In medieval times, aggressors cut the water supply and poisoned the wells. In the 21st century, they go for the electric supply.

The aggressors today know that electricity is a vital commodity; without it, civilized life fails, suffering begins. It is a war of special cruelty against the civilian population.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose forces haven’t fared well on the ground against the Ukrainian military, has turned to the civilian population. He has unleashed a vicious campaign against Ukraine’s electric grid.

The unfolding result — winter is just beginning — is untold suffering. There is no quick fix, no way to fly in electricity as you can fly in food and munition, and no equal retaliation. The vulnerability lies in the nature of electricity itself. It is a quintessentially complex, real-time system.

When an electric system is harmed, it is incapacitated for months and even years. A storm passes through, trees fall on the lines, and crews repair them quickly or bypass the damaged transmission.

But when the guts of the system — the sophisticated interplay of wires and substations, turbines, power electronics and myriad connectors — are damaged, power can be off for months, and that assumes that there isn’t a war raging.

This vulnerability has just been exhibited by an attack with firearms on a substation in North Carolina. A turbine was shot up, and 30,000 people will be without electricity for days and possibly weeks. That scenario is with the full resources of U.S. power companies, working in unison, to help restore power.

Imagine trying to get power back online with precision weapons raining on parts of a grid? Realize that much of a bulk power supply system is bespoke; that big things like turbines aren’t sitting on a shelf. They are usually made to order, mostly in China nowadays.

If you have the stomach for it, imagine the suffering in Ukraine at the start of winter: no light, no heat, no water because electricity pumps city water. Europe is set for a brutal winter, but nothing like the catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine.

First, Europe, like much of the world, is trying to move from fossil fuels to renewables. But it has been a messy transition, especially in Britain, where the expectations for a smooth transition were too rosy.

The British failed to build enough gas storage in the hope it wouldn’t be needed; shilly-shallied for years about committing to new nuclear power; and had an absolute confidence that the wind in the North Sea was a steady force.

Then things went wrong for Britain.

The first was the wind drought of last autumn in the North Sea and across Europe. It had a particular effect on Britain, which had to use more of its gas reserves to get through — and so was set for near disaster when the Russian war against Ukraine erupted nine months ago, pushing the price of gas up tenfold. British electric prices have soared, and the government has had to promise to pay substantial subsidies to affected households.

Germany, though, is the poster child for what not to do.

First, Germany has allowed itself to rely on Russia for nearly 40 percent of its natural gas — a principal fuel for electric generation — while, at the same time, closing its very reliable nuclear power plants. Germany also imports large quantities of petroleum and hard coal from Russia.

Germany isn’t only a problem to itself, but it also may be one for its neighbors in Europe. It is the richest country in Europe, and there is some fear that it will use some of its wealth to buy gas and push prices higher. That hasn’t happened, but it is a fear expressed across the energy sector.

Another fear is that as Germany needs so much gas to keep its industrial machine going that it will break ranks and cut a side deal with Russia, throwing Ukraine under the bus. But that hasn’t happened either.

The big challenge for Europe is how it will defend the remains of the Ukrainian grid, how fast it can help Ukraine restore power to the whole country, and how it might block the merciless aerial assault.

That is a political and security question for Europe and the United States: How far will the allies go in risking a nuclear war?

The lesson of Ukraine is clear: Protecting the physical infrastructure of the electric supply, the grid, is as much a part of national security as is cybersecurity.

Trying to predict the future of the internet or even to see how it will become a reliable source of fact, like old-fashioned newspaper and television reporting, is to my mind the equivalent of standing on the sand spit at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and predicting the future of aviation.

As the effect of the internet evolved, publishers of yore wished it away. I was one of those. Although I did tell the Newsletter Publishers Association way back that putting a print story down a wire wasn’t enough, that they should develop products for this new medium.

A few were up early and caught the worm while newsletter publishers like me slept in — notably The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Economist. They embraced and adjusted their offerings for the internet.

They are all publications that traditionally have had a preponderance of readers interested in issues beyond local coverage. The Wall Street Journal has always had a business audience and adapted quickly.

The New York Times was able to leverage its global and national followers and convert them to reading online. The Economist had an obvious business and world affairs audience to tap into.

