Solar Power Is Booming in Emerging Markets

By Haley Zaremba - Sep 01, 2026

• Romania's solar installations jumped 45 percent in 2025 while the rest of Europe barely grew, thanks to early investment in battery storage.
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• Pakistan is adding rooftop solar and batteries faster than any other market on Earth as residents bypass a failing national grid.
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• Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya and Namibia have all overtaken the United States in their clean energy transitions.
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Solar energy is going gangbusters. The world is adding photovoltaic solar panels at a blistering rate, shattering its own records year after year, buoyed by a flood of ever-cheaper solar panels out of China. “We have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world,” NewScientist wrote in an article published late last year. “Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything?”

But the growth of solar power is uneven around the globe, with some regions seeing a rapid transformation while others see their numbers plateauing. Interestingly, it is some of the world’s poorest countries that are now leading the solar revolution, while some of the richest and most avid champions of the clean energy transition are lagging behind.

“Europe likes to think of itself as a champion of renewable energy, the Economist wrote in an August report, when in reality, solar additions in 2025 barely topped those of 2024, and in 2026 “new deployments are set to fall in every big EU country except Italy.”

Europe’s solar slowdown is in large part thanks to the constraints of the continent’s energy grid. During peak production hours, the grid is overly congested and lacks sufficient energy storage, leading to energy wastage, negative energy prices, and even the threat of grid failure and catastrophic blackouts, such as the one that took almost all of Spain and Portugal offline in 2025. European leaders are racing to add storage capacity to the grid in order to address these mounting issues and avoid yet another energy crisis, but in the meantime, adding even more solar to the overloaded grid will only serve to intensify these issues.

But one dark horse country managed to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to energy storage development, and is therefore now emerging as a surprise solar frontrunner in 2026. “Unlike many western European countries, Romania is deploying storage relatively early in its solar build-out, rather than trying to catch up after large amounts of solar capacity have already been installed,” Antonio Arruebo, an analyst at SolarPower Europe, told the Economist. Much of this growth comes in the form of small-scale and residential solar-plus-battery systems. As a result of the steady growth of these much smaller capacity additions, Romania managed to see a 45 percent increase in solar installations in 2025, while the rest of Europe barely eked out any growth at all.

“At the start of Europe’s solar revolution, the impulse was to get panels deployed by all means. As the industry matures, countries need to strike a balance between generating capacity and storage,” the Economist writes. “Romania looks like a model.”

But Romania is not alone in this approach – nor in its success. Around the globe, some of the world’s poorest countries are seeing unprecedented gains in solar energy capacity growth thanks to solar-plus-battery systems. In recent years, emerging economies including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya, and Namibia have all overtaken the United States – the world’s largest economy – in their clean energy transitions.

“Some countries are pulling off stunningly fast energy transitions, adding solar so rapidly, it’s become a major source of electricity over the course of years — not decades,” reports CNN. Pakistan has become the surprise poster child of this movement over the past couple of years as residents install rooftop solar and batteries faster than any other market on Earth. Pakistanis are rapidly adopting these systems to provide electricity more cheaply and reliably than the country’s beleaguered energy infrastructure.

Globally, solar power adoption is no longer a matter of climate policy – it’s going gangbusters thanks to its essential and growing contribution to energy security and simple economics. Solar is now the cheapest form of energy on Earth, while also representing the clearest pathway forward to energy autonomy and resilience, especially for smaller and growing economies that need to shield themselves from the whipsaw geopolitical climate in which they have vanishingly little leverage.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Gary’s Two-Week Blackout Is a Warning for America

BLACK WORKING CLASS CITY

By Leonard Hyman & William Tilles - Sep 01, 2026

• Gary, Indiana’s two-week blackout highlights a broader decline in U.S. grid reliability, driven by aging infrastructure, extreme weather and rising electricity demand.
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• A weak grid could also undermine emerging technologies such as fusion and AI, which require enormous amounts of power and robust transmission infrastructure.
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• A two-tier electricity system where wealthier consumers secure reliable private power while lower-income households increasingly depend on a deteriorating public grid could become reality.

After two weeks of darkness, power has been restored to all the citizens of Gary, Indiana, an old, low income, lakefront, industrial city within sight of Chicago. The outage did get some national publicity, TV stories showing the residents of Gary roaming around in the hot nights, showing empty refrigerators in dark apartments, complaining bitterly. But, you know, not a story as spectacular as when an electric company burned down an entire island or when another one managed to set fire to Pacific Coast towns with glamorous names. Just two weeks in the summer without electricity. Not a big story.

A violent storm had hit Gary. Trees fell. Some people complained that the trees had not been trimmed properly. The local utility had infelicitously announced a reorganization of assets to attract data center business, too. Not paying attention to the core business? The governor will investigate. So what is the big deal? It’s an isolated incident caused by freakish weather. Sort of like all the other incidents caused by freakish weather, drought, storms, blizzards.

Well, we have another take on events. Freakish weather has become normal. That’s what scientists predicted more than two decades ago, predictions the electricity industry, by and large, chose to ignore. Add together years of unpreparedness, changing climate, aging equipment and rising demand on the system and that produces a decline in reliability, a trend demonstrated by the statistics over the past 25 years. In other words, two weeks without power in Gary is just part of a pattern.

