Well, this is interesting. A Russian company is claiming that it intercepted an American drone flying over Crimea:

Moscow (AFP) – A United States surveillance drone has been intercepted above the Ukranian region of Crimea, a Russian state arms and technology group said Friday.

“The drone was flying at about 4,000 metres (12,000 feet) and was virtually invisible from the ground. It was possible to break the link with US operators with complex radio-electronic” technology, said Rostec in a statement.

The drone fell “almost intact into the hands of self-defence forces” added Rostec, which said it had manufactured the equipment used to down the aircraft, but did not specify who was operating it.

“Judging by its identification number, UAV MQ-5B belonged to the 66th American Reconnaissance Brigade, based in Bavaria,” Rostec said on its website, which also carried a picture of what it said was the captured drone.

There’s an enormous amount of tantalizing information packed into a two hundred some-odd word news report. American drone over Crimea. Brought down using technology from Russian electronics firm. Brought down intact. And so on.

If true, it has some very troubling implications. Foremost among them is I don’t know how you make a credible complaint about Russians violating Ukrainian sovereignty if you’re violating it yourself.

Update

This is getting even more interesting rapidly. Rostec, the company that produced the equipment that reportedly brought down the drone which it calls “Autobase” has denied the report:

Rostec State Corporation does not confirm the information concerning the facts of use of the “Autobase” technical utility on the Crimea Peninsula, which was published in a number of mass media.

The State Corporation bears responsibility for the quality of its products but is by no means responsible for the relocation and the results of the use of the equipment supplied by the Corporation’s organizations within the framework of contractors’ orders.

characterizing the above as an “official denial”. Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.

The original article reporting the interception is here. If it’s as interesting as it appears I may produce a translation.

Update 2

The article isn’t interesting enough to translate. There are only two interesting additional tidbits in it. The first is the claim that they’ve observed American unmanned aerial vehicles over the area since the beginning of March. The other is the picture of Autobase:

If it did bring down an American UAV, there’s probably a pretty fair market for the product.

I think that Dana Milbank’s interepretation of the failure of the Millennials to sign up for healthcare insurance in droves as their abandoning Obama’s White House:

Young voters, after playing a big role in the campaign, became little more than an e-mail list for the White House and Obama’s Organizing for Action group. Then came health-care reform. The millennials, very liberal overall, saw Obama’s plan as too timid; they were disillusioned by his failure to fight for the “public option” of government-run health plans.

This cost Obama the young activists he would need to rally enrollment in Obamacare. Polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that, while the generation looks more favorably on big-government solutions than do older generations, the millennials disapprove of Obamacare in the same proportion as the rest of the population.

is wrong. I think they’re like most of the rest of us. It’s easier to support projects that don’t actually make any demands of us. Which reminds me of a joke that was a favorite of a dear old now-departed friend of mine.

It was Farmer Brown’s birthday. The farm animals were talking about what they would do for him in celebration. The cows suggested that they make him breakfast. The chickens asked “What shall we make?” The cows responded “We were thinking of bacon and eggs.” The pig protested “Hey! You’re convinced but I’m committed!”

Commitment is hard, especially when you have other priorities. Among young people who are too old to be covered under their parents’ insurance plans, are saddled with large education debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and are drastically underemployed those priorities include food and shelter.

Today marks ten years to the day since my first post on this blog. It wasn’t much. Just putting a message in a bottle. I wrote my first decent post a couple of days later, “It’s not a pretty story”, a character study of a woman I encountered when working as an election judge.

It wasn’t until June of that year that I wrote what I think is still one of my best posts, “Anthems”. It’s a study of my own mood and, possibly, the mood of the country at that time as epitomized by three national anthems, the official one and two that I think of as unofficial anthems. There’s actually the beginnings of a good discussion in the comments of that post.

That was and continues to be one of the enduring purposes of this blog—fostering thoughtful comment. Nowadays this blog has a coterie of commenters who provide comments that are, mostly, civil and considered. Such commentary is becoming rare in the blogosphere which to my ear has become more of a place for people who want to have their opinions affirmed rather than challenged and too frequently respond to challenges with invective rather than discourse. The other day in the comments of one of my posts at Outside the Beltway a commenter lamented that I gave any “bandwidth” as he put it to the opinions of a columnist with whom he (and I) disagree. The answer to that is obvious: if you only air opinions with which you agree, you’re an echo chamber.

