ME AND THE COBRA

 I had become accustomed to informing the bridge that we were, "at the top of the green" when they called down to Main Control and indicated that they wanted more speed out of the engines. With all four main engines online and running at the top of the green there was no more speed to be had and in the first 9 months before the crews started rotating to the ships in the Persian Gulf, it was understood that there was nothing more to give.

Top of the Green was defined as the "not to exceed" manifold pressures for the Packard main engines and it was not some arbitrary definition because we all knew that exceeding that pressure would almost instantly result in blown head gaskets and that meant the loss of an engine for the 8 hours or so it would take to repair it. It made no difference if we blew one head gasket or all of them since in any event the entire top of the engine had to come off which entailed removing all the fuel lines to the cylinder heads, removing the valve covers and ever so carefully backing out the retaining rings over each cylinder. That was the tricky part because even if done perfectly it sometimes resulted in stripping the aluminum threads in the aluminum block that held the rings and the only way to repair that was to weld the block back up and then cut new threads. The only 3 people I knew of on the west coast that could do that were my ENC, the Diesel Inspector at the Group in Seattle and Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Obviously, that was going to take a lot of time and the engine was out of commission.

When the rotations to the Gulf started one of the men who left before I did was the Commanding Officer who knew all about Top of the Green. When the Cobra (what everyone called the Mine Group chief staff officer) took over acting command to get us underway to conduct some testing of some new (ancient) Royal Navy mine sweep cutters it required extensive underway operations and the bridge kept calling down for more speed since the British said they needed to have the gear pulled at 12 knots in order to fully test the new cutters.

I was in Main Control for these events and told the bridge we had no more power to give and that we were at the top of the green at which point the Cobra himself came on the bitch box and informed me that he was speeding up from the pilot house controls. About 5 seconds later we blew all the head gaskets in 2 main engines and took manual control of propeller pitch to keep the last two engines from going offline. (Diesels don't cool/run very well on emulsified lube oil). 

Needless to say, we returned to port at about 8 knots and that was the end of testing and the Cobra headed back to Seattle.

Do you get the sense that the world right now is running at the Top of the Green? I do. I cannot believe that 81 million people actually voted for senile imbecile who is so obviously a senile imbecile. He was always an imbecile but the senile part would surely have discouraged some democrats from voting for him but it seems they came out in more than record numbers to vote for him. What the democrats/media/hollywood/et al, don't understand about the "deniers" is not that suspect the election was entirely tainted by fraud orchestrated in the major democrat controlled cities in the east and California, it's that it is all to obvious that it was since it is flat out impossible to believe 81 million Americans failed to perceive the truth about Biden's mental condition.

At Penn State we had like most schools, an undergraduate student government that did damned knows what but they were self-vested with importance and dignity on account of being in the 'government'. As I recall, in my senior year a rat was put up as a candidate for President of the USG and won the vote. He was denied office by the Administration. In that case there was no detectable difference between President Rat and whatever non-entity was given the office as a consequence of coming in second to a rat in the polls.

I would urge you to stand a responsible distance from the polling places tomorrow but hold up large signs asking "WHY VOTE FOR THE DIABOLICAL SENILE PARTY when you can get an articulate semi-honest politician instead?"

If American politics and the craziness of the left here is not enough, consider Europe which slit it's own throat and spurned Russian appeals to honor the reunification agreements and not extend the NATO border to Russia's own border. So, they destroyed the Ukraine as a result and when I write, 'they' I don't just mean the Russians. Ukraine would have been spanked and left reasonably intact but the entire EU and Switzerland decided to sanction Russia with the result that it won't just be Ukrainians freezing to death this winter due to a lack of energy and oh, by the way, somebody, British or US blew up the natural gas pipelines feeding Russian gas to northern Europe.

That's not enough of course. The Ukrainian wheat harvest is trapped in Ukraine which means many arabs in the middle east will starve. There was a route out for the wheat by sea as negotiated between Turkey and Russia and Turkey and NATO but some idiots launched a major drone attack on Russians ships from within the safe transit corridor. Why would any sane person do that knowing that the Russians would promptly retaliate?

Heinlein was prophetic decades ago when he incorporated, "The Crazy Years" into his future history. These have to be the crazy years.