Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we don’t know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Donald Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media — racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group — is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool — that old monster solution — is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you can’t untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be today’s judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadn’t been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didn’t save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized — whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them — a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nation’s capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadn’t published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population. 

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship — banning someone else’s speech — isn’t going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldn’t be censorship. It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadn’t first censored the Russian media.

Newspapers are on death row. The once great provincial newspapers of this country, indeed of many countries, often look like pamphlets. Others have already been executed by the market.

The cause is simple enough: Disrupting technology in the form of the internet has lured away most of their advertising revenue. To make up the shortfall, publishers have been forced to push up the cover price to astronomical highs, driving away readers.

One city newspaper used to sell 200,000 copies, but now sells fewer than 30,000 copies. I just bought said paper’s Sunday edition for $5. Newspapering is my lifelong trade and I might be expected to shell out that much for a single copy, but I wouldn’t expect it of the public to pay that — especially for a product that is a sliver of what it once was.

New media are taking on some of the role of the newspapers, but it isn’t the same. Traditionally, newspapers have had the time and resources to do the job properly; to detach reporters to dig into the murky, or to demystify the complicated; to operate foreign bureaus; and to send writers to the ends of the earth. Also, they have had the space to publish the result.

More, newspapers have had something that radio, television and the internet outlets haven’t had: durability.

I have a stake in radio and television, yet I still marvel at how newspaper stories endure; how long-lived newspaper coverage is compared with the other forms of media.

I get inquiries about what I wrote years ago. Someone will ask, for example, “Do you remember what you wrote in 1980 about oil supply?”

Newspaper coverage lasts. Nobody has ever asked me about something I said on radio or television more than a few weeks after the broadcast.

I was taken aback when, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decades ago, a senator asked me about an article I had written years earlier and forgotten. But he hadn’t and had a copy handy.

There is authority in the written word that doesn’t extend to the broadcast word, and maybe not to the virtual word on the internet in promising, new forms of media like Axios.

If publishing were just another business — and it is a business — and it had reached the end of the line, like the telegram, I would say, “Out with the old and in with the new.” But when it comes to newspapers, it has yet to be proved that the new is doing the job once done by the old or if it can; if it can achieve durability and write the first page of history.

Since the first broadcasts, newspapers have been the feedstock of radio and television, whether in a small town or in a great metropolis. Television and radio have fed off the work of newspapers. Only occasionally is the flow reversed.

The Economist asks whether Russians would have supported President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine if they had had a free media and could have known what was going on; or whether the spread of COVID in China would have been so complete if free media had reported on it early, in the first throes of the pandemic?

The plight of the newspapers should be especially concerning at a time when we see democracy wobbling in many countries, and there are those who would shove it off-kilter even in the United States.

There are no easy ways to subsidize newspapers without taking away their independence and turning them into captive organs. Only one springs to mind, and that is the subsidy that the British press and wire services enjoyed for decades. It was a special, reduced cable rate for transmitting news, known as Commonwealth Cable Rate. It was a subsidy, but a hands-off one.

Commonwealth Cable Rate was so effective that all American publications found ways to use it and enjoy the subsidy.

United Press International created a subsidiary, British United Press, which flowed huge volumes of cable traffic through London. Time Inc. had a system where its cable traffic was channeled through Montreal to take advantage of the exceptionally low, special rates in the British Commonwealth.

That is the kind of subsidy that newspapers might need. Of course, best of all, would be for the mighty tech companies to pay for the news they purloin and distribute; for the aggregators to respect the copyrights of the creators of the material they flash around the globe. That alone might save the newspapers, our endangered guardians.

Did the fire at the end of Walt Disney’s iconic animated movie “Bambi” prejudice the country against forest management with controlled burning? Maybe so.

The U.S. Energy Association in February presented a virtual media briefing on the fire threat in the West and the Southwest this year. The prognosis, especially from the weather forecasting company AccuWeather, was grim.

Now that prognosis is being borne out as terrible fires again scorch those regions. Fire is now a year-round danger.

Enter forest scientists, who believe the solution to rampant wildfires is scientifically managed, pre-emptive burning. But this fire management practice isn’t without controversy. The memory of Bambi and his father, trapped by a raging forest fire, can spill into politics, with fierce advocates for prescribed burning often at odds with those who believe fire should be suppressed.

The epicenter of the science of forest management with fire isn’t in the West but in the East — in the Red Hills, stretching from Tallahassee, Fla., to Thomasville, Ga. This is the home to the research stations of the Tall Timbers Institute, which studies and practices prescribed burning to save the long-leaf pine forests and their abundant populations of game birds and other wildlife.

