“Murder most foul,” cries the ghost of Hamlet’s father to explain his own killing in Shakespeare’s play.

We shudder in the United States when yet more children are slain by deranged shooters. Yet, we are determined to keep a ready supply of AR-15-type assault rifles on hand to facilitate the crazy when the insanity seizes them.

The murder in Nashville of three 9-year-olds and three adults should have us at the barricades, yelling bloody murder. Enough! Never again!

But we have mustered a national shrug, concluding that nothing can be done.

Clearly, something can be done; something like reviving the assault rifle ban, which expired after 10 years of statistically proven success.

We are culpable. We think our invented entitlement to own these weapons, designed for war, is a divine right, outdistancing reason, compassion and any possible form of control.

The blame rests primarily on something in American exceptionalism that loves guns. I mostly understand that; I like them, as I write from time to time. I also like fast cars, small airplanes, strong drinks, and other hair-raising things. But society has said these need controls — from speed limits to flying instruction — and has severe penalties for mixing the first two with the last. Those controls make sense. We abide by them.

Regarding that other great national indulgence — guns —  society has said safety doesn’t count. So far this year, more than 10,000 people have been killed in gun violence. If that were the number of fatalities from disease, we would again be in lockdown.

We have concocted this sacred right to keep and use guns. To ensure this, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been manhandled by lawyers into being a justification for putting something deadly out of the reach of social control or even rudimentary discipline.

The latest school shooting has raised our hackles, but not our capacity to act. This national shrug at something that can be fixed is a stain on the body politic. Most of the conservative wing of the establishment, represented by the Republican Party, has dismissed it as one might a natural disaster.

But the routine murder of innocents in school shootings is a man-made disaster. Worse, it is sanctified by a particular interpretation of the Second Amendment.

It is an interpretation that has demanded, and continues to demand, legal contortionism. This is used to justify the citizenry owning and using weapons of war.

This latest school shooting, which happened in this young year, was shocking, but the political reaction was more shocking.

President Biden wrung his hands and said nothing could be done without the support of Congress — thus endorsing a national fatalism.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested more police officers in schools, and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said teachers needed to be armed.

In personal life and in national life, perceived impossibility is hugely debilitating.

Imagine if the Founding Fathers had said the British Empire was too strong to challenge, if FDR had said America couldn’t rise against the forces of the economic chaos of the 1930s, or if Margaret Thatcher had said British trade unions were too strong to be opposed?

These are incidents where perceived reality was, with struggle, trounced for the general good.

Guns, along with drugs, are the largest killer of young people. They aren’t unrelated. Unregulated guns find their way to the drug gangs of Central America, facilitating the flow of drugs.

On the Senate floor, the chamber’s longtime chaplain, retired Rear Adm. Barry C. Black, took on the pusillanimous members of his flock after the Nashville murders, quoting the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke’s admonition, “The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” 

Indubitably.

Today will be a terrible day in Malawi, where more than 500 died in Cyclone Freddy last month, and everything is flattened.

Today will be a terrible day in Turkey and Syria, where thousands died in the Feb. 6 earthquake and cities are piles of rubble.

And today will be a worse day in Ukraine, where flames will burn off skin, where cordite will propel lead through soft tissue and turn bone into fragments.

This crescendo of horror isn’t the product of aberrant nature, but aberrant men. It didn’t have to happen.

But horror is all in a day’s work for two remarkable women, one in Slovakia and one in Louisville, Ky. Their task is to get life-saving supplies to victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine day after day. They share a similar first name.

Denise Sears is the president of SOS International in Louisville. It has a unique position among aid agencies: Its mission is to collect, certify and transport medical surplus of all kinds, from medicines and bandages to X-ray and other imaging equipment and even incubators.

Hospitals across the United States collect and send their surplus to SOS International, where it is certified for potency or functionality. Then it heads to where it is needed — at present, Ukraine, Turkey and Syria, and Malawi.

There are more than 100 hospital donors, and there are tax advantages for hospital donations. “Their donations incentivize others and boost morale among staff. Donating is their way of being able to impact the lives of people in the world,” Sears said in an interview on Zoom.

