Of the 1.4 million people in the armed forces, only 2,800 of them are Navy SEALS (acronym for “sea, air, and land”). That’s 1/5th of one percent. They are one of the most elite fighting forces in the world. However, less than 20% of those who attempt to become a SEAL ever succeed. To even try you must pass a physical screening test which requires you to swim 500 yards in ten minutes or less, perform seventy-nine push-ups in two minutes or less, and eleven pull-ups. You have to be able to run 1.5 miles in at least 10:20 minutes, and that’s while wearing boots and trousers.
Some may think: well, that’s not too difficult. I could work up to that. However, the reality is that this level of physical fitness will not be enough. Because once you get into the initial training, you’re going to be doing far more than this every day.
Can you knock out 500 push-ups in a day, along with a four mile run, hours of paddling out in a six-man raft into a ten foot wave that tumbles you again and again into chilling waters, hefting your share of a 160 pound log over your head until you can barely lift your arms, and running an obstacle course with obstacles three-stories high. You’ll do a lot of this while covered with sand, your thighs and armpits chafing. On some days you’ll have to swim a few miles in a cold sea. And then you’ve got to get up and do it all again the next day. No wimpy hour-long workouts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with rest days in between. Heck, on the third week, you’ll get only about four hours of sleep over four days.
Can you do it?
Maybe you can. But before you try, or assure yourself that you could have if you’d only had the chance, let me suggest you watch Discovery Channel’s Navy SEALS BUDS Class 234 to witness what it takes to become the best of the best. It’s a fascinating three-DVD set, just over five hours of programming, that follows class 234 through the initial six-month SEAL training called BUDS (basic underwater demolition/SEALS). You’ll see 114 men start the six-month course and only 17 finish it. In fact, less than thirty make it past the first three weeks, which include the most grueling and punishing training I’ve ever seen. Those initial weeks are designed specifically to weed out all but the most committed and able.
The Discovery Channel does a great job with this six-part series. And it’s not just for guys. It only took about three minutes for each of my daughters to get hooked as well. And why wouldn’t they? It’s as fascinating as any American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance. In fact, in many ways it’s far more interesting. Heck, it was so good I think I’m going to watch it again. You can get it on Amazon, rent if from Netflix, or check it out from the Logan library.
For more info on the SEALS, let me recommend you start with these two sites: http://www.seal.navy.mil/seal/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_SEALs
***
My high school age daughters took the ACT last year and got good scores. But we wanted to make sure that they had excellent scores. High enough to put them in the upper levels of those applying to their desired universities. But how would we prepare them?
Back in the olden days when I was preparing to get my Masters of accounting degree, I knew I’d need some help to get a score on the GMAT that would be competitive. I looked at a number of study guides and ended up choosing the Princeton Review guide for the GMAT. I studied hard, got a great score, and became a believer. The guide made everything so easy. More importantly, everything the guide prepared me for was on the test. This is why, when I wanted to get a Masters of fine arts in creative writing, I used the Princeton Review for the GRE. Again, the study guide was easy to follow, and I got an equally good score on that test. Having had two great experiences, it’s no surprise I turned to Princeton Review again to help my two girls with their test. (BTW, some may see an attempt to get more than one graduate degree as smart, others as masochistic, and yet others as simple ivory tower bone-headery—I’ll let you decide which it might be in this case.)
The Princeton Review guide for the ACT is called Cracking the ACT. A new edition is published every year and includes general ACT test-taking tips, everything you need to know in the specific content areas, and practice tests. It also includes access to the Princeton Review’s online resources which include another practice test. It’s a big guide (this year’s edition was 619 pages), but the size is deceptive. There’s plenty of white space for taking notes, and the text is written so clearly, and everything broken down in such an easy manner to follow, that you’ll start only to suddenly realize you’ve just read thirty pages. Besides, you don’t have to study it all. You can focus on specific content areas, if that’s all you want to do.
This spring, both daughters worked through the book. We looked at their previous scores, identified areas for improvement, and set up a six-week schedule that required them to study about an hour per day, sometimes with help from Mom or Dad, but mostly on their own. One daughter studied hard, took the test in June, and improved her score by five points. The other daughter studied a little less diligently, took the same test, and improved her score by four points.
When 36 is the highest possible score, such jumps become significant. However, they’re not the result of special DNA. While I tend to think my girls are everything and a bag of chips (especially when they give me back scratches), the truth is the ACT doesn’t test some mumbo-jumbo innate intelligence. It tests skills. Skills anyone can learn. What my girls supplied was consistent effort. All they needed was expert guidance in how to apply the effort. And Cracking the ACT provides boatloads of that.