It can be argued that a small game bird, the Northern bobwhite quail, has been responsible for preserving a huge acreage of forest land in the Red Hills. The name Red Hills is more poetic than accurate as the land is undulating rather than hilly. However, the name is enshrined in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The area is home to some of the largest private estates — still called plantations — in the nation. They have been preserved and lovingly tended for hunting since the 19th century.

Conservation began in the 1920s to preserve the habitat of the quail, fell off in the 1930s, and came roaring back in the 1950s when philanthropist Henry Beadel gave 2,200 acres to establish five ecological research stations. This has grown to 4,000 acres.

The theory of deliberate burning is that it keeps down the forest-floor “fuel” that makes wildfires so deadly and unmanageable. The prescribed burns are carefully organized, considering the weather, the vegetation and the escape routes for the fauna.

During these burns, the fires sweep through without damaging the soil. The trees are left standing — because the fires are fast and very hot — but the forest floor is cleared.

Tall Timbers researchers showed me and a small group of visitors the product of a new burn on the previous day, where there was lingering smoke, and the revived, flourishing areas that were burned one, two, and three years earlier. These researchers have a passion for their work and their conservation with fire.

The institute is active on more than 500,000 acres in Georgia and Florida and leads the country in remedial burning. California is now tentatively trying to burn on a limited scale, learning from Tall Timbers.

But Tall Timers conservation extends well beyond fire.

They explained the real threat to forests is urban sprawl, and they are active —  vigorously so — in persuading Red Hills-area landowners to write easements into their deeds to preserve what the Nature Conservancy has called one of America’s “Last Great Places.” 

And the movement is growing. “We have been working with nonprofits in the West,” said Morgan Varner, fire research director at Tall Timbers. Varner said Florida leads the country in preservation of great tracts of untrammeled forest and savannah managed with prescribed burning.

As we toured through Tall Timbers, one could marvel at the resiliency of both the flora and fauna. Animals and birds, which naturally flee fire, also enthusiastically return after the fires have done their work. Bambi went back.

History isn’t short of people to blame. You could say of the present world crisis that it was former president Barack Obama’s fault for not getting tougher with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Syria. You could blame former president Donald Trump for giving Putin a sense of entitlement and for undermining NATO, seeing it as a financial play. You could blame former German chancellor Angela Merkel for encouraging Russian gas imports, shutting out the nuclear energy option.

You could, of course, blame President Biden for explicitly telling Putin, and the world, what the United States wouldn’t do if he invaded Ukraine. And you could blame Biden and NATO for dribbling vital military aid to Ukraine over the first devastating months of the Russian invasion.

If you want to continue, you could blame the world’s military strategists for believing that Russia, after the fall of communism, had changed. You could, perhaps, blame NATO itself, for expanding its reach to the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Putin is unequivocally the one to blame. He is the one who wants to remake Russia in the image of the imperial tsars. It is a flawed scheme but a real one.

As the world grapples with the reality of Putin, the past informs but it doesn’t instruct. If NATO were to engage Russia with conventional forces, it would triumph. That is one lesson of Ukraine. Russian military forces are woefully inefficient, even incompetent.

Would it were that simple.

The beast in the room, the feared monster, the threat that hangs over the whole world is nuclear war. It is the clear-and-present danger. It shapes our handling of Russia and will shape our response to China, if and when it invades Taiwan.

Nuclear war avoidance is again dominating the world in ways we had nearly forgotten. Will Russia — a caged, fierce bear — resort to nuclear, and how much nuclear to what effect against which targets?

The United States and the Soviet Union reached a modus vivendi: mutual assured destruction (MAD), which kept the peace even as nuclear armaments proliferated and stockpiles grew exponentially. Is that still the option? Is MAD — so long after the collapse of the Soviet Union — still the underlying realpolitik, the restraining factor between nuclear powers?

Does that mean that anyone with nuclear weapons can wage conventional warfare in the belief that they won’t face NATO or any other serious restraining military action because they can unleash terrifying global destruction?

Or is there, as some believe, the prospect of limited nuclear engagement, using area tactical nuclear weapons? This has never been tested. There hasn’t been a limited nuclear ground war. Could it be contained? Should it be contemplated outside the deeper reaches of the defense establishment?

But it is what keeps the leaders of Europe, the United States and Canada awake nights. If you favor limited nuclear war, just look to the effects of a nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, and start multiplying.