We have argued that technology has begun to favor a scenario in which those who want and can afford high quality standalone electric service (solar, batteries, propane back-up) will arrange it for themselves and the public network will become a provider of last resort for those who cannot afford the best. This scenario has equity implications, of course. People need electricity in the same way they need water. We don’t furnish (not usually, anyway) second rate water to those who have trouble paying the water bill. There is, however, another implication of our scenario, for fusion power, the unlimited energy source that will (we hope) bail us out of our current energy dilemma. Backers of fusion are tackling their projects in the same way as backers of electric vehicles did, that is, build the device and expect that the market will furnish the infrastructure in a timely manner. Fusion power plants will require a robust electric grid ready to transmit their power. The grid is an interconnected system. The invisible hand won’t produce one. If it sinks into a second rate state, it won’t have the resources to support new fusion technologies. Delivery system first and power source second.  (As an aside, one of the top AI executive said that connection to the grid can take years, maybe 4-12 years depending on the situation. But that a comment brings up the question of why the AI people were making plans without understanding the limitations of the network. You would think that all that artificial intelligence would lead to a better planning process.)

Finally, a nasty and cynical thought. Would the outage have lasted two weeks if it had occurred in Beverly Hills, CA or Greenwich, CT or Georgetown in Washington, DC? Just something to think about.

By Leonard Hyman and William Tilles for Oilprice.com

Op-Ed

Big Tech’s Debate Over “Open” and “Safe” AI Leaves Corporate Power Unquestioned


Two seemingly contradictory letters emerging from the AI industry point toward the same future.

By Tim Scott ,

Truthout

September 1, 2026

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on during a meeting with France's President Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India, on February 19, 2026.Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images

On July 24, 2026, an initial coalition of 25 technology companies and organizations, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Meta, released the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter, calling for wider adoption of AI models that institutions can download and modify. By August 3, more than 270 companies and organizations had signed, spanning Big Tech, venture capital, investment management, and the defense and security industries. Four days after Open Weights’ release, another letter, Pacing the Frontier, organized by employees of frontier AI companies with support from two AI-policy nonprofits, drew more than 1,300 signatures. It warned that leading companies may be close to automating AI research, accelerating development beyond society’s ability to understand or control the resulting AI systems.

The letters seem to argue for opposite futures. One presents wider access and fewer restrictions as the route to security and prosperity. The other asks the U.S. government to support an international effort to slow frontier development before competitive pressures make coordinated restraint impossible.

But they address different levels of the industry. Open Weights seeks to deepen AI’s already pervasive presence by making customizable models easier to embed throughout the economy and public life. Pacing the Frontier proposes government-backed management of frontier AI, the industry’s term for its most advanced and broadly capable models. That framework could make the small circle of companies building these systems indispensable to defining the dangers and writing the rules meant to restrain them.

Read together, the letters point toward a two-tier arrangement. AI becomes entrenched across society while ownership of its most powerful systems, infrastructure, and governance remains concentrated at the top. Their connection requires no secret agreement. It lies in what both take for granted: AI development will continue, public institutions will finance and adopt it, and private ownership and corporate power will remain intact.

The letters leave out harder questions: Who will own AI and decide its direction? How will it be used in surveillance and war, and how will it reshape work and deepen inequality? Whose lives and futures will be valued, and does the public have any right to limit or refuse a technology presented as inevitable? Beneath the language of openness and safety lie deeper a general agreement over corporate power, military dominance, elite rule, and the authoritarian currents shaping Silicon Valley’s vision of the future.

Open Weights Are Not Open Source

An AI model is the underlying system that generates answers, predictions, images, or other outputs. Its “weights” are the billions of numerical settings developed from patterns in training data. Releasing those weights allows organizations with computing power and expertise to download, run, and modify the model rather than use it only through a company-controlled service such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.

Researchers can examine these models, test their weaknesses, and build specialized tools, while organizations can run them locally rather than send sensitive information to a commercial service. Yet proprietary, company-controlled services such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are not inherently safer: their operators can keep flaws from public scrutiny, monitor how people use them, impose restrictions, raise prices, or withdraw access.

But releasing a model’s weights does not by itself make the AI system open source. Under the Open Source Initiative’s definition, open-source AI must provide the necessary materials and the legal freedom to use, study, modify, and share the system for any purpose. Those materials include the model’s parameters, the complete code used to train and run it, and detailed information about its training data and methods. Most open-weight releases, by contrast, provide the finished numerical settings and enough supporting files to run or adapt the model, but not the complete training code or the required details about its training data and methods. The training data itself and much of the development process often remain proprietary or unavailable. Beyond the definition’s formal requirements, the labor arrangements and corporate decisions behind these systems also remain undisclosed. Users of open-weight models can therefore operate and adapt them without gaining a full account of how they were built.

The Open Weights letter borrows the democratic reputation of open source to present open-weight access as a path to competition, independence, and shared prosperity. Yet an open-weight release gives the public access to a corporate product without transferring ownership or giving workers, affected communities, and the broader public meaningful power to govern the data, computing infrastructure, labor conditions, and deployment decisions behind it. A genuinely open-source release would provide broader materials and legal freedoms, but even that would not place the resources, infrastructure, or institutional uses of AI under public, community, or worker governance. In either case, access remains unequal. Individuals may run smaller models, but corporations and agencies possess the data centers, private datasets, institutional records, and specialists needed to customize them, connect them to institutional data systems, and deploy them at scale. An open-weight model that supports independent research can therefore also expand institutional surveillance and coercion by enabling governments and corporations to monitor and classify people, inform or automate consequential decisions, and control access to services.

