When the ancient Greeks wanted to learn what their future held, they would consult with oracles. Alexander the Great, for one, visited the Oracle at Siwa, an oasis in the Egyptian desert. According to his biographer, Plutarch, the oracle told Alexander that he was destined to conquer the world.

In these tumultuous days when we, the electorate, are offered a choice between an old, old president and his daffy vice president and a vengeful reprobate with a persecution complex, I did the smart thing: I consulted the oracle.

No, I didn’t cross the desert on a camel, nor as Alexander did on his much-loved horse, Bucephalus, nor in a snazzy BMW SUV.

I did go to the oracle of the day, which is the only place I know to seek and get what seems to be extraterrestrial advice: the Bing AI. I asked the oracle several questions and got some interesting answers.

When it came to the big question, I beseeched the Bing AI, “Great Oracle, I am an American voter, and I am in an awful tizzy. I don’t know whom to support in the next presidential election.

“It seems to me that one candidate, President Joe Biden, a decent man, may be too old to navigate the difficult waters ahead in domestic and international affairs.

“As for another candidate, former President Donald Trump, many people find aspects of his conduct reprehensible.

“What to do? For me, this is even harder because I am a columnist and television commentator, and I need to have something to say. I am sure you understand, Great Oracle.”

Well, the Bing AI clammed up: It delivered only the formal histories of both men.

I had thought my question would spark a revelation, a wise analysis, or a contradiction of my view of the candidates. Clearly, I shall have to wait for the day when I get into real AI chat: ChatGPT.

Mostly, I had thought the oracle would tell me that all the presidential hopefuls so far will be toast by November 2024, that new candidates will bring us hope, fire up party enthusiasm, and let rip.

Are new faces and new choices too much to hope for?

Republicans are wrestling with their prospective candidate after his latest character stain, having been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial. What does this mean for the whole issue of what we look for in the character of candidates? Rectitude was once considered essential. Not for Trump. Post-Trump is post-rectitude.

Just under 70 percent of the electorate have told pollsters that they think Biden is too old to be re-elected. That isn’t, I submit, a conclusion arrived at by pondering what it means to be 80. That is a conclusion, again I submit, they have come to by looking at the president on TV — on the few occasions they see him there.

Clearly, he doesn’t have the strength or the confidence to hold a press conference. These are vital.

In America, the press conference is the nearest thing we have to question time in the British House of Commons. It is the time of accounting. Biden is behind in his accounting as audited by the press corps.

Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the American Prospect, is avowedly liberal. He is one of the most skillful political writers working today; he is deft, informed, and convincing, and you know where he stands. He stands with the Democrats.

So, it is significant when he raises a question about Biden and when he draws attention, as he did on May 9, to Biden’s absence from public engagement.

Meyerson wrote, “Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in … allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.”

A whole new thing to worry about has just arrived. It joins a list of existential concerns for the future, along with global warming, the wobbling of democracy, the relationship with China, the national debt, the supply chain crisis, and the wreckage in the schools.

Artificial intelligence, known as AI, has had pride of place on the worry list for several weeks. Its arrival was trumpeted for a long time, including by the government and by techies across the board. But it took ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, for the hair on the back of the national neck to rise.

Now we know the race into the unknown is speeding up. The tech biggies, like Google and Facebook, are trying to catch the lead claimed by Microsoft. They are rushing headlong into a science the experts say they only partially understand. They really don’t know how these complex systems work; maybe like a book that the author cannot read after having written it.

Incalculable acres of newsprint and untold decibels of broadcasting have been raising the alarm ever since a ChatGPT test told a New York Times reporter that it was in love with him and he should leave his wife. Guffaws all around, but also fear and doubt about the future. 

Will this Frankenstein creature turn on us? Maybe it loves just one person, hates the rest of us, and plans to do something about it.

In an interview on the PBS television program “White House Chronicle,” John Savage, An Wang professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, told me there was a danger of over-reliance, and hence mistakes, on decisions made using AI. 