The Washington Post’s internet adoption was more dynamic.

When the Graham family sold The Post to the then-richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, many of us believed he would be another rich man buying a newspaper to keep it going and to reap the social opportunities that go with the franchise. But Bezos saw the future and poured money into the Post, not to keep it alive but to expand it hugely in the cyberworld. He was right and has pulled off a publishing coup.

What wasn’t seen by anyone I knew in the publishing world and isn’t in the literature is no one understood how the internet would suck up nearly all the advertising dollars.

The pure internet companies, peripherally in publishing, have vacuumed up the advertising, creating great wealth for their owners.

While they haven’t had a background in publishing, and haven’t even thought of themselves as publishers, they have added news — often generated by legitimate news organizations — as a giveaway, which they haven’t paid for; if you write for a newspaper or a magazine, you have been ripped off by an internet publisher.

The irony is that back in the 1980s and ’90s, newspaper and television properties were highly valued and selling for multiples never dreamed of. It was the time when Al Neuharth was building the Gannett chain and launching USA Today. I knew Neuharth, himself a newspaperman through and through.

Now that empire has been sold and many of its once-proud local titles are closed or look more like pamphlets than newspapers. The advertising, and with it the revenue, has gone to the internet behemoths.

But they aren’t newspapers, and their owners aren’t publishers. They are aggregators, and thanks to the wonder of the internet, they have a global presence and penetration beyond the wildest dreams of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and the Sulzberger dynasty.

I salute those publications that are taking the fight to the internet by creating daily online editions and keeping the craft-of-old alive.

These include The New Yorker and The Spectator, an English magazine trying to get an American presence.

On a recent visit to Edinburgh, my wife and I ducked into a newsagent, the traditional British shop that sells newspapers, magazines and sundries, to buy some newspapers. Hanging above the shop’s entrance was a large blue sign advertising The Scotsman. The owner told my wife that he didn’t sell newspapers anymore, and nobody needed to read them.

If you know there is a war going on in Ukraine, it is because the traditional media has told you so, because brave reporters are there on the spot, not online. Repeat this line for Iran, China, Mexico to say nothing of Washington, Toronto, London, Rome, Moscow and Beijing.

We need the old media, often called the mainstream media. We earned that moniker. The Hill, Axios and Politico show where journalism might be headed nationally. But who will cover the statehouse, the school board and the courts? In the dark, all those institutions stray.

In a courthouse in Prince William County, Virginia, I asked about press coverage. The woman showing me around sighed and said, “We used to have reporters, they even had their own table, but not anymore.” Lady Justice had closed one eye.

Has the internet of things — the vast, interconnected, computer-centered ecosystem of today — reached a point where it is so complex, so multilayered, has so many architects, and has so many national interests embedded in it that it has become a threat to itself?

Will the electric grid, the financial system or the air traffic control apparatus implode not by the hand of a malicious hacker but because the system — which is now systems of systems — has become the most subtle threat it faces?

Worse, as the speed of telephony increases with 5G, will that speed up the system implosion with devastating consequences?

Will this technological meltdown be triggered from within by a long-forgotten piece of code, a failed sensor or inferior products in vital, load-bearing points in this system?

This kind of disaster from complexity is known as “emergent behavior.” Remember that concept. Likely, you will hear a lot about it going forward.

Emergent behavior is what happens when various objects or substances come together and trigger a reaction which can’t be predicted, nor can the trigger be predetermined.

Robert Gardner, founder and principal at New World Technology Partners and a National Security Agency consultant, tells me that the computer ecosystem is highly subject to emergent behavior in the so-called complex, adaptive system of systems which is today’s cyberworld. It is a world which has been built over time with new layers of complexity added willy-nilly as computing, and what has been asked of it, has become a huge, impregnable structure, beyond the reach of its present-day architects and minders, including cybersecurity aficionados.

In At The Creation

Gardner, to my mind, is worth listening to because he was, if you will, in at the beginning. At least, he was on hand and worked on the computer evolution, starting in the 1970s when he helped build the first supercomputers and has consulted with various national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. He has also played a key role in the development of today’s super-sophisticated financial computing infrastructure, known as “fintech.”

