The word is exaptation. It will change the future, and it may save your life.

It is a word traditionally used in evolutionary biology. But now in scientific and high-tech circles, it is used to describe finding and adapting processes and compounds to uses for which they were not originally intended.

In biology, exaptation is used to describe how an evolving species uses a trait in a new way. The classic cited example of exaptation is prehistoric creatures that developed wings to keep warm. A later iteration in the same species finds wings can also be used to fly.

In today’s use of the word, it means cross-fertilization of old discoveries with new technologies; extant remedies applied in new ways.

For example, a medicine that was created to treat one disease may be used effectively for another. A drug destined for a specific cancer may be used to treat an immune disorder like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A material developed for space travel may be ideal for strength and lightness in an automobile.

All this takes on much greater importance in the age of mega data and computer capacity to delve into it and find treasuries of new uses. Today’s machine learning enables the data to be squeezed and pummeled into yielding extraordinary applications and solutions.

“The challenge is to break down silos and to get companies to democratize their data internally and externally,” says Ryan Caldwell, CEO of MX, a financial technology company.

Now a forward-thinking NASA engineer wants to put this approach — this multidisciplinary, multi-material, multi-compound, multi-procedural, multi-operational data approach — on a fast track, accelerating cures and solutions.

He is Omar Hatamleh, chief innovation officer, engineering at NASA Johnson Space Center and executive director of the Space Studies Program at the International Space University.

Hatamleh, a polymath with a fistful of degrees, is establishing Infinity Institute, a new kind of think tank that will accelerate cross-industry innovation over the whole spectrum of discovery and application.

Think discovery and rediscovery as the findings of the past are linked to the needs of today, and as findings in one technology can pollinize unrelated technologies. Essentially, it is the story of NASA and the collateral developments from the space program. Exaptation at work.

The genesis of the Infinity Institute is to be found in a series of four annual NASA cross-industry innovation conferences — the last just concluded.

They were notable for what was not on the agenda: no large discussions of money or the lack of it; no whining about government or regulations, or court decisions. Just a world of science, ideas and the bond between the seemingly incompatible, which when brought together inform each other. A cellist, Jennifer Stumm, described the math in Bach and what that means for science. A NASA scientist, Steve Rader, described how to find affinity ideas through the Internet of Things. An animated filmmaker, Charlie Wen of Marvel Studios, revealed synergies with industrial design.

In the last of these conferences, data expert Caldwell described how he used the very kind of data management and interrogation Infinity Institute has in mind to save the life of a colleague at MX.

When Brandon Dewitt was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his lungs and face at age 33, and given six months to live, Caldwell went to work to break down the medical silos, which enclose so much medicine and hide so many research results. A new treatment being tested in Oregon, which he found, shrunk multiple tumors in Dewitt’s lungs and cheek and saved his life.

When Caldwell’s 2 ½-year-old daughter, Chloe, was given the wrong medicine in an emergency room, her heart stopped cold. Doctors said would live only a short time without a heart transplant. Caldwell and his wife went to work: They established a war room with computers and whiteboards and bored into the research. A therapy was found and Chloe, now nearly 4, is doing well.

Hatamleh’s first target for the new, sweeping concept of exaptation is cancer.

You would think that cancer is well-researched, but Hatamleh believes the exaptation route is the way to go: “We want to break down barriers, go across industries and identify emerging technologies from various industries and explore their application in other fields.”

He believes he can half the death rate from cancer in 10 years by cross-pollinating technologies and therapies and using the kinds of techniques and ideas on display at his unique innovation conferences.

The Democratic deep state — it is not made up of Democrats in the bureaucracies but rather those who make up the core of the party — is in agony.

Solid, middle-of-the-road, fad-proof Democrats are not happy. They are the ones most likely to have thrown their support early to Joe Biden, and who now are eyeing Elizabeth Warren with apprehension and a sense of the inevitable.

Warren exhibits all the weaknesses of someone who, at her core, is not a professional politician. She blunders into traps whether they are set for her or not. She is vulnerable to the political equivalent of fatal attraction.

