21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Opto-thermoelectric Nanotweezers on path to commercialized nano-particle manipulators integrated to smartphones.

REVIEW: ‘Chappaquiddick’ is a long-overdue dismantling of the Kennedy myth.

As portrayed by Jason Clarke, the young senator is a venal, self-pitying coward, thoughtless and remorseless, ambition his only care. He treats loyalists and groupies with equal contempt, and as the weekend begins, he toasts them all for “wanting to prove yourselves worthy of . . . the Kennedy name.”

It’s clear the filmmakers are in on this joke.

We next see Kennedy leaving the party with the young Mary Jo Kopechne, who had worked for Bobby Kennedy and was still mourning his death. The film depicts Ted as drinking and driving before his black Oldsmobile 88 flies off a small wooden bridge and into a pond, crash-landing upside down.

According to contemporaneous accounts, the tide was dead low, the water only 5 or 6 feet deep. Both of the passenger-side windows were blown out. Kennedy later testified that Mary Jo might have been hitting or kicking him in her frantic struggle to escape. He claimed to have gone back under for her six or seven times but there is no proof. He was seen at 2:25 a.m. in dry clothes by a hotel desk clerk.

The fact that it took nearly 50 years for a movie like this to get made tells you everything you need to know about the power of the Kennedys and the complicity of Hollywood.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Social Media’s Troubles Grow and Much, Much More.

UPDATE: Missing CDC Employee Timothy Cunningham Found Dead Two Months After He Vanished.

Timothy Cunningham, a 35-year-old Harvard-educated leader within the nation’s health protection agency, was found dead late Tuesday night in the Chattahoochee River, which runs near his home, police said Thursday. A medical examiner identified his remains and said the cause of death was drowning.

Police said there is currently no indication that foul play was involved, and there were no signs of trauma on his body to indicate he died of anything but drowning.

“Barring new information coming forward, we may never be able to tell you how he got into the river,” Major Michael O’Connor of the Atlanta Police Department said at a press conference on Thursday. “We just don’t have those answers at this time.”

His job and the suddenness of his disappearance made this an odd case from the start, and now it seems we might never have answers.

SOCIALISM IN SEVEN WORDS: ‘It feels like we’re all dying slowly.’

After six years of studying and working part-time jobs, Cristian Diaga, 24, will soon graduate from medical school in Caracas, Venezuela. But instead of continuing his training in a top hospital in the country, as he had hoped, he is taking a job in a fast-food restaurant in Argentina – a situation he says is much more preferable.

“I do feel bad leaving. I think everyone would like to give something back to their country, but right now it is my life and future and all my possibilities to help my family to get out of this madness,” he says.

More than half of Venezuelans between 15 and 29 want to move abroad permanently, according to a poll carried out by the US firm Gallup and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

“In Venezuela, it feels like we are all just dying slowly and there’s no hope for a change. I don’t care if I’m gonna work as a doctor or not. I just want to have food, medicines, security, a house, a car, and be able to give a good life to my loved ones,” he says.

Flipping burgers in Argentina is preferable to and more profitable than practicing medicine in Venezuela.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scott Pruitt is the greatest-ever Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the Obama era especially, the EPA was used to advance an anti-market agenda in the guise of environmental correctness. Obama’s various federal clean air regulations, for example, were justified by supposedly expert testimony from the EPA that fine particles of soot in the atmosphere were killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

But there was no real evidence for this. Essentially the ‘proof’ had been rigged by parti-pris activist scientists at the EPA – who were permitted to keep their data and methodology secret so that they could not be found wanting in independent experiments.

Hence the new rule just introduced by Scott Pruitt that from now on the EPA cannot engage in “secret science”. Whatever side of the political debate you’re on, this ought to be a good thing: Pruitt is just insisting on something which should have been EPA policy from the start – rigorous observation of the scientific method (part of which stipulates that for any experiment to be valid it must, of necessity, be reproducible).

Pruitt is never going to get any credit for this, either from the greens or the left (not that there’s really much difference). That’s because his opponents recognise it as yet another assault by the Trump administration on the “consensus” science of the Climate Industrial Complex.

The “party of science” is actually the party of “science.”

I HAD BEEN EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Did You Hear That? NASA Orders A Boomless Supersonic Jet.