For example, he said, some Stanford students partly covered a stop sign with black and white pieces of tape. AI misread the sign as signaling it was OK to travel 45 miles an hour. Similarly, Savage said the slightest calibration error in a medical operation using artificial intelligence could result in a fatality.

Savage believes AI needs to be regulated and that any information generated by AI needs verification. As a journalist, it is the latter that alarms.

Already, AI is writing fake music almost undetectably. There is a real possibility that it can write legal briefs. So why not usurp journalism for ulterior purposes and put stiffs like me out of work?

AI images can already be made to speak and look like the humans they are aping. How will you recognize a “deep fake” from the real thing? Probably, you won’t.

Currently, we are struggling with what is fact and where is the truth. There is so much disinformation, so speedily dispersed that some journalists are in a state of shell shock, particularly in Eastern Europe, where legitimate writers and broadcasters are assaulted daily with disinformation from Russia. 

“How can we tell what is true?” a reporter in Vilnius, Lithuania, asked me during an Association of European Journalists’ meeting as the Russian disinformation campaign was revving up before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Well, that is going to get a lot harder. “You need to know the provenance of information and images before they are published,” Brown University’s Savage said.

But how? In a newsroom on deadline, we have to trust the information we have. One wonders to what extent malicious users of the new technology will infiltrate research materials or, later, the content of encyclopedias. Or, are the tools of verification themselves trustworthy?

Obviously, there will be upsides to thinking-machines scouring the internet for information on which to make decisions. I think of handling nuclear waste; disarming old weapons; simulating the battlefield; incorporating historical knowledge; and seeking new products and materials. Medical research will accelerate, one assumes.

However, privacy may be a thing of the past — it almost certainly will be.

Just consider that attractive person you saw at the supermarket but were unsure what would happen if you initiated a conversation. Snap a picture on your camera, and in no time AI will tell you who the stranger is, whether the person might want to know you and, if that should be your interest, whether the person is married, in a relationship or just waiting to meet someone like you. Or whether he or she is a spy for a hostile government.

AI might save us from ourselves. But we should ask how badly we need saving — and be prepared to ignore the answer. Damn it, we are human.

There is a terrible shortage of people who fix things. I am thinking of electricians, plumbers, glaziers, auto mechanics and many more skilled workers who keep life livable and society running.

It is frustrating if you can’t get a plumber when you need one. But the skilled worker shortage has much more significant consequences than the inconvenience to the homeowner. The very rate of national progress on many fronts is being affected.

More housing is desperately needed, but architects tell me some new construction isn’t happening because of the skilled worker shortage. Projects are being shelved.

The problem in electric utilities is critical — and interesting because the utilities offer excellent pay, retirement and healthcare, and still, they are falling short of recruits. They are aware that many of their workers will be retiring in the next several years, adding to the problem. One utility, DTE in Michigan, has been training former prisoners in vegetation control — the endless business of trimming trees around power lines.

Auto dealerships are scrounging for mechanics, now euphemistically called “technicians.”

Skilled workers are in short supply for the railroad and bridge industries. Many industries are prepared to offer training.

The need is great, and it has a quietly crippling effect on national prosperity.

President Biden has almost ceaselessly promoted solar and wind generation as job creators. Someone should tell him there is a severe shortage of those same electricians, pipe fitters, wind farm erectors and solar panel installers.

The skilled worker shortage has been worsening for some time, but it is now palpable.

Contributory factors have been building: The end of the draft meant an end to a lot of trade schooling in the military. Many a youth learned electronics, motor repair or how to paint something from Uncle Sam. That is the generation that is now retiring.

Then there is the education imbalance: We encourage too many below-average academic students to go to college. It is part of the credentialing craze. Those less suited to academic life seek easier and easier courses in lesser and lesser colleges just to come out with a bachelor’s degree — a certificate that passes for a credential.

