Author Archives: billtoner1960

A principled stand

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The U.S. government is going to shut down in an hour and 5 minutes.

While I hate to see the inconvenience this will impose on hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors, I applaud Chuck Schumer for taking a principled stand. The republicans have worked themselves into a corner where they have absolutely no credibility with respect to a promissory note to fix important issues later.  Schumer and the democrats recognized that it’s now or never.

With the ensuing chaos that will start tomorrow morning where Dick Mulveyney will need to decide what stays open and what closes, there exists a clear inconvenience to republicans to come to the table and negotiate.  Trump might have to postpone a golf game or two.  The party celebrating the one year anniversary of his inauguration is in jeopardy.  It’ll be interesting to see if he holds it.  It would be incredibly bad optics.

Schumer played this poker hand pretty well this time.  Basically called republicans’ bluff that Dems would take the heat for a shut-down.  On the contrary.

If he’s able to negotiate a deal for the Dreamers and get funding for CHIP, he’ll have accomplished two things.  One, his principled stand will get looked at as what resolved the Dreamers issue.  Two, he will have established credibility that democrats are willing to call McConnell’s bluff if they feel like public opinion is on their side.  These are two very important accomplishments that need to happen in order to fix the ‘tude problem on the other side of the aisle.

Where’s your song, man?

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I’m reminded of a funny story I was told by local musician, producer, singer, songwriter Jim Walker a few years ago.  One day we got off on the topic of people who, with no talent of their own, like to sit there and launch criticisms of bands and how they suck or whatever.

So as the story goes, Jim and a friend were at a bar watching a local band and there happened to be an obnoxious guy standing behind him who kept making rude comments about the band and how they sucked.  You can only ignore someone like that for so long.  Evidently Jim’s friend had had enough of this guy, turned around and asked him “Where’s your song, man?”  I guess he got a lot more quiet after that.

I’m reminded of this humorous episode as I watch Republican infighting over the DACA solution.  It’s humorous for a couple of reasons.  First, Lindsay Graham tries to be Trump’s buddy and get into his inner circle by going golfing with him and flattering him afterwards.  Then he makes what I would say is a good faith effort to work with democratic senator Dick Durbin on a bipartisan solution to DACA.  Does the President want to hear about it?  Sure, c’mon over.

To his surprise, Trump had invited a few of his hardliners to the meeting as well.  Graham’s idea got shot down by Cotton and Perdue who have no intention of working in a bipartisan fashion with any democrat, even though 80% of U.S. citizens want to see a solution for Dreamers.  So Graham is out there strumming his tune, laying out his proposal and Trump gets indignant about it complete with shithole comments.

But as bad and racist as that was, that’s not the point here.  The point is, okay, you don’t like my plan.  Where’s yours?

So, Senators Cotton and Perdue.  Where’s your song, man?

Credit

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Yesterday a Chinese credit rating agency downgraded the U.S. credit rating over “political deficiencies”.

It’s worth noting that this occurred prior to any government shutdown. A shutdown will of course further reduce the U.S. credit rating and likely have an immediate impact on interest rates.

I believe this is a case where the minority party actually has a better poker hand than the majority. 80% of Americans want the DACA issue settled. The question then becomes “who looks worse if the Dems take a stand on Dreamers and government shuts down?”

I think Republicans will take the hit.

The question is then, do Democrats have the cajones to risk public opinion on a shutdown? I’m not convinced they do. However, it would be a historic stand and the right thing to do. 3 days to find out. My money is on kick the can down the road on a short term resolution.

Billboards

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It’s hard to decide some days in which form to participate in the #resistance. For the most part, with Facebook and Twitter we’re preaching to the choir without having any real impact.

After some consideration, I feel like getting involved with voter registration efforts is probably the best use of time. My help isn’t needed in Portland though. I’ve seriously considered a trip to Wisconsin to support Randy Bryce because Paul Ryan must be defeated. But I have equal disdain for Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Chuck Grassley and Tom Cotton so it’s a tough call.

Focusing on house races is more important than Senate races. It’s unlikely the math is there for a takeover of the upper chamber.

Recently I came across an innovative idea from a guy I follow on Twitter, Claude Taylor. He’s buying up billboard space to “oppose all the Trump boot lickers.”

It’s an official PAC and they are starting the roll out any day now. The first one will be in Florida off if I-75, It’s also worth noting, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri won the Golden Globe for best picture.

I like the idea so much I sent the PAC some money. The combination of voter registration and public shaming sounds like the ticket.