If you’re looking to improve your own score or help your children improve theirs, get this book. I have no doubt that anyone who supplies a bit of effort will be able see some nice results.
***
Imagine emerald pools, steep red canyons, and a gentle breeze. Imagine water so clear you can see the plants and rocks sixteen feet down on the bottom. Imagine trout swimming only feet away. Imagine swimming with those trout and then getting back into your raft to ride some rapids. Imagine picnicking a the water’s edge or atop a flat, shaded rock forty feet up that gives you a grand view of the river. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll see an osprey dive for a fish or watch a pair of river otters swim by. Imagine doing this with family or friends, all in a short twenty-four hour period.
This experience is only about three hours away from Laketown, Utah. Well, everything except the swimming with the trout bit. The fish don’t really swim with you. They mostly just flee, but you get the idea. To enjoy it, all you need to do is raft the seven mile stretch of the Green River from the Flaming Gorge dam down to the Little Hole campground.
My family and I just did this with some friends and had a grand time. Because the river is relatively slow and the rapids are relatively moderate and short, parents don’t have to worry every second that someone is going to fall in and drown in a man-eating surge. In fact, along many of the calm areas we actively helped the children into the sparkling cold water (grin), including one rafter who was only three years old. One of the most enjoyable moments was when we pulled the rafts up into the gentle backwash of a large rock in the middle of the river, climbed the rock, and took turns jumping into the current and letting it carry us downstream.
The sun was shining, the weather warm. It was a wonderful trip. A total memory-maker. We put in just before noon and hauled the raft out just before 6 PM. But we could have taken much longer to play along the way.
The experience was fairly cheap. It cost about $70 to rent an eight-man raft. Perfect for six people. But there are other smaller and larger raft sizes. You’ll need to arrange a way to get the raft to the river and back again. We simply tied our raft to the top of our minivan. You can pay the rental people to drive your car to the exit ramp at Little Hole after you put into the river, or bring two cars (or a bike) and drop one at the exit. Or you can pay for a shuttle service where they drive you to the River and pick you up.
You’ll want to bring a small cooler with drinks, snacks, and sunscreen. You’ll also want to have good footwear. The river bed is rocky, and when you pull into shore, you don’t want to be ouching it the whole way in. I don’t recommend flip flops. They’re no better than bare feet. Old sneakers are fine, but they don’t dry quickly. And they waterlog and get heavy, which makes them less than ideal for swimming. Your best bet is to get real water shoes that are made to be light and drain quickly and yet still have a decent sole–a sandal or mesh covered shoe that uses Velcro to strap up. You can be fancy and spend a lot, or do what I did and get yours at Wal-Mart for less than ten bucks.
You could make it a long trip and drive to and from the gorge and run the river all in one day, but why push it? Just find a place to stay overnight. There are some motels in the area, but we elected to camp. The spots at the Firefighters Memorial campground were $27 per night. The campground was beautiful and tidy with restrooms and running water. One of the most surprising things about this particular campground was that I didn’t see one mosquito while I was there.
I’m one of these types that attracts the villains. If there’s only one mosquito within a mile radius, it will smell me, pass up many other suitable victims (including my wife), and risk its life and limbs to sink its #@!* proboscis into my flesh. I think my blood must be some kind of mosquito crack. There’s probably some mosquito black market out there for it, run by some nasty mosquito cartel, which is led by a murderous, malaria-ridden mosquito boss making piles of evil mosquito money and spending it on opulent mosquito yachts and guns!
Anyway, not one bite. We watched the sun set and then fell to sleep with the stars overhead and the wind gently soughing through the boughs of the pine trees.
To make campsite reservations, go to www.utah.com to get a good map view of possible camping sites. Then go to www.recreation,gov to make the reservations online. Make sure your specific camping spot has everything you need. Our campground was very rocky and not all of the sites had tent pads. If you want to scope the lay of the land, the recreation.gov site will give you GPS coordinates of the campground. Enter those into Google maps then switch to satellite view and zoom in. You see exactly what you get. This way you can avoid accidently booking the site right next to the bathrooms or road or the one that features no trees.
Finally, when you’re done, you might want to top it all off by stopping at the The Flaming Gorge Lodge restaurant, just a few miles south of the dam, and enjoying a monster-sized cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream and one of their fabulous desserts. The blackberry cobbler and ice cream was delicious.