As a medium-sized organization, SOS International can be very nimble, she said, adding, “We’re big enough to have an impact, but small enough to pivot.”

Denisa Augustinova is the director of operations and co-founder of Magna, which delivers medical supplies collected by SOS International and other groups to where they are used in Ukraine, Turkey and other places hit by natural disasters, wars and conflicts. It has 2,000 staff on the ground in or near crisis areas.

Denisa has visited almost every war and disaster zone over the past two decades. But today, it is Ukraine that has her attention and where the work has been difficult and distressing.

I caught up with her when she was visiting — and meeting for the first time — Sears in Louisville. The two women have been working together, collecting and channeling medical necessities to Ukraine for a year.

“We were working for many years with the Ministry of Health in Ukraine. Our medical initiatives are in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” Augustinova told me in a Zoom interview.

She said that by the end of 2021, Magna had been forced to evacuate most of its medical staff from their facilities.

“We were shocked by the cruelty and the strong bombing. Shocked, but not surprised by the scale of it,” she said.

Supplies from SOS International, sometimes carried by corporations that volunteer transportation — UPS made an aircraft available — make their way to Ukraine mostly from Munich and Warsaw, where Magna takes over and sends them by truck and train to their war-zone hospitals. Sears said 12 shipments, 1.3 million medical items, have been sent to Ukraine.

The two women’s medical supplies are often the difference between life and death.

As a success, Augustinova noted, “Babies were delivered in hospitals without power or beds, the alarms going off and the bombs. We were able to save them because we already had the incubators and the supplies of formula in place.”

But the war rages, and the horror is endless.

Augustinova said, “I have in my mind the brutality of the war on children and old people. In 2023, we still have to deal with the killing of innocents. We are still facing the killing of civilians in spite of the Geneva Convention and humanitarian law. Humanitarian workers are attacked: doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers are killed. Our team members are victims.”

She added, “Women are raped, and children are raped. It happens all the time.”

Sears and Augustinova are bound by motherhood and being compelled to help. Sears lost her daughter, Lauren, who died at 23 of a hospital infection. That inspired her to do humanitarian work.

Augustinova has two daughters, far from the war, ages 8 and 14. “They keep asking me why the children can’t go to school, and why they have to die?”

Good questions.

America’s electric utilities are undergoing a revolution — one which is quiet but profound.

Since Thomas Edison set the ball rolling, utilities have made electricity in a central station and dispatched it down a line to a consumer. It was a simple transaction: manufacture, transport, sell.

Now it is getting more sophisticated. So long a one-way street for electrons, those wires are getting two-way traffic.

Electricity is beginning to be more multidimensional. Smart, if you will.

There is talk about the “smart grid” and the “smart meter” in your home. More than 70 percent of electric meters nowadays fit the smart classification, which means they are equipped to play a part in a virtual power plant.

Most of us are aware of the shift from coal and natural gas generation to renewables, mostly wind and solar. But hydro, tidal and geothermal are also classed as renewable.

This new wave in electricity is known as distributed energy resources (DER), and it is sweeping the country and the world.

DER are energy resources mostly located close to the place where the demand is. Renewables tend to require a lot of land and to be situated primarily where the wind blows and the sun shines.

DER harness a lot of slack, which already exists in the electric grid. Utilities are looking to incorporate new sources of electricity and storage, besides their own battery installations. These include commercial and home rooftop solar, if they have batteries installed, and in the future will embrace electric vehicle (EV) batteries by contractual arrangement. Privately owned commercial and home generators will also be included.

Rooftop solar, EVs and their associated batteries are, in fact, a kind of Uberization of that resource, which is growing all the time as more companies and homeowners put panels on their roofs and buy EVs.

DER incorporate what used to be called demand-side management. Industrial, commercial and residential consumers enter into a partnership with the utility to curtail electricity use at times of stress for the supply.

For example, data miners may contract to turn off their servers during peak demand times, mostly in the evening. A retailer might tune up the air conditioning in the storage areas of the facility. A homeowner might agree not to operate their washing machine or dishwasher; or to charge their EV in the evening, but instead to allow the utility to buy back some of the charge. Or simply to set a thermostat higher between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. for a rebate or a check.

