Anyone who has watched documentaries or has read books about the training Navy SEALS go through knows it is beyond what normal human beings are willing to endure, which is why those that complete the training are different than you or me. It is the reason they can do what they do while in hostile territory with their life and the lives of their team on the line. Within the extensive training period is a week known as “Hell Week”, where the trainees are exposed to extreme conditions of the cold Pacific Ocean, while enduring sleep deprivation. According to Navy SEALS website, the training of Hell Week consists of 5 and a half days of “cold, wet, brutally difficult operational training on fewer than four hours of sleep.” As a result of that training last week, a Navy SEAL candidate is dead and another has been hospitalized after they both completed training known as part of Hell Week. Per multiple sources, around 5:42 p.m. on Friday, 24-year-old Kyle Mullen — who was once a football player at Yale University and Monmouth University — was pronounced dead at the Sharp Coronado Hospital in San Diego, the Navy announced in a press release on Sunday. Mullen, 24, and his Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUD/S) class had just completed Hell Week, which is when sailors who wish to become SEALs go through intense training that pushes them to their physical and mental limits. “Mullen was not actively training at the time of his death,” the Navy said. His cause of death remains under investigation. In a press release on Saturday, the Navy said that another candidate was in the hospital in stable condition after Hell Week. That sailor’s identity has not yet been released. My thoughts and prayers are with his family.
Per the Detroit News, the best season in Michigan women’s basketball has reached new heights. The Wolverines are inside the top five of the Associated Press rankings for the first time in program history, checking in at No. 4 in Monday’s rankings following a thrilling 98-90 win over then-21 Iowa at Crisler Center on Sunday night. See my Orchid of the Day
For the past year I have written about Peter Meijer and Fred Upton, the two conservative Republican congressmen from SW Michigan who have been censored, vilified, harassed and more, since they voted to impeach President Trump last January. Upton, one of the longest serving congressmen in the country, has always been a voice of reason who has been loyal to his conservative principles. He has been “around the block” on many occasions so I expect that nothing really phases him, He is not afraid to do what he thinks is right even if it goes against his party. Meijer, a former U.S army veteran who served in Afghanistan, had only been on the job for six days when the “political discourse” occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The following are the opening paragraphs from a story which appeared in The Atlantic and was sent to me by my sister-in-law Jan Nieman. I have included the link to the full article following these paragraphs.
At night on the second Tuesday of January 2021, Peter Meijer, a 33-year-old freshman congressman from West Michigan, paced the half-unpacked rooms of his new rental apartment in Washington, D.C., dreading the decision he would soon have to make. Six days earlier, Meijer had pulled a smoke hood over his face and fled the U.S. House of Representatives as insurgents broke into the lower chamber. They were attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Meijer had been on the job for all of three days. Once the Capitol was secured, he cast his vote to certify the election results. It was his first real act as a federal lawmaker—one he believed was perfunctory. Except that it wasn’t. The majority of his fellow House Republicans refused to certify the results, launching an assault on the legitimacy of American democracy. That entire day—the vote, as much as the attack—had caught Meijer unprepared. His party’s leadership had provided no guidance to its members, leaving everyone to navigate a squall of rumor and disinformation in one-man lifeboats.
The next week, when Democrats introduced an article of impeachment and promptly scheduled a vote, seeking to hold President Donald Trump accountable for inciting the mob’s siege of the Capitol, Meijer steeled himself for some tough conversations within his party. But those conversations never happened: Most of Trump’s staunchest defenders were too shell-shocked to defend him, even behind closed doors, and the Republican leadership in the House was once again AWOL. There were no whipping efforts, no strategy sessions, no lectures on procedure or policy. Barreling toward one of the most consequential votes in modern history, everyone was on their own.
For Meijer, the stillness was unsettling. He felt that impeachment was warranted— “The vice president and the next two in the line of succession were inside the Capitol as it was being assaulted,” he says, “and for three hours the president was nowhere to be found”—but he longed for a dialogue. Growing up, he’d heard the legend of how a family friend, President Gerald Ford, had pardoned Richard Nixon in an act of mercy after Nixon had resigned to avoid the humiliation of being impeached and removed. Meijer’s first political memory was made watching the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even as a kid, he sensed that it was trouble for the country. Now, after just over a week in office, he was bracing himself to vote to impeach the president of the United States—a president from his own party—without so much as a caucus meeting where competing cases might be presented.
Meijer felt angry and betrayed, “like I’d seen something sacred get trampled on.” He told himself that Trump needed to pay. But he worried that a rash impeachment of the president might unleash an even uglier convulsion than the one he’d just survived. And he knew that by voting to impeach he might be committing “career suicide before my career ever began.” In the day s leading up to the vote, Meijer says, he barely slept. “It was the worst 96 hours of my life,”
Whatever his final decision, Meijer didn’t want to blindside the people back in his district. So he began making calls. The conversations did not go well. Meijer remembers one man, “a prominent business leader in Grand Rapids,” arguing that the election had been stolen, that Trump was entitled to a second term, that Meijer was a pawn of the “deep state.” The man went “full QAnon,” spouting conspiracy theories and threatening him with vague but menacing consequences if he voted to impeach. Meijer was well acquainted with that kind of talk; one of his own siblings was fully in the grip of right-wing conspiracies. Even so, the conversation “shook me to my core,” Meijer says, “because the facade had been stripped away. It showed me just how bad this had gotten.”
What are you doing to stop the violence? Get vaccinated and get your booster.
Orchid of the Day: The Michigan Women’s Basketball team for achieving their highest ranking ever.
Onion of the Day: Jim Harbaugh, in the six weeks since competing in his first ever BCS Bowl, his program appears to be in disarray, because of losing his two coordinators and his seeking the head coaching job of the Minnesota Vikings which he didn’t get. It is going to be tough to recover from this.
Quotes of the Day: See article from the Atlantic that Peachy sent. “I can convince myself not to vote for impeachment. If my son asks me in 20 years why I didn’t vote for impeachment, I couldn’t convince him.” Anthony Gonzalez, second term congressman from Ohio speaking to Peter Meijer prior to the vote to impeach President Trump
Video of the Day: A special drummer. https://twitter.com/Larry_Vocke/status/1490371226077958144?t=3e7Apov0wI9z9q1-bGfJbw&s=01