Biden lurches from gaffe to gaffe and is haunted by the positions he took a long time ago. Some of his social positions turn out to be like asbestos: decades ago, seen as a cure-all building material, now lethal.

Where Biden stumbles over the issues of the past, Warren walks into the traps of today. She is one of those self-harming politicians who shoots before she takes aim.

When Donald Trump mocked her claims of Native American ancestry, Warren took the bait and ended with a hook in her gullet. A more seasoned politician would not have been goaded by a street fighter into taking a DNA test, resulting in an apology. Ignorance met incaution, and Trump won.

Warren also swallowed the impeachment bait of the left, ignoring the caution of centrists who worried about the outcome in an election year. If the Senate acquits, Trump claims exoneration.

Then there is the Medicare for All trap into which Warren not so much fell as she propelled herself. Because Bernie Sanders, who reminds me of King Lear, and his field commander Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left favored it, Warren had to leap in, ill-prepared.

The prima facie logic is there, but the mechanism is not. It is easy to see that Medicare is a very popular program that works. It is also easy to see that the United States pays more than twice as much on health care as any other nation.

Those, like myself, who have experienced state systems abroad, as well a Medicare at home, know the virtues of the single-payer system with patient-chosen, private insurance on the top for private hospital rooms, elective surgery and pampering that is not basic medicine. But we also know that the switch to Medicare for All would be hugely dislocating.

Employer-paid health care is a tax on business but substituting that with a straight tax is politically challenging, structurally difficult and impossible to sell at this stage in the evolution of health care. It likely will give a new Democratic president a constitutional hernia.

Warren seems determined to embrace the one thing that makes the left and its ideas electorally vulnerable: The left wants to tell the electorate what it is going to take away.

Consider this short list of the left’s confiscations that the centrists must negotiate, not endorse: We want your guns, we want your employer-paid health care, we want your gasoline-powered car, and we want the traditional source of your electricity. Trust us, you will love these confiscations.

Those are the position traps for Warren. To make a political sale — or any sale — do not tell the customers what you are going to take away from them.

It is well known that Republicans roll their eyes in private at the mention of Trump, while supporting him in public. Democratic centrists — that place where the true soul of a party resides, where its expertise dwells, and where its most thoughtful counsel is to be heard — roll their eyes at the mention of all the leading candidates. They like Pete Buttigieg but think him unelectable. If elected, they worry that Warren would fall into the traps set for her around the world — as Trump has with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un.

Politics needs passion. “She is better than Trump,” is not a passionate rallying cry.

 

 

 

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Photo: EXETER, NH – MARCH 15, 2019: Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren Campaigns in New Hampshire

California is burning. It was yesterday, it is today, and it will be tomorrow. The price in human life is enormous — in animal and plant life, too. The price in human suffering is gigantic, and the price in property damage is incalculable.

Even while unprecedented high Santa Ana winds are blowing devastation, electric utilities are looking for fixes that accord with the new realities brought about by global warming. Worse is yet to come, they fear.

In January the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based trade association, assembled a task force of electric utility CEOs to find solutions. The choices before them are not appealing.

The problem is California may be in the vanguard of fire-prone states, but it is not alone. Many states with heavy forest cover and long electric lines have reason to look to the future with apprehension. What amounts to a perfect fire storm in California could happen in states from Illinois to Louisiana, and from Virginia to Oregon.

Here are the options facing the electric utility CEOs:

—Vegetation control. This is essential, as Rod Kuckro, a reporter for E&E News, points out. But vegetation control — simply cutting down trees near electric lines — is easier said than done. Kuckro, an astute utilities journalist, says that Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), the utility that has borne the brunt of the blame and whose northern California service area is ground zero for fire, has 125,000 miles of power lines. These are threatened by millions of dead trees, plus the normal threat to power lines from falling trees, dead or alive.

Kuckro says the vegetation issue is complicated by a severe lack of manpower skilled in tree management. Trees must be cut and removed, or they will become fresh fuel for fires.