Gardner says of emergent behaviors in complex systems, “They can’t be predicted by examining individual components of a system as they are produced by the system as a whole — facilitating a perfect storm that conspires to produce catastrophe.”

Complexity is the new adversary, he says of these huge, virtual systems of systems.

Gardner adds, “The complexity adversary does not require outside assistance; it can be summoned by minor user, environmental or equipment failures, or timing instabilities in the ordinary operation of a system.

“Current threat detection software does not seek or detect these system conditions, leaving them highly vulnerable.”

Gardner cites two examples where the system failed itself. The first example is when a tree branch which fell on a power line in Ohio set in motion a blackout across the Michigan, New York, and Canada. The system became the problem: It went berserk, and 50 million people lost power.

The second example is how something called “counterparty risk” sped the demise of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street colossus. That was when a single default embedded in the system initiated the implosion of the whole structure.

No Nefarious Actors

Of these, Gardner says, “There were no nefarious actors to defend against; the complex, heterogeneous nature of the systems themselves led to emergent behaviors.”

Going forward, the best practices in cyber hygiene won’t defend against catastrophe. The entwined systems are their own enemy. Utilities take note.

And the danger may get worse, according to Gardner.

The villain is 5G: the super-fast phone and data system now being deployed across the country. It will come in what are called “slices,” but for that you can read stages.

· Slice one is what is being built out now: It is faster than today’s 4G, which is what phones and data use currently. It features mobile broadband.

· Slice two, called “machine to machine,” is faster yet.

· Slice three will move vast quantities of data at astounding speeds which, if the data is damaging to the system and has occurred at an unidentifiable location, represents a threat to a whole tranche of human activity.

Self-destroying machines will be unstoppable when they have 5G slice three to speed bad information throughout their system and connected systems. Tech Armageddon.

A great voice is stilled. James “Jimbo” Bohannon died of cancer of the esophagus on Nov. 12. Only weeks earlier, he had to resign from his “Jim Bohannon Show,” the overnight broadcast that aired on 500 radio stations, largely AM, weeknights from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. ET.

Jim was a big man with a big voice, a big curiosity and a big heart. Over most of the 29 years that his show was on the air, I had the pleasure of being a guest from time to time.

At first, my wife, Linda Gasparello — a writer, broadcaster and an occasional guest on the show — and I would journey to a studio in suburban northern Virginia — the building always looked forbidding in the dark of night. Later, the show moved to the CBS studios on M Street in Washington. But in recent years, Bohannon broadcast from his home in Westminster, S.C.

As with most of us in the trade, I believe “in studio” trumps virtual. But one of the pleasures of radio is that it is portable and can be done with a phone anywhere. Before Jim took over the show, it was the springboard for Larry King, who once interviewed me in a bedroom in the Algonquin Hotel in New York. That was odd, but I was used to guesting on the radio from odd spots, like sitting in a parked car in a hotel lot overlooking the River Moy in Ballina, Ireland.

Jim’s show was a mixture of guests, whom he interviewed with genuine curiosity and gruff respect for views other than his own, and call-ins. He also was kind. I asked him to interview a friend, Ryan Prior, who was establishing a charity to support Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research and medical education. Bohannon asked informed and perceptive questions and elicited an interesting hour of broadcasting with his skill as an interviewer.

He was less indulgent of crazy folks. If you do call-in radio, you get crazies. When their rants began, Jim simply cut them off. No apology, but no indulgence either. Some were regulars and went to lengths to circumvent the security provisions of Westwood One, the show’s syndicator.

One technique was to use a different phone for each attempt, say a wife’s or a neighbor’s phone. I once said, “George, in St. Louis, did you take your medicine today?” Jim chuckled, but I doubt he would have addressed a caller that way. Jim had a superficial toughness — he was a Vietnam veteran — but his kindness always broke through.

Unlike many in the star business, Jim didn’t yearn, that I could discern, to emulate his predecessor, Larry King, becoming a television star. Like many, if not most, broadcasters, he loved radio. It is flexible, mobile and not slaved to technology and big crews.

That isn’t to say Jim didn’t enjoy doing television, but he was a radio man, having started in it, like many, when he was in high school — in his case, in his native Missouri. He found his footing in Washington, where he did some television and a lot of radio before taking over the late-night slot that uniquely fitted him.