The biggest threat to PDX Home Prices

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It’s not what you think.

We have to hope that the procrastination of the Hanford cleanup doesn’t kill us all.  Our home values would be the least of our concerns.

It’s really true there’s no free lunch.  Yes, the United States beat Russia in the race to develop the first nuclear bomb.  There are many books on the subject and The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious undertakings in the 240 year history of this country in size and scale.

The downside is, we’ve been trying to clean up the site for over 70 years and are nowhere near complete.  Current estimates are $2 billion per year until cleanup is complete in 2050.

There are 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in stored in 177 underground tanks.  One third of these tanks are leaking radioactive waste into the soil and groundwater.  Aquifers are containing 270 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater. As of 2008, 1 million gallons of radioactive waste was traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me lean towards Alaskan Salmon at the seafood counter.

From a recent article comparing the risk of Hanford to what happened in Fukushima, Japan.

On 29 September 1957 a tank containing waste similar to the waste in the Hanford Tank Farms exploded at the Mayak plutonium production site in the former Soviet Union, known as the Kyshtym Disaster. The cooling system for one of the tanks at the Mayak site failed and the temperature inside the tank rose eventually causing a chemical explosion that sent a radioactive cloud for over 350 km downwind and heavily contaminated an area near the plant with catastrophic levels of cesium-137 and strontium-90. This was one of the worst radiological disasters in human history at the time, and remained so, along with the fire three weeks later inside a nuclear reactor core at the Windscale facility (now called Sellafield) in Cumbria in the United Kingdom, until the Chernobyl meltdown and explosion in 1987. The Kyshtym Disaster, which a Soviet study concluded resulted directly in 8,000 deaths (not to mention illnesses) was the consequence of an explosion in one tank. At Hanford there are currently 177 such tanks, each containing similar disastrous potential, and located beside one another.

If you do the math on the population of people downwind, all I can say is we’d better hope those cooling systems continue to work or this place will be uninhabitable for a century.  And that’s just one scenario.

I’m anxiously awaiting the Trump administration to roll out its infrastructure plan.  Rumor has it a small, private outfit in Montana with connections to Ivanka Trump’s wedding planner will be put in charge of the cleanup.  If that happens, I’m moving.

The Fog of War

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In 2003, a documentary titled The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara was introduced.  Here’s a link to a 2 minute trailer on it.

The reason this movie comes to the forefront of my mind these days has to do with the banter going back and forth between the U.S. and North Korea and Iran.

In the movie itself, McNamara was interviewed where he talked about the discussions of the Kennedy administration cabinet, strategizing around the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The most revealing aspect of the interview was the fact that much of the strategy conversations had to do with ‘guessing’ at what Russia and Cuba were thinking.  What their motives were.  They didn’t know for sure so they had to guess.

McNamara’s point was, had they guessed wrong, they could have a nuclear event on their hands that was a result of a big misunderstanding.  It was entirely possible for this to happen.  He strongly emphasized the need for diplomacy so that any events centered around war were fully understood and not the result of second guessing wrong.

This is perhaps the scariest aspect of the Trump Administration for me.  The probability that he will initiate military action based on his impulses without a full understanding seems extraordinarily high.  This is why level-headedness matters in the oval office.

It looks to me like the movie is available from Netflix but on DVD only.  There may well be other streaming sources.  If you get a chance to see it, I found it very enlightening.

Below is a summary of the 11 lessons from McNamara.

  1. We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
  2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
  3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
  4. Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
  5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
  6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
  7. After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.
  8. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
  9. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
  10. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
  11. Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.

Don’t give away your power

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This blog post is actually about counseling.  In no way am I an expert, but after 12 years as a client, I feel somewhat qualified to make a few  comments on the subject.

I don’t intend to go into my personal life or the personal lives of family members, but I think I can share a few nuggets of wisdom that I learned along the way.

In retrospect I see my divorce in 2008 as a win-win.  She’s met someone who I like a lot and I think is a perfect match for her.  I’ve done the same.  It was really tough but after 27 years we had to face it.  It wasn’t working.  We got married too young.  We are different people at the core.  We’re human and humans make mistakes.  We consider ourselves lucky in that this one turned out pretty good for everyone.

15 years into the marriage we entered counseling.  In the process I feel a little bit like the blind man who had surgery and was suddenly able to see.  There were a few aha moments that changed my life for the better.  For that, I have very grateful.