DER also offer something not often seen: a wholehearted endorsement by both the utility industry and the environmental community, often at odds over everything from fuels to power lines. They fit the common environmental view that less is more.

Brian Keane, who runs SmartPower, an environmentally conscious, power marketing organization that has been a strong voice for solar, says, “DER is a win for the residential consumer, the local utility, and society at large.”

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, a utility bordering the Dallas metroplex, says: “Rayburn views DER as a resource that has tremendous potential to both lower our members’ bills and to improve reliability while minimizing the lifestyle impact.

“For example, should Rayburn be instructed to shed load, DER enables us to meet those obligations while the users see no difference in their homes. During extreme weather, DER also increases our flexibility to meet the power obligations and backstop reliability.”

The head of another Texas utility, Rudy Garza of municipally owned CPS Energy in San Antonio, notes the same advantages but adds that DER will help CPS with decarbonization.

I  find similar enthusiasm among leaders across the industry.

Duane Highley, CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission near Denver, says DER benefits from geographic scale and is reaching a point where distributed resources can be bid into the market in the same way as other generation. In other words, these resources are a virtual power plant, something environmentalists have been talking about for a while.

The key is reliable and independent data flows and communications between smart meters and the whole interconnected world of the smart electric utility of the future.

DER is coming of age at a time when new sources of power are likely to be needed in increasing volumes. Most forecasts say the demand will double by 2050 and that supplies, already tight in New England, Texas the mid-section of the country, and California. All could reach a breaking point in a few years.

At present, DER is the best hope to keep the electrons flowing from where they are hiding to where they are needed.

The Irish punch above their weight. That is why worldwide, on March 17, people who don’t have a platelet of Irish blood and who have never thought of visiting the island of Ireland joyously celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

That day may or may not have been when St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, died in the 5th century.

The fact is, very little is known about St. Patrick. The broad outline is that he was born in Roman Britain, kidnapped by pirates as a child and taken to Ireland as a slave. He escaped, returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary and became a bishop.

To be sure, in the Emerald Isle truth can be augmented with folklore, mysticism, and the great love of a good story.

Hence devout Ireland can also believe in fairies and leprechauns, or little people, to this day. Both are quite real to some in Ireland, although, unlike the festival of St. Patrick, they don’t seem to have crossed the Atlantic, or even the Irish Sea, except in movies.

When horseback riding with my wife on an annual visit to the northwest of Ireland, we were curious about a stand of trees that seemed not to belong in the middle of a working farm field.

“A fairy ring is in there. You can ride through, if you keep on the path,” a stableman told us.

But he warned that if we got off the path, we would upset the fairies. “And you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

Indeed, we didn’t want to upset any fairies, so we stayed on the path, and all was well.

From what I have gathered, the little people co-exist with the fairies but also are separate.  

A friend built a house for his mother near Galway. It was an A-frame house with a low, decorative wall around it. The wall had — surprise — a gap; not a gate, just a space of about 18 inches. That, she insisted, with the concurrence of locals, was for the little people to pass through. You don’t mess with the little people any more than you would trample a fairy circle.

The little people were originally an Irish tribe dating back to antiquity, who disappeared but were encased in legend. When Hollywood met Irish legends, the movies embraced the legends and expanded them.

Over the centuries, Ireland has been hard-used by England. It began with the English Reformation and Henry VIII and went on through the English Revolution, with Oliver Cromwell being especially brutal, then on to the potato famine in the 19th century and the excesses of the Black and Tans, poorly trained and equipped, thuggish British troops with mismatched tunics and trousers.

Given that around 40 million Americans can claim some Irish ancestry, it might be argued that they were welcomed here. Hardly. Irish immigrants were often persecuted as they flooded in, escaping the privations at home.

I thank my friend Sheila Slocum Hollis, a very proud Irish-American, for pointing out that in the 1920s, the Irish were victims of the Ku Klux Klan violence in Denver. They fit the profile of KKK enemies, along with Blacks and Jews. Except they were Irish and Catholic.

In no field of endeavor have the Irish punched above their weight more than in literature. They took the language of the conqueror, the English, and have added to it immeasurably and profusely.

