OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
Port is right
to back away
from cargo deal
S
o, let’s see: A salesman knocks on the door and offers to
sell you a case full of marvelous things, but he wants you
to pay before he opens the case, and the price he is asking
is far more than you have in your wallet.
Would you buy the case?
That’s exactly the scenario entrepreneur Rece Bly put the
Port of Astoria in with a proposal to develop a bulk terminal at
the Port’s leased dock space at North Tongue Point. The Port
and Bly have gone back and forth with proposals and count-
er-proposals for months on a proposed contract that would
compensate Bly for bringing an unspeciied cargo to the dock
facility located at the long-underutilized former U.S. Navy
base east of Astoria. The Port’s interest in the facility is for its
access to both rail and a channel of
the Columbia River.
The Port
The dock site is currently used
was more
only as a temporary location for
likely to get
Paciic Seafood Group, along with
storage and work space for two ship- zonked by
building and repair companies. The
choosing
Port has entertained numerous devel-
opment proposals since it leased the Door
land in 2009, but none have come
No. 3 than
to fruition. Although the Tongue
winning the
Point lease expires in 2019, there are
wonderful
extension options. Thus far, how-
ever, the Port and the Montana-based prize
property owner have disagreed on a
sale price. The Port contends the price should be far lower than
the company wants because signiicant investment would be
required to modernize the facilities.
In Bly’s proposal, the Port would buy the land and upgrade
the facilities and he would provide an unspeciied cargo that
would generate an estimated $3 million annually for the Port.
On the surface, it sounds attractive, and for a governmen-
tal entity struggling to generate revenue to cover its costs, it’s
almost like a description of a fabulous prize behind one of the
curtains on a game show.
Bly wrote a white paper, an authoritative report on the pro-
posal, and wants the Port to compensate him for it even though
he has not identiied what the cargo would be. Additionally,
Bly has estimated the facilities upgrade and maintenance costs
would be about $100 million, while Jim Knight, the Port’s
executive director has said he has heard other estimates that
run as high as $1 billion. Bly’s cost estimate would mean a
minimum time for a return on investment would be 34 years,
and if the higher costs are more accurate the Port more than
likely would never achieve a positive return.
The costs and risks of this deal are far too high, and the Port
was more likely to get zonked by choosing Door No. 3 than
winning the wonderful prize.
It was right to walk away from this one.
The stillborn legacy
of Barack Obama
By CHARLES
KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post Writers Group
W
ASHINGTON — Only
amid the most bizarre,
most tawdry, most addic-
tive election campaign in memory
could the real
story of 2016 be so
effectively oblit-
erated, namely,
that with just four
months left in the
Obama presidency,
its two central pillars are collapsing
before our eyes: domestically,
its radical reform of American
health care, aka Obamacare; and
abroad, its radical reorientation of
American foreign policy — disen-
gagement marked by diplomacy
and multilateralism.
Obamacare
On Monday, Bill Clinton called
it “the craziest thing in the world.”
And he was only talking about one
crazy aspect of it — the impact on
the consumer. Clinton pointed out
that small business and hardwork-
ing employees (“out there busting
it, sometimes 60 hours a week”)
are “getting whacked ... their pre-
miums doubled and their coverage
cut in half.”
This, as the program’s entire
economic foundation is crumbling.
More than half its nonproit
“co-ops” have gone bankrupt.
Major health insurers like Aetna
and UnitedHealthcare, having lost
millions of dollars, are withdrawing
from the exchanges. In one-third of
the U.S., exchanges will have only
one insurance provider. Premiums
and deductibles are exploding.
Even The New York Times blares
“Ailing Obama Health Care Act
May Have to Change to Survive.”
Young people, refusing to pay
disproportionately to subsidize
older and sicker patients, are
not signing up. As the risk pool
becomes increasingly unbalanced,
the death spiral accelerates. And
the only way to save the system
is with massive infusions of tax
money.
What to do? The Democrats will
eventually push to junk Obamacare
for a full-ledged, government-run,
single-payer system. Republicans
will seek to junk it for a more
market-based pre-Obamacare-like
alternative. Either way, the singular
domestic achievement of this pres-
idency dies.
The Obama doctrine
The president’s vision was to
move away from a world where
stability and “the success of
liberty” (JFK, inaugural address)
were anchored by American power
and move toward a world ruled by
universal norms, mutual obligation,
international law and multilateral
institutions. No more cowboy
adventures, no more unilateralism,
no more Guantanamo. We would
ascend to the higher moral plane
of diplomacy. Clean hands, clear
conscience, “smart power.”
This blessed vision has just
died a terrible death in Aleppo.
Its unraveling was predicted and
predictable, though it took fully
two terms to unfold. This policy
of pristine — and preening —
disengagement from the grubby
imperatives of realpolitik yielded
Crimea, the South China Sea, the
rise of the Islamic State, the return
of Iran. And now the horror and the
shame of Aleppo.
After endless concessions to
Russian demands meant to protect
and preserve the genocidal regime
of Bashar Assad, last month
we inally capitulated to a deal
in which we essentially joined
Russia in that objective. But such
is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for
our president that he wouldn’t stop
there.
He blatantly violated his own
cease-ire with an air campaign
of such spectacular savagery —
targeting hospitals, water pumping
stations and a humanitarian aid
convoy — that even Barack
Obama and John Kerry could no
longer deny that Putin is seeking
not compromise but conquest.
And is prepared to kill everyone
in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it.
Obama, left with no options — and
astonishingly, having prepared
none — looks on.