One of them had to do with people connections.  Not just acquaintances, real people connections.  One day you’re thinking that you’ve got it all going pretty smooth.  Shoot you’re the Vice President of Little League Baseball.  You’re a manager at a high tech company.   Everyone knows you.   Next you realize your life consists of mostly acquaintances where you’re not really connected on a deep level in any way at home or at work.  That one was hard.  Very hard.  Life changing.

Another one was humility.  She was just so gentle with the message too.  I don’t even recall what I was talking about at the time but she interrupted me and asked “Where’s the humility in that?”  In the moment I was taken aback.  I couldn’t answer.  It didn’t make any sense.  I was brought up to see the value in humility and if anything, my parents’ capabilities and intelligence were understated.  Where did I go wrong?  I think I know the answer and it’s not really important to this blog post, but be that as it may, I learned a dose of humility goes a long way and have tried to be a different person ever since.

When someone figures you out at a deep level like this, I think there’s a danger of elevating their words to a level that’s not healthy.  They are just humans too.  They make mistakes.  But somewhere along the way I became more of a disciple than a client.   And in her own way she recognized this and corrected that line of thinking too.

Basically what she said was, “Don’t give me that power.   I don’t know everything.  You don’t need me anymore.  You can do this yourself.  It’s all in here.” And then she put her fist over her heart.

Truth be told, I think I wanted the dependency at the time.  But she was spot on.  It is in there.  We don’t need to give up our power to other people who are the experts.  They are just people.  Sometimes (not always) what we need to do is to dig deep.

Counseling is a tricky business.  I’ve talked to several.  Only 1 or 2 have made a difference so it can be hit and miss.  It’s one of those things where you really have to go with your gut.  I can attest to life changing moments that were worth every penny.  I can also attest to at least a dozen appointments that were a complete waste of time and money.

I can also say that there’s something to be said for just manning up and owning your own stuff and not looking outside for guidance.  You can’t buy your way out of it.  How do I know this?  Because I learned the hard way.

My takeaways?  You can’t take it with you.  People don’t care what titles you hold.  Live in the moment as much as possible.  Enjoy your friends and family while you can.  And don’t get too big of a head on your shoulders.  When we reveal our humanness with our flaws and all, people are actually drawn to that more.

My $.0.2

Shut it down

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This probably won’t happen, and it’s a huge political gamble, but I think the Democrats should shut the government down if they don’t get the deal they want on DACA.

My reasoning is, a shutdown would send shock waves through the world, and when that happens, people start looking at the underlying reasons.  In previous years when the Republicans / Tea Party shut the government down, the took the heat big-time.  But that was different.  The underlying reason had to do with money and greed.  The decision to shut down the government over that issue was extremely unpopular.

This is different.  This is about sticking up for a group of people who have been marginalized.  It would be a principled stand and I actually think the Democrats would not face much backlash for a shutdown.  On the contrary.  And the timing of the “shithole” comment couldn’t be better.  The support for bigotry in the US has not risen to majority levels.

The question is, do they have the intestinal fortitude to take the gamble?

Penn Station

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I recently ran across an article on the sad state of the Hudson River tunnels that feed into Penn Station in mid town Manhattan. I felt it was alarming enough to be worthy of a quick review.

Here are some statistics and highlights from the article:

  • Penn Station services 430,000 passengers daily.  More than La Guardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined
  • The route into Penn Station from the south to the north travels through 2 tunnels beneath the Hudson River, both 107 years old
  • More than 200,000 people also use the subway stops that connect to Penn Station.  Amtrak shares the space with the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit.
  • There are more than 1300 arrivals and departures every weekday

Accounts from the article talk about riding in the caboose slowly through the tunnels observing just how bad the walls have decayed to the point of crumbling concrete.  There is visible damage from the aftermath of hurricane Sandy five years ago, where sulfites and chlorides have been eating away at the concrete.

My wife and I have taken Amtrak from New York’s Penn to Boston starting and have seen first hand the volume of people and the bee-hive of activity that place is on any given day.  It’s nuts-o.  Worse than Chicago’s O’Hare on a busy day in terms of chaos.

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As we learned from 9/11, the financial center of the country doesn’t react well to a crisis. Estimates by congress in 2008 projected that any disaster – natural, terrorist or decay of infrastructure that shuts down New York city would impact the U.S. economy by $100 Million per day.  The potential impact on the stock market measures in the Trillions.  The Amtrak into Penn Station is literally the artery of the U.S. Financial system.  A crucial piece of infrastructure that is crumbling as I write this.

There have been a few attempts to do something about Penn Station, but to date all of the efforts have run into unfortunate roadblocks.