Irish writers have enhanced, expanded and luxuriated in the English language. Just a few towering names: Swift, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Goldsmith, Synge, Bowen, O’Brien, Hoult, Lavin, Murdoch, Binchy and, contemporarily, John Banville and Sally Rooney.

The Irish word for good fun is craic (pronounced “crack”). “Good craic” is a party where you indulge.

I wish you great craic this St. Patrick’s Day. May you consort with the little people, after some Guinness, and may the fairies guide you safely home. Sláinte!

If you punch in “outage map” in a search engine, you will get a series of maps, ranging from the entire country to state by state and even smaller jurisdictions. These maps show electrical outages across the United States and territories, and they are within 10 minutes of actual time. The data come from the electrical utilities.

The maps are enlightening. At this writing, there are some areas in the dark in Michigan and California. More outages appear on the maps as severe weather sweeps across the country.

Today’s outages are all weather-caused. But in just a few years, they will reflect something else, something more ominous: shortages in the available amount of electricity. They will occur when demand begins to outstrip supply, as it frequently does in some developing countries.

The nation is in the grips of two great transitions: a transition from fossil-based generation (coal, natural gas and some oil) to renewables (primarily wind and solar) and a transition to electricity, especially in transportation with electric vehicles.

We are in a rush to electrify to reduce carbon emissions.

There are an astounding 3,000 utilities, ranging from very small public and rural electric cooperatives to very large, investor-owned firms like the Southern Company and Exelon.

These make up the electric supply system, which has been described as the world’s largest engine. They all work together with surprising unity and are variously connected to the three electric grids, the Eastern Grid, the Western Grid and ERCOT, the free-standing Texas grid.

Their challenge isn’t only where will the power come from but also whether there will be enough transmission to move it to where it is needed? 

Duane Highley, CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc., an electric cooperative in Westminster, Colo., told me that adding two electric cars to a family home can raise electric consumption by as much as 40 percent.

Many utilities, including those in rapid-growth states like Texas, are counting on distributed generation, which is when the utility enters into contracts with its customers to share the burden. This can involve agreements with incentives to allow the utility remotely to turn off certain functions during peak hours and buy power from its customers if they have rooftop solar installations or backup generators.

After Texas was felled by Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, many electric customers are turning to generators and rooftop solar to protect themselves, said David Naylor, president of Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative Inc. in Rockwall, Texas. 

Faced with a growth rate that has been as high as 8 percent and 9 percent in recent years, Naylor is vigorously pursuing distributed generation.

In the electric utility industry, distributed generation is spoken of as “the first step in the virtual power plant.” In Connecticut, two pilot projects — promoted by SmartPower, a nonprofit green energy concern, where a utility, Eversource, and Connecticut Green Bank — are helping customers install solar power and a substantial battery. In return, the utility acquires the right to draw down from that battery on certain days at times of high demand.

All of this will help, but it doesn’t overcome the fact that between now and 2050, a target year for carbon reduction, electricity demand will double in the nation, according to many experts, and there is no way that demand can be met on the present generation and transmission trajectory.

The biggest frustration in the industry isn’t siting new wind farms and solar plants but building new transmission to move electricity from the resource-rich areas where, as Tri-State’s Highley says, “the wind blows and the sun shines,” such as the Western states, to where it is needed.

With money pouring out of the Department of Energy for projects, the problem isn’t money but selfishness — selfishness as in “not in my backyard.” No one wants power lines, just the power. And everyone wants more of it.

The fact is that if the nation continues to electrify at the present rate, shortages could begin at the end of the decade and worsen as the century rolls on.

Those outage maps might become must-watching — until the power for our computers fails, and your region gets color-coded on the outage map you can’t see.

I am an unabashed lover of Scotland and all things Scottish. It is different from England, gloriously so.

Although bound to its big neighbor under the Act of Union of 1707, Scotland has remained a very separate place. It has its own legal system with demanding rules of evidence that require two witnesses, or lines of evidence, before conviction.

It has authority over most local governments, including some taxing authority and control of its education system. Since “devolution” in 1999, its control over other domestic issues also has increased.