That unequal distribution of power is only one danger. Open weights also create an irreversible loss-of-control problem. Once copied, a model cannot be fully retrieved, monitored, or patched across all distributed copies, nor can its safeguards be guaranteed to remain intact. Those with sufficient technical expertise and computing resources can modify open-weight models, remove their refusal mechanisms, introduce discriminatory behavior or hidden backdoors, and redistribute the results. Modified models could facilitate cyberattacks, fraud, impersonation, targeted disinformation, nonconsensual sexual imagery, harassment, or guidance involving weapons, abuse, and self-harm. Connected to institutional records, they could expose private information, intensify surveillance, discriminate, restrict services, or help target communities. Responsibility then fragments as developers, vendors, and institutions blame one another.

Even as the weights circulate and open the door to still more harmful uses, the infrastructure remains firmly closed. AI depends on specialized chips, enormous data centers, electricity, water, and cloud platforms. Open weights may reduce an institution’s dependence on a particular model provider, but training, adapting, and deploying AI at scale still depend on highly concentrated infrastructure markets, led by NVIDIA in advanced AI accelerators and by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in cloud computing. All four companies now appear among the letter’s signatories. The model may be downloadable, but control over the infrastructure surrounding it remains concentrated in a small group of corporations.

For researchers and organizations in the Global South, open weights may provide some genuine independence from closed commercial services and make it easier to adapt models to local languages and needs. But that limited autonomy does not alter the global labor system through which AI is produced, requiring a vast workforce largely across the Global South that gathers, labels, cleans, translates, moderates, and evaluates data and model outputs. These workers are often monitored and managed algorithmically, bound by nondisclosure agreements, and required to endure prolonged exposure to traumatic material. Releasing a model’s weights reveals none of these labor conditions and gives the workers neither an ownership stake nor decision-making power over the systems their labor helped create.

Open Weights asks policymakers to expand computing access, fund datasets and testing tools, avoid restrictions that might slow development, and spread AI throughout the economy. This is a familiar Big Tech strategy: use public resources to build markets for privately controlled technology and make everyday life dependent on products the public neither owns nor governs. The costs are distributed across workers and the public, while private companies retain control over much of the infrastructure, intellectual property, and resulting wealth.
Pacing the Frontier — But Under Whose Authority?

Building frontier AI requires extraordinary amounts of computing power, energy, data, and capital, largely confining its development to a small number of Big Tech corporations, heavily financed AI laboratories, and state-backed institutions. Pacing the Frontier warns that if AI systems begin automating the research and engineering needed to create more powerful successors, development could outpace researchers’ and governments’ ability to test, understand, or control them. These systems could facilitate cyberattacks, weapons development or deployment, mass manipulation, and other catastrophic harms before effective safeguards are in place. Because no company or country wants to surrender its competitive position while others continue racing ahead, the statement calls on the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop technical and governance mechanisms for deliberately pacing frontier development.

Many of the letter’s signatories may sincerely seek to prevent catastrophe, and coordinated restraint may indeed be necessary. Yet the letter calls for no immediate pause and leaves the decisive questions unanswered: Who decides when development must slow? What capability threshold or kind of security breach would trigger intervention? Who oversees the companies, and what prevents the largest laboratories from shaping rules that entrench their dominance by imposing barriers smaller competitors cannot meet?

Many of the signatories work for companies that would be subject to any resulting rules, yet these same companies possess enormous power to shape those rules. These firms are private centers of power and rank among the world’s wealthiest and most politically connected institutions. Collectively, they own or control much of the frontier-model, cloud, and data-center infrastructure, as well as the proprietary information and technical expertise on which regulators depend. Their wealth funds lobbying, research partnerships, political access, and policy campaigns. Through search engines, social platforms, AI assistants, media partnerships, and sponsored research, they also shape public perceptions of AI: what it promises, which harms receive attention, and which alternatives appear possible.

Yet this power is subject to little democratic accountability. Major decisions are made without public scrutiny, while the people and communities affected by these systems have little power to inspect them, challenge their decisions, or refuse their use. The companies can help define what constitutes a danger, which responses are acceptable, and which restrictions remain outside serious debate. Those creating the risks thereby become indispensable government partners and coauthors of the rules meant to restrain them.

The emphasis on future catastrophe can push present harms out of view. AI is already intensifying racist systems of mass surveillance, policing, detention, and deportation; supporting military targeting and the rapid development of increasingly autonomous weapons systems; automating work and displacing workers; deepening data extraction; and accelerating environmental destruction. A Brennan Center report details racial disparities in facial recognition and notes that Black people account for at least 8 of 10 known wrongful arrests based on faulty matches. The Department of Homeland Security AI inventory documents ICE’s use of facial recognition. An ACLU investigation traces Palantir’s role in ICE’s detention and deportation infrastructure. A Government Accountability Office review describes the Pentagon’s Maven program using machine learning to identify potential targets from geospatial imagery. The AI Now Institute’s 2025 Landscape Report documents AI’s energy and water demands, worker displacement and exploitation, workplace surveillance, deepening inequality, and risks to critical infrastructure and national security. Debate over hypothetical loss of control can obscure the harms already imposed on people by systems functioning as designed.

