deciduous trees? What trees produce maple syrup?
    4 – What is the difference between dogs and humans? Give examples for each.
    5 – Why do we have seasons?
    6 – How long is the longest day, and when does it happen? How short is the shortest day, and when does it happen? How many hours are there in a day?
    7 – Why does the ocean have tides?
    8 – What is a tidal bore? Give an example.
    9 – What is a solar system? How far away is the Sun? Is the Sun a star?
    10 – Who invented the electric light bulb. How many experiments did he create and conduct?
    11 – What is the chemical formula for each of the following: A) water; B) salt; C) dry ice; D) household ammonia
    12 – How are fish and land animals different?
    13 – What is a good way to stop erosion in farmland?
    14 – Why are crops rotated?
    15 – What kinds of plants fix nitrogen in the soil?

    That’s a 10-gallon hat in that photo, right?

    Remember, students, the sillier your answers are, the higher your score will be.

    It’s Friday and the 4th of July is coming up. Happy Summer!!!!

  • The more they shout and point….

    There are a couple bits of interesting news that have come up in the past week or two.

    For starters, that impromptu gun ban by the mayor of the village of Deerfield, IL, back in May was overturned before it went into effect, when two separate lawsuits were filed  to stop it.

    https://patch.com/illinois/deerfield/judge-blocks-deerfield-assault-weapons-ban-it-takes-effect

    Per the attached article: Associate Judge Luis Berrones found that Deerfield’s 2018 ordinance was unenforceable, that it was not an amendment of the village’s previous ordinance regulating assault-style firearms and that – contrary to the village’s repeated claims – its recent ban does not ban large-capacity magazines.

    “We moved swiftly to challenge this gun ban because it flew in the face of state law. The village tried to disguise its extremism as an amendment to an existing ordinance. The ordinance bans possession of legally-owned semi-auto firearms, with no exception for guns previously owned, or any provision for self-defense,” said Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb, in a release. “Worse, still, the ordinance also provided for confiscation and destruction of such firearms and their original capacity magazines. It was outrageous that the ban would levy fines of up to $1,000 a day against anyone who refused to turn in their gun and magazines or move them out of the village. This certainly puts the lie to claims by anti-gunners that ‘nobody is coming to take your guns.”

    There is recourse for gun owners with pre-emptive strikes like this. And we do have to remember that Illinois has probably the most restrictive gun laws in the entire country, but they also have a self-defense section, including self-defense in home invasions, that allow gun owners to defend themselves without repercussions. Furthermore, anyone with a brain could argue correctly that there is no specific definition for “assault-style weapons”, particularly when everything in my house can be used that way, including my flagpole and the keys to the front door, and that alone makes the ban invalid. “Assault-style weapons” is incorrectly and constantly used by ignorant, self-serving twits. Them’s fightin’ words.  They should be taken down a peg or three for it.

    I’m quite sure that all these politicians who want weapons out of the hands of private citizens have some absurd fantasy that someone wants to shoot them, even if they deny it. Unfortunately for their delusional fantasies, there is not one politician on the planet, including an ex-president and a prior political candidate, who is worth the cost of a single bullet.

    The other event, which you may have heard about, was that Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, was told by the owner of the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, VA, to take her family and leave.  The owner’s political opinions of people seem to carry more weight than running a profitable business. So Ms. Sanders and her party left.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/live-white-house-briefing-june-25-2018-live-stream/

    A savvy business owner would welcome the party and give them good service, but not this restaurant owner. She was “concerned” about the effect on her employees. Baloney.

    There is an unfortunate side effect to this nonsense. The owner of the Lexington, VA, Red Hen Restaurant apparently thought her restaurant name was unique. Again, this clearly demonstrates the ‘me first and  me only!’ mind of the left side of the fence, because other Red Hen restaurants have been getting enormous flack for the Virginia Red Hen owner’s rudeness to a customer.  One of them is in New Jersey.

    https://www.nj.com/gloucester-county/index.ssf/2018/06/post_145.html

    The other is in Collingwood, Ontario – yes, in Canada. Apparently, some people think Canada is in Virginia. (If these links don’t work, just copy them to a search block.)