—Surveillance technology. Long-term technology is going to be decisive. Utilities will need a great deal more real-time data about their lines. Line surveillance, always a utility priority, is becoming job number one, and they are looking to the digital frontier.

Surveillance by men on foot and horse gave way to men and women in helicopters and all-terrain vehicles. Now comes the age of drones and data.

Morgan O’Brien, CEO of Anterix, which offers secure broadband communications to utilities, says with broadband technology and judiciously placed sensors, “a utility control room could know about a falling line in 1.4 seconds.” Time enough to cut off the power and start a repair crew on its way.

But this kind of data solution will take time and, like all the solutions, money. This will be difficult for PG&E, which is already in bankruptcy because of fire claims from last year, and the year before.

—Undergrounding. This sounds so reasonable, so logical. But in most places, it is not an option and not in earthquake-prone California. The cost of burying lines, where they can safely be buried on the PG&E system, is estimated to be as much as $3 million a mile for residential lines to $80 million a mile for high-voltage cables. It would take decades to bury even a few of its lines. And the cost is almost beyond contemplation.

—Microgrids. These are often mentioned. These are autonomous entities usually serving a paper mill, a university, a shopping center or sometimes a whole community. Microgrids self-generate, mostly with gas or solar, and sell surplus power to the utilities; and, in some cases, they act as storage systems for their host utility. Their advantage in a fire-prone region is that they can be isolated from their host grid. Therefore, the lights stay on if the big grid is shut down prophylactically, explains Mike Byrnes, senior vice president of Veolia North America, an energy and environmental services company.

Recently Jacqueline Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy, told me that cybersecurity concerns keep her up at night. For many utility managers that threat is now joined by an existential threat from one of man’s oldest enemies: fire.

If you are the manager of a utility in a blue state, you might also worry whether the federal government will help in a fire disaster. To date, President Trump has let California burn: no federal declaration of a disaster and, accordingly, no federal disaster relief, no troops. Hell, not even a presidential flyover for beleaguered California.

This is not benign neglect. This is vengeful neglect. Remember Puerto Rico?

Read any good books lately? As a matter of fact, I have. Quite a few.

We’re expected to plow through great stacks of books over the summer; perhaps a throwback to a time when people on vacation were quite bored. But for me, it was a good summer of reading.

A confession: I don’t read to improve my mind, to understand what skullduggery this president — any president — is up to, or what venality drives the great houses of commerce.

I read to spend a spot of time with other people. When I get a book that interests me, I move in. I take lodgings, as it were, with the people I’m reading about, whether it is great historical figures, say Conde Nast, or the denizens of works of fiction like those to be found in good detective stories — such as the Chief Inspector Banks novels by Peter Robinson, an English author who lives in Canada and sets his stories in the North of England. Or, I move to Venice in the mysteries of Donna Leon, an American who sets her Commissario Guido Brunetti series there.

Historical or fictional, I hang out with the subjects in books. I join families, police stations, cabinets, regiments, love affairs and just good friends.

This escapism for me is vastly enhanced by the fact that I’m a slow reader. But if it weren’t for my slow reading, I wouldn’t have long to live my man-who-dropped-in fantasy life. A sadness descends when I’m near the end of my sojourn with strangers and I realize that, in a half an hour or so, I’ll have to leave, endure separation, sorrow.

In recent years, technology has added to my ability to sojourn whenever I like: The technology is the Kindle. As much as I deplore what electronic publishing has done to the craft of book making and to newspaper production, it has added a wonderful portability to my reading.

The electronic reader is a manageable size and slips easily into a pocket. I’m glad when someone is late because I can read for a few minutes. What used to be an inconvenience has become a gift. Waiting for the doctor or being put on hold, while a recorded voice advises “one of our representatives will be with you shortly,” becomes an opportunity to take a quick trip somewhere else.

So, what did I do on my summer vacation — the one I didn’t take because I was too busy and too broke? I had a fabulous time in the 18th century with an extraordinary group of men, and a few women, who shaped the thinking of that time and whose influence has stayed with us to this day. The book, strongly recommended, is “The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age,” by Harvard professor of literature emeritus Leo Damrosch.