Pacing the Frontier does little to challenge the structures producing these harms. Its limits are especially clear on labor. A genuine slowdown could reduce the pace of worker displacement, resource extraction, and demand for exploitative or psychologically harmful data work, but it would not by itself change the ownership structures, working conditions, or power relations governing AI production. The letter does not include these present harms in its case for restraint. It defines danger primarily through frontier capabilities, geopolitical competition, and possible future catastrophe, not through low wages, algorithmic management, psychological injury, labor displacement, or the transnational contracting chains already sustaining AI development.

That narrow conception of danger also shapes the safety framework envisioned by Pacing the Frontier. Evaluating and stress-testing models, reviewing content, and monitoring systems after deployment would still require human labor. Given the tech industry’s entrenched labor practices, this framework would almost certainly continue to rely on workers who toil in the shadows. The letter calls for none of the protections or decision-making power these workers would need: labor standards, transparency about who performs the work and under what conditions, collective bargaining rights, protections against workplace surveillance, or a meaningful role for data workers in determining what their labor is used to produce.

The concentration of authority in laboratories and government experts can fortify the companies already at the top. Frontier regulation may reduce genuine dangers, but expensive testing, security, and reporting requirements can exclude universities, public-interest researchers, and smaller developers while the largest firms absorb the costs. Because governments depend on corporate expertise, oversight can become a wall shielding Big Tech from public accountability and leaving the labor regime on which it depends untouched.

On labor, then, the letters are less opposed than they appear. Open Weights would diffuse models whose dependence on human labor remains concealed; Pacing the Frontier would subject the most powerful models to expert oversight without democratizing the labor relations or restructuring the supply chains behind them.
The Ideology Behind the Two-Tier System

Both letters treat AI’s advance as inevitable, leaving the public to adapt and government to manage its deployment. That technological determinism merges with Silicon Valley solutionism: questions about ownership, labor, surveillance, military power, and the right to refuse AI shrink into matters of design and oversight. Within that shared premise, Open Weights gives institutions greater freedom to deploy AI, while Pacing the Frontier places corporate laboratories, experts, and officials at the center of determining whether and when AI development poses an unacceptable danger. The public remains a population to manage rather than a political force empowered to decide whether and how the technology should be developed and used.

The division between the letters is not ideological alone. It also corresponds, although imperfectly, to different positions and material interests within the AI economy. The largely industry-based coalition behind Open Weights spans chipmakers, cloud providers, model developers, software companies, security and military contractors, and venture capital firms. Pacing the Frontier emerges from a different institutional position. It was signed in individual capacities by employees, researchers, and executives of frontier AI companies, including some of the industry’s most influential figures, rather than formally endorsed by the companies themselves. Their concerns cannot simply be reduced to their employers’ economic interests. Yet their place within the industry matters: they work inside the small group of elite laboratories where computing power, investment, proprietary knowledge, and technical authority are most heavily concentrated.

The letters, however, should not be treated as expressions of completely separate blocs of capital. Google, Meta, OpenAI, and other companies appear in the Open Weights coalition, while employees and executives of the same firms signed Pacing the Frontier. A single corporation can benefit from broad diffusion across the AI market and concentrated control at the frontier: it can encourage widespread adoption, sell the infrastructure and services that adoption requires, and retain control over its most advanced systems. What appears to be a conflict among different sections of AI capital can therefore also reflect competing strategies within the same corporations and investment networks. This is primarily a dispute within AI’s corporate and technical elite over the terms of expansion, not a challenge to corporate ownership or concentrated control.

Open Weights echoes themes found in Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, effective accelerationism, and techno-libertarianism. These currents treat technological expansion as a social good, private markets as engines of progress, and regulation as an obstacle. Pacing the Frontier departs from techno-libertarianism’s hostility to government restraint, but it does not overturn the distribution of power that techno-libertarianism legitimates. Frontier systems remain privately owned, development remains organized through corporate competition, and technical and corporate elites retain a privileged role in defining danger. The letter therefore represents less a rejection of techno-libertarianism than a technocratic effort to contain the dangers created by unrestrained corporate competition while leaving its underlying structures of ownership and control intact. At the same time, its emphasis on possible future catastrophe and expert-led restraint more closely resembles longtermism, which can assign greater moral importance to hypothetical future populations than to people suffering now, and singularitarianism, which anticipates that superhuman AI will transform society beyond recognition. These currents overlap with transhumanism, which envisions using technology to enhance selected human capacities and ultimately create supposedly superior “posthuman” forms of life.

Despite their differences, these ideological currents converge around the pursuit of ever-more-powerful AI. Accelerationists seek more computing power, faster deployment, and fewer restraints, convinced that technological growth will produce abundance and solve social problems. Longtermist safety frameworks may urge greater control over the pace of development, but they often leave that underlying project and its private corporate ownership and direction unquestioned. In the framework developed by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, these visions share a tendency to centralize power, elevate technical elites as humanity’s guardians, and invoke “safety” or universal benefit while pushing out of view the exploitation, discrimination, and environmental destruction already affecting dispossessed peoples.

