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Information I'd love to know

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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by kzt   » Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:35 pm

kzt
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Secretary of the Treasury in the US.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by cthia   » Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:40 pm

cthia
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kzt wrote:Secretary of the Treasury in the US.

But the Secretary of the Treasury doesn't have anything to do with the naval budget does he?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by roseandheather   » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:34 pm

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cthia wrote:I concur. Very nice analysis. It should be featured in the wiki. I looked and looked for some tangibles and caught no joy. I don't do politics well. Some are a shoe-in for it. Thanks much Rose! Incredible. You and Estelle would hit it off quiiiite well! ;)


Well, there's my sweet dreams fuel for the night... :mrgreen:
~*~


I serve at the pleasure of President Pritchart.

Javier & Eloise
"You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley..."
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by Yow   » Mon Jul 07, 2014 10:25 pm

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cthia wrote:
Amaroq wrote:Anyone else wonder what the Dresden accent sounds like? I don't know if I've ever heard of an accent described as "saw-edged" before. Maybe it's like a Cockney accent?

I wondered about that too Amaroq. My niece says it makes her think of people from Arkansas. Where the ending of some words, mostly ending with the 'w' sound, are butchered, sawed off, and an 'r' sound displaces it. As in Arkansar, and Sarred-off shotgun. Featured on an episode of Matlock, the accent gave a criminal away. It's unmistakable.

She may be wrong, but I like the guess.


:evil: :evil: :evil:
dreamrider wrote:David is from South Carolina.

The only foreign accents that DON'T sound "saw-edged" to him are Georgia and North Carolina. :twisted:

dreamrider

Edit Oooo. S :roll: rry. Read that wrong. :D :D :D thanks Dreamrider :D

Cthia's father ~ "Son, do not cater to the common belief that a person has to earn respect. That is not true. You should give every person respect right from the start. What a person has to earn is your continued respect!"
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by lyonheart   » Tue Jul 08, 2014 3:15 am

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Hi RoseandHeather,

Sorry to rain on the parade, but Estelle Knows lots of very good naval officers, besides Honor in OBS before Kumalo reclaimed his soul.

Given prolong, NTM the fact she was Home secretary before she was sent to the Talbot Cluster, she knows plenty of very good naval officers that Kumalo didn't measure up to, such as Terekhov, which is why she liked him so much and immediately by comparison.

I'm sure she had studied Terekhov's personnel record quite carefully, before she saw him at the reception, which probably included some personal notes from friends over her long career recommending him from both the Foreign Office and the Navy.

Do you recall her remark at the reception in Spindle from SoS [chapter 12] where she mentions one of her nieces is a captain at BuShips?

I suspect her family has a rather long and large naval tradition, which is probably another reason why she didn't like Young or Kumalo since they were both Conservative Association members, and she such a strong Centrist.

L


roseandheather wrote:
cthia wrote:
Can someone enlighten me as to why Estelle Matsuko initially disliked Khumalo?



Oh, God in heaven, can I ever.

Okay. So remember how, back in OBS, His Royal Assness Pavel Young basically did jack shit to help Estelle with - well, anything? How he was politically connected but not particularly good at his job, and how he made her job considerably harder, instead of easier like he was supposed to?

Well, so does Dame Estelle Matsuko.

You have to remember that, until the Monica crisis hit, Khumalo - as much as I love him - had not proven at all gifted with imagination or moral courage. He was a political appointee by the Janacek Admiralty because he was an aristocrat in his own right, a relative of the Queen's, and - critically - a firm member of the Conservative Association.

By this point, we had met Michael Oversteegen, ergo we were aware that not all Conservatives were useless assholes. Dame Estelle had not, and given her prior experience with political appointees - particularly conservative ones - she was already predisposed not to like him. Remember, in OBS she saw Honor Harrington as the exception for Navy officers, not the rule. Honor changed that somewhat, but a lifelong distrust of political Navy officers doesn't go away overnight, and all that old mistrust came roaring back when she ended up with Khumalo, who - remember, again, this was before Monica - appeared to her to be yet another "Conservative Political Appointee Officer, Specimen #906", not "Augustus Khumalo, that guy who rode to Aivars Terekhov's aid without hesitation and told the Monican President to shove it up his ass and the ass of the horse he rode in on."