NASA has just commissioned Lockheed Martin to design and build a new supersonic jet that could cut existing air travel times in half. In fact, if you flew one between, say, Milwaukee and Chicago, you might arrive before you left.

The new X-craft is called the LBFD for Low Boom Flight Demonstrator and it’s scheduled to fly by 2022. NASA awarded the $247.5 million contract this week.

It came only two weeks after President Trump signed the massive federal budget for the remainder of this fiscal year. Trump said the new plane “would open a new market for U.S. companies to build faster commercial airliners, creating jobs and cutting cross-country flight times in half.” It contained full funding.

Before flying commercially, NASA and Lockheed Martin must convince the Federal Aviation Administration and the International Civil Aviation Organization that they’ve reduced a supersonic jet’s loud boom to a softer, muffled one.

Not quite “90 minutes from New York to Paris,” but it would certainly be usable on far more routes than the Concorde was.

J.D. TUCCILLE: Don’t Look to the State to Keep Social Media Companies From Imposing Ideological Conformity.

Last week, former Google manager William Echikson wrote that his old employer has shifted from efforts in favor of free speech to trying “to convince authorities in Europe and elsewhere that the internet giant is serious about cracking down on illegal content. The more takedowns it can show, the better.” He added that out of eagerness to comply with increasingly draconian directives to suppress unpleasant and inconvenient messages, “legal content is being censored.”

Germany introduced a new Internet censorship law last year which requires cooperation from social media companies, and France and the UK are also tightening their online efforts against “hate speech.”

Picking up on our own President Trump’s insistence that hostile media outlets should be punished for spreading “fake news,” Malaysia plans prison terms for spreading “fake news” as defined by government officials.

And online publishers across the United States are busy shutting down sexually related online forums and even personals out of fear of the legal penalties against “sex trafficking” in the FOSTA bill.

That’s a big reason why we shouldn’t look to governments for solutions to the problem of social media companies imposing ideological conformity. It’s annoying when a social media site sidelines your politically incorrect post or boots you for an off-color joke. But when government agencies exercise muzzling power, they impose fines and jail time.

Governments may not target speech for the same reasons as tech-industry smugsters, but they do so vigorously, and with nastier tools.

“Celebrate diversity” always seems to devolve into “enforce conformity.”

JUSTICE: Chinese Scientist Gets 10 Years for Swiping GMO Rice in Ag Espionage. “In summer 2013, officials from a crop research institute in China visited the U.S., got facility tours and tried to smuggle stolen seeds out of the country.”

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Jimmy Kimmel and Joss Whedon Sure Are Brave to Criticize the Trumps.

FEATURE CREEP: Your Nosy Amazon Alexa Can Now Interrogate You.

BLUE WAVE? DNC Quietly Adds Another 160K In Debt, Bringing Total Debt To $6.3 Million.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: YouTube Shooting Highlights Frustration Among Some ‘Creators.’ “Some independent video makers complain YouTube has limited their viewership and shortchanged them on ad payments.”

As the number of creators has grown and uploaded a wider range of videos, advertisers have grown more skittish about putting their messages next to what they deem objectionable content. Top brands including Procter & Gamble Co. pulled spending from the site last year after discovering YouTube running their ads before extremist, racist and hateful videos.

In response, YouTube last year began requiring video producers to have more than 10,000 views from their combined videos before they can start making any money from ads. The company also hired more human reviewers to vet videos, removing clips or entire accounts they see as violating their terms of service.

YouTube prohibits nudity, violence, and other categories of content it deems potentially harmful or dangerous. Its terms also restrict copyrighted content and personal information uploaded without consent.

Earlier this year, YouTube raised the bar even more for its video creators that want to carry ads. Rather than 10,000 views, YouTube channels must now have accumulated at least 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. YouTube said a “significant” number of channels would be affected but declined to provide more details. The company said nearly all affected channels make less than $100 a year in ad revenue.

The changes had little impact on YouTube’s most popular stars, some who make more than $100,000 on a single video, including sponsorships, according to Evan Asano, chief executive of Mediakix, a marketing agency for YouTube creators. But the new policies cut tens of thousands of smaller video makers off from getting paid, Mr. Asano said.

Some of them, like Chris Thompson, said the company has gone too far in removing content without being clear about what rules it violates.