They trace transhumanism, singularitarianism, longtermism, and related ideologies to Anglo-American eugenics. In their account, transhumanism recast improving the “human stock” as creating enhanced or “posthuman” beings. The language shifted from compulsory breeding to innovation and personal choice, but the sorting logic endured: ideas about race, intelligence, productivity, able-bodiedness, and capacity for enhancement continue to shape whose lives and futures are valued. Eugenics has not disappeared. It has been updated for an age in which powerful elites imagine redesigning humanity through technologies that reproduce existing hierarchies.

Techno-optimism turns this hierarchy into a story of liberation, presenting corporate technologies as neutral instruments of progress while concealing who owns them and who bears their costs. At its authoritarian edge, it overlaps with neo-reactionary or “Dark Enlightenment” thought, which rejects egalitarian democracy and imagines society governed like a corporation by CEOs or technocratic elites. Such an order need not announce itself as a dictatorship. It can emerge through privately owned systems that monitor, classify, restrict, and punish people without meaningful consent or appeal.

Silicon Valley’s supposed hostility to the federal government is selective. The industry resists the state as regulator while embracing it as investor, customer, military partner, police force, and border authority. It does not necessarily seek a smaller state, but one that protects a techno-capitalist oligarchy, suppresses resistance, and uses privately developed systems to govern.

That bargain has entered the machinery of the Trump administration. Reuters reported that technology executives and companies gave more than $300 million to support Trump’s 2024 campaign and an allied political committee. Elon Musk spent more than a quarter-billion dollars, while David Sacks and figures from Marc Andreessen’s network entered or advised the administration. Whether driven by ideology, profit, or access, this alliance advances domestic authoritarian priorities (including ideological policing, mass surveillance, and deportation) and an imperial project of military dominance and worldwide dependence on American technology. The state gains private infrastructure and expertise. The companies receive deregulation, subsidies, contracts, and support for global expansion.

The administration’s America’s AI Action Plan turns that bargain into policy through accelerated adoption, fewer regulatory barriers, rapid data center construction, and global export of American chips, models, software, and standards. A related executive order on “Preventing Woke AI” directs agencies to buy models conforming to the administration’s definitions of truth and neutrality while casting systemic racism, intersectionality, and what it calls “transgenderism” as ideological threats. The state is not removing politics from AI. It is using public purchasing power to present its own politics as neutral truth.

None of this means every signer or developer endorses the Trump administration or shares the ideological commitments described here. The point is structural: both letters operate within a political order built around private infrastructure, concentrated wealth, U.S. geopolitical dominance, and interstate competition for AI-enabled military and technological superiority. The race (especially between the United States and China) to develop AI for weapons, intelligence, surveillance, cyberwarfare, logistics, and military planning turns continued expansion into a national-security imperative and makes restraint appear to be strategic surrender. Open weights accelerate diffusion, frontier-safety governance can legitimize control by insiders, and public institutions supply the money, data, infrastructure, legitimacy, and users. AI spreads throughout society, but ownership, power, and wealth remain concentrated.



This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Tim Scott is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Central Connecticut State University, a tech industry researcher, and the author of the book, Schooling for Silicon Valley.

Oh Canada: We Will Neither Cower Nor Bend

Meme from the war between Canada and South Canada
Image from Bluesky

Abby Zimet
Aug 31, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
Further


More insane idiocy from the petty huckster clown king whose idea of governance is threatening lawsuits, trade wars, buildings that won’t put his name on them; bungling war and peace; flaunting Nazi loyalty queries and sadistic images of black men in chains; and distracting from it all with the dumbass geographic circlejerk of inventing “LAKe AMeRiCA.” The Internet was born for this: Cue Donald Ducks, the Straits of Our Moose, Lake Dead Pedo Bestie, Lake Superior President Obama, and Lake Stupid Fucking Moron.

Last week, after God killed the wrong 80-year-old in the 784th year of a presidency that feels like “being in middle school when there’s a substitute teacher and a student has a medical emergency,” yet more banal slop issued from a needy racist sociopath so stupid he once seemingly conflated the Very Hard words “transistor” and “transgender” to claim Biden’s CHIPS Act offered billions to domestic tech companies but “if you weren’t transgender, (you) didn’t qualify.” Jesus. No wonder, à propos of nothing, the widely deemed “worst president in U.S. history” took time out from his busy mob boss schedule to declare himself the bestest - take that Honest Abe - after his faithful Human Printer dug up a similar 1948 Life Magazine chart, which is “exactly the kind of thing a healthy, high-functioning person shares.”




‘The Red States, We’re Going to Hit Hard’: Canadian Politicians Vow to Make MAGA Pay for Trump’s Trade War



‘Canada Must Respond’: Ottawa Slaps Retaliatory Tariffs on US Goods After Trump Trade War Escalation

Other things he did, abetted by a confederacy of dunces, stooges, techno-fascists, warmongers, crypto dorks, “unfuckable hate nerds” and “an actual Jewish Nazi“: Having hit the six-month mark of his Iran debacle, he giddily proclaimed, ”Mission Accomplished!“ despite a. the only thing achieved is handing a newly empowered Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. gas prices skyrocket and the economy implodes, b. he evidently missed the part where George W’s 2003 banner aboard an aircraft carrier became a queasy punchline, c. he did so amidst reports his and Kegsbreath’s said debacle has pushed the US military into a ”beyond critical“ shortage of money and missile interceptors in the case of an enemy attack, forcing them to shift funds around ”in imaginative ways“ - because everything he touches dies and we probably will too.