Scotland has the world’s most distinctive men’s attire: the kilt. It has its own sports: shinty, the caber toss and haggis hurling. Others it has bequeathed to the world, like golf, tug of war and curling.

Walking on the streets of Aberdeen or Glasgow, you wouldn’t think you had fetched up in some English town. Just the hard-to-follow dialects will put you right on that one. Prepare yourself by watching the many Scottish series on PBS. One gets used to the different speech after a couple of days in the land of Robert Burns.

The resignation of Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has focused attention on the perennial issue of Scottish independence. Although it was defeated in a referendum in 2014, it was given new life after the Brexit vote in 2016, when Scottish citizens, unlike those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, voted to remain in the European Union.

Some thought it would be given that this would boost demands for independence with Sturgeon leading the (bagpipe) band. Instead, support in the opinion polls for independence has dwindled, and Sturgeon’s plan to turn the next general election into a de facto referendum on independence found opposition in her own Scottish National Party.

Sturgeon was wrapped in the flag of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. The flag is a diagonal white cross, or saltire, on a blue background. If you disassemble the Union Jack, it is in there.

The original Act of Union reflected the weak economic situation in Scotland then and England’s control of trade in and to the British Isles. More than 300 years later, that is the case again.

The great argument against Scottish independence has always been economic — to say nothing of the difficulty of duplicating Hadrian’s Wall. Scotland’s population of 5.5 million is outbalanced by the English population of 60 million and its trade domination.

But that imbalance hasn’t always seemed that large. In the 19th century, Scotland boomed. It commanded a dominant role in ship construction on the Clyde River, where 20 percent of the world’s steamships were built in the latter part of that century and into the 20th century. Much other heavy industry was situated along the Clyde and other waterways. Scottish entrepreneurs were spread across the world and made their mark. Think Andrew Carnegie.

Of course, Scotland continues to produce some exceptional products. Among my favorites are whiskies, foods like Robertson’s jams, and the ubiquitous and delicious shortbread offerings from Walker’s; and I never forget the unassailable quality of Scottish tweeds and woolens.

Sadly, these and other products aren’t enough to save the Scottish economy, which depends on dwindling North Sea oil and gas, but soon may get a boost from wind farms, which are set to expand there.

Nonetheless, the last block payment from the United Kingdom to Scotland was a hefty $41 billion, emphasizing Scotland’s economic dependence on the union exchequer.

Scotland is a European treasure. Edinburgh, a gem, is one of the great cities of the world often overlooked as visitors are drawn north to the Highlands, or leave the United Kingdom without traveling to Scotland at all.

Edinburgh has it all: art and architecture, literature and music, science and technology, and the centuries-long history of a proud and independent people.

It is also welcoming and set with pubs, fine restaurants, gruesome legends (like the grave robbers when Scottish medical researchers needed cadavers), and a glorious and imposing castle.

Recently my wife and I spent a week in Edinburgh, and we were swept up by its tapestry of wonders. Even though I have been visiting Edinburgh since 1961, I have spent too little time tarrying, walking the streets, savoring the ale, the sounds and the wonder of this great and unique metropolis.

Scotland may be legally and commercially tied to England, but it is brave, bountiful and profoundly different in its ways. Although independence may never happen and may not be desirable, as Burns might have written, “Scotland’s a country for a’ that.”

People often ask me who are the most interesting or most influential people I have met. It is easy to say Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton, but sometimes the real history makers are never known outside of their specialty. One such was Richard Morley.

A mutual friend took me to meet Morley at his home in New Hampshire about 23 years ago. We spent a delightful afternoon there. He let me move a pile of earth from one spot to another with a backhoe operated by a personal computer.

I didn’t realize that I was in the presence of a great inventor, a member of industrial royalty, who had moved technology a giant step forward and sped up the automation revolution.

Morley did that in 1968 when he and colleagues at General Motors perfected the programmable logic controller. With the PLC, automation had arrived for the car industry and much else.

If it is moved, stored, welded, shaped, collated and shoved out the door, a series of programmed controllers ordered all that. In fact, for everything manufactured, PLCs are at work translating the blueprints into products.