And Khumalo - darling man! - wasn't helping; he was a Conservative and not shy about it, and managed to open mouth insert foot more than once in diplomatic circles. Dame Estelle was basically thinking, "What in God's name did I do wrong to continually get saddled with conservative officers who make my job harder? Harringtonexceptedofcourse," and he really wasn't doing anything to prove her wrong, because he didn't know he could. Remember, he had been waiting for the White Haven Admiralty to yank him from his post - he'd only been sent there in the first place, after all, because it wasn't supposed to be an important military post. Diplomatic, yes - that's why they sent such a Foreign Office heavy hitter as Dame Estelle - but a Navy presence wasn't thought to be necessary beyond a token. So he was constantly on edge, knowing one wrong move would only hasten his dismissal but dead sure it was coming anyway, as well as knowing that anything that went wrong in the Talbott Quadrant, militarily speaking, was his responsibility, whether he knew about it or not. And so he overcompensated - see the early chapters of Shadow of Saganami.

It's also true that someone's preconceptions of you tends to affect how you yourself behave. If you know everyone thinks you're a mostly useless incompetent, what's to stop you from thinking you're a mostly useless incompetent? That was Khumalo's problem.

But Monica changed everything. When the flag went up at Monica, Khumalo knew he had two choices; he could do the right thing, or he could do the easy (and seemingly career-saving) thing. And in that moment, Augustus Khumalo found his courage. He said, "You know what? I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks of me. I was stationed out here to do a job, and I am by God going to do my job."

In that, Dame Estelle saw echoes of the first Navy officer she'd ever truly respected, and a switch flipped somewhere. Suddenly he wasn't "Conservative Political Appointee Officer, Specimen #906" to her any more - he was a man who had stood up and done what duty demanded of him, even if it would ruin his career, and they both saw him for what he truly was - but what neither of them knew he was until it came down to the most important choice of all.

And that is why Dame Estelle Matsuko disliked Augustus Khumalo, and how they became not only close friends but comrades-in-arms from Monica on. :mrgreen:
Any snippet or post from RFC is good if not great!
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by runsforcelery   » Tue Jul 08, 2014 4:04 am

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lyonheart wrote:Hi RoseandHeather,

Sorry to rain on the parade, but Estelle Knows lots of very good naval officers, besides Honor in OBS before Kumalo reclaimed his soul.

Given prolong, NTM the fact she was Home secretary before she was sent to the Talbot Cluster, she knows plenty of very good naval officers that Kumalo didn't measure up to, such as Terekhov, which is why she liked him so much and immediately by comparison.

I'm sure she had studied Terekhov's personnel record quite carefully, before she saw him at the reception, which probably included some personal notes from friends over her long career recommending him from both the Foreign Office and the Navy.

Do you recall her remark at the reception in Spindle from SoS [chapter 12] where she mentions one of her nieces is a captain at BuShips?

I suspect her family has a rather long and large naval tradition, which is probably another reason why she didn't like Young or Kumalo since they were both Conservative Association members, and she such a strong Centrist.

L




Rose's analysis of Dame Estelle's initial attitude towards Khumalo is pretty much spot on. She does somewhat overestimate the Baroness' attitudes towards naval officers in general, but the fact that Estelle has a niece in BuShips fifteen or twenty years after meeting Honor doesn't necessarily mean that she's known "plenty" of good officers. I will concede that by this point in her career she's known a lot more good officers than bad officers, however. On the other hand, Khumalo was a political appointee to a naval station clearly regarded as of minor and secondary importance by the same Admiralty which had sent Pavel Young to Basilisk. I think it is, therefore, fair to suggest that her initial reaction to him most definitely was affected by her view of "political naval officers" and of the disastrous consequences of command appointments made on the basis of factional political policy. She'd been there, done that, and she had the T-shirt.