It is the unthinkable scenario that must be thought about. It is the reality that holds back NATO and makes the West a spectator to the carnage in Ukraine.

Russia isn’t a rich country. It has a large, poorly trained and equipped military. But it bristles with nuclear weapons aimed at North American and European cities. Its ability to threaten us with nuclear horror changes the balance between nations: an indelible change to future foreign policy.

In the short term, when contemplating the return of MAD in international relations, the question is: How mad — as in insane — is Putin, and how ready is Biden?

The pieces on the world chess board have moved and they won’t be moved back. The intelligentsia has yet to grasp the extent to which Ukraine has changed the world — and made it a more dangerous place. They need to catch up fast.

Loud detonations are going off in the economy. When the debris settles, new realities will emerge. We won’t return to the status quo ante, although that is what politicians like to promise.

After great cataclysmic events — wars, natural disasters or the impact of new technologies — we need to acknowledge the realities and find the opportunities. 

The inflation that is shaking the world is the inflammation that arises as markets seek equilibrium — as markets always do.

The greatest disrupter has been the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ramifications of how it has reshaped economies and societies are still evolving. For example, will we need as much office space as we did pre-pandemic? Is the delivery revolution the new normal?

Russia’s war in Ukraine has added to the pandemic-caused changes before they have fully played out. They, in turn, were playing out against the larger imperatives of climate change, and the sweeping adjustments that are underway to head off climate disaster.

Some political actions have exacerbated the turbulence of the economic situation, but they aren’t the root causes, just additional economic inflammation. These include former president Donald Trump’s tariffs and President Biden’s mindless moves against pipelines, followed by attempts to lower gasoline prices, or wean us from natural gas while supplying more natural gas to Europe.

In the energy crisis (read shortage) of the 1970s, I invited Norman Macrae, the late, great deputy editor of The Economist, to give a speech at the annual meeting of The Energy Daily, which I had created in 1973 — and which was then a kind of bible to those interested in energy and the crisis. Macrae, who had a profound influence in making The Economist a power in world thinking, shared a simple economic verity with the audience: “Llewellyn has invited me here to discuss the energy crisis. That is simple: the consumption will fall, and the supply will increase. Poof! End of crisis. Now, can we talk about something interesting?”

Of the many, many experts I have brought to podiums around the world, never has one been as warmly received as Macrae. Not only did the audience stand and applaud, but many also climbed on their chairs and applauded. I’m not sure Washington’s venerable Shoreham Hotel had ever seen anything like that, at least not at a business conference.

In today’s chaotic situation with political accusations clashing with supply realities, the temptation is to find a political fix while the markets seek out the new balance. Politicians want to be seen to do something, no matter what, and before it has been established what needs to be done.

An example of this was Biden increasing the allowed amount of ethanol derived from corn and added to gasoline. It is so small an addition that it won’t affect the price at the pump, but it might affect the price of meat at the supermarket. Corn is important in raising cattle and feeding large parts of the world.

There is a global grain crisis as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is a huge grain producer. Parts of the world, especially Africa, face starvation. The last thing that is needed is to sop up American grain production by burning it as gasoline.

We are, in the United States, gradually moving from fossil fuels to renewables, but this is going to move our dependence offshore, and has the chance of creating new cartels in precious metals and minerals.

Essential to this move is the lithium-ion battery, the heart of electric vehicles and battery storage for renewables, and its tenuous supply chain. Lithium has increased in price nearly 500 percent in one year. It is so in demand that Elon Musk has suggested he might get into the lithium mining business.

But lithium isn’t the only key material coming from often unstable countries: There is cobalt, mostly supplied from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; nickel, mostly sourced in Indonesia; and copper, where supply comes primarily from Chile.

Across the board, supplies will increase, and demand will decline. Equilibrium will arrive, but vulnerability won’t be eliminated. That is an emerging supply chain constant as the economy shifts to the new normal.

The aftershocks of the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine will be felt for a long time — and endured as inflation.

I have never met Will Smith, but I would like to just so that I could pump that hand — the hand that connected with Chris Rock’s cheek at the Oscars; the slap that was seen around the world.

That hand connecting with that unsuspecting cheek should start us on a happy back-to-the-future journey.

I would rather the striker had been a woman. Slapping men’s faces has a long and honorable tradition in female defense of rectitude.

