Nuclear Experts Head to China to Test Experimental Reactors - Bloomberg:
“China by a very large margin is the largest market in the world for new power plants of any type,” said Charles W. Forsberg, a professor at MIT. “If we do not get our act together, the low-carbon energy business will be owned by the Chinese.”Yup.
There is a lot to consider in this, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Lest I create the false impression of a disjointed argument, please note that these are just a few bones taken from a beautifully articulated skeleton. The First White President:
After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment and economic reversal has become de rigeur among white pundits and thought leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed.
Trump’s white support was not determined by income... Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly [emph. added] every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31).
And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.
Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating premises—white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else—lived on.
“A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country. “It is a voice that has been silent too long,” Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law.”
It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and Bill Myers had been run out of Levittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin Luther King Jr. had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquette Park. But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible.I suspect all of the above is just background, to enable the reader to see in a new light the material to come: I've just reached the point where Mr. Coates begins recounting statements of the (all-white) Democratic candidates in the 2016 Presidential election. Recommended reading.
