IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Half of the universe’s missing normal matter has been found.

IT’S THE ZUNE OF SMARTPHONES: Windows Phone is now officially dead: A sad tale of what might have been.

PARTY OF THE WORKING MAN: Majority of Households Paying Obamacare Penalty Are Low and Middle-Income.

This isn’t an unexpected result, given that there are far fewer wealthy people and that they’re far less likely to have to make the difficult financial choice between, say, buying insurance or making the rent.

But it certainly wasn’t discussed much during the faux debate over ObamaCare, or during the law’s slapdash implementation under Barack Obama.

CRISPR IS LOOKING LIKE A TRUE REVOLUTION: Arming Bodies with CRISPR to Fight Huntington’s Disease and ALS: The editing tool normally targets DNA, but scientists are aiming it at a different molecule.

LONE GUNMAN: After reviewing 200 instances when Paddock was spotted around Vegas before the shooting, sheriff said he’s “never been seen with anyone else.”

SAY, HAVE WE HEARD FROM JIMMY KIMMEL YET? Harvey Weinstein Caught on Tape by NYPD Admitting to Groping.

Related: A-listers Who Worked With Harvey Weinstein Denounce His ‘Vile’ History of Alleged Sexual Harassment. So it’s probably safe for Jimmy to say something now. Hey, maybe even Hillary and Barack will break their silence.

UPDATE: Three Women Accuse Weinstein of Rape.

DOUBLING DOWN: Identity politics isn’t the problem for Democrats. It’s the solution.

EUGENE ROBINSON: Our Democracy Could Be Sunk by a President Adrift.

If we stipulate Robinson’s assertion, it’s mostly an indication that we’ve invested far too much power in the executive branch.

FUNNY THING ABOUT DEMOCRATS: The Weinstein Silence. Comics pretend they speak truth to power, but on late-night TV that’s limited to mocking Trump and other Republicans. Which is not exactly a profile in courage, as Bob McManus writes in City Journal:

In the absence of personal risk, haranguing the powerful can be soul-satisfying, and sometimes it forges careers, but it isn’t brave by a long shot. Thomas More spoke truth to Henry VIII, and it cost him his head. Dietrich Bonheoffer spoke truth to Adolf Hitler and was hanged in a concentration camp. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke truth to the Soviet Union and suffered grievously for it. Stephen Colbert piddled on the president’s rug, and he’s been cashing big-bucks checks ever since. See the difference?

Their sense of humor mysteriously vanishes when a Democrat like Harvey Weinstein is involved:

Weinstein caught no grief came from late-night wisecrackers. Colbert was dumb as a post on the topic for days, breaking silence only after Weinstein had been fired—and even then, only to call him “a bad guy.” His late-night colleagues in calumny weren’t any better. Saturday Night Live invented slow-motion political character assassination with its over-the-top post-Watergate treatment of Gerald Ford, and the show has been gleefully tormenting politicians of a certain party ever since (and Bill Clinton, for his Oval Office shenanigans). But SNL had nothing to say about Weinstein over the weekend. Lorne Michaels, the show’s top producer, dismissed the scandal as “a New York thing” early Sunday morning.

Nobody reasonably expects political balance in a comedy sketch—how boring would that be?—and it is generally understood that Hollywood, and the media in general, descended into a progressive sinkhole long ago. So ignoring Weinstein’s agony is not surprising, ideologically—not to mention his storied ability to vaporize careers. There’s no appetite in show biz to speak truth to that kind of power.

Now that Hollywood is finally turning on Weinstein, expect the late-night comics to bravely join the mob.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: PBS’ The Vietnam War Miseducates America.

There’s a lot to chew on, but the most telling stuff is in this graf:

Both programs depict Ho Chi Minh as more of a nationalist than a communist, but never seriously address the question of why such a “nationalist” would wage a war of aggression against his own people in the name of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and why the communist regime that conquered South Vietnam in Ho’s name imprisoned its perceived political enemies in gulags, sent tens of thousands to re-education camps, and produced hundreds of thousands of “boat people,” who risked and often lost their lives in an effort to flee from the communists.

The horrors of Communism always seem to get swept under the rug, don’t they?

WHY SOME SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS are tired of dystopias.

I wrote a related piece for Popular Mechanics a while back.

ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM IS THE FIRST STEP: Naysayers will invariably discount anything James O’Keefe records, but this recording from Project Veritas is yet more grist for the mill about why legacy media is trusted about as much as used car salesmen (or lawyers). I really don’t mind ex-campaign staffers working for news organizations, but when they are so brazen about applying their agenda as editorial gatekeepers…

Dudich goes on to explain what he might do to target President Trump:

“I’d target his businesses, his dumb fuck of a son, Donald Jr., and Eric…Get people to boycott going to his hotels. Boycott… So a lot of the Trump brands, if you can ruin the Trump brand and you put pressure on his business and you start investigating his business and you start shutting it down, or they’re hacking or other things. He cares about his business more than he cares about being President. He would resign. Or he’d lash out and do something incredibly illegal, which he would have to.”

When the undercover journalist asks Dudich if he could make sure that the anti-Trump stories make it to the front, he replied, “Oh, we always do.” Now to be fair, it might be a simple case of a low-level nobody talking smack and trying to impress someone and overstating his importance. But it’s a good thing they have a Public Editor  to sort this out. Oh, wait…

FIGHTING THE KOREAN INFORMATION WAR: The Trump Administration’s information warfare operation has strategic traction. Even The Washington Post has noticed.

TURNABOUT: Israel ought to offer her services to Spain and the EU as an “honest broker,” and negotiate an end to the Catalonian crisis on the basis of “land for peace.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump space plans could restore U.S. optimism. It worked for Columbus and Europe.

BREXIT BLUES: A year ago I wrote that the UK and the EU were in a prisoners’ dilemma over Brexit. As negotiations grind to a halt and a “No Deal” Brexit is looking more likely, that still seems to be the case. There’s clearly a win-win position here, but the EU side especially doesn’t seem interested in it. More on this from Julian Jessop, the Chief Economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, at the Telegraph (free registration required).

CHARLIE DUNLAP ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND WAR: What is the “First Tool of 21st Century Warfare” and what can we do about it?

HARDBALL: Spanish Police Set To Arrest Catalan Leader “Immediately” If He Declares Independence.

The word yesterday was that Catalan President Carles Puigdemont plans to declare a “gradual” independence, which sounds a little like Brexit although perhaps with less Cabinet infighting. But if Madrid is serious about stopping Puigdemont, there can’t be anything gradual about his arrest and/or crackdown.

MAYBE UNIVERSITIES SHOULDN’T TRY TO BE GLOBAL ENTERPRISES: Academic Freedom in an Era of Globalization.

Not surprisingly, this growing dependence on outside funding has been criticized for weakening the technocratic university’s commitment to academic freedom.

This is not just disturbing in the domestic context. It is also troubling in the global context. For example, some of America’s leading universities have in recent years agreed to help authoritarian regimes build their own state-of-the-art research facilities. There are, for example, several medical school satellites of U.S. institutions—Duke’s partnership with Singapore was one of the first of these, dating to 2005. One of the most prominent non-medical examples of these ventures is the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, developed in cooperation with MIT. Masdar wears the benign aspect of a richly resourced institution devoted to finding new sources of sustainable energy. But given the lack of transparency in the Persian Gulf kingdoms, not to mention the susceptibility of American researchers to flattery and especially generosity, it is not hard to imagine some dubious outcomes.

An even greater challenge arises when an American university agrees to plant a full-fledged liberal arts college in authoritarian soil. Three prominent examples would be NYU-Abu Dhabi; NYU-Shanghai (developed in cooperation with East China Normal University); and Yale-NUS (a partnership between Yale and the National University of Singapore). Because these transplants do not confine themselves to science and technology, it seems inevitable that their commitment to academic freedom will be tested.

So far, the record is mixed, with NYU and Yale both trying to sidestep the fact that their overseas partners do not share the assumption, deeply ingrained in U.S. higher education, that there is a necessary connection between liberal arts education and democratic citizenship. In the case of NYU, Sexton is on record saying, “I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression. These are two different things.”

Uh huh.

THE BAD HEADLINE: Oil rises to $56 on Saudi export cut.

But under the headline, this: “In the United States, some production remains offline following Hurricane Nate, lending additional support.”

Yes, oil prices are up — but only up to about half of where OPEC would really like them to be, and even that hike might be artificially (and temporarily) inflated by Hurricane Nate.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student protesters shut down University of Oregon president’s speech to ‘stand against fascism.’

AND NOW YOU KNOW…THE REST OF THE STORY: The Reality of Women’s Lives Under the U.S.S.R. — The part the New York Times left out.

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