We need to reinstall the periodic slapping of the male face as a part of the interaction between men and women so there are fewer instances of #MeToo. Once there has been a slap, there can be no later debate about who allowed what. An open-handed blow to the over-eager male face is declarative: Cut it out now. It is the unique female form of defense without having to take up judo, kickboxing or succumbing to unwanted advances. Slapping the pushy male face is, or was, instinctive.

A crisp slap of the face puts a definite and embarrassed end to “inappropriate touching.” A face slap is so articulate, so incontrovertible, so absolute and so very effective. It doesn’t ever get confused with “consensual,” “maybe” or “perhaps.”

Had a few more faces been slapped, there would be fewer TV personalities sitting out their lives in early retirement because they said they thought there was mutual consent. Had the face of one governor been slapped, he would have restrained his unlicensed hands from roving where they shouldn’t have, and he would still have a job. No equivocation or doubt; no he-said, she-said. A slap is a notable event, never forgotten by the deliverer or the receiver.

Neither the slapper nor the slapped quickly forgets the inside of the female hand swiftly connecting with the outside of the male face. It hurts the male ego far more than it stings the offending cheek or the delivering palm.

Question: Did she slap your face? How can a man answer that without a simple “yes” or “no”? A slap can’t later be confused with foreplay. You weren’t desired is an unambiguous statement implicit in the face slap. Once thus discouraged, further advance is not allowable, or is the beginning of #MeToo territory.

What happened to face slapping? Why did it go the way of couches in women’s restrooms and nose-powdering, as in “I have to powder my nose.” Such a delightful euphemism. Somewhere in the women’s movement some useful things got lost.

The last time, as I remember, when a face slap echoed around the world was when Vivien Leigh, playing Scarlett O’Hara in the movie “Gone With the Wind,” brought an open palm against the astounded cheek of Clark Gable, playing Rhett Butler.

When a woman delivers the unambiguous slap to the face of an over-eager man, she has an opportunity to accompany it with a solid verbal rebuke; to  append a testy codicil. How about one of these: “What kind of women do you usually go out with?” “How dare you, lover boy?” “I told you, keep your hands to yourself.” Or a withering, “What do you think you’re doing?” That should deflate the aspiring Don Juan and send the putative lover back to computer dating.

You are probably wondering how often this writer’s face has been slapped? Only once, in quite a different circumstance and for quite a different offense. It was a shock, an ego-crusher, and I have an indelible memory of it.

Despite the current imbroglio between Will Smith and Chris Rock, the face slap remains uniquely a woman’s prerogative and a man’s shame. Whack!

Joe Biden at war and Joe Biden at peace aren’t the same person. When it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war and energy policy, the U.S. president is severely conflicted.

Central to Biden’s strategy has been to cut off Russia’s huge revenues from exporting natural gas to Europe. He has unambiguously declared that the shortfall Europe will have in natural gas supplies from Russia will, in time, be remedied with other sources, especially with liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from the United States.

So far so good. But Biden has always favored the environmental vision of the left wing of his own party and its implacable resistance to all forms of carbon-based fossil fuels because of their contribution to global warming.

Europe imports one-third of the natural gas it needs for electric generation, heating, and other domestic uses by pipeline from Russia. Particularly vulnerable is Germany, which depends on half of its gas imports from Russia: a dependency which it has happily allowed to grow year after year.

That was worsened when Germany turned its back on nuclear, aided by its influential Greens, after Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.

Charlie Riedl, executive director of the Center for LNG at the Natural Gas Supply Association, said on the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” it will take several years to boost U.S. LNG exports to Europe and will need substantial infrastructure investment.

The United States has six operating export LNG terminals and a seventh nearly ready to enter operation. Europe has 26 main receiving terminals and eight smaller ones. Each new U.S. terminal has a price tag of around $20 billion, Riedl confirmed. Similarly, tankers must be available and gas exporters, like Qatar, are increasing their tanker fleets.

The impediments to building new natural gas infrastructure in the United States are formidable. On the same broadcast, Sheila Hollis, acting executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, a non-partisan, non-lobbying group that embraces all energy, explained, “I don’t think there is any easy way to make anything happen of this magnitude in the country, regardless of what infrastructure you’re building, or which industry’s infrastructure.

She went on to say, “I do think it will remain an ongoing saga of slogging your way through the morass of regulations, both state and federal of every conceivable variety, and the strong opposition that comes from entities like financing communities and universities that may have a particular interest in reducing CO2; and because of the magnitude, it is one that will be lit on in the regulatory setting, in the judicial setting, and in the legislative setting, both state and federal, because that is the nature of the beast.”