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/collingwood-restaurant-gets-hate-from-trump-supporters-1.4721521

    Shades of the 1950s and the Deep South!

    I have a long memory that allows me to recall when black people were told they could order food but not eat it in a restaurant, had to use “colored people” restrooms and water fountains, and were not allowed to vote. Does this mean we’re going to have another “Mississippi Burning”? If this isn’t a throwback to those days, then what is it?

    The so-called liberals are about as liberal as a locked door. They haven’t changed at all, not in over 85++ years, and frankly, with their ridiculous notions about guns and their colossal (and growing) social moron behavior, I don’t think they will.They’ll wake up some day, find out that they’ve turned 45, and they aren’t “cute” any more.

    These are only two fine examples of the sheer stupidity and ignorance that inhabit the leftred side of the political fence. I’m sure there are more, such as that fat checker from Hahvahd who had to quit her media job because she insulted a disabled veteran for no valid reason. Her level of pure ignorance backfired on her. I know that there are many, many more, such as the antifas being unwilling to face down anyone unless it’s twelve of them ganging up on an old lady – something like that.

    It’s like the ignorance about the solar cross: American Indian tribes used that in pictographs for many centuries, long, long before the Nazis under Hitler stole it and used it as a symbolic threat. There were many versions of it, including the cross in a circle and the broken circle.  It bears zero resemblance to the Maltese cross on that vet’s left arm. https://www.warpaths2peacepipes.com/native-american-symbols/cross-circle-symbol.htm

    These generational social morons have no manners. They can barely read and write and do simple arithmetic. Their knowledge of anything from the past is minimal, and comics are literature. They think their half-baked opinions are golden, but don’t realize that it’s fool’s gold instead.

    They think there are no consequences to anything they say or do.

    They should keep this stupidity going for as long as possible, and make it as public as possible. And they should continue to be as loud and obnoxious abut it as they can.

    We need to know who they are and how empty-headed they are, so that we can persuade those currently on the middle of the fence to lean to the righthand side in the voting season, and approach it in a reasonable way.

  • Bump Stocks – l’Horreur!!!

     

    This relates to bump stocks, so read this Pew Trust article on the subject as a reference, if you like.

    http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/05/18/so-states-ban-bump-stocks-now-how-do-they-enforce-the-law

    Bump stocks are anathema!! They are going to cause more and more slaughter!!! So let’s have a round of hysterics and a case of  the vapors while we’re on this subject.

    – The money involved totals about $96.2 million overall in about 7 years, including taxes. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

    – Purchase prices range from $180 to $452 per item. Likewise, this is nothing to sneeze at.

    – If the bump stocks go, the sales taxes go with them, so there’s an economic loss no one thought about.

    – There’s no compensation to people who decide to cave into a silly demand  Zero. Zip. Nada. Just leave it at the precinct desk or hand it over.

    – As with weapons, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the po-po-pohlease will actually destroy it, so there should be a demand that the prior owner can watch while it’s chewed up in the wood chipper.

    – There are no serial numbers on these things, so how could they be tracked in any way, period?

    Let’s take a look at the practicalities of ownership, too.

    – The cost of ammunition is not exactly comparable to bubblegum, is it? Rapid fire eats up more in one go than single shot fire, by a long shot.

    – You’d have to keep it attached to the weapon anyway, because if your kids find it sitting by itself, they may use it for a lawn hockey puck or something for the dog to fetch, or your rugrat may think it’s a teething ring.

    – Your bestie might decide it makes a really, really cute key fob or a hook to hang pots on in the kitchen.

    – As has been noted in various videos, you can get the same effect with a heavy duty rubber band, which costs about $.01 each, which means that for about $1.50, you’re right back in business with rapid fire shooting even if the po-po make you hand the thing over.

    – As has been noted by other people than moi-même, the only people who are really worried about it are politicians and others of their ilk, because they are all quite sure that you, an owner of weapons, “might” use it on them. (Paranoia and delusions come with the job, in my view.)  Considering the cost of ammo, I can’t think of a good reason to waste it on those parasites.