Jim seemed supremely happy in the wee hours. So were his listeners from coast to coast who enjoyed his camaraderie, humor, wisdom and masterful interviewing.

The one talent that great commercial broadcasters must have is the skill in “hitting time” to accommodate syndicated radio advertising. Jim seamlessly guided his interviews to a full stop without the interviewees knowing they had been diverted to silence. It takes skill to do that. It also takes skill — and the love of craft — to be fresh night after night; and skill to elicit gems of truth and wisdom from reluctant subjects.

Jim had those talents, but I shall remember especially his talent for friendship. He has signed off but won’t be forgotten by those who knew him and shared the time of stars in the sky with a true star of the microphone.

ERETRIA, Greece — The sites of horror — the places where mass murder happened — are seared into my memory. Holocaust sites like the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, or Kigali, where the Hutus butchered the Tutus, or the Falls Road in Belfast, where many died over the decades of strife.

A new one has just been fixed firmly in my memory: Distomo.

These sites of slaughter trigger the sense of how fragile human society is — and such slaughter is taking place this day, this hour, this minute in Ukraine.

I am not enthralled by history per se. My lens is mainly confined to what happened in my lifetime, whether as a small child during World War II or the years since. That way, I know that it can and will happen again and again.

The horrors of the past aren’t confined to the past. They leak into the present as new bleak chapters on human conduct are written.

I say this because I have just visited Distomo, where barbarity reached a crescendo on June 10, 1944. There, for two hours, the Waffen-SS killed villagers with machine guns, bayonets and with any weapon at hand. They killed the unborn, infants and older children, women and men. They beheaded the village priest.

If they paused, it was to rape.

The Association of European Journalists, the 60-year-old organization with sections spread across Europe, had invited me to its annual congress in central Greece. After two busloads of delegates had visited the Oracle at Delphi, we stopped at Distomo: a trip from the celestial to the bestial.

My mind is set afire with questions at these World War II sites. If I had been a young Jew swept up by the Nazis, would I have been killed in a camp? If I had been a young German guard, would I have participated in the killing, and how much enthusiasm would I have brought to the work?

I wonder how the young men who did the butchery at Distomo lived with themselves afterward. Did they dream of bayonetting pregnant women, of old people begging to be killed instead of their spouses, children and grandchildren?

In the end, few were spared — only those who were left for dead. Conservative estimates are that 238 people died in the massacre.

My journalistic colleagues and I went from the foibles of the Greek gods of antiquity to the horrors of humans in the 20th century. 

I was just a child during World War II, but I feel especially connected because this and other Nazi atrocities happened in my lifetime.

When I visited Auschwitz and saw the hair, the shoes, the toys and other jetsam of children, my thought wasn’t that it could have been me, but that those could have been my friends, my playmates, and every Jew I have been close to, and there have been many.

At the Distomo museum, they show a graphic film with eyewitness accounts of those who survived, those who bore witness, like the woman who describes scooping the brains back into her dead toddler’s head and carrying him home — but her house, and nearly all those in the village, was burned by the SS. That is what she did and lived to tell — to tell of that butchered child. She said in the film that she couldn’t forgive. Who with that memory could?

The young men who carried out the Distomo killings, under their 26-year-old leader, SS-Hauptsturmfurer Fritz Lautenbach, did so in reprisal for attacks on German troops.

After visiting many killing fields — and I don’t seek them out — I wonder what I would have done? Would I have followed orders? Would I, in seconds, persuade myself that what I was doing was right?

What would I do if I were on the Russian frontlines in Ukraine today? There is savagery equal to Distomo going on right now in wars in many places, carried out by people just like us.

Photo: Skulls of some of the villagers in Distomo, Greece, who were massacred by the Nazis on June 10, 1944. Linda Gasparello

In nearly every city in the United States, and many around the world, bulldozers are busy making dreams come true: Leveling land for a single-family home on a lot.

Who doesn’t want a lovely home with a nice bit of land on some tree-lined street? It is the American Dream manifested in bricks and mortar.

Trouble is dreams can morph into nightmares. A growing nightmare across the nation is the incursion of homes onto farmland – land that will be out of production essentially forever.