They are everywhere, from the factory floor to advanced farms, to city water plants, to oil and gas drilling. They occupy a part of the modern world known as operational technology, or OT.

Vital though OT is, it gets less attention than its big sibling, information technology, or IT.

Matt Morris, managing director of security and risk consulting at 1898 & Co., the consulting arm of Burns & McDonnell, the big architecture, engineering and construction firm, told me, “IT is the ‘carpeted space,’ and OT is the ‘uncarpeted space’ ”

In other words, much of industry’s heavy lifting is done by OT, while IT has taken over all of the other more obvious functions of society, from accounting to airline reservations, from doctors’ offices to designing aircraft.

IT is king, but that is only part of the story.

Regarding cybersecurity, OT and IT differ, but both have their vulnerabilities. When we say cybersecurity, we mostly mean IT. OT is different, and the threats emanating from attacks on it are usually more strategic and harder to identify.

Attacks on OT aren’t necessarily as immediately detectable as those on IT. They can be very subtle but also highly destructive and expensive.

The classic example of what can be done to OT was provided not in an attack on the United States but by the United States in 2007 (and revealed in 2010) when the nation’s cyber-warriors were able to slow down or speed up uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran. The Iranians didn’t know that their operating systems had been fooled surreptitiously. Their engineers were at a loss.

Now, 1898 & Co. is taking a bold step into the world of critical infrastructure resiliency with the creation of a new service aimed at offering full-time, proactive cybersecurity at critical infrastructure sites, like utilities, embracing IT and OT.

The company and its parent have enormous experience in utilities and other critical infrastructure, including oil rigs, refineries and water systems. Through a program they call “Managed Threat Protection and Response,” their aim is to take critical infrastructure defense and response to new levels. The capability is an addition to its existing Managed Security Services solution.

To implement this, the company has set up its program in Houston, far from its home base in Kansas City, Missouri, to be near the customers — much critical infrastructure has links to Houston — but also, as Mark Mattei, 1898 & Co. director of cybersecurity, told me, to avail itself of the talent in the area.

The company is opening up a new horizon in cybersecurity, focusing on OT.

With IT, you would want to throw a switch, avert or stop the attack as fast as possible. But with OT, a more measured response might be called for. You wouldn’t want to shut down a whole plant because one pump had had its controller attacked or bring down part of the electricity grid because a single substation had evidence that it was malfunctioning because of an attack in one component.

The more one learns about cybersecurity, the more one appreciates the unsung heroes who take on unknown enemies 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

We are on the threshold of something big in defending critical infrastructure. I am sure that Richard Morley would have approved of this new approach. He died in 2017.

I have gone over. All the way. I have fallen in love with artificial intelligence. We need it and I’m on board. 

My conversion was sudden. It happened on one memorable day, Feb. 8, 2023. It was a sudden strike in a well-worn heart by Cupid’s arrow.

My love life with technology has been either unrequited or messy. I was always the one who blew the relationship, I admit that.

It started with computer typesetting. I was a committed hot type man. I didn’t want to see that painted lady, computer technology, destroying my divine relationship with hot type. But she did and when I tried to make amends she was, er, cold, froze me out. 

Likewise, as an old-time newspaperman, I was very proficient and happy with Telex. Computer technology separated us.

The worst of all was my first encounter with the internet.

I was pursuing the story of nuclear fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A lab technician tried to interest me in the new device he was using to send messages: The internet. I blew it off. “That is just Telex on steroids,” I said. 

Ms. Internet doesn’t care to be scorned and she nearly cost me my manhood — well, my publishing company — when she took her terrible revenge. She killed print papers as well as hot type. She was a vengeful siren that way.

My conversion to AI began innocently enough. I was listening to a reporter on National Public Radio explaining how Microsoft’s new AI search engine would not only change the world of online searching but would also give Google a serious run for its money — billions of dollars, I might say parenthetically. 

The writing’s on the wall for Google unless it can get its AI to market fast. I was intrigued.

The illustration used by NPR reporter Bobby Allyn was that of buying a couch and carrying it home in your car. The new search engine, Allyn explained, will tell you if the couch you want to buy will fit in your car. It will know the dimensions of the car and, maybe, of the couch, too. Wow!