I also hugely enjoyed my stay in London with “Vanessa and Her Sister: A Novel” by Priya Parmar. It’s all about the Bloomsbury Set circa 1907, about Virginia Woolf and many other writers and artists. They were very open about homosexuality, sex in general and arranged each other’s relationships with abandon.

My time in Wyoming was enlightening and enjoyable in J.L. Doucette’s crime mystery novel “Last Seen.” Doucette brings to life the hard times and interesting happenings in Sweetwater County, Wyo., featuring psychologist Dr. Pepper Hunt and Native American detective Antelope.

I dug into the complexities of sex and creativeness in Francine Prose’s “The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired.” Her book takes you from Man Ray and Elizabeth “Lee” Miller to Salvador Dali and Gala. As I met Dali several times, I found his relationship with his love Gala fascinating.

Right now, I’m hanging out in Australia with the characters of Liane Moriarty, one of the great fiction writers of our time. I’ve hung out with her characters in other books, but this time with those in “Nine Perfect Strangers.”

Armchair travel has joined the electronic age for me. Up, up and away!

The leading Democratic candidates for president want differing degrees of major surgery done on health insurance. During Tuesday’s debate, they contrived only to cut themselves.

The smell of blood from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden must have been a near-divine scent to Republican operatives who haven’t had an easy time of it lately.

Sanders and Warren have signed on to an idea favored by many on the left: Medicare-for-all. Joe Biden, seeking to carve out a position as the seasoned centrist, favors not surgery but Band-Aids all over the patient.

The problem with Medicare-for-all is money. Or, it is advertised as money?

Yet the reason for single payer — a national health insurance system — isn’t to spend more money but less. Much less.

The United States spends about double what other countries spend, but the coverage is patchy and has non-medical consequences that are severe. One of these is the effect on the mobility of labor. Workers stay in dead-end jobs because they fear the loss of their health insurance.

A bigger effect is the burden on business of saddling it with health care. The price tag to business is huge. Transferring that expense to the government would have the effect of a big tax cut. A new Social Security tax designed to compensate for the loss of business support in health care would be reasonable. Business would be ahead, and the national misery of paying in multiple ways for health care would be ended. Simple is cheaper.

One benefit would be the leveling of the playing field for business and employees. The employer-provides-system is a burden on business as well as a distorter of society.

The Milliman Medical Index calculates the cost of health insurance for a family of four, on a standard plan, at $28,386. Unsurprisingly, many employers are now seeking to share health-care costs with employees. In 2019, according to Milliman, companies are paying 82 percent of employees’ health insurance premiums.

The current system costs everyone in every possible way. Doctors employ staff whose only job is to wrestle with health insurance companies, and hospitals have armies of people working on claims. An attorney working for a big city hospital told me that it has 150 people whose only job is to struggle with insurance claims.

The mistake the leading Democrats are making, especially those of the left, is just looking at health insurance from the humanitarian point of view. Sanders sounds off on the uninsured and the bankruptcies. Democrats are all heart and not enough numbers — or courage to suggest necessary tax adjustments.

What they should do is look at the business case against the sustained chaos that passes for health care. Businesses of all sizes should be enthusiastic about being relieved of the health care burden: a burden carried only by U.S. businesses.

Americans pay roughly twice as much of the Gross Domestic Product for health care — about 19 percent — as does any other advanced country. The driving issue should be to reduce that; to get the fat out, to curb profiteering, to end rent-taking by insurance companies, and to end the wasted effort in negotiations on nearly every claim. Patients and business would both be winners.

The business cavalry has an expeditionary force already saddled up with a group called Business for Medicare for All. Its chairman, Richard Master, says: “You don’t need to be a progressive to see why single-payer is a logical option for America. For a growing number of business leaders, including myself, transitioning to a single-payer, centrally financed health care system makes sense from a purely economic perspective.”

