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Photo Credit: Gallagher.com with permission

Unusual, but a good ending for LT Gallagher back in 1991.And, the video is here from the PLAT camera view is is here.

Secretary Gates talks back to Congress.

The current flap of Congress being asked for about $190B to continue to fund the war and Nancy Pelosi coughing up $50B with demands to extract ourselves from conducting National Defense proves to me Congress shows more and more ignorance of their own jobs.

Just because DoD gets handed about a trillion dollars or more, doesn’t mean it’s in one huge bank account, to be spend as the DoD officials decide.

I’m no real money expert, but was, for 2.5 years, responsible for managing about $34M worth of funds. Federal budget money is tagged in all sorts of ways, so it will be spent in the manner in which it was justified to Congress thought the development of each annual budget.

Quickly, as a not to detailed level, there is money that is specifically authorized for expenditure in a specific fiscal year and then there is “multi-year money.” The multi year money is labeled with how much of it will be spent in each fiscal year in the range of the funding. Within those two gross categories, there is account designation as well. For instance, there will be funds for manpower (pay checks), MILCON (military construction projects), software development, and a raft of other designations. The Federal Budget is like a real budget, in some ways, that is based on justified needs.

The game rules for money managers? It’s a federal crime to shift funds from one account to another, without getting permission. Here, I’m not clear on exactly how that process works, but I know it exists, and suspect it has something to do with going back up the chain of command to Congressional offices that control appropriations. So, for Secretary Gates just to shrug his shoulders and start walking around the Pentagon halls, with his steno pad, asking for funds from various people to make up the shortfall of his request, he’s in violation of Federal Law. I’m sure Nancy and Harry are aware of not only this, but, if he does do it in the correct way, the extended period of time it will take to accomplish moving $140B from existing accounts to the one funding the front line warfighters needs. That way, they can slow roll the effort at a second level.

Congress really gets this when they “ear mark” funds for their special projects, yet somehow have amnesia when it comes to DoD spending, unless, of course, there is tax money designated to be laundered though the DoD funds to get to a family member, friend of political supporter, then they are all over making sure it’s not diverted.

One more reason to rid ourselves of the “professional” politician class we have become hamstrung with.

Continued from last week…

The Combat Systems Assessment (CSA) on the USS WAINWRIGHT (CG-28) was going to be different. Since the ship needed some work done in Norfolk, she was sailing a few days early from her homeport of Charleston, SC to conduct her CSA off the coast of Virginia. The plan was for us to ride a small boat out of Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, and meet her near one of the main buoys in the approach lane to Hampton Roads.

We met at the pier at Little Creek, on the appointed day, before the sun rose, LCDR Kathy Hobbs included. Our ride into the entrance of Chesapeake Bay that morning was one of the Special Boat Unit boats, so the team of about 15 had plenty of room. Off we went, into the sunrise, across a choppy bay. We (the guys) were keeping an eye on our XO for signs of discomfort, at the least, or plain old sea sickness. None noticed.

We pulled alongside the WAINWRIGHT and they had rigged a Jacob’s Ladder for us to board. It was about a 15 foot climb up the side of the cruiser to the weather deck. Once more, Kathy kept right up with us, not a sign of disapproval for the unusual arrival method, even for us.

Once aboard and when the ship was safely returning to sea, the Captain, CAPT “Iron Mike” Fahey, joined us in the Wardroom to do the obligatory “We’re glad you’re here” speech and introductions. Then it was off to work. My usual first check was to inspect the Personnel Qualification System (PQS). Off I went to the Embarked Commander’s Lounge area, accompanied by a second tour division officer who would present the Ship’s program to me. LCDR Hobbs came along.

I start down the checklist, one which was distributed to the Fleet, carefully researched and referenced to actual published requirements, having done this many, many, and many more times than I could count by now. The young, dedicated LT sitting across the table from me exuded confidence, as he explained the things “seemingly” amiss int he records. He was, well…wrong, but he had figured if he took a “forward leaning” stance in the discussion, it would pass. After a few minutes of questioning and looking over watchbills and service records, LCDR Hobbs asked if she might ask a question. I, thinking this would be greatly entertaining for a shore based officer to get into a program pretty well identified with only the Surface Navy, said something like, “go ahead.”

Right out of the starting blocks, she commenced rapid fire questioning of this LT, quickly reducing him to admitting the bad administration and lack of compliance with the standards set by the various levels of the chain of command. My jaw was on the deck, aghast, not because she had the LT figuratively groveling and begging for mercy, but moreso because she had it all right, which, in my over two years of doing this inspecting job, found it was a rare case that someone had that level of understanding of such a foundational program.

I dismissed the sliced and diced LT after some follow up questions, and then looked at Kathy and asked: “Where did you learn that?” “The PQS Management Guide.” Wow…someone had actually read and understood the process, and, more amazing than that, someone who had almost no requirement to work with that program in a shore duty status.

Her stock went way, way up…

Next week: The grind of Combat Systems Training Team (CSTT) drills.