She hadn't studied Terekhov's record any more closely than she'd studied the records of any other naval officers assigned to the Talbott Quadrant, particularly since she didn't know he was coming ahead of time. On the other hand, Terekhov was well known in naval circles because of his actions at Hyacinth, and if you will recall, he had quite a successful Foreign Office career before returning to active duty after the outbreak of the actual shooting war. During that time, he and Dame Estelle had been working in the same field for the same superiors.

Rose's analysis of Khumalo's perception of himself — and the perceptions of him held by others — is pretty darned accurate, as is the moment at which others realize (even before he did) that he'd "found his moment." The fact that he was a distant relative of the Queen, that his membership in the Conservative Association made him (somewhat unquestioningly) acceptable to High Ridge and Janacek, and that the Talbott Sector was generally regarded as a place which required a competent administrator but not necessarily a competent military commander had, indeed, been the primary reasons for his appointment to Talbott in the first place. Of course, as Michael Oversteegen demonstrates, the Conservative Association has its own . . . political gradients within its membership, and Janacek and High Ridge would have been quite surprised if they'd discovered exactly what Augustus Khumalo's view of their policies truly was even prior to Monica.


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by dreamrider   » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:04 am

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cthia wrote:
kzt wrote:Secretary of the Treasury in the US.

But the Secretary of the Treasury doesn't have anything to do with the naval budget does he?


The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury would be involved distantly with the naval budget in his role as senior financial advisor to the President and the Administration. At some astronomically high level, as master of the revenues and monetary balance of the country, he would have input on the OVERALL budget and major components on the question of "Can we afford it?"

The Department of the Treasury no longer directly oversees the formulation of the annual and projected federal budget itself, or the issuance of financial targets to the various departments. That is the province of the Office of Management and Budget, an operating agency of the Executive Office of the President. The precursor to the OMB was transferred from DoT to the White House in the 1970s.

dreamrider
Last edited by dreamrider on Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by dreamrider   » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:18 am

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cthia wrote:
The Lord of the Exchequer, also known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a senior member of the Royal Council, in charge of the financial affairs of the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

The Naval Budget Estimate was one of the larger concerns for this office. In 1900 PD, the current Lord of the Exchequer was William Alexander. (HH1, HH3)


Is there a present day equivalent of this? Perhaps Chief of Naval Operations, or Secretary of the Navy?


The annual and forecast budget preparation would fall more to the Office of the Sec Nav, with the CNO heavily involved.

Theoretically, however, CNO involvement is to fill in the blank preceding the statement," $_____ This is what I need to keep the Navy in condition to conduct the missions we expect the President to hand us, and to conduct current missions." (S/he is, after all, the Chief of Naval Operations.)

Then the Sec Nav gets to oversee the horse trading and guard the ricebowl.

dreamrider
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by Yow   » Tue Jul 08, 2014 9:38 am

Yow
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dreamrider wrote:Then the Sec Nav gets to oversee the horse trading and guard the ricebowl.


:lol: defending our cut Kungfu Panda Style

Cthia's father ~ "Son, do not cater to the common belief that a person has to earn respect. That is not true. You should give every person respect right from the start. What a person has to earn is your continued respect!"
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Re: Information I'd love to know
Post by dreamrider   » Tue Jul 08, 2014 11:26 am

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Yow wrote:
dreamrider wrote:Then the Sec Nav gets to oversee the horse trading and guard the ricebowl.


:lol: defending our cut Kungfu Panda Style



The way I see it, this makes Sec Nav at least as much of a combat position as one of the Fleet COs. :lol:


dreamrider

PS - In Kung-fu Panda style, that would be "guarding the noodle bowl". :D
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