Moreover, Hollis said, there are environmental justice sensitivities: “Who gets the work? Where will the facilities be sited? And there will be extreme attention to environmental issues at the facilities and the pipelines.”

Biden is caught between his own plans to cut fossil fuel use in electric supply in the nation and his commitment to Europe that the United States will be a reliable supplier of fuel for their electricity needs over the long haul.

Commitment is important to the gas industry which is whipsawed between demands for natural gas and attempts to limit its use by obstructing development. New natural gas infrastructure will need to operate over several decades to recover investment — at odds with the Biden plan to reduce fossil fuel generation in the United States by 2030 and get to net-zero by 2050.

A bright spot: The industry is confident that sometime in the future, carbon can be removed from natural gas at the time of combustion. This technology is called carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and envisages getting the carbon out of the combustion effluent before it goes into the air. It can then be used as a building material and for future gas and oil well stimulation.

According to USEA’s Hollis, the Department of Energy is working with its national laboratories and is making solid progress in perfecting the technology. Energy aficionados believe increasingly that a breakthrough is at hand.

If that is so, then Biden can shush his environmental critics and approach the future with more confidence, giving gas companies and utilities the durable assurances they need.

Meanwhile, Biden is bullish on future gas in Europe and bearish on gas in the United States. As in the Johnny Mercer song, “something’s gotta give.”

The Ukrainian diaspora is upon the world. Of the millions who are dispossessed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is wishful thinking that on some glorious day they will all go home. In reality, the world will have to accommodate them. They can’t all stay in Poland and Romania.

One by one, the countries of Europe falteringly are stepping up to their moral and humanitarian duty. Most countries say they will take some Ukrainian refugees. The Biden administration, without clarity, has indicated that some refugees will be welcomed. What the administration is hoping is that these will be glommed onto existing Ukrainian communities in several cities.

This might be a mistake. The cities with large Ukrainian communities are New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland and Indianapolis. In all these cities, housing is expensive and in very short supply; and there are many social problems for those at the bottom, where refugees traditionally find themselves.

Now comes an extraordinary proposal for refugee resettlement from an attorney, Christopher Smith, who practices in Macon, Georgia. He is also the honorary consul there for Denmark, but he tells me his proposal is in no way a reflection of that office and is entirely his own as a private citizen.

Smith’s sweeping and enticing proposal is that refugees from Ukraine should be settled, with federal and state assistance and with the participation of local government, not in crowded cities but in American counties that have been losing population for decades. “Those include counties here in south Georgia,” Smith told me by telephone.

You may think, from anecdotal reporting, that there is a major move from cities to the country, spurred by COVID. But Smith tells me that movement is small and doesn’t reverse the decades-long trend of county depopulation.

My own observation of this COVID-induced trend is that it applies to places like New York and Boston, where the outward movement has been to garden locales where virtual commuting can be accomplished. For example, people who have moved from Boston and New York to Rhode Island and Connecticut, and from Los Angeles to smaller outposts, or north to Washington and Oregon.

Smith said in a position paper: “There are 3,143 counties in the United States. From 2010 to 2020, approximately 1,660 (53 percent) of American counties lost population. Here in Georgia, 67 (42 percent) of 159 counties saw a reduction in population during that time span. Most but not all American counties that lost population during this 10-year period are located in rural areas.”

While counties tend to have a higher apartment and rental home vacancy rate and a lower cost of living than the national average, many of these communities have job shortages, Smith said.

“Logic would suggest that these communities would be an ideal location to host Ukrainian refugees,” he said.

The thing that struck me about Smith’s proposal is how thoroughly he has researched it. He hasn’t just sprouted an idea, he has worked out a plan and enshrined it in a draft act of Congress, which lays out the federal, state and county responsibilities and the issuance of work permits and residence certificates — and, of course, the all-important issue of funding. He has sent it to his congressman, Austin Scott, a Republican.

Smith told me that it is worth noting that Scandinavians were encouraged to populate the Midwest — as anyone who listened to “Prairie Home Companion” on NPR knows.

I don’t know whether America’s wheat farmers need help, but certainly there will be pressure to grow more wheat. The chances that wheat will be sown in the middle of Russia’s war on Ukraine are unlikely. Ukraine is a huge wheat producer. Canada brought in Ukrainian immigrants in the 1890s to help boost wheat production. It was a great success.

It seems to me that Smith’s well-conceived proposal has merit and deserves attention. It has the prima facie merit of helping a part of America that needs help, and giving succor to the most desperate of people, those uprooted by war.