The result is a glut on the market of workers with useless degrees in such things as marketing, communications, sociology, and even journalism. If you arrive in college in need of remedial English, your future as a journalist is likely to be wobbly.

Since childhood, I have been impressed with people who fix things: People like my father. He fixed everything from diesel engines to water well pumps, burst pipes and sagging roofs.

Men, and some women, of his generation worked with their hands, but they were, in their way, Renaissance people. They knew how to fix things from a cattle feeder to a sewing machine, from a loose brick in a wall to a child’s bicycle to a boiler.

The work of fixing, of keeping things running, isn’t stupid work; it involves a lot of deduction, knowledge and acquired skill.

Men and women who fixed things were at one with men and women who made things, often bound together in a common identity inside a union.

Think of the great names of the unions of the past and the sense of pride members once took in their belonging: the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Teamsters or the United Autoworkers. You had work and social dignity. You weren’t looked down upon because you hadn’t been to college.

We aren’t going to bring back quickly honor to manual work or reverence for the great body of people who keep everything running. So we might look to the hundreds of thousands of skilled artisans who would do the work if they could enter the United States legally. Yes, the migrants milling at the southern border. Many skilled welders, plumbers and masons are yearning to cross the border and start fixing the dilapidated parts of this country.

The owner of a clothing factory told me she was desperate to find women who could sew. She said it is a skill that has just disappeared from the American workforce. A landscape contractor in Washington told me he would close without his Mexican workers.

A modest proposal: Let us write an immigration law based on who is really needed. Add to this a work permit dependent on fulfilling certain conditions. You would soon find company recruiters mingling with the border agents along the Rio Grande.

And we would lose our fear of a burst pipe. Help is just a frontier away.

I have watched Rupert Murdoch’s career with admiration, irritation and, sometimes, horror.

His besetting sin is that he goes too far. The fault that has landed Fox News settling with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million isn’t new in the Murdoch experience.

He is a publishing and television genius. But like many geniuses, his success keeps running away with him — and then he must pay up. He does so without apology and without discernible contrition. Those who know him well tell me he treats his losses with a philosophical shrug.

Murdoch’s talent reaches into many aspects of journalism. He has nerves of titanium in business and a fine ability to challenge the rules — and, if he can, to bend them.

As an employer, he is ruthless and, at times, generous and indulgent. I know many who have worked for Murdoch, and they speak about the contradictions of his ruthlessness and his generosity, particularly to those who have borne the battle of public humiliation for him. Check out the salaries at Fox News and the London Sun.

The Murdoch story begins, as most know, when he inherited a newspaper from his father. He quickly formed a mini-news empire in Australia.

But Murdoch had his sights set — as many in the former British possessions do — on London and the big time there. While at Oxford, he was hired as a sub-editor at The Daily Express, then owned by another colonial, the formidable Lord Beaverbrook.

In 1968, Murdoch bought The News of the World, a crime-centric Sunday paper. The following year, he bought the avowedly left-wing Sun.

Here Murdoch showed his genius at knowing the makeup of the audience and what it wanted: He flipped The Sun from left politics to the extreme right and, for good measure, stripped the pinups of their bras.

That was a hit with men, and the politics were a revelation: Murdoch had defined a conservative, loyalist and anti-European vein in the British newspaper readership that hadn’t been mined. He went for it and soon had the largest circulation paper in Britain.

After he bought the redoubtable Times and Sunday Times, the Murdoch invasion was complete. He had also been instrumental in the launch of Sky News. Money rolled in and political power and prestige with it — although there is no evidence that he sought formal preferment, like a peerage.

On to New York and U.S. newspapers.

Here, the formula of sex and nationalism foundered. Murdoch didn’t succeed as an American newspaper proprietor except for deftly keeping The Wall Street Journal a prestige publication.

However, he brilliantly — with several bold moves — built a television network. Then, in the cable division, he applied the British formula: Give the punters what they want.

