CYBERWAR PUSHBACK: Kremlin gets DDoS’d by Anonymous Caucasus.

JOE PAPPALARDO: What Can the U.S. Do If Russia Attacks Ukraine? Give Poland and Lithuania nukes. And a lot of other stuff that Putin would find painful, and possibly fatal. But what will we do? A strongly-worded demarche, at most.

AMAZON TOUTS how it’s helping small businesses. All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

A UKRAINIAN OUTSIDE-THE-BOX RESPONSE TO A RUSSIAN INVASION: Paint some tanks to look American. During the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, everything came to a halt when American-flagged tanks were sighted, before it was discovered that they were part of a movie being filmed. Tanks with American, and German, appearance — even papier-mache ones on truck bodies — would create great confusion at low cost. . . .

NOMADISM WITH ALL THE MODERN CONVENIENCES: So there is a Cruise Ship where Residents Permanently Live as it Travels the World.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: Missing Airliner Apparently Flew to Central Asia. Could the Passengers Still Be Alive?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 310.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Obamacare Co-Ops Exploit Dodgy Pricing.

You can read this development in two ways. One is as the surprising success of an innovative business model. And the other is as a potential fiscal disaster.

My general understanding of health insurance markets is that they are very, very tightly priced. If a policy is significantly cheaper, it’s either because the policy offers fewer benefits, its provider networks are miserly, or the insurance company has found a way to select for unusually healthy patients. (My favorite example of this in recent years was the Medicare Advantage policies that prominently advertised free gym memberships. You can imagine which seniors this benefit appeals to.)

And maybe that’s what the Obamacare phones are for. An insurer with 80 percent of the state market, however, cannot be lowering its prices through cherry-picking patients. My understanding is that most of the exchange policies offer relatively thin networks compared with the policies that are sold to employers, or individuals off the exchange, so that’s unlikely to be the full explanation, either. And what with all the mandates, an insurance company can’t be offering dramatically reduced benefits, either.

Which suggests a worrying alternative possibility — that the inexperienced co-ops have systematically priced their policies too low. That could hit the taxpayer in two ways: through the risk-corridor payments, which will make up excess losses, and through the $2.1 billion worth of government loans that have been made to these insurers.

Well, that would seem par for the course, wouldn’t it?

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: You Really Can Predict the ‘Marrying Type’ — Attractive, agreeable, and clean people are more likely to get married. Surprise?

AT AMAZON, deals galore in the Spring Outlet Event.

Also, find out what your gadgets are worth.

MICHAEL BARONE: Lower crime now may be a fruit of welfare reform 20 years ago.

JAMES TARANTO: No Country for Old Men: Now there’s a call on the left for Justice Breyer to retire.

Back in 2011 this column noted that some liberals were anxious to get rid of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Their concern wasn’t jurisprudential but actuarial: They feared that Ginsburg, then 78, might outlast President Obama but not President Romney, and they didn’t want a Republican nominating her successor.

Ginsburg, whose 81st birthday is tomorrow, is still in office, and so is Obama. This week Bloomberg View’s Jonathan Bernstein renewed the call for her departure, as well as that of Justice Stephen Breyer, now 75. (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan shouldn’t get too smug; their time will come.)

The argument now is that Republicans appear set to capture a Senate majority in November, or, as Bernstein delicately puts it, “there is simply no way of knowing whether Democrats will maintain a majority.” He adds that “there’s also no way of knowing when the next Democratic presidential victory might be.”

In truth, everyone knows it might be in 2016, but you see his point. From a partisan standpoint, there’s a realistic prospect that this year will turn out to be Ginsburg’s and even Breyer’s last opportunity to retire while Democrats hold both the White House and a Senate majority.

“Ginsburg and Breyer might not prefer a Supreme Court that is highly partisan and ideologically divided, in which retirements are strategic moves,” Bernstein concludes. “But that’s the court they’ve got. If they care about the principles they’ve fought for, they should retire in time for confirmation battles this year.” Following his advice would be unseemly, he acknowledges, but it’s worth it. The ends justify the ends of their careers.

Rampant ageism.

WHAT THE KITTY GENOVESE STORY REALLY MEANS:

If crimes don’t involve anyone powerful or well known, they generally aren’t considered news. But a few such crimes do become news, big news, and hold the public’s imagination in a tight, enduring grip.

An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times. . . .