    So maybe the real solution is to just not own one, but instead, go to your office supply store and get a big box of heavy duty rubber bands, buy cheaper ammo, and let ‘er fly. And then when the pohlease show up at your door looking for a bump stock (not that it’s likely to happen, they have real crimes to pursue), you can truthfully say “No such animal here, thanks for asking.” Kind of goes along with that terrible loss of some items falling overboard on your last hunting trip in a canoe.

    Now, personally, I’d keep the crossbow and quarrels hanging over the fireplace in plain sight, along with the two-handed swords, the gladius, and the Viking sword, and my hunting bow and full quiver. They’d look at that and get puzzled, but with no guns anywhere and no bump stocks (which seem like a waste of cash to me) –  well, what can those poor fellas do? After all, if the ATF has determined that it has no authority to remove bump stocks from the possession of the owners, then it’s the state’s cost, not the taxpayers’.

    Frankly, I doubt this is anything but another crackpot scheme to garner votes. Let’s recall that Ms. Haspel was approved for her CIA position on a 54-45 vote. That is a shift by itself. There are likely more to come. Stay alert.

    There will continue to be more screeching by the media and the self-terrorized. I think they get some kind of adrenaline rush out of the self-inspired terror, some sort of peculiar mind-orgasm with the rush that follows and gives them a giddy high.

    It does not help that the Florida county school shooter’s videos have been posted on the internet by the vultures in the media. Nor does it help that the noisy rampages of the media contribute to the next idiot who is hell-bent on collecting his 15 minutes of Warhol fame. There is a definite connection there. The lack of reality in blaming an inanimate part for a weapon that can’t perform without human interference is part of the neurosis involved in this nonsense, and that is slowly evolving into some sort of psycho freakout at even the mention of GUNNZZZ.

    A crossbow with a bumpstock??? Okay!! (Thanks, Big Guy!)

  • Post-Combat Drunken Orgies Okay

    6th Victrix Tribune (Ret.) Fabius Flatulus Maximus was kind enough to give me some of his time in retirement for another interview. He’s been fascinated by the game of golf, but can’t imagine anyone chasing a little white ball around a mowed lawn with holes in it. I did explain to him that it was a game invented by the Scots, who used to be known as the Pictish tribes.

    “Oh! Those birdbrains! Why didn’t you say so!” He laughed. “Yeah, we just called all of them Gauls or Galicians and ignored their tribal cacaisms. Pissed them off no end. We helped Pius Antoninus build the Antonine Wall and then ol’ Hadrian built his wall to keep them on their side of the fence. Kept the troops busy, too. How can I help you?”

    I explained the whole business of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the units, and he stopped me right there.

    “Whoa! Misconduct?” He shook his head and snorted. “Sexual misconduct?”

    I nodded.

    “I did not know there was such a thing,” he remarked, with a twinkle in his eyes.

    I gave him a copy of the latest bit of tight-as-a-drumhead lecture on ‘look but don’t touch, and don’t look, either’. He let out a bellow of laughter, which went on until his eyes were watering and he finally caught his breath.

    “Who wrote this nonsense?” he asked. “What is he? Castratus? Oportet mihi cacare!1”

    I answered “No, it seems that it has to do with a lack of understanding of things like the fight or flight response and human nature’s need to breed, once territory is confirmed in friendly hands.”

    His response to that was quite straightforward: there is nothing wrong with having a little post-combat orgy, as long as too much wine isn’t spilled and no one gets into knife fights.

    “It’s okay if they have chest bumping contests for amusement,” he said, “or a javelin throw using leftover skulls as targets. Relieves stress, you know. But you’re putting women in combat?”

    I nodded.

    “Must be wretchedly mulierii ieiunio2. Carnarius sum, sed pinguiarius non sum3. If they’re really worried about it, they could try recruiting women from the Isle of Lesbos over in the Adriatic. So are these Amazons any good at killing the barbarians?” he asked.