Radio and TV have incredible power. But until the last decade they were always constrained by time and signal power. You had to listen when the station broadcast it, and you had to listen where you could pick up the signal. 
Richard Lindzen is wrong. On the quotes page as well as the myths page you will find over 30 times he is wrong.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Richard_Lindzen.htm
Here is a summary from 2012 of climate scientists taking on Lindzen.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-take-on-Richard-Lindzen.html
And here is a dozen errors from 2017.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/brenda-ekwurzel/a-dozen-doozies-setting-the-record-straight-on-richard-lindzens-letter-to-president-trump
Will Harper – His 23 errors.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/William_Happer_arg.htm
A response to a 2018 lecture by Harper, on of many he gives.
“Happer argues that the current concern over human-caused greenhouse gases is overblown. Although he clearly understands basic climate science, his presentation includes claims that are exaggerated, misleading, or incorrect regarding human-caused climate change. His presentation is entertaining, but he argues in many places against claims that climate scientists do not make. He acknowledges that CO2 has an influence on climate, but emphasizes that the influence is small. Yet he gives no physical reason to conclude that the current scientific understanding on the response of climate system to CO2 (the “climate sensitivity”) is wrong, other than to say that he does not trust climate models. His claims that climate models do not work are exaggerated and misleading. He also claims that increased CO2 will be beneficial by increasing plant growth – it is true that plant growth will increase by the CO2 increase alone, but he does not show that it will be beneficial, especially when climate is changing at the same time as CO2. His presentation ignores the large number of studies available that show that through climate change, CO2 will be detrimental to agricultural productivity as well as to human well-being generally.”
and more:
https://www.unc.edu/~jjwest/climatechange.html
Patrick Moore is policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, the leading source of climate change disinformation which has spent many millions provided by energy companies and conservative foundations and billionaires with energy company ties to stop government regulations against climate change.
Greenpeace accuses him of leaving when he saw opposing Greenpeace was much more financially lucrative and his career now is speaking out against climate change.
https://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-moore
Bjorn Lomberg is pretty famous for being fully funded by energy companies to deny the severity of climate change.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2014/06/25/millions-behind-bjorn-lomborg-copenhagen-consensus-center
https://www.desmogblog.com/bjorn-lomborg
He got major funding and wrote a book called ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ he was mostly known for along with his later book ‘Cool It’. Another writer decided to write a book examining that books claims. He found every reference cited was wrong or misleading in two chapters. The book ‘The Longborg Deception’ was going to handle the entire book and every citation but it would take years so he skimmed checking the cites in the other chapters. It concludes Lomborg is ‘a performance artist disguised as an academic,’ ‘misrepresenting academic research, misquoting data, relying on irrelevant studies, (omitting important citations and sources), (using the lowest estimates of likely climate changes), and citing sources that seem not to exist.’ Many of the cites appear to be simply cited to build up the number of cites with multiple entries to simply show where a person worked for example.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq1hv
http://www.newsweek.com/debunking-lomborg-climate-change-skeptic-75173
A short critical analysis of recent articles.
https://climatefeedback.org/authors/bjorn-lomborg/
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/
There is a reason climate change skeptics rely on lies and misrepresentations. The science and evidence of human-caused global climate change is overwhelming and the warming is accelerating.
Gary, thanks for the links.
At the same time, I can’t see that any of them address the claims made in the videos posted.
They’re a general attack on the reliability and motives of all of these individuals. I think potential conflicts of interest are important to raise, but they do nothing to address the specific claims in the videos.
You say Lindzen is wrong. That out of the 200 papers he’s written, people have challenged him on various points. That seems par for the course. How many scientific papers are written that aren’t challenged on various points? More importantly, is he wrong on what he claims in the video? I can’t find any evidence of that. It doesn’t seem any of the links refer to anything in the video.
Same with Harper.
On Moore, you repeat a claim about him leaving Greenpeace that sounds like rumor. He left in 1986. From what I can tell that was well before global warming became any type of issue. Al Gore wasn’t until 2002. Heck, in the 70s, it was global cooling that was all over the news.
More importantly, what about the specific claims made in the videos?
The fact that he advises Heartland doesn’t mean any of the claims he made in the videos are wrong. Heartland seems to be like all other think tanks–favoring one political view.
With Lomborg, I made a mistake. Somehow I thought he was an actual climate scientist. He’s not. At the same time, the question is whether his facts are correct in the video.
Finally, the purpose of this post is not to refute any current theory or model. It’s a call to get the politics out of climate science so we avoid exactly what happened with nutrition science.