From the doctors’ corner, John Perryman, a Roscoe, Ill.-based pediatrician, says the leading Democrats missed out. “The system is chaotic and failing. The debate was very disappointing. Biden said it would cost $3.6 trillion a year to switch over — the amount we now spend on health care every year. But that is growing by 4 percent a year which means in 10 years, we will be spending $30 trillion, with 20 percent going to insurance companies. The only way to get that down is with a single-payer system,” he says.

Perryman is a member of Physicians for A National Health Program, a 23,000-strong group of doctors with offices in Chicago. A different prescription is being written.

Impeachment is a procedure of last resort. It is for when those governed are unable to abide the excesses of one person or more doing the governing. It owes its genesis to England and was a remedy for the Parliament to remove, or have removed, agents of the Crown (the king) whose conduct was egregious and contrary to the public good.

It goes back to the 14th century. The language is the language of the day, peculiarly vague in today’s proceedings. “High crimes and misdemeanors” was one of those phrases that everyone in the context of the day knew what it meant. “Conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman” is another such phrase loaded with meaning but deliberate in its obscurity.

It was not until 1788 that Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish orator, moralist and member of Parliament, really put flesh on the skeleton of impeachment. During the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal and employee of the marauding British East India Company — which had been acting as a government in India before it was annexed by Britain. He was the agent of what was little more than a criminal enterprise.

Hastings claimed that he was given arbitrary power by the East India Company to act in any way he chose. It was this arbitrary power, this concept that he was above the law and above all norms of decency, that inflamed Burke. “We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold, nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will — much less can one person be governed by the will of another,” he said.

Burke stated that there was no entitlement to arbitrary power in any human institution, and it could not be conferred on a governor by anyone because there was no entitlement under heaven for arbitrary power.

It can be argued in today’s crisis it is the exercise of arbitrary power by President Trump that lies behind the U.S. House’s move to impeach. Arbitrary power in diverting funds not approved for that purpose to building a wall on the southern border. Arbitrary power in restricting Congress’s entitlement to investigate the executive branch. On and on the use of what many would call arbitrary power, from abrogating treaties, abandoning allies, trashing traditions, and reversing previous settled issues, like the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

All this, Trump asserts, is constitutional under Article 11. In essence, he has said, “Arbitrary power is mine.”

That is what lies behind the urge to impeach Trump. He is claiming to be, in conduct and statement, above the Constitution and the law. Ergo, he should be impeached.

But no. Impeachment, as Burke and his allies found, is a trap unless followed by conviction. In Hastings’ case, impeachment was up to the House of Lords and, despite the pleading of Burke and others, it declined to impeach after the procedure had dragged on for seven years.

Given the pusillanimous nature of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, its seeming preparedness to overlook damage to the constitutional order of governance and all the cascading damage to come down through the years, Trump’s acquittal is to be feared.

Trump in a second term, with the sense that he had been vindicated, would have no regard for law. He would feel emboldened to exercise arbitrary power in the most egregious way, rewarding his business interests and punishing his enemies, real and imagined.

As others have suggested, a better path for Democrats to pursue in the present constitutional crisis might have been to censure Trump, while looking to the courts to restrict him where possible. A less dramatic indictment, but also less of a future danger.

Republicans have developed an interesting defense of their own. Call it “the eye-rolling, tut-tutting.” They do this whenever Trump is raised in conversation, but they will not curb him in the Senate or speak out in public. Political cowardice.

These lily-livered legislators might find courage if they read on in Burke’s pleading in the matter of Hastings: “Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is bound to resist it in the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world.”

There is much more from Burke. It is meaty, relevant stuff.

 

 

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Photo: Monument to Edmund Burke at the entrance to Trinity College in Dublin

The future may be whirring above your head.

There is a push to commercialize drones that equals any gold rush. Hundreds of drone makers, drone service companies and drone management firms are creating new machines, divining new uses, and planning to increase the penetration of their devices or services in a marketplace that is burgeoning.

Although dominated by DJI, the giant Chinese drone company with seven locations in the United States alone, there are hundreds of drone companies keen to get in on the action.

The drone takeover of the skies is not a thing of science fiction and Popular Mechanics anymore. It is real and it has begun. Soon the skies in cities will be getting as crowded as the highways of Washington and Los Angeles.