    I assured him they were trained properly for the job. But the general concern was that post-combat stress would lead to improper and inappropriate sexual conduct.

    He stared at me for a moment, then burst into more raucous laughter.

    “Inappropriate what??? Whoever comes up with this stuff,” he said, “has to be psychotic! Iignosce mihi4, but we always approved drunken orgies after a battle. Spoils of war and all that. It relieves the troops’ stress as long as no one overdoes it. Takes the cork out of the amphora, so to speak. We let ‘em party until they pass out. Then they get to work hard the next day, doing things like carpentry and building stone walls. In the sun. Under really bad-tempered centurions.”

    “Well, what about the rape of the Sabine women?” I asked.

    “Hey, I had nothing to do with that! It happened six hundred sixty years before I was born. My granny told me it was half and half. Some of the Sabine women were desperate for real men, so when the Romans showed up, off they went. Those flabby Etruscans like to lie their asses off about everything, you know, and they didn’t want to lose their monopoly on trade with local farmers. When we showed up, we brought competition. That, and muscles.”

    “Well, I’m glad we got that straightened out,” I said. “So Livy was wrong?”

    “Mostly. So who cooked up this nonsense? Some pig-eyed male virgin with a squint?”

    I said no, it was purported to have been the fault of some jug-eared guy with a big nose who talks to himself a lot, and doesn’t have a real job any more.

     

    1 A eunuch? You gotta be shittin’ me!

    2 Bony broads

    3 I’m a meat lover, not a fat lover.

    4 Excuse me, but…

  • What Fools These Liberals Be….

    Ed Rogers posted an article in Jewish World Review, which was picked up and posted by the Washington Post and by my morning newspaper.  http://jewishworldreview.com/0518/ed_rogers051018.php3

    In the article, he reports that Hillary Clinton whined that being a capitalist “probably” hurt her when campaigning against democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2016, that maybe she should have used the word socialist.

    As he indicates, Republicans are chasing their tails, trying to avoid that ‘deer in the headlights” appearance and Democrats are wondering if they’ll have to answer questions about whether they support capitalism or socialism when 2020 campaign season comes up. He also takes a look at the current crop of millennials.

    I’ve been wading through a biographical account of Ernest Hemingway’s involvement in spying for the nascent Soviet Union when he was a journalist in the USA and following events in Spain during the Franco Revolution, at the outbreak of World War II. It’s written by Nicholas Reynolds, (Writer, Sailor, Solider, Spy) a curator for the CIA’s museum (yes, they have one, but can you get tickets to it?) which follows Hemingway’s journey from the aftermath of the 1935 hurricane that whacked the Florida Keys and his discovery that War Bond soldiers who had been recruited to go to the Keys to do housing construction had not been evacuated, and almost all of them had died when the hurricane struck. He was outraged. He began to hate Roosevelt (a New Deal socialist if there ever was one) and was easily persuaded by the editor of The Masses, a Communist publication in the USA, to write articles for them – and later, to spy for the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. At some point (I haven’t arrived there yet) he was also recruited by the OSS (pre-CIA) to work for them.

    He spent time with the Castros during their ouster of Batista. He thought they were buddies. He believed Fidel when that goat told him he carried a copy of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ in his backpack. It  was not until Fidel Castro confiscated Hemingway’s beloved home La Finca in Havana and kicked him out of Cuba, that Ernest Hemingway, the brilliant author, WWI ambulance driver, and hard-driving war correspondent, realized that he had been hosed.

    While Hemingway was being led around by the nose, mostly because his contacts knew how to feed his massive, expansive ego, Josef Stalin was executing anyone he perceived as a threat to his position. When he’d gotten rid of Trotsky,  he turned on his senior Army officers, which included Massiliev, the most senior and most experienced of them. This comes from Robert Conquest’s ‘The Terror: a Reassessment”, which I have only glanced through. Twelve senior, experienced, loyal Russian Army officers were executed, while Hitler was just beginning his rampage through Europe. The mass grave was found near St. Petersburg a while back.