  • In the late 1990s, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised $350 million to replace it with a new station next to it.  The effort fell apart after 9/11.
  • In 2008, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was on the verge of pushing through a multi-billion dollar plan to relocate Madison Square Garden, (which sits directly above Penn station and adds to the problem) and renovate Penn.  It collapsed after Spitzer’s political career tanked when he was caught patronizing prostitutes.
  • In 2009, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine put together a fully funded 8.7 billion project for new tunnels.  Chris Christie killed the project in order to keep gas prices low.

In October of 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the region with 80 mph winds and the water rose higher than at any time in the city’s recorded history.  The Hudson River surged over the banks of Manhattan, poured into a submerged rail yard and flooded Penn Station’s tunnels.  A few days later, Amtrak pumped out 13 million gallons of seawater.

The electrical systems now malfunction on a fairly regular basis.  It’s projected that within 7 years, even with no natural disasters the tunnels will need to be taken out of service for 18 months of repairs.  The bridges and ferries have nowhere near the capacity to pick up the slack if a tunnel needs to be taken out of service.

  • In 2015, the governors of New York and New Jersey agreed to a deal on Gateway: The states would pay half the cost of building new tunnels to Penn, and the Obama administration pledged that the federal government would cover the other half.
  • During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump campaigned as the guy who would rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, promising $1 trillion to repair roads, bridges, and tunnels.  After he was elected he eliminated billions in funding for Gateway related projects in the 2018 budget and reneged on the commitment Obama made for the federal government to pay half.

As with many things in the US, we lack the vision it takes to prioritize modern infrastructure like London, Paris and Tokyo do.   The Trump administration brushed it off as a local problem.  But I wonder if those of us who will see our 401k values tank as the country’s financial center becomes paralyzed will feel the same way.  My guess is we’ll be begging for a bailout by the feds.  Anything to protect that coveted 401k, but not until I have to.

So far there have only been whispers about what Trump’s infrastructure plans might be, but the whispers have been pretty revealing: privatization.  Prisons, roads, bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, you name it.  Everything is for sale and it’s all about profit… for someone anyway.  Nothing shall get in the way of the almighty dollar.  That is of course, until you clog the artery of the thing that is feeding you those almighty dollars.

It all starts in the tunnel

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As the story went, in the 1980’s my cousin Mike, after years of laboring in the So. Cal job market and recently graduating from SDSU put together a resume where he listed his Job Objective: “To obtain the type of position where I don’t have to take a shower when I get home.”

A good writer will make a bold move like that to get the attention of the reader.

As a young technical worker at Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in the early 1980’s, I had landed one of those jobs and felt lucky to have it.  Sit at a desk all day long and do paperwork.  It was about the most boring thing you could possibly imagine, tracing airplane wire bundle drawings against the system level drawings for accuracy.

One other young colleague of mine joked about the sedentary nature of the job “Yeah, watch out for the Boeing spread.”  If I put 2 and 2 together, it meant sitting in a chair for 40 years is likely to yield a hefty backside, so be mindful of that.

A couple of years of chair sitting wasn’t working very well for me.  I felt like I needed to get moving.  Somehow, someway.   One of the guys in my group, Don Cobane, was a 20 year Boeing veteran who was very physically fit and a runner, so I was talking to him about the options.

Come to find out, about 5 years prior, he weighed in about 100 pounds heavier and had this moment where he slid his chair around his desk and got his stomach caught on the pull out drawer.  He was so mad and embarrassed at the time that he slammed the drawer back in the desk and said “That’s it.  I’m going to do something about this.”  I’ve since wondered if I’d ever have my “Don Cobane” moment where you just get sick of not taking care of your physical self well enough.

At the time, about 20,000 people worked at the Boeing plant in Everett, Wa.  The building, all 4 assembly lines connected, holds the Guinness World Record as the largest building in the world with a volume of 472,000,000 cubic feet (13.3 million cubic meters).

boeing-everett-top-view

There were no gym facilities anywhere to be found at the site in the factory or its adjacent office buildings.  In talking with Cobane I found out about this underground tunnel that people run in when the weather is bad, so I figured it might be worth a look.

Turns out there are 2.33 miles of underground pedestrian tunnels running below the assembly lines pictured above.