Then I went on to watch a wild, unruly hearing before the House Oversight Committee. A long-suffering panel of former Twitter executives faced some pointed abuse from the Republican members. Some of those members never got to pose a question: Their time was entirely taken up castigating the witnesses over alleged collusion with the Biden administration and over Hunter Biden’s laptop — the holy grail for conspiracy theorists. It was a performance worthy of a Soviet show trial.

The worst aspects of the new House were on display. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was visibly flustered because she wasn’t in her seat when her time to question the witnesses arrived. She rushed back to it and was so excited that she was nearly incoherent.

Then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) who was adamant that Twitter was advancing a political agenda by accepting the science that vaccines helped control the Covid-19 outbreak. She claimed Twitter had a political objective when it denied her free speech rights by suspending her account, after frequent warnings about her dangerous public health positions opposing vaccinations. 

The lady’s not for turning. Not by facts, anyway. That was clear. Any Southern charm she may possess was shelved in favor of invective. She told the former Twitter executives that she was glad they had been fired.

The clincher in my conversion to AI had nothing to do with the brutal thrashing of the experts, but with the explanation by Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, who with forbearance explained that there were then and are now hundreds of Russian false accounts on Twitter aimed at influencing our elections and reaching deeply into our politics. Likewise, Iranian and Chinese accounts.

That is when it occurred to me: AI is the answer. Not the answer to the mannerless ways of the House hearing, but to the whole vulnerability of social media. 

We have to fight cyber excess with cyber: Only AI can deal with the volumes of malicious domestic and foreign material on the net. Too bad it won’t resolve the free speech issues, or the one that emerged at the House hearing: the right to lie without restraint.

This AI doubter is now an enthusiast. Bring it on. 

Police excess gained huge attention after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and again after the alleged beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis last month. But police excess isn’t new.

A friend, who had been drinking and could be quite truculent when drunk, was severely beaten in the police cells in Leesburg, Virginia, a couple of decades ago. I have never seen a man so badly hurt in a beating — and I have done my share of police reporting.

That he provoked the police, I have no doubt. But no one should be beaten by the police anywhere, ever, for any amount of provocation. I might mention that my friend — and the officers who might have killed him — are White.

I used to cover the Thames Police Court in the East End of London. That was before immigration had changed the makeup of the East End. It was then, as it had been for a long time, solidly White working class.

Every so often, a defendant would appear in the dock showing signs that he had been in a fight. One man had an arm in a sling, another had a black eye, and a third had bruises on his face. One thing was common: If they looked beaten up, they would be charged with “resisting arrest,” along with other charges like drunkenness and petty larceny.

In the press benches, we shrugged and would say something like, “They worked that bloke over.” We never thought to raise the issue of police brutality. It was just the way things were.

At least nowadays, when social norms don’t allow police to hit suspects, there is a slight chance of redress. Although I would wager that nearly all police violence goes unreported, the “blue wall” closes tightly around it.

People in uniform, men and women, hold dominion over a prisoner. If there is ethnic bias or verbal provocation, bad things can and do happen.

Yet, I hold a brief for the police. Policing is dangerous and heartbreaking work, especially in the United States, where guns are everywhere. Also, it is shift work, itself a stressing factor.

Wearing the blue isn’t easy, and abuse and danger go with the job. Sean Bell, a former British policeman, now a professor at the Open University, described the police workload in the United Kingdom this way, “Those in the policing environment can become a human vacuum for the grief, sorrow, distress and misfortune for the victims of crime, road crashes and the plethora of other incidents dealt with time after time.”

Many of the incidents of American police being shot and police exceeding their authority have as their genesis a traffic stop, as with Nichols. These are a cause of fear for both the police and criminals. It is where the rubber meets the road of law enforcement.

Motorists form our opinions of the police largely through traffic stops, which we rail against. But to the police, they are a  life-threatening hazard as they approach a car that may have a crazed or dangerous criminal driver with a gun. They face danger and tragedy in plain sight.

The only thing police officers are warier of than traffic stops are domestic violence calls. They are the worst, officers in Washington have told me.