In Britain, it was sex and nationalism. In America, it was far-right jingoism.

Murdoch gave it to Americans just as he had given it to the British: in large helpings of conspiracy, paranoia and nationalism.

Royal and celebrity gossip was the mainstay in his tabloids after right-wing Euro-bashing and breast-baring. He paid well for sensationalism, and that attracted a seedy kind of private investigator-journalist, prepared to go further and deeper than his or her colleagues. Corruption of the police was the next step, along with telephone bugging and other egregious transgressions.

Eventually, it all came tumbling down. Murdoch had to appear before a parliamentary committee, fire people and, in a strange move, close The News of the World as though the inanimate newspaper had been breaking the law without anyone knowing.

In fact, he had gone too far. The joyful music of the cash register had led to a wilder and wilder dance. He damaged his legend, his papers and all of Britain’s journalism. He also lost the opportunity to buy control of Sky News.

But Fox was a joy. Oh, the sweet music and the wild dance! Give them what they want all day and all night. Give them their heroes untrammeled and their own facts. And finally, the election results they, the punters, wanted to believe, not the ones that the polls posted.

You can see the two-tiered approach that has worked so well for Murdoch working again here. Some respectable publications and some vulgar moneymakers, like his respected The Australian and his raucous big-city tabloids; in Britain, the respected Times and Sunday Times and the ultra-sensational Sun; in America, the respected Wall Street Journal and the disreputable Fox Cable News and his other remaining newspaper, the scalawag New York Post.

For a remarkably gifted man, Murdoch can do some appalling things and has genius without bounds.

Sometimes I dine in fancy restaurants with starched white tablecloths, napkins and professional waiters; waiters who don’t ask me throughout the meal, “How is your food so far, sir?” To pestering waiters, I want to say, “If I am capable of ordering a meal, I am also capable of calling you to the table and telling you if the soup is cold, the fish is old, or the bread is stale.”

That is an occasional indulgence and reminds me of the time when, between journalistic gigs, I worked at a high-end restaurant in New York. It even featured a big band, Les Brown and His Band of Renown.

My wife and I frequently dine somewhere local, usually a pub-type eatery. After a while, you learn what they are good at and order accordingly. You are resigned to vinyl tablecloths and flimsy paper napkins.

And I resign myself to being asked at least three times some variant of “How is it so far?” The answer, which like other diners I never have the moral courage to voice, should be, “Go away! You are spoiling my dinner with an insincere inquiry about the comestibles. I am eating, aren’t I?”

Maybe these waiters should ask the chef how the food is for starters —  it is too late by the time it gets to the table.

The other dinner-spoiling intrusion, if you don’t have a professional, is the young waiter who wants you to be their life coach. It begins something like this, “I am not really a waiter. I am studying sociology. Do you think I should switch my major to journalism?”

I am tempted to reply, “I don’t know anything about sociology and it is damn hard to make a living in journalism these days. But there is a huge shortage of plumbers. You might try an apprenticeship somewhere and give up college.” 

Give up waiting tables, too, I hope.

Please don’t misunderstand; I love restaurants. It cheers me up to eat out. I rank towns with a vibrant restaurant culture as high on the quality-of-life scale.

I am writing this from Greece, where a cornucopia of restaurant choices beckons everywhere, from avgolemono soup to taramasalata. I am all in.

When your mouth is full, the awful business of asking you how the chef’s skills are that day doesn’t seem to be part of the continental culture. That, I find, is an egregious weakness of the English-speaking nations.

But the business of interrogating you about your breakfast, lunch or dinner isn’t confined to when you are at the table. If you make a reservation online, using one of the booking services, you will be pursued afterward, sometimes for days, by annoying questions about the restaurant’s food and ambiance, and the service.

The multiple-choice questions follow a formula like this, “On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your dining experience?” How do you explain that you loved the meal except for flies diving into your plate? Is that a one because of the flies, or a 10 because of the food? Splitting the difference with a five explains neither the failure nor the success.

