The Rape of the Crimea is now complete with a sham referendum that has codified the transfer of that region from the Ukraine to Russia. President Obama has been reduced to sputtering impotently promising this or that vague consequences.

The American Spectator recalls a crucial part of President Ronald Reagan's strategy that won the Cold War and suggests that it become one of those consequences. That would be to bend every effort to lower the price of oil and gas. Russian depends on exports of these two commodities to fuel its war machine and lubricate its imperial pretensions.

The idea is that the Obama administration could reverse its five year plus policy and start drilling with abandon and then exporting the excess product to Europe in order to undercut Russian oil and gas. Putin is riding high with the price of a barrel of crude at about $100 or so a barrel. He would be in big trouble is the price were to be, instead, $20 a barrel.

The policy would have a number of happy side effects, cutting off a source of income to Islamist terrorists and rogue regimes like Venezuela as well as providing a boost to the American economy. Imagine paying around $2 a gallon for gasoline and having one's utility bills cut by a substantial amount. With energy costs declining, the American economy would finally start to recover.

The same sort of thing happened in the 1980s, as low energy prices helped to fuel the Reagan recovery while pinching off income to the Soviet Union. It could happen again.

Unfortunately the current president, captive as he is to his own ideology, is not likely to follow his predecessor's winning strategy. That is why the next two and a half years are likely to be long and depressing. That is why Reagan is a world historic figure and Obama will always be a warning of what happens when someone like that is given power.

The media is in a frenzy over the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Was it hijacked? Did it crash into the ocean? Did the captain or copilot take over the flight? According to CNN, the latest in a long string of theories is that the flight may have landed on a remote island chain in the Indian Ocean, based on data that the airliner's engines were still operating hours after communications from the cockpit ceased and that the big jet was unexpectedly changing course. As the investigation into the vanishing of Flight 370 continues many commentators have questioned why, in 2014, an expensive airliner could have simply gone missing.
With today's modern technology, why not simply have all cockpit data, especially audio, sent straight to computer servers and recorded? This would provide a real-time record of what flight crews were doing or experiencing. Pilots could be heard snoozing on the job, arguing, struggling with equipment, or behaving strangely, alerting airlines to the possibility that their ultra-expensive jets, and the safety of hundreds of passengers, were in jeopardy. Or, at the very least, if something bad did happen investigators wouldn't have to comb the ocean for a black box - they could pull up the audio files from the flight.

Sure, this technology might be expensive up front, but could save airlines millions by reducing the number of pilot-related accidents. Incompetent or unprofessional pilots could be detected early based on their cockpit audio and confusing or ineffective equipment or flight protocols could be discovered by hearing pilots' confusion or frustration. Constantly-recorded cockpit audio could help researchers and engineers discover ways to improve commercial flight and pilot training.

Pilots would likely chafe at the notion of being constantly recorded on the job but, given the enormity of their tasks, such surveillance is justified, especially if commonsense limits protecting pilots from abusive termination policies are implemented. To protect pilots, FAA regulations should limit the use of in-cockpit audio recordings for employment purposes and should only allow them to be used retroactively, as part of investigations into incidents, as part of independent flight research where pilot anonymity is protected, or as part of probationary pilot training and performance review.

Though we want to promote safety and professionalism in the air, we don't want good pilots to be fired or demoted for uttering untoward language occasionally, enjoying a joke with colleagues, or speaking heatedly during times of stress and inclement conditions.

With many other professions dealing with increased digital oversight, ranging from police officers and their in-dash cameras, office workers and Internet tracking software, and teachers constantly at risk of being recorded by students, pilots should expect, and accept, greater oversight in the cockpit.