A fragile child, he demands fealty to even his ceaseless clusterfucks. Thus the latest inane authoritarian hokum from a Department of Homeland (sic) Security that alas hasn’t lost any of its fascist fervor since the brutal puppy-killing days of ICE Barbie. Its new, dystopian, “genuinely deranged” missive: A glowering image of Dear Dumb Leader with the dark challenge, “Did you remain loyal?”, which chillingly fails to consider just what atrocities they’re demanding allegiance to. The answer came in a post that swiftly followed: Sadistic footage of shackled Haitian immigrants, targeted after losing Temporary Protected Status for no reason but mindless, racist cruelty, being shuffled onto planes in pouring rain to the sneering tune of a Creole song about returning home - complete with fawning close-ups of the chains on their feet. Well done, sick fucks.

Meanwhile, the trail of destruction goes on apace. In D.C., after the East Wing and reflecting pool - we like the meme of him studying it with, “All I see is scum” and a lackey saying, “Well, it is a reflecting pool, sir” - we’ve reached the mobsters’ “offer-they- can’t-refuse“ phase on the besieged Kennedy Center. Having repeatedly lost in court, the regime now threatens to demolish the not-long-ago-flourishing Center unless a tantrum-throwing 10-year-old gets his name ”prominently added“ to its exterior with ”appropriate respect“ of his efforts to ”save“ it from a fictional “death spiral” that’s rendered it ”dilapidated, outdated, decrepit and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital,“ which is some pot/kettle. If they can’t plaster his ghastly name over it - inscription, plaza et al - they’ll replace it with ”an outdoor amphitheater,“ aka a lawn.

They’re also pushing to sell off part of Yosemite National Park, like everything else, to the highest bidder, though the seller is such an imbecile he still cringingly says “Yo, Semites!“ He’s such a petty dolt he’s also skipping this year’s 9/11 remembrance at Ground Zero because he wasn’t allowed to give a Nazi speech there, opting to give it at the Pentagon before rushing off to the Irish Open at his crappy golf course, ‘cause priorities. Having trashed jobs, health insurance, food aid, the environment and most of our global alliances, he blew up trade talks with Canada, calling its endlessly nice residents ”nasty people,“ and holding a clownish Oval Office event to sign an idiotic executive order renaming Lake Ontario to ”LAKe AMeRiCA,“ which he’s ”been thinking about for a long time“ with what’s left of his tiny brain. (Here he is on trade: The stupid, it burns.)

“All it takes is a good pen and some intelligence,” he said, only batting one for two in a pretend-name-changing event labeled, “Making the Great Lakes Even Greater.” Then - what a feckin’ playacting infant - he drew a line through the doomed lake and intoned, “We have notified various people who needed to be notified...This is official.” He said he’d instructed craven lickspittle and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “take all appropriate actions.” Burgum slavishly wrote, “We’re on it, Mr. President!”, thus becoming the only person on Planet Earth to take this puerile claptrap seriously, evidently unaware an executive order is not a law and every ship entering the Great Lakes has to go through Canada’s Welland Canal, including $26 billion in U.S. trade, and it would be a shame if Canada up and supersized their tolls, and thank you for your attention to this matter.

Uncle Bernie and most of America promptly responded they’d rather have affordable health care, thanks, also housing, food, education and cancer research. Nova Scotia’s Conservative premier Tim Houston, “not exactly a firebrand,” opined, “We’re into some real foolishness now. It’s Lake Ontario, buddy.” Canada’s newly combative Prime Minister Mark Carney, out of fucks to give, noted that long before Europeans came the lake was named by Native Americans using the Huron word “Ontari’io,” for, “The lake is beautiful, the lake is big.” “The name is more than 400 years old,” he said. “Canadians know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario - then, now and always.” The Canadian Resistance Army, who earlier defended penguins, also chimed in, declaring, “We’re going to trade war/Beavers and moose won’t take it any more.”

Above all, it was agreed, “LAKe AMeRiCA” is what God invented the Internet for. The names spooled out in a gleeful torrent.

Lake Release the Epstein Files. Lake Gulf of Mexico. Lake Are We Doing This Again. Lake Micropenis. Lake Natalie. Lake Huron Thin Ice with Melania. Lake Universal Healthcare. Lake Eerily Overweight Pres Dick J. McRectum. Lake Felon. Lake Not Eerie. Lake Oh Canada. Lake Small Dick Energy. Many chose Lake Obama. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers created the politically incorrect Lake Retard: “See, I can sign napkins that say things too.” One decided to “just keep calling it Lake Epstein, like the Founders wanted.” Mapquest, unlike cowering Google, not only declined to change the lake’s name but invited viewers to “spread some geographic joy” and “name it whatever you want.” One result: Lake Who Uses Mapquest Anymore.