A restaurant in Washington once specialized in delicious roast beef sandwiches. They were the creation of the man who owned the restaurant, and he had cuts of beef, a sauce, and rolls all made for the purpose.

But once I can remember, there was a distinct problem: A rat appeared next to a colleague when he was tucking into the sandwich.

How do you rate that dining experience when Yelp sends its questionnaire? Do you rate the food as a resounding 10 but the ambiance as one? How would the number-crunchers rate that in the overall dining experience?

Knowing how they like to seek averages, my suspicion is the roast beef eatery would have rated a five.

I read somewhere that during the Siege of Paris in 1870-71, an entrecote (a sirloin steak) was a slice of a rat. For years, I wondered about that place in Washington and its excellent roast beef sandwiches.

I would rather eat with an annoying server than a fraternizing rodent. Bon appetit!

The case for Joe Biden to accept the inevitable dictates of his age and not run again is persuasive. Too much rests on the health and fitness of the president to turn it into a kind of roulette: When will his number come up?

Worse, what if Biden fails mentally and stays in office incognizant of his condition? Being the president of the United States is the most demanding and most responsible job in the world.

Winston Churchill got a second term as prime minister of Great Britain in 1951, and lots of stuff went wrong, from immigration policy to the growth of unchecked union power. History’s greatest prime minister had lost his acuity.

As I am older than Biden, I can say he should quit. I love to work, but there’s the rub: Not all people and all work are created equally. What I do isn’t critical and doesn’t decide the nation’s future or war and peace.

No one would suggest that an artist toss the easel at a predetermined retirement age. Noel Coward, the great English entertainer, said, “Work is more fun than fun.” That depends on the work.

Age is a complex equation for society, and retirement is a nettlesome problem. France is in revolt over President Emmanuel Macron’s move to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. Very reasonable, most Americans say.

The issue in France is simple: The French can’t afford huge state pensions any longer. There aren’t enough people at work to pay for those who have retired on their nearly full salaries. You can vote the population rich, but you can’t vote in new, young taxpayers to keep them rich. When the Social Security system falters in the next decade, America may be staring at the same sums as Macron.

Mandatory retirement is a crude way to manage the retirement dilemma. Some workers are genuinely unable to work into their 70s and 80s because their bodies, their minds or both are worn out. Others are at their most productive.

My father’s mind was fine, but he was a mechanic who had done everything from building steel structures to working in mines to repairing cars. His body failed around the age of 6o. He had been doing manual work since he was 13 years old, and he couldn’t bend, twist, delve, lift, climb, stretch, grab or do any of the myriad things he had done all his life to earn a living. He had to work in a school and then a shop; he loved the school but not the shop. But he had to work. That is what he did: He got up every day and went to work.

He had worked so long and so hard, primarily self-employed, that he hadn’t had time to learn leisure — to play golf, to watch ball games, to read for recreation, or even to learn how to socialize. That came with work or didn’t happen; friends were people at work.

A friend of mine, a nuclear engineer, reached mandatory retirement age and fell apart, much as my father nearly did. He, too, had no interests outside of his family and work and was lost in the post-job world.

Something of this same problem exists for people leaving the military. Their life is the military, and then, at an early age, there is no more of that life, their life.

When it comes to Biden, things are quite different.

I know the president slightly, and I like him personally. He loves the job. He has been at the peak of power for a long time. When his term ends, he should adjourn to his beach house in Delaware and write his memoirs.

Maybe someone will teach Biden how to play boules, a European form of bowls played by older people in parks. French boules aficionados would be happy to teach him the game. The French have a lot of time in retirement to perfect their play and travel to beach destinations. They would love to bring their skill to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Maybe I should join them.

 

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Photo: Joe Biden and Lucy Coffey, who at 108 is America’s oldest woman veteran. 2014.

“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.