We didn’t make the planned goals, but…many chose to send in checks.

First cut is here. Despite the totals shown on the web, the collections so far are up to $168.370.91, and more is bound to come in. Some money got donated via the first widgets and they are scouring that info. The Navy/Coast Guard Team accounts for $20,081.75. Toss in there is already over $29K that came in the mail with no team designations, we still did a respectable job.

So, it’s still a lot of money to do what we planned. I’m sure more news will follow inthe next few weeks of the grand totals for the fund drive.

BZ, everyone!

Update – The “known” Navy/Coast Guard Team:
Chaotic Synaptic Activity
Shira bat Sarah
enrevanche
Marvin’s Word
CDR Salamander
Grouchy Old Cripple In Atlanta
Searchlight Crusade
Here, There and Back Again
Information Dissemination
pamibe
EagleSpeak
NWOhio4Fred
NavyWife
NoisyRoom.net
Scarlett Crusader
American Geek
Ballseye’s Boomers
The Wood Shed
Bobo Blogger
Shot In The Dark
An Unofficial Coast Guard Blog
iamnot
Screw Liberals
Tailhook Daily Briefing
Brain Shavings
A Work In Progress
Rhymes With Right
Andi’s Answers
Under the Sea
United Conservatives of Virginia
Thought You’d Never Ask
Butter Side Down
Striped Bass Fishing New England
The Thomas
The Online Lunchpail
Fred Fry International
Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Doc in the Box
Whether it amounted to one donation, or many, it made a difference – From the Sea!

The Park Service has a history of keeping the Secretary of the Interior in the dark about the decisions it makes in his name. It is likely that Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has never been told about the many warnings of Islamic symbolism in the planned Flight 93 Memorial. Please help bring Dirk into the loop by pasting the following letter (or one of your own) into an email for him.

Dear Secretary Kempthorne:

Please heed Congressman Tom Tancredo’s call to completely scrap the present design for the Flight 93 Memorial. The original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked crescent and star flag on the crash site:

The memorial plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic flag marks the crash site. (Click pics for larger images.)

All the redesign did was add some trees to the west of the original crescent:

Aside from the re-coloring of the site-plan image, the only actual change in the design is the additional arc of trees to the rear of a person facing into the original crescent.

The Park Service promised Congressman Tancredo in 2005 that Islamic iconography would be removed from the memorial. Instead, this iconography has only been very slightly disguised. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the redesign.

The giant crescent points to Mecca

In September 2005, a half dozen different bloggers verified that a person facing directly into the original Crescent of Embrace would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. That makes the crescent a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built.

Face into the crescent to face Mecca:

Left: mihrab from the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Right: Crescent of Embrace also faces Mecca. The green circle is from the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. When it is placed over the original Crescent of Embrace site plan, the Mecca-direction line (the “qibla”) almost exactly bisects the crescent.

You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. But this isn’t just the world’s largest mosque. The planned memorial is also full of terrorist memorializing features.

Please hear my voice along with those of Congressman Tancredo and Tom Burnett Sr., who is refusing to allow Tom Jr.’s name to be used in the crescent design. The memorial to Flight 93 should not be a terrorist memorial mosque.

Sincerely,

Secretary Kempthorne’s phone number is 202-208-7351
Snail-mail: Hon. Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of Interior
Office of the Secretary
Rm. 6156, ms7229-MIB
1849 C St, NW
Washington, DC 20240-0001

The fund drive is over for 2007. Navy/Coast Guard took up rear guard, to ensure no one was following. That was an obvious chice, when we saw how we ran out ahead of everyone before the first sun rose on the first day of the collection drive.

Congratulations to the Army Team, who managed to let the Marines tease them a little, while sitting there, acting cool about the pseudo lead the Marines managed to get, but for a fleeting day or two.

Net result? Lots of money was raised to help those who need a replacement capability for the ones they lost in serving us.

Next Monday, I begin posting about ships named after Army heroes.

We’re running out of petroleum?

I don’t think so. It’s just we’ve managed to get the easy to find and extract from the earth reserves. I’m no geologist, but I dod some unintentional reading once in a while on this topic. I know we’re actually progressed past the “easy” to get oil, and have developed techniques to go back to “old” fields and use methods, like hot water/steam to tease the entrained oil out of the surrounding soil so we can have that, too.

Just the other day, Brazil found a huge reserve of oil. From Forbes:

11.09.07, 2:27 PM ET SAO PAULO, Brazil –

A monster offshore oil discovery and promising fields near the find could help Brazil join the ranks of the world’s major exporters, but full-scale extraction is unlikely until 2013 and will be very expensive.

The “ultra-deep” Tupi field off the coast of Rio de Janeiro could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude, and initial production should exceed 100,000 barrels daily, though experts believe the amount will then go much higher.
[…]

So, what’s the deal? Isn’t this post about technology?

Yep. Hang in here. Notice the words “ultra-deep?”

[..]
Though tapping the Tupi field will be expensive, Petrobras is flush with cash for strategic investments because of growing production and high international oil prices.