At the outset of the war, we
could have bombed Assad’s air-
ields and destroyed his aircraft,
eliminating the regime’s major
strategic advantage — control of
the air.
Five years later, we can’t.
Russia is there. Putin has just
installed S-300 antiaircraft missiles
near Tartus. Yet, none of the rebels
have any air assets. This is a warn-
ing and deterrent to the only power
that could do something — the
United States.
Obama did nothing before. He
will surely do nothing now. For
Americans, the shame is palpable.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea may
be an abstraction, but that stunned
injured little boy in Aleppo is not.
Burial ground
“What is Aleppo?” famously
asked Gary Johnson. Answer: The
burial ground of the Obama fantasy
of benign disengagement.
What’s left of the Obama
legacy? Even Democrats are
running away from Obamacare.
And who will defend his foreign
policy of lofty speech and cynical
abdication?
In 2014, Obama said, “Make no
mistake: (My) policies are on the
ballot.” Democrats were crushed in
that midterm election.
This time around, Obama says,
“My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the
2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a
referendum on character — a battle
fully personalized and ad homi-
nem — the collapse of the Obama
legacy would indeed be right now
on the ballot. And his party would
be 20 points behind.
Social intimacy for the avoidant in the internet age
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
O
ver the past generation there
seems to have been a decline
in the number of high-qual-
ity friendships.
In 1985, most Americans told
pollsters that they
had about three
conidants, people
with whom they
could share every-
thing. Today, the
majority of people
say they have about two. In 1985,
10 percent of Americans said they
had no one to fully conide in, but
by the start of this century 25 per-
cent of Americans said that.
All of this has left people
wondering if technology is making
us lonelier. Instead of going over
to the neighbor’s house, are we
sitting at home depressingly suring
everybody else’s perfect lives on
Facebook?
Over the past decade, the best
research has suggested that no,
technology and social media are not
making us lonelier. These things
are tools. It’s what you bring to
Facebook that matters. Socially
engaged people use it to further
engage; lonely people use it to mask
loneliness.
As Stephen Marche put it in
The Atlantic in 2012, “Using social
media doesn’t create new social net-
works; it just transfers established
networks from one platform to
another.”
Saturation level
But recently, people’s views
of social media have grown a bit
darker. That’s because we seem to
be hitting some sort of saturation
level. Being online isn’t just some-
thing we do. It has become who we
are, transforming the very nature of
the self.
Earlier this year, Jacob Weisberg
had a ine essay in The New York
Review of Books reporting that,
according to a British study, we
check our phones on average 221
times a day — about every 4.3
minutes.
A decade ago almost no one had
a smartphone. Now the average
American spends 5 1/2 hours a day
with digital media, and the young
spend far more time. A study of
female students at Baylor University
found that they spent 10 hours a day
on their phones.
A lot of this trafic is driven by
the fear of missing out. Somebody
may be posting something on
Snapchat that you’d like to know
about, so you’d better constantly be
checking. The trafic is also driven
by what the industry executives
call “captology.” The apps generate
small habitual behaviors, like swip-
ing right or liking a post, that gener-
ate ephemeral dopamine bursts. Any
second that you’re feeling bored,
lonely or anxious, you feel this deep
hunger to open an app and get that
burst.
A ‘friend’
Last month, Andrew Sullivan
published a moving and much-dis-
cussed essay in New York magazine
titled “I Used to Be a Human
Being” about what it’s like to have
your soul hollowed by the web.
“By rapidly substituting virtual
reality for reality,” Sullivan wrote,
“we are diminishing the scope of
(intimate) interaction even as we
multiply the number of people with
whom we interact. We remove or
drastically ilter all the information
we might get by being with another
person. We reduce them to some
outlines — a Facebook ‘friend,’ an
Instagram photo, a text message
— in a controlled and sequestered
world that exists largely free of the
sudden eruptions or encumbrances
of actual human interaction. We
become each other’s ‘contacts,’
eficient shadows of ourselves.”
At saturation level, social media
reduces the amount of time people
spend in uninterrupted solitude,
the time when people can excavate
and process their internal states.
It encourages social multitasking:
You’re with the people you’re with,
but you’re also monitoring the 6
billion other people who might be
communicating something more
interesting from far away. It lattens
the range of emotional experiences.
As Louis C.K. put it in a TV
appearance, “You never feel com-
pletely sad or completely happy.
You just feel kinda satisied with
your products. And then you die.”
Perhaps phone addiction is mak-
ing it harder to be the sort of person
who is good at deep friendship. In
lives that are already crowded and
stressful, it’s easier to let banter
crowd out emotional presence.
There are a thousand ways online
to divert with a joke or a happy face
emoticon. You can have a day of
happy touch points without any of
the scary revelations, or the boring,
awkward or uncontrollable moments
that constitute actual intimacy.
When Montaigne was describing
the accumulating intimacy he
enjoyed with his best friend, he
described an emotional interaction
that was full and progressive: “It
was not one special consideration,
nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a
thousand; it was some mysterious
quintessence of all this mixture
which possessed itself of my will
and led it to plunge and lose itself in
his; which possessed his whole will
and led it, with a similar hunger, and
a like impulse, to plunge and lose
itself in mine.”
When we’re addicted to online
life, every moment is fun and
diverting, but the whole thing is
profoundly unsatisfying. I guess a
modern version of heroism is regain-
ing control of social impulses, saying
no to a thousand shallow contacts for
the sake of a few daring plunges.