Yet, the traffic stop is an essential police tool, partly for controlling traffic but, importantly, for arresting criminals, fugitives and drug transporters. It is how the police work within the constitutional prohibition on illegal search and seizure.

People who have control of other people — drill sergeants, wardens and the police — are in a position to abuse, and some do. A uniform and authority can bring out the inner beast. Remember what went on in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?

After the two terrible incidents of police excess, Floyd and Nichols, all the solutions seem inadequate. But when out on the streets or in our homes, most of us are vitally aware that we feel secure because a call to 911 will bring the law — the men and women in blue who guarantee our safety and wellbeing.

What to do about police violence? Vigilance is the first line of defense, but appreciating the police and holding them to account helps. Not many police officers feel appreciated, and that isn’t good for them or for society.

“The policeman’s lot is not a happy one!” So wrote British dramatist W.S. Gilbert in “The Pirates of Penzance,” an 1879 comic opera, one of his collaborations with composer Arthur Sullivan.

And Gilbert and Sullivan had never dreamt of a traffic stop.

Big tech has siphoned off advertising and wants to be a global censor. 

The Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for its predatory advertising practices. Bully!

Not that I think Google is inherently evil, venal or greedier than any other corporation. Indeed, it is a source of much good through its awesome search engine.

But when it comes to advertising, Google, and others with high-tech platforms, have done inestimable damage. They have hoovered up most of the available advertising dollars, bankrupting much of the world’s traditional media and, thereby, limiting the coverage of the news — especially local news.

They have ripped the heart out of the economics of journalism.

Like other internet companies, they treasure their intellectual property while sucking up the journalistic property of the impoverished providers without a thought of paying.

While I doubt the DOJ suit will do much to redress the advertising imbalance (Axios argues the part of Google that the DOJ wants divested accounts for only 12 percent of the company’s revenue), it will keep the issue of what to do about big tech media churning.

The issue of advertising is an old conundrum, written extra-large by the internet.  Advertisers have always favored a first-past-the-post strategy. In practice, this has meant in the world of newspapers that a small edge in circulation means a massive gulf in advertising volume.

Broadcasting, through the ratings system, has been able to charge for the audience it gets, plus a premium for perceived audience quality — “60 Minutes” compared to, say, “Maury,” which was canceled last year.

But mostly, it is always about raw numbers of readers, listeners and viewers. As rough a calculation, first-past-the-post has meant 20 percent more of the audience turns into 50 percent more of the available advertising dollars.

I would cite The New York Times’ leverage over the Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun’s edge over the News-American, and The Washington Post’s advantage over the Evening Star. The weaker papers all in time folded even when they had healthy circulations, just not healthy enough.

With their massive reach, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are killing off the traditional print media and wreaking havoc in broadcasting. This calls out for redress, but it won’t come from the narrow focus of the DOJ suit.

The even larger issue with Google and its compatriots is freedom of speech.

The internet tech publishers, for that is what they are, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others reserve the right to throw you off their sites if you indulge in speech, which, by contemporary standards, incites hate, violence or social disturbance.

Conservatives believe they are victimized, and I agree. Anyone whose speech is restricted by another individual or an institution is a victim of prejudice, albeit the prejudice of good intent.

Recently, I was warned by LinkedIn that I would be barred from posting on the site because I had transgressed — and two transgressions merit banning. The offending item was a historical piece about a World War II massacre in Greece. The offense may have been a dramatic photograph of skulls, taken by my wife, Linda Gasparello, displayed in the museum at Distomo, a scene of a barbarous genocide.

I followed the appeal procedure against the two-strikes-you’re-out rule, but I have heard nothing. I expect the censoring algorithms have my number and are ready to protect the public from me next time I write about an ugly historical event.

The concept of “hate speech” is contrary to free expression. It calls for censorship even though it professes otherwise. Any time one group of people is telling another, or even an individual, what they can say, free speech is threatened and the First Amendment is compromised.

The problem isn’t what is called hate speech but lying — a malady that is endemic in the political class.

The defense against the liars who haunt social media is what some find hateful speech: ridicule, invective, irony, satire and all the weapons in the literary quiver.

The right to bear the arms of free and open discourse shouldn’t be infringed by social media giants.