The Tupi field lies under 2,140 meters (7,060 feet) of water, more than 3,000 meters (almost 10,000 feet) of sand and rocks, and then another 2,000-meter (6,600-foot) thick layer of salt.
[…]

Kinda sounding like Bruce Willis andf his crew trying to get to the 800 feet on the asteroid, doesn’t it, but without the zero gravity?

Obviously, it can be retrieved. It’s because we have discovered similar deposits in the Gulf of Mexico, but they are….a little bit deeper….to the tune of 30,000 ft down. From Wired:

[…]
Siegele has reason to be giddy. He works for Chevron, and his team is sitting on several new record-breaking discoveries in the Gulf, a region that many geologists believe may have more untapped oil reserves than any other part of the world. On this trip, the 48-year-old vice president for deepwater exploration has come to a rig called the Cajun Express to oversee final preparations before drilling begins on the company’s 30-square-mile Tahiti field.
[…]
A drill is plunging down through 4,000 feet of ocean and more than 22,000 feet of shale and sediment — a syringe prodding Earth’s innermost veins. That 5-mile shaft will soon give Chevron the deepest active offshore well in the Gulf. Some land drills have gone deeper, but extracting oil from below miles of freezing salt water and unyielding sediment creates a set of technical problems that far exceed those faced on terra firma.
[…]

And, the challenges are many and varied. Farther in the article, they discuss the drilling “platform” is actually a ship, based on the technology of the Glomar Explorer. It is a ship, not a fixed rig; it is not anchored, it hovers, using 4 large thrusters and a GPS feed to keep the ship above the pipe to the ocean floor, built of 90 ft sections. Top that off with the oil, being as deep as it in the earth’s mantle, is hot and therefore very thin in terms of fluidity. When it gets to the piping exposed to the ocean on it’s trip to the surface, it’s all of a sudden surrounded by not much over 32 degree water, causing a dramatic change in viscosity. Again from the Wired article:

[…]
Dropping a drill down through more than 1 mile of water and 4 miles of earth isn’t easy either. The drill string is composed of hundreds of 90-foot sections known as joints that are dropped into the water by an automated mechanical arm and successively screwed into each other. It took more than three days to assemble all the joints in the drill string that pierced the Jack field.

Once the rotating drill bit begins its journey down through miles of sediment and pierces the seafloor, it encounters another set of problems caused by the changing terrain. The test well for the Jack field drilled through nearly a dozen geological layers — ranging from hard bedrock to sandy sediment to empty voids. These rapid shifts from one level of pressure to another can disturb the rotations of the drill, causing it to get stuck or veer off course. Pressure is good — it’s what naturally forces the liquid crude up the length of the well and into the barges and pipelines that send it back to shore. (The layer of shale over the oil-bearing sands acts like a brick on top of a water balloon — the fluid wants to surge upward.) But, at the very bottom, farther below sea level than Mount Everest is above it, there’s enough pressure to implode a human head — or, more pertinently, to crack iron casings.

Moreover, the closer you get to Earth’s core, the higher the temperature of the rocks. At 20,000 feet below seabed, the oil is hot enough to boil an egg. At 30,000 feet, it can reach more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cook off into natural gas and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, the water at the bottom of the deep sea is at near-freezing temperatures — between 32 and 34 degrees — creating a dangerous interaction: When the boiling-hot oil hits the freezing-cold water, it could solidify and block the flow, rupturing the pipes. The machinery on the seafloor, therefore, has to be well insulated. Engineers on the Cajun Express have been relying on a fairly primitive method — pumping the casing and substations with antifreeze — but much more sophisticated systems are in the works.
[…]

So…there is oil to be taken from the Earth, above and beyond what we thought, because now we can go deeper to get it. With the cost of a barrels of oil hovering about the high $90s, to $100, it makes this a good investment of money to figure out the technology to get this oil to market. I also hopes it puts some pressure on the market,as the supply expands.

Interesting stuff.

“Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the
world.”
-Thomas Carlyle

Got up early, went to pound the keyboard with some history of some person with a naval heritage and ships named for them, but, alas, something was amiss at the host, which, has been an excellent place to host my stuff.

Kept trying all morning, yet, I still kept getting errors.

Went out for some deliveries after lunch and turns out one of my customers waded ashore at Utah Beach. I also stopped at Jim, Sr’s house to say thank you.

Today, I think I’ll just ask for a bye and return next week, with my pile of material to satisfy a bet. I have the first installment already under my control, but in the meantime, if you’re the praying type, pay some well-to-do donor suddenly finds the donate to the Navy/Coast Guard Team button and puts us across the finish line for the ValOUR-IT fund raiser. Add to the prayer the specifics of “before midnight 11/12/2007 and for the donation to come in via the net.”

Check this out…

After it’s over, but you have to get in on it before then, Information Dissemination, will hold another contest.

So….get your “ticket” to enter before midnight tomorrow night…that’s under the Navy/Coast Guard Team, not any other team.

Who knows…it could launch your blog/website to a whole new level.