It’s evidence of a kind of editorial genius that Rosenthal, by playing the story in the way that he did, was able to get such a reaction. The tabloids had treated it simply as a sensational tale of urban violence. The Times made sure that its apathetic-witness angle would land by prominently displaying the story on its front page. The murder now stood for a profoundly disturbing sociological trend. The key line in Gansberg’s story came from one of the witnesses (none of whom were named), who said, “I didn’t want to get involved.” . . .

It’s now clear that this version of events is wrong, thanks to a number of Genovese revisionists who have emerged over the years. They include Jim Rasenberger, a journalist who has written a couple of influential articles about the case, notably one in the Times, in 2004; and Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, the authors of a 2007 article in American Psychologist (which quotes from, and debunks, the textbook rendering). The essential facts are these. Winston Moseley had been out in his car, looking for a victim, when he came across Genovese driving home from work. He followed her. She parked at the Kew Gardens train station, adjacent to her apartment. Moseley parked, too, and attacked her with a hunting knife. She screamed, and a man named Robert Mozer opened his window and shouted, “Leave that girl alone!” Moseley ran away. Genovese, wounded but not mortally, staggered to the back of her apartment building and went inside a vestibule. Moseley returned, found her, and attacked again, stabbing her and assaulting her sexually. He fled again before she died.

The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene—precisely because neighbors had called for help—Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled.

Insider Timesman lunches with police bigshot, publishes version of story that lets police off the hook, does incalculable damage to national psyche. All in a day’s work. . . .

JAMES LILEKS: Nobody Likes Malls, Except The Customers.

So it’s great when suburbs die! Except they’re not dying. A recent story in my local paper noted how the first-ring suburbs are great bargains for young people, which makes them cool again. So: Twenty-somethings in 1962 with two kids and a house full of Danish Modern furniture with push-button appliances and a Siamese ceramic cat on the mantle: the oppressive falsehood of the postwar American dream. Twenty-somethings with the same house in 2014, the same decor (they’re into mid-century design), and two pugs: the salvation of urban America, because the style section can do a piece that includes the phrases “lovingly restored” and “Josh works as a web designer for a nonprofit.”

Josh may go to the mall, but rest assured he’ll have the proper attitude: Here I am, ironically inhabiting the lifestyle of suburbanites, when I’m really the sort of guy who’s planning a Kickstarter campaign for my artisanal-shaving-cream company. We’re going to use fair-trade sustainable eucalyptus.

But he’ll go to the mall when the pugs are replaced by kids and they need something to do on a dreary February Tuesday, and everyone needs diversion. He’ll find himself in the food court, the tots fighting over a pretzel, the anodyne music leaking from speakers overhead, an Apple Store bag at his feet. Then one of the kids spies the ride that takes a quarter and lets you pretend you’re driving a car.

I have become my father, he thinks, and realizes that’s actually a good thing.

Read it all. It’s Lileks.

WITH LESSONS FOR EVERYONE ELSE: 5 Ways The Government Keeps Native Americans In Poverty.

FASTER, PLEASE: 3D Printing Technology Helps Doctors Rebuild Man’s Face After Horrible Motorcycle Accident.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE: Europa’s Water Geysers Entice Scientists to Send a Probe—but Can NASA Do It on the Cheap?

THIS SOUNDS PROMISING: Gel Protects Monkeys From H.I.V. After Sex, Study Finds. But it’s a vaginal gel. Men, apparently, are on their own.

HEADLINES LIKE THIS REMIND ME THAT I’M LIVING IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Desktop quantum cloud to hunt elusive space-time waves.

AT AMAZON, deals on Luggage & Travel Essentials. Nice luggage does make traveling easier.

Plus, deals on Dyson fans. Summer is coming.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: FBI Blocked In Harry Reid Corruption Probe.

FALSE RAPE CHARGES: ‘These girls are vicious and greedy’: Premier League star who was cleared of gang rape hits out at women who he claims target wealthy footballers. Well, when there’s a big payoff and no consequences — note the story doesn’t even mention the false-accuser’s name — some people will act badly.

VIRAL KISSING VIDEO ACTUALLY A CLOTHES AD: “The video peddles the fantasy that beauty can spring from an unexpected connection between two random people, but what it’s really showing us is the beauty of models making out. It’s like the hipster Bachelor. I doubt that millions of viewers would be so quick to celebrate a video of randos kissing if they were all less thin, hip, stylish, charming, and well-manicured.”

DO SMALL SATELLITES MAKE FOR MORE SPACE JUNK? It depends on how they’re deployed.