All around Washington, I watched year after year for decades lovely farms in adjacent Maryland and Virginia being turned into suburbs — sometimes 70 and more miles from the city center.

It has been a simple tradeoff: There has been a relentless demand for single-family homes and builders see farms, usually family-owned, as ripe fruit ready for picking. When age is an issue, they almost always sell. Farming is a tough, 365-days-a-year undertaking, and a fat check at the end of a farming career is irresistible.

No villains here, but there are consequences. Mark Twain said, “Buy land, they aren’t making it anymore.” Sadly, Twain didn’t take his own advice and instead invested in the tech world of the day: He lost a fortune in a company that was trying to perfect the typewriter.

Farmers are special to me. They are the real renaissance men and women. They know a lot about a lot, from being able to gauge the pH levels of soil on their tongues to how to birth a calf, repair a tractor, or raise a barn.

They also know a thing or two about how the government works and filling out forms. They are regulated but have no guaranteed rate of return. They are as subject to the weather over their own land as floods around the world.

Businesses talk about being rewarded for taking a risk. Farmers take a risk with every seed they plant — and the returns aren’t guaranteed.

But, as Gail Chaddock, host, and producer of “No Farms, No Future,” a podcast of the American Farmland Trust, said, “You can’t blame the farmers, and you can’t blame the developers. But the land we’ll need for food production in the future is being taken.”

What is happening is the irreversible destruction of millions of acres of prime farmland every year. A reverence for farmland needs to enter the culture, she said.

No longer, however, is it just developers buying up farms. Farmland is now being sought by another kind of developer: renewable energy companies. They are buying it for large solar arrays. They also contract with farmers to install windmills which, while not taking so much land out of agricultural use, cumulatively take a lot.

But it is solar farms that are the real problem. Britain is thinking of legislating to prohibit the use of agricultural land for energy production. Other countries are waking to the realization that a field of shining solar collectors is not the same as a field of waving wheat or even lowly cabbages.

As over time we exported our manufacturing, we also have exported our food production. What was once raised on truck farms around the cities is now raised in neighboring Canada and Mexico, or as far away as Chile and South Africa.

There is no compelling reason to cover huge acreages with solar panels. Roofs, rights of way, and urban parking lots could be pressed into service. Railroad tracks cry out for a solar canopy.

Just because energy or housing is a higher economic use for land today doesn’t mean that it won’t have a higher future value, feeding future generations.

The nation’s electric utilities are facing revolutionary changes as big as any they have faced since Thomas Edison got the whole thing going in 1882.

Between now and 2050 – just 28 years — practically everything must change. The goal is to reach net zero, the stage at which the utilities stop putting greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

But in that same timeframe, the demand for electricity is expected to at least double and, according to some surveys, to exceed doubling as electric vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles and as other industries, like cement and steel manufacturing, along with general manufacturing, go electric.

Just eliminating fossil fuel alone is a tall order — 22 percent of the current generating mix is coal and 38 percent is natural gas.

Half of the generation will, in theory, go offline while demand for electricity soars.

The industry is resolutely struggling with this dilemma while a few, sotto voce, wonder how it can be achieved.

True, some exciting technological options are coming along: Hydrogen, ocean currents, small modular nuclear reactors, so-called long-drawdown batteries, and carbon capture, storage, and utilization. The question is whether any of these will be ready to be deployed on a scale that will make a difference by the target date of 2050.

There are other schemes — still just schemes — to use the new electrified transportation fleets as a giant national battery. The idea is that your electric vehicle will be charged at night, or at other times when there is an abundance of power, and that you will sell the power back to the utility for the evening peak when we all fire up our homes and electricity demand zooms.

That is just an idea and no structure for this partnership between consumer and utility exists, nor is there any idea of how the customer will be compensated for helping the utility in its hours of need. It is hard to see how there will be enough money in the transaction to cause people to want to help the utility as besides the cost of charging their vehicles, the batteries will deteriorate faster.

The ongoing digitization of utilities means they will be able to better manage their flows and to practice more of what is called distributed energy resources (DER), which can include such things as interrupting certain nonessential users by agreement.

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, bordering Dallas, says DER will save him as much as 10 percent of Rayburn’s output, but not enough to take care of the escalating demand.