    Conquest wrote the first edition of ‘The Terror’ based on eye witness accounts. When the Iron Curtain fell, when the Soviet Union was disestablished, he went to Russia to research those accounts and provided back up for them in the ‘Reassessment” edition.

    I think it’s a good idea to have both of these titles on your bookshelves. They are thoroughly researched works.

    Why am I writing about this? Because the mind-numbingly blasé attitude of the socialist side of the millennial crowd is that it wasn’t done right. It isn’t done that way.

    Wrong, kiddies. Very wrong.

    Stalin did it exactly right: eliminate any and all who may even vaguely oppose you, quickly and thoroughly. All he needed was unquestioning obedience, which he got through fear, mass murder, forced labor at gulags, and starvation. Thanks to his embracing Lysenkoism and outright mass murder, 27,000,000 people died of starvation, execution, hard labor in the gulags, and just plain freezing to death.  Hitler did it right, putting Germany first, and slaughtering 14,o00,000++ German and European citizens, just because he could.  Mao Tse-Tung did it right, letting 30,000,000++ Chinese people starve. Why would he care? They breed like rabbits, don’t they? You always need more laborers. Pol Pot did it right: get rid of the older generations because they knew too much and resisted him and his Khmer Rouge. Ask the survivors of his rampages.

    Ho Chi Minh was a Communist. He blackmailed the French at the end of the French-Indochina War into forking over ransom cash for their 15,000 prisoners of that war. He knew exactly how to do it right. The Viet Cong meant nothing to him, so he used them. That spilled over into the 1960s and became our war when Kennedy sent advisers to the South Vietnamese government, and you know the rest of that story. But it wasn’t really over. When the NVA rolled their tanks into Saigon in April, 1975, the city was rapidly being abandoned because the South Vietnamese knew what they’d face if they stayed. And that is what it is: a Communist country, following China’s economic model. You can run a business and make a profit and they love tourists there. But if you speak out against the government in anyway, you will be sent to a re-education camp, so shut up.

    The point is that they ALL knew how to do it right: get rid of any people with opposing ideas, independent thoughts, etc., and squelch the rest through Pure Terror. That’s how it’s done right  (I can hear someone squawking now!) Ask Vlad Putin about it. He was the head of the KGB for a very long time.

    As you’ll see when you read the article linked above, the millennials who belong to the Bright Idea Club all have these wunnaful-a, wunnaful-a ideas about things like a monthly stipend for everyone and guaranteed jobs – all things you get in a Communist world – but all cooked up with no idea where the money comes from to pay for these things. What they need is a harsh lesson in the reality that it creates. When have any of them gone hungry, frozen or exhausted from hard labor – ever?

    When I watched the demise of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted on the news as saying “We can’t do this any more. We are broke,” and he dissolved the Politburo, I realized that there would be future generations who never had to face the possibility of missiles launched from Cuba toward their homes in the northern Midwest. And they would take this safety for granted.

    Sometimes, I detest being right.

  • Strange Days….

    I came across this gem on Claymore’s DUers column last week. I try to stick to reading the text, not the comments, because the comments seem to be written by Silurians who lost the fight against Dr. Who. It’s very strange to find something at DU that has the blinking eye effect. You see something with one eye, then something like it – but completely different – with the other eye. And then I realized that this is the work of a split personality.

    This is how it works:  read this once, then reread it and everywhere you see Democrat or liberal or whatever refers to that side of the coin, replace it with Republican, conservative or whatever is on the other side of the coin. If you see GOP or Trump replace with Dem or Hillary.  You get the idea. Then read it again.

    Author unnamed wrote:

    The stench and danger of political corruption is nothing new. America has seen it at the local, state, and federal levels many times in the past.

    But this is the first time we’ve seen the total corruption of an entire political party from top to bottom.

    Fox “news,” for all practical purposes, is an arm of the Republican Party in general, and Trump specifically. Republicans also have the benefit of radio stations and online sites that spew their hate and propaganda every hour of every day.