Indeed. YouTube has been deplatforming countless conservatives without cause or explanation — and yet it was a lone progressive who went on a shooting spree.

WELL, GOOD: “Nightmare” superbugs continue to lurk in US, but control efforts working. “Scary headlines, but 2006-15 data show declines in prevalence of these nasty germs.”

HANDICAPPING THE MIDTERMS: A reminder that all politics is indeed local — and often loco, too.

SHE’S LOSING IT: Hillary Blames James Comey And Pizzagate For 2016 Loss In Bizarre New Talk.

There’s video at the link, but it’s a wince-inducing challenge to watch the whole thing.

YA THINK? Vets say Air Force should have allowed retirement speech that mentioned God.

I HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS: Train Carrying 10M Pounds of Poop Stuck in Alabama Town.

BUT I HAD BEEN ASSURED HE WAS AN AUTHORITARIAN MADMAN: Trump National Guard Border Plan to Look Like Bush, Obama Deployments.

FACEBOOK CLAIM: ‘Malicious actors’ used its tools to discover identities and collect data on a massive global scale.

Facebook said Wednesday that “malicious actors” took advantage of search tools on its platform, making it possible for them to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide.

The revelation came amid rising acknowledgement by Facebook about its struggles to control the data it gathers on users. Among the announcements Wednesday was that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy hired by President Trump and other Republicans, had improperly gathered detailed Facebook information on 87 million people, of whom 71 million were Americans.

But the abuse of Facebook’s search tools — now disabled — happened far more broadly and over the course of several years, with few Facebook users likely escaping the scam, company officials acknowledged.

The problem is the platform and the platform is Facebook.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Have Christian nationalists staged a “soft coup,” with Trump as their figurehead?

Forget it, Jake — it’s Salon.

HMM: Turkey-Russia ties move beyond tactical.

This dialogue has had three main results so far: First, Turkey has had to accept the remaining of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, prompting a radical change in its policy. Ankara has also had to acknowledge that both Iran and Russia have put down their roots in Syria for a very long time, both politically and militarily.

Second, Turkey’s alignment with the Russia-Iran duo in Syria has led to a further souring of its ties with its traditional Western allies, namely the United States. Moscow’s permission for Turkey’s fight against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Afrin worsened a crisis between Ankara and Washington, whose ties were already strained over several other sources of tension. Strong-worded criticisms also came from European powers, which have questioned the real motives of the Turkish military campaign in Syria. Despite these reactions, Turkey now feels freer to launch new operations in eastern Syria at the expense of further risking its ties with NATO partners. Turkey’s plans to procure S-400 anti-ballistic missile systems from Russia should also be evaluated with this in mind.

Thirdly, cooperation with Russia paved the way for Turkey to become a hard power in its region. Turkish troops are currently in the Idlib, Afrin and al-Bab regions of northwestern Syria, with the government vowing that the next targets will be east of the Euphrates and even northern Iraq.

Putin gets what he wants: Assad stays in power and Russia enjoys a position in the Arab Middle East it hasn’t had since the mid-’70s; and Erdogan gets to indulge his neo-Ottoman fantasies in northern Mesopotamia.

RETREAT: Most Migrants Plan to Stay in Mexico as Caravan Stalls Far from U.S. Border. “Only ‘a small handful of migrants with strong claims for asylum’ will continue on.”

I wonder what changed their minds…

COLLUSION! Trump administration to impose fresh sanctions against Russia.

VOX: It’s time to think seriously about cutting off the supply of fossil fuels.

Policies that choke off fossil fuels at their origin — shutting down mines and wells; banning new ones; opting against new pipelines, refineries, and export terminals — have been embraced by climate activists, picking up steam with the Keystone pipeline protests and the recent direct action of the Valve Turners.

But they are looked upon with some disdain by the climate intelligentsia, who are united in their belief that such strategies are economically suboptimal and politically counterproductive.

Now a pair of economists has offered a cogent argument that the activists are onto something — that restrictive supply-side (RSS) climate policies have unique economic and political benefits and deserve a place alongside carbon prices and renewable energy supports in the climate policy toolkit.

In other words, a tacit — if lengthy — admission that they’ve lost the debate.

Or as David Harsanyi quipped: “Green energy is so popular, cost efficient, and moral! that we must cut off your access to fossil fuels to make you buy it.”