Like many utilities, Rayburn is bracing for the future, expecting to burn more natural gas and add solar as fast as possible. It is also upgrading its lines, called connectors, to carry more electricity.

The latter highlights another major challenge for utilities: Transmission.

The West generates plenty of renewable power electricity during the day, some of which goes to waste because it is available when it is not needed in the region, but when it would be a boon in the East.

The simple solution is to build more long-distance transmission. Forget about it. To get the many state and local authorizations and to overcome the not-in-my-backyard crowd, most judge, wouldn’t be possible.

Instead, utilities are looking to buttress the grid and move power over a stronger grid. In fact, there isn’t one grid but three: Eastern, Western and the anomalous Texas grid, ERCOT, which is confined to that state and, by design, poorly connected to the other two, although that may change.

Advocates of this strengthening of the grid abound. The federal government is on board with major funding. Shorter new lines between strong and weak spots would go a long way to making the movement of electricity across the nation easier. They would also move the nation nearer to a truly national grid. But even building short electric connections of a few hundred miles is a fraught business.

The task of the utilities — there are just over 3,000 of them, mostly small — is going to be to change totally while retooling without shutting off the power. The car companies are totally changing, too. But they can shut down to retool. Not so the utilities. Theirs must be a revolution without disruption, the light that doesn’t fail.

Once at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, I went to check in, and when I reached for my wallet it wasn’t there. The clerk said that I wouldn’t be able to check in without a credit card.

I explained that I had, mercifully, in another pocket, enough cash to pay for the stay. Reluctantly, they took more than enough of it for the two days and made a big point of telling me not to sign for even a cup of coffee.

Nowadays, I doubt they would accept my cash deposit.

Real people carry credit cards. Non-people — a subspecies of the American customer — are without. Woe to those.

Today there are more of these non-people because one of the lasting effects of the COVID pandemic is that cash is out, and plastic is all. No plastic, no go.

Hotels, airlines and even coffee shops have gone cashless. Ostensibly, this is because it is healthier. Truthfully, they don’t want to be bothered. Cash is a problem; credit is easier. In fact, from the vendor’s point of view, cash sucks, credit is cool.

At a large hotel in Orange County, Calif., where I am attending a conference, I tried to buy a coffee at Starbucks. “I don’t take cash,” said the barista, primly. “Just credit cards and room service.”

This caused me to wonder again about the legions of Americans who don’t have credit cards, some of whom don’t want them, but most don’t have credit or have been turned down.

If we have a recession, which now seems inevitable, there will be more people without credit and immobilized by the post-COVID realities of the plastic-favored world.

Cash on hand won’t save them. They are the unbanked, a lesser order of our citizenry.

For starters, millions of the working poor are mostly without credit. It is hard to worry about the niceties of credit when you struggle to get food to the table for the family.

In this new world, the cardless also are immobilized.

Consider what being without plastic means: You can’t make a reservation on Amtrak or an airline. You must go to an airport, as airlines no longer have free-standing ticket offices. Then you will learn that you must use a reverse ATM to buy a card with cash to buy a ticket. Amtrak still takes cash, but you must go to the railroad station.

The first consequence is, in most cases, you will pay a lot more if you try to buy the ticket on the day of travel. Those tempting “book now and save” ads are only for credit card holders.

You can’t get to the railroad station or the airport on a ride-sharing service because they work only with credit cards.

So the luckless, who probably don’t have plastic because of financial problems, will pay more because they will be paying mostly at the last minute, and they will be charged to convert their cash to plastic at the airport. These travelers won’t be able to buy a drink or internet service because that requires you to file a credit card before you board.

It is an old story: the poor pay more. Now they may not be allowed to pay with the currency of the land.

An odd byproduct of the move to plastic is a further blow to privacy. Cellphones and security cameras have already stripped away much of our privacy. Will the fact that this very morning I bought a latte and a croissant with a credit card cause me to be inundated with internet advertisements for designer coffee and pastry?

What would the deduction be by a suspicious partner if the credit card bill showed two lattes and two croissants?

Bring back cash. It was universal, left no record, and was preferred by merchants. Now they don’t want it, even for a coffee.