In the world of drones, the big struggle now is to increase the payloads. But the real value may be in their ability to collect and process huge amounts of data — an essential part of the “smart cities” of the future. Former Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said data is the new oil and drones are the new oil wells.

Drones and autonomous vehicles are destined to be integral to smart cities, with different entrants pursuing different goals. Uber Eats wants dinners for families of four to be wafted aloft by drones. Amazon wants drones that can carry loads of various sizes and shapes. Google wants to own the control technology.

Everyone wants the data.

City managers, police departments, motor vehicle departments and first responders want data. Marketers and homebuilders want data about how we live and travel — and even what we do when we are not between working and getting home.

Smart cities will run on data and drones will be part of the data-acquisition infrastructure. Morgan O’Brien, co-founder of Nextel Communications and now president of Anterix, a company providing secure communications to utilities and others, tells me that data will be the foundation of smart cities.

“A smart city is ‘smart’ in the same way a smartphone is smart. Collecting and processing vast amounts of digital data in virtual real time, a smartphone collects a user to the internet for voice, texting, video and experiences of every sort,” O’Brien said, adding, “The smart city similarly will collect vast amounts of data and virtually simultaneously process that data to make the city safer, more livable, more green and more pleasant.”

This data will be collected from a myriad of sensors, including those on drones: the eyes in the sky.

Carl Berndtson, managing director of Confex Partners Ltd., a Concord, Mass.-based commercial conference organizer, expects 2,500 people at a drone conference which will be held on Oct. 28-30 in Las Vegas. Confex is part of the giant “Drone Week” early in December in Amsterdam, where 3,000 drone entrepreneurs and engineers are expected.

Of course, to keep all those goods-delivering, data-gathering, unmanned vehicles from crashing into each other, a sophisticated micro-air traffic control system will be needed — something far beyond today’s macro system that keeps large aircraft safe. One company, AirMap of Santa Monica, Calif., claims to be well along the way in developing a control system, but there are others and governments will have the essential role.

Drones will come in many sizes and shapes, from drone taxis whipping us about to worker-bee drones, like the ones already employed to inspect electric power lines and hammer nails into shingles on roofs.

In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate, was advised to go into plastics. Today he might be advised to go into drones.

The drone industry has taken off and is headed for where you live and work. Watch your head.

Energy company executives went to bed Sept. 14 with a new existential worry: drone attacks. These are added to the general fear of a cyberattack that could hobble an oil company or bring down the electric grid, or parts of it.

Final details are not in yet, but it is believed that an army of drones hit two Saudi oil processing facilities early on the morning of Sept. 14, causing huge fires.

Heretofore energy companies, especially pipelines and electric utilities, found drones to be a gift. Drones have enabled oil and gas companies to monitor pipelines and electric utilities to monitor their transmission lines.

They are doing the jobs that were done initially by men on horses, then by teams in trucks and jeeps and by line technicians in helicopters. Less expensive, less dangerous and more efficient, drones have been a godsend.

Much of this surveillance is now done by these small electric aircraft, not appreciably different than those the general public can buy in a sophisticated toy store.

The attack on the Saudi oil installations, with its resultant destructive fires, harbors horrors for the future that haven’t been part of the portfolio of future uncertainties faced by companies with large installations or thousands of miles of exposed lines and, in some cases, over-the-ground pipes.

The traditional posture of utilities to this kind of physical threat has been not to try to meet every possibility with a tailor-made defense, but rather to respond quickly.

In fact, rapid response is in the utility DNA — and honed in foul-weather events. If lines come down, the utilities, with military precision, try to get them up again. They stock replacement parts and have a network of crews from neighboring utilities on call. Worst case, they hope, will be a short blackout.

“It’s like a military operation. Think of action stations aboard a ship,” a utility executive says.

But as climate change has increased expectations for extreme weather events, and as the digital society has put new demands on electricity resilience, rapid response is inadequate going forward.

Undergrounding electric lines, previously thought to be prohibitively expensive, is now on the table in the C-suites of some utilities. Worry about drones is another endorsement of that option, where possible. But undergrounding is only a limited defense and it is very expensive and not suitable for major lines carrying vast amounts of power.