Many noted the traditional Great Lakes litany of “H.O.M.E.S” had entirely logically become “S.H.A.M.E.” People renamed their toilet bowl to Lake Trump. The White House to Home of Diaper Butt. Mar-a-Lago to Poopy Pants Palace. The United States of America to the Epstein States of Pedophiles, or just South Canada. President Trump to President Dickhead. California to Amerifornia. Strait of Hormuz to Strait of Our Moose. People mocked his thieving choice of one of the smallest and dirtiest Great Lakes. They noted, “Nobody in Ontario gives a single solitary fuck what Assclown McCrappy-Pants says about anything.” They griped the name change “really screws with the lyrics of Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“What are they trying to distract us from this time?” they asked. Response: “The previous distraction.” Some coddled the needy child-king: “Good for you, li’l fella.” Some railed: “Jesus Christ, can somebody just get him a coloring book already?” Some were still baffled by how low we’ve gone: “Wait, this is real?” Some refused to go there: “Nope.” Some summoned the great Talking Heads: “As things fell apart/Nobody paid much attention.” And some fought back against the incessant bullying. After the Center for American Progress released a report finding billions spent on ICE thugs and National Guard swarms had no real effect on reducing violent crime, Trump threatened a $5 billion lawsuit if they didn’t retract it. The center stood firm against “a transparent attempt to silence us.” “We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it,” they said. And, still and all, we will snark away.

Update: Talk about “Do not obey in advance”: After defying the petty madness, usage of Mapquest has surged to about 50 times its usual rate, leapfrogging past Google and Apple Maps to become the most-downloaded mapping app, and the fourth most popular of all apps excluding games in the US. Along with their “spread some geographic joy” invite, they posted a mocking, all-caps retort: “OUR MAPS ARE BIG AND BEAUTIFUL. PEOPLE COME UP TO US AND SAY WE’LL GET THEM PLACES. AND WE DO!!” Lol.

Canada vs. the Epstein States of America  Image from Bluesky

SPACE/COSMOS

Declining Star Formation Not Caused By Simple ‘Fuel Crisis’

FAST and DESI reshape our view of cosmic evolution CREDIT: Image by National Astronomical Observatories of China and Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of CAS

 September 2, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Key Takeaways:

• FAST plus DESI stacking of ~2.5 million galaxies (Nature Astronomy, Sept. 1) finds that over 4.5 billion years the cosmic star-formation rate fell to about 1/2.5 of its old level while neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) density only fell to about 1/1.4.
• That mismatch undercuts the simple “the fuel ran out” story: HI, seen in the faint 21-cm line, is still a large reservoir between the cosmic web and the molecular clouds that actually make stars.
• Authors shift the question to conversion efficiency—weaker inflow and lower density may stall HI → H₂ even while HI stays relatively plentiful—setting a late-universe baryon-cycle benchmark.

The universe has been having fewer and fewer stellar “babies.” Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate of star birth has crashed to less than half of what it once was. But here’s the twist: the most essential “fuel” for making stars has barely decreased.

This finding comes from an international team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. They used China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) to make high-precision measurements of cosmic neutral atomic hydrogen over the past 4.5 billion years.

The study reveals that while cosmic star formation has declined dramatically over this period, neutral atomic hydrogen (HI)—a vital gas reservoir for galaxies—has only decreased slightly.

This finding was published online in Nature Astronomy on Sept. 1.

Why has it become harder for the universe to form new stars? That question has long been central to the study of galaxy formation and evolution. A natural explanation is that, as the universe ages, the cold gas that fuels star birth is steadily consumed, inevitably driving a decline in star formation. If that were true, however, the drop in the star formation rate should be matched by a simultaneous sharp depletion of the cold gas reservoir. But such depletion has not been detected.

HI is a key cold-gas reservoir in galaxies that links the large-scale cosmic gas cycle to internal star formation and is mainly detected via its extremely faint 21-centimeter radio emission line. Unfortunately, individual signals for distant galaxies are often swamped by background noise.

For this reason, astronomers long faced a frustrating dilemma: deep observations could not cover large areas, while wide-field surveys lacked the sensitivity to detect faint signals. As a result, the evolution of total HI mass in the low-to-intermediate redshift universe has remained difficult to measure directly and reliably.

To overcome this bottleneck, the new study integrated FAST’s ultra-high radio sensitivity with DESI’s massive optical spectroscopic survey. The researchers analyzed a vast sample of about 2.5 million galaxies, covering nearly one-third of the sky. Using an innovative HI spectral stacking technique, they aligned and stacked the faint, otherwise undetectable radio signals based on precise galaxy redshifts. This allowed them to extract the average HI signal from the noise, tracing the evolution of cosmic neutral hydrogen with unprecedented statistical precision and sample size.

The highly precise measurements revealed a striking disparity: 4.5 billion years ago, the cosmic star formation rate was about 2.5 times higher than today, while the corresponding neutral atomic hydrogen density was only about 1.4 times its current level. This indicates that while star formation activity plummeted, the cosmic HI reservoir did not dry up synchronously. This striking contrast shows that rapid hydrogen depletion cannot explain the decline in star formation.

Shifting focus

According to the researchers, this breakthrough effectively shifts the scientific focus from “whether the gas is depleting” to “why it is increasingly difficult to form stars despite abundant neutral hydrogen reserves.”