One of the posts of which I’m proudest is “Learning from history: the relief and rebuilding of New Orleans”. The post examined the prospects for New Orleans’s recovery through the prism of three historical natural disasters: the Chicago fire, the Galveston flood, and the San Francisco earthquake. In my view and sadly those involved with the rebuilding of New Orleans did not heed the lessons of history and, consequently, New Orleans’s recovery has not been as great as it might have been.

Another post of which I’m proud came a year later: “The influence of immigrants on American political thought”. It’s another historical reflection that considers the long-lasting political impact that the famine Irish and the Scandinavian immigrants of the later 19th century had on American politics along with some speculation about the influence that our latest wave of immigrants might have on our politics.

In the early years of this blog I was more predisposed to long, painstakingly researched, analytical pieces than I am now. I’ve learned those posts are entirely written for my own satisfaction—practically no one reads them. As ideas come to me I’ll probably write such posts in the future but don’t be surprised if they become less common with the passing years—I just don’t have the energy.

My most-read post is a joke: “The four types of dog vomit”. Many people don’t get it and many aren’t in a mood to get it. They’ve gone there looking for help with a vomiting dog. One of these days I should write a serious, follow-up post to that which actually provides some resources for people whose dogs are vomiting.

My next most-read post is a recipe: “How to poach a chicken breast”, a method I learned in a Chinese cooking class I took.

Over the years my blog’s traffic has waxed and waned. Right now it’s in a waning phase. I can’t honestly tell how much of that is due to the audience for my work actually dwindling and how much an illusion due to bots and comment spam once having been treated as legitimate readers that no longer are. 90% of the notional hits I get are either bots or comment spam. I use various methods of blocking or slowing them but the constant battle is very frustrating to me. I’d rather be writing substantive posts than blocking comment spam but it’s part of the cost of blogging these days. I consider comment spam a crime, stealing space and bandwidth that I pay for.

Do I wish my blog had more traffic? Of course I do. Do I want crude and thoughtless readers? Not particularly. All in all I guess I’m satisfied with how things are. I’ve accomplished every goal I set for myself with this blog, albeit at a very small scale.

I intend to continue posting at The Glittering Eye as long as I live which, if family history is any gauge, will be for decades into the future. And I’ll continue to post about what interests me: current events, politics, history, opera, food, dogs, geneaology, and anything else that strikes my fancy. That hasn’t changed since the very earliest days. Recently, I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a second more commercial blog that’s tangentially related to my area of professional expertise. At this point it’s in the research stage.

In closing, I’d like to express my profound gratitude for all of my readers, whether frequent commenters, family, friends, occasional silent visitors, or those who arrive here by accident never to return. Thank you all!

I do not think that a belief in God is necessary for a person to be moral. However, if this survey from Pew Research is to be believed, that puts me and many people in the richest countries in the world in a distinct minority from a global standpoint:

Many people around the world think it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person, according to surveys in 40 countries by the Pew Research Center. However, this view is more common in poorer countries than in wealthier ones.

In 22 of the 40 countries surveyed, clear majorities say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. This position is highly prevalent, if not universal, in Africa and the Middle East. At least three-quarters in all six countries surveyed in Africa say that faith in God is essential to morality. In the Middle East, roughly seven-in-ten or more agree in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, the Palestinian territories, Tunisia and Lebanon. Across the two regions, only in Israel does a majority think it is not necessary to believe in God to be an upright person.

Many people in Asia and Latin America also link faith and morality. For example, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Filipinos and Malaysians almost unanimously think that belief in God is central to having good values. People in El Salvador, Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela overwhelmingly agree. However, most Chinese take the opposite position – that it is not necessary to be a believer to be a moral person. And in Latin America, the Chileans and Argentines are divided.

The linked source has lot of interesting charts and graphs.

While I don’t think it’s necessary, I think that whether you believe in God or not it’s very difficult to be a moral person with the level of moral education that most Americans possess. Most of our moral educations are what we learned at our mothers’ knees. If that.

I don’t believe that moral conduct is natural to human beings (the Roman Catholic belief is that it’s natural but our present condition is unnatural) and it requires some work to gain an understanding of right conduct, work that most of us are unwilling to do.