    And they also have the power to gerrymander entire states, deny the “wrong” people the right to vote, “scrub” voter’s rolls, and even make voting results from “certain districts” disappear.

    Above all, the entire Republican Party is enabling the most dangerous, ignorant, corrupt person who ever sat in the White House. They’re allowing him, by their silence, and in some cases their active assistance, to destroy democracy.

    Our votes mean nothing if the outcome can be rigged. So what else can we do?

    Here’s what we can do. We can publicly denounce anyone, anywhere, who votes for any Republican candidate for any office. Each and every one of us must make our voices heard. Even if we’re speaking to a GOP family member, an acquaintance, or a “friend.”

    We need to shame those who vote for Republicans. They need to be made aware of the damage they are causing with their “party loyalty.” And they need to be exposed as aiding and abetting a political party that is doing its best to turn our country into an authoritarian nightmare.

    It’s up to us to stop it. No one else can. Each and every one of us know people who vote for, and thus enable Republicans. And we must speak up now while we’re still “allowed” to speak up.

    Sorry to be asking so much. It can cause hurt feelings, and in some cases irreparable damage. But, yes. I’m asking a lot of everyone. After all, there’s nothing at stake except our way of life, and all of our freedoms.

     

    Okay, now that you’ve done that at least once, did you see what I saw? Or am I wandering alone in the Universe?

  • New Helo Style for Marines

    The nearby USMC Aviation Depot is trying out a new, streamlined air hull configuration, which they insist on flying over my house.

    This sleek, shiny, brightly colored style has been given the name ‘Skyfish’, owing to its quickly taking to the air as if it were born there.

    The traditional helo rotors are shipped and locked above the cockpit and fuselage and are designed to be used only in emergencies.

    In flight, the bird has two rear paddles to propel it through the air, taking advantage of air currents and rising air bubbles, very much akin to the previously tested Ornithopters which were designed to be used in deserts like the Sahara and Arrakis.  The Skyfish configuration has been found to be very adaptable to flatlands, dunes, drumlin ranges and Silurian cave zones.

    The electronics have been updated to include worm, wookie and Cardassian detection, all at more than ten thousand feet of distance. The cargo load is currently rated at 5,750 kilograms (2.2 pounds/KG), which allows for the inclusion of heavy weapons such as the A&P-51 assault laser mortar launcher and its accompanying load of mortars and pineapples, plus lunch and cold drinks for the crew.

    Unlike the currently popular Sikorsky (below), now being used to increase the Aviation Dept’s cash flow for aviation fuel and air time by delivering Rosati’s pizzas and Peapod grocery orders, the Skyfish runs on what is popularly termed ‘green fuel’, e.g., alcohol left over from parties, or strained vegetable oil from the base galley’s used oil drums. Rather than just toss it, recycling these substances is becoming a big part of the military’s cost-savings programs.

    It also keeps the ecohippies at arm’s length, off the base.

    Photos by Ex-PH2

  • Army, Navy, and Marines To Get Hogs

    Just announced this week, the A-10 aircraft program will begin to include Navy, Army and Marine Corps pilots. Distribution of pilot slots will coincide with production of new aircraft, now under contract negotiation, designated as A-10N, A-10R, and A-10M. USAF craft will be redesignated A-10A.

    While dearly beloved by USAF pilots as the venerable Warthog, the current generation of USAF pilots in training has hinted repeatedly at their desire to “share the glory” of the Warthog with their counterparts in the other service branches.

    Accordingly, since the Air Force is searching for a new contractor to build new wing sets https://www.military.com/dodbuzz/2018/01/25/air-force-searching-new-company-re-wing-10s.html and the plan to retire the program has currently been blocked, http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17764/usaf-official-in-charge-of-a-10s-says-re-wing-program-is-not-going-to-happen , a newer and slightly revised model of the original A-10 airframe will be released for each service branch, with upgraded missiles and guidance systems, increased fuel tank volume, wider seats for female Navy pilots, and new nicknames. Among other improvements the planes may include CB and AM/FM access to keep bored pilots from dozing off during target practice runs.