So sometime in about 1982 I started a lunch-time exercise routine that began with “running in the tunnel.’   There’s nothing sexy about running in the tunnel.  Dark, dingy, not very well-lit.  Poorly ventilated. The smell of crusty pipes. This particular tunnel had columns in the middle so that it was set up kind of like a swim lane.  The tunnel was 1/3 of a mile long, so if you wanted to run 2 miles, that’s 6 lengths, or up and back 3 times.  I actually found a picture of the real deal on the inter-webs.  It’s exactly how I remembered it.

boeing-tunnel-1

Most groups at Boeing, even the engineering groups had fairly strict rules with respect to the amount of time you could take for your lunch hour.  Officially it was 40 minutes.  Heading out to the tunnel, dressing down in a very crowded seriously smelly locker room a couple of stories above the tunnel, doing the actual run, shower and get back to work took the full 40 minutes and then some.

People say that running around the track is boring.  Try a tunnel.  But I managed to get myself down there a few times a week and get a routine started, and I felt better and stronger almost right away.

When the weather warms up, it’s really hard to justify heading down to the tunnel, but the problem was, there weren’t that many good routes to run outside the plant.  But there were a few and as human nature dictates, if you’re stuck in a crummy situation, you start  to look for something better.

A few months in my times were getting a little bit faster and I’d met some guys who were determined to do the outdoor routes when the sun came out.  If we really hustled, we could get 3 miles in and get back to work without being too tardy.  This was much more enjoyable.

A few years later I got transferred to a building that wasn’t inside the main complex, but about 1/2 mile from the main plant.  And it had its own little locker room.  This is where my running started to take off a bit.  The next thing I knew I was doing 4 miles at lunch.  And then 6.   I was getting hooked.  Almost every day I’d head out with a group of guys and taking 4-6 miles at lunch with a ‘long’ one on the weekends of closer to 10.

Summer came around and I was with the family on a 4 day weekend at Seaside, Oregon.  I was 30 at the time.  The house we stayed in was a small 2 bedroom house but we used to pack 10 or more people in there on any given weekend.  What this mostly meant was that the bathroom (singular) was backed up most of the morning so I might as well go for a good long run.

The day before, in town I ran across a pamphlet for the Portland Marathon.  I grabbed it with the idea I’d learn about it later.  On my Saturday run, all I could think about was the Portland Marathon and how I was in the best position to give it a go right now, and if I don’t do it this year, I probably never will.  That particular day I ran up to Gearhart and back and put in about 11 miles.

By the time I got home I made the decision to go for it.  I read that pamphlet 100 times by my bedside.  The marathon date was at the end of September and it was about the end of June now.  I had 3 months to get my miles up from the 30 mile range to 50, with long runs of 20+ in there somewhere.  I put together a very detailed plan.  At that point I was almost obsessed with the idea.  I knew what time I wanted to average, what time I wanted to achieve and constantly strategized on how to best train for this event.

Along the way I ran my first 10k and in early September I entered a half marathon.  Enjoyed both of those but the idea of doing a full still seemed pretty daunting.

The big day arrived and I was excited and ready.  The weather was perfect for the 7am start.  I ripped off the first 10 miles at about 8 min/mile pace and felt really good.  I think I started slowing down a bit around 15 miles, but pressed on.  At 23 I was pretty dehydrated and decided to actually stop at the water table and get some water, but walk fast while drinking it.  After about 100 yards I decided to get back in running form again and everything stiffened up.  That was a scary moment but I got past it.  I’m guessing my last 3 miles were at closer to 10 min/mile pace.  Pretty slow but I was so happy because at that point there was no doubt I was going to make it.  And I did.  3:43 and change. Pretty much exactly the time I was striving for.  Anything under 3:45 was going to be considered a win for me.

What brings me down memory lane this evening is the thought patterns I have as I hop on the treadmill in the morning at age 58.  I’m way overdue for some exercise.  Way overdue.  To be completely honest, I think I’m on the verge of a Don Cobane moment.

I can’t even come close to the times I used to put in.  Even on the treadmill now I’ve got more of a walk/run routine going, so it’s not really even running yet.  But what keeps me going some days (like this morning), is just the thought that “It all starts in the tunnel.”

The tunnel was only 2 miles and at a slow pace at first.  But the point is I started somewhere and didn’t just sit in that chair resigning myself to the Boeing spread.

I believe most people have instincts that drive us to compete against ourselves.  If I did 2 miles yesterday, maybe I’ll do 2.25 next week because 2 miles is getting boring.  And while I’m at it, I might try to improve my time by 10 seconds too.  It’s just human nature.  But in order for human nature to have a chance to succeed, you gotta get down to that tunnel and get going on something.