For the first time the United States has earned a place on Reporters Without Borders’s “Enemies of the Internet” list:

This is the first time the US has made it onto RSF’s list. While the US government doesn’t censor online content, and pours money into promoting Internet freedom worldwide, the National Security Agency’s unapologetic dragnet surveillance and the government’s treatment of whistleblowers have earned it a spot on the index.

When you get a place on a list that includes Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, and Syria, I think that some reflection is called for. At the very least.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov remarked that there was “no common vision” between him and his American counterpart, Sec. of State John Kerry as their meeting on Ukraine broke up without results:

LONDON (AP) — Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that differences remain between Moscow and the U.S. following negotiations in London aimed at ending the crisis in Ukraine, whose strategic Crimea region is voting this weekend on whether to secede.

How I wish he had expanded on that! I would very much like to know what their respective visions are.

David Wright, the Director of the federal government’s Office of Research Integrity which monitors scientific misconduct in biochemical research, has announced his resignation because he can no longer put up with the stifling bureaucracy. ScienceInsider publishes his letter of resignation in full and there’s a paragraph that’s well worth reading:

The sociologist Max Weber observed in the early 20th century that while bureaucracy is in some instances an optimal organizational mode for a rationalized, industrial society, it has drawbacks. One is that public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves. This is exactly my experience with OASH. We spend exorbitant amounts of time in meetings and in generating repetitive and often meaningless data and reports to make our precinct of the bureaucracy look productive. None of this renders the slightest bit of assistance to ORI in handling allegations of misconduct or in promoting the responsible conduct of research. Instead, it sucks away time and resources that we might better use to meet our mission. Since I’ve been here I’ve been advised by my superiors that I had “to make my bosses look good.” I’ve been admonished: “Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.” Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to “lower my expectations.” The one thing no one in OASH leadership has said to me in two years is ‘how can we help ORI better serve the research community?’ Not once.

You would think that a lifetime spent working in academic institutions would have prepared him for mindbogglingly obtuse bureaucracy. Apparently not.

After this experience I predict that the number of scientost-investigators on ORI’s staff will be cut and its responsibilities expanded.

The most recent information on missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 suggests that either sabotage or hijack are likely possibilities:

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country’s northwest coast.

This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.

The last plot on the military radar’s tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India’s Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

[…]

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.

“What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards,” said that source, a senior Malaysian police official.

I wonder what the going rate for a Boeing 777 is these days.

I think that Dana Goldman and Sarah Axeen’s post at Forbes can be summarized like this:

1. The rate of increase in healthcare spending has slowed over the last couple of years.
2. The slowdown began before the ACA was enacted.
3. The slowing of the rate of increase was due to changes in Medicare.
4. Those changes had nothing to do with the PPACA.
5. The administration thinks so, too.

That would fully support the point I’ve been making for some time: the “doc fix” has promoted faster increases in healthcare spending than would otherwise have been the case.

However, I think they go off the rails here:

If—as the Administration argues—the only way to slow spending is through spillovers from Medicare to the private market, then we could have done without all the mandates, insurance exchanges and the like. To be fair, there is more to the ACA than slowing spending. It is supposed to cover the uninsured. But given the limited enrollment success to date, the Administration seems to be side-stepping that issue.

The Obama Administration had more eggs to fry than decreasing healthcare costs and some have even argued that decreasing healthcare costs was just a pretext for their other objectives. The most obvious objective is that they wanted more people to have healthcare insurance. Whether they’ve accomplished that remains to be seen. We’ll know soon enough. If the administration decides to make the data available.

At any rate we’ll soon be able to test their hypothesis:

Finally, and most important, 2014 will see an increase in spending as newly insured individuals with generous coverage seek new services. As a projected 7 million individuals gain insurance coverage through the health insurance exchanges and 9 million through Medicaid expansions, spending on health will grow at faster rates. The most recent CBO projections show new direct government spending of $23 billion for subsidies and other related spending. That does not include private and out-of-pocket spending by individuals on these services. The slowdown in spending trumpeted by the Administration, while important, will be short-lived. The lower Medicare spending growth and hopes of spillovers to the private sector cannot offset the growth in spending that will result from these newly insured individuals.

As I’ve been saying, we’ve had insurance reform now we need healthcare reform.