Oil and gas companies are more worried about the central facilities than they are about the distribution systems, as far as drone attacks are concerned. Oil refineries have always been vulnerable and now that vulnerability is exposed. While most refineries won’t go up in flames because a small drone with an ignition source hits them, this threat will increase as weaponized private drones grow in power and carrying capacity.

There is a growth industry in protecting vulnerable infrastructure. From secure communications to shields against drone attack, the battle for safety on the home front has been joined.

Drone terrorists have the advantage that drones are cheap, anonymous and the threat is disruption and panic, even if the actual damage is trivial. Off-the-shelf terrorism has arrived.

The public will worry about the security of nuclear plants. Actually, these are probably the safest of large energy facilities from aerial attack. The nuclear vitals are encased in feet of concrete, steel and lead that protects them from bombs and cruise missiles, let alone the new threat coming from those once-fun toys: drones.

The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are acutely aware of the threat from drones and are examining ways to defend against these, sources say. They see a battlefield where the location of the enemy might not be known and where it will be harder to determine whether the perpetrator of an attack is a state player or a terrorist organization.

Complex problems cannot be fixed with simple solutions — unless the problems have become so intricate and intractable that only a simple solution will work.

That may be where we are now with health care.

To some, the simple solution that unties the complicated knot is a single-payer system: Replace the whole complex, expensive and teetering system with something new and simpler.

Yet in the intellectual debate — where ideas are discussed long before they are codified into law — there are powerful forces aligned against real health care overhaul.

These are not just on the right, although conservative thinking is opposed to anything that suggests a larger government or even a community role in health care. Unions, which gain strength when they provide health care, do not want to see that leak away, nor do employees who are happy with the health care provided as part of their employment. Better keep that job.

There is also a phalanx of conservative economists who calculate that universal health care will be too expensive and bankrupt the country. This I find dubious because single-payer health care works. There is evidence. It is not uncharted territory. It works from Australia to Britain, from France to Japan.

In short, the advanced countries of the world all have a single-payer system. It costs them about half of the 18 percent of GDP we spend on health care. You might reasonably think something is wrong when you spend more and get less.

The fact is those who experience tax-paid health care like it. No one who has permanent health care, as in Canada or Britain, is asking for it to be ended. National health systems are fiercely defended by those who have them, bar none.

One organization that is fully committed to a single-payer system — also known as Medicare for All in the political debate — is Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). It is a national group with headquarters in Chicago and 23,000 health care professional members. It is adamant in its advocacy of a single-payer system and takes aim at the health insurance companies as the source of what ails health care in America.

It rejects partial measures, such as beefing up the Affordable Care Act, improving Medicaid and lessening the effect on the poor in various ways. These, PNHP says, avoid the question at the center of the health care debate: What are the insurance companies for? What wound do they bind? The answer, according to PNHP, is none. They just add cost.

Every hospital, whether a for-profit or a community institution, employs huge staffs, sometimes well in excess of 100 people, for negotiating claims with insurance providers. That is a great burden on hospital costs right there, let alone the costs inside the insurance companies.

In decades of dealing with health insurance, which includes looking at it as a reporter, paying for it as an employer, and occasionally, receiving treatment under private insurance, I can tell you that Medicare is now one of the great improvements in my quality of life and peace of mind. I am also one of the few with the temerity to offer an opinion on health care who has received care, and watched members of my family receive it, under the British system.

I am a free-market person, someone who has and still runs his own business, albeit a very modest one, so I am not in love government for government’s sake.

But neither am I in love with state-sanctioned monopolies in insurance. The health insurance companies do not provide health care. They make it more expensive. They do not contribute to wellness. They make it more problematical.

We do not have a health care system. We have a lack of a system: a savage garden full of weeds, where medicine endeavors to grow while the gardeners stand around arguing over money.

PNHP may not have all the answers, but at least it is a pressure group trying to put something on the table, something that serves the rest of the developed world well: single-payer health care.