Stars are primarily born in denser molecular gas clouds, and neutral atomic hydrogen sits at a critical intermediate stage between the large-scale cosmic gas supply and the formation of molecular gas. The study suggests that the most important late-time changes may occur not in the total HI reservoir itself, but rather in the gas flow through the baryon cycle. As the gas supply from the cosmic web weakens and gas density declines, the efficiency of converting HI into molecular hydrogen likely drops. This mechanism allows the HI reservoir to stay relatively stable, even as the molecular gas that directly feeds stars gradually dwindles.

As a result, the significance of this work goes far beyond merely measuring how much hydrogen is in the universe. Instead, it provides crucial new clues for understanding why the massive stellar engines of the universe are gradually shutting down.

According to the researchers, the joint observation by FAST and DESI establishes a brand-new observational benchmark for unraveling the late-stage cosmic gas cycle, the decline of star formation, and the broader evolution of galaxies.

The research was led by scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of CAS, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in collaboration with researchers participating in DESI. The study includes contributors from research institutions across Asia, North America, and Europe, highlighting the scientific power of combining sensitive radio observations with large-scale optical spectroscopy.

 

SwRI Study Helps Unravel How The Sun’s Corona Transforms Into Solar Wind

This illustration shows how the Sun’s magnetic field shapes and directs the heliospheric current sheet (HCS). A Southwest Research Institute study used data from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter to help define the early-stage composition of the HCS. This will help scientists construct more accurate models of how the solar wind affects space weather that can impact the Earth. CREDIT: Southwest Research Institute

 September 1, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Key Takeaways:

• SwRI analysis of ESA Solar Orbiter data (Astrophysical Journal) gives the closest look yet at the heliospheric current sheet—the Sun’s north–south magnetic boundary, twisted into a “ballerina skirt” that divides the heliosphere.
• Crossing a fold ~26 million miles from the Sun (inside Mercury’s orbit), instruments saw a drop in the iron-to-oxygen ion ratio aligned with the polarity flip—so the HCS is a compositional sorter in the corona, not only a magnetic switch.
• That does not settle how the million-mph solar wind is launched, but it constrains models of current-sheet formation, heating, and magnetic connectivity that space-weather forecasts depend on.

A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) study of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter gives the most detailed view of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS) to date. The HCS is a sprawling undulating surface emanating from the Sun to beyond the solar system, which serves as the boundary between the Sun’s north and south magnetic field hemispheres.

Anchored deep in the solar surface, the HCS acts as a high-speed pipeline, carrying crucial data and information from the raw corona straight into space. “For decades, scientists have faced a cosmic paradox: how does the Sun blast a continuous supersonic stream of charged particles into space at over a million miles per hour,” asks SwRI’s Dr. Keiichi Ogasawara, lead author of the study.

“Known as the solar wind, this invisible torrent shapes space weather, powers auroras on Earth, and can disrupt modern satellite technology,” Ogasawara said. “The key to solving this puzzle lies in magnetic connectivity. By tracing magnetic field lines to the solar surface, scientists can link local surface activity directly to solar wind gusts. The HCS offers a prime connection point thanks to its distinct, oppositely directed magnetic signatures.”

The new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, provides scientists with a better understanding of the origin and composition of the HCS and will help to define its relationship with the solar wind. As the Sun rotates, the HCS is twisted like a huge “ballerina skirt,” spiraling outward through the solar system and dividing the heliosphere into separate hemispheres where the Sun’s magnetic field points in opposite directions. In one hemisphere, the field pushes away from the Sun, while in the opposite hemisphere the field pulls toward the Sun. The heliosphere is a vast bubble of plasma created by the solar wind that streams out in all directions from the Sun. It surrounds the entire solar system and shields it from much of the high-energy galactic radiation found in interstellar space.

The Solar Orbiter recently passed through a fold of the HCS at about 26 million miles from the Sun, which is closer than the innermost planet Mercury, allowing researchers to study the youngest version of the solar wind ever observed. Solar Orbiter used its high-quality field, plasma and composition instruments to study how particle populations behave in this mysterious region.

SwRI researchers studying the Solar Orbiter’s observations found a clear and distinct change in the composition and makeup of ions within the HCS. An ion is an atom that has either lost electrons and become positively charged or gained electrons and become negatively charged.

“Within the HCS region, we identify a decrease in the ratio of iron and oxygen ions that lines up closely with the magnetic sector boundary itself,” said Ogasawara. “While the overall plasma on both sides is similar, we find a clear compositional change that is tightly aligned with where the magnetic polarity flips. This suggests that the HCS is not just a magnetic feature, it is also linked to how the Sun sorts ions in the corona and releases them into the solar wind.”

While this new data does not define HCS origins, the researchers believe that it helps to set boundaries for future models and theories.

“We have provided a detailed, multi-aspect view of an HCS crossing close to the Sun, and we showed that it includes organized, measurable variations of the types and amounts of particles within the plasma. It’s not just a simple flip of the magnetic field,” Ogasawara said. “This offers clear constraints that future models of current sheet formation, solar wind heating and magnetic connection must satisfy. Our work is less about proving any one theory and more about defining what any successful theory has to explain.”