For those who don’t contain a vast knowledge of Green Day lore like myself, I don’t think it is hitting just how much of a “fuck you” the NFL is giving djt/the white house.
This is a band that is:
Made entirely of openly bisexual/queer men
Made entirely of men who are vocal about being raised by single mothers on welfare
One of their members was adopted and raised by a Black woman and has said he “understands how his mother could hate ‘the white man’ and love him with her whole soul.”
Were the first band to say, “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist/MAGA U.S.A.” on live television without ANY warning.
Literally released a song last year called, “The American Dream Is Killing Me”
Only hires ALL FEMALE bands to open for them to address inequality in the music industry
OPENLY tells trump supporters they are not welcome at their concerts.
Anyway, Enjoy Feb. 8th Magats! You’re gonna hate it. :)
Fuentes: “So just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women. … So they go to the gulag first. They go to the breeding gulags.”
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Africa was the world’s fastest-growing solar market in 2025, defying a global slowdown and reshaping where the momentum in renewable energy is concentrated, according to an industry report released in late last month.
The report by the Africa Solar Industry Association says the continent’s solar installed capacity expanded 17% in 2025, boosted by imports of Chinese-made solar panels. Global solar power capacity rose 23% in 2025 to 618 GW, slowing from a 44% increase in 2024.
“Chinese companies are the main drivers in Africa’s green transition,” said Cynthia Angweya-Muhati, acting CEO of the Kenya Renewable Energy Association. “They are aggressively investing in and building robust supply chains in Africa green energy ecosystem.”
Some of that capacity has yet to be rolled out. Africa has only 23.4 gigawatts peak (GWp) of working solar capacity even though nearly 64 GWp of solar equipment has been shipped to the continent since 2017. A gigawatt peak represents 1 billion watts of maximum, optimum power output under ideal conditions.
“Africa’s growth is driven by changing policies and enabling conditions in a number of countries, “said John Van Zuylen, CEO of the Africa Solar Industry Association.
“Solar energy has moved beyond a handful of early adopters to become a broader continental priority,” he said recently on the sidelines of the Inter Solar Africa summit in Nairobi. “What we are seeing is not temporary. It is policies aligning with market dynamics.”
Historically, South Africa dominated solar imports in Africa, at one point accounting for roughly half of all panels shipped to the continent. The latest data show its share has slipped below a third as demand surged elsewhere. Last year, 20 African nations set new annual records for solar imports, as 25 countries imported a total of at least 100 megawatts of capacity.
Nigeria has overtaken Egypt as Africa’s second-largest importer as solar energy and battery storage provide a practical and affordable alternative to diesel generators and unreliable grid power. In Algeria, solar imports soared more than 30-fold year-on-year. Imports also surged in Zambia and Botswana.
At least 23 African countries, including South Africa, Tunisia, Kenya, Chad and the Central African Republic, are now generating over 5% of their electricity from solar energy, the report said.
Prices have fallen both for solar panels and batteries, mostly from China, enabling households and businesses to rely on solar plus batteries for round-the-clock electricity, the report said. Battery storage costs in Africa fell to $112 per kilowatt-hour in 2025 from an average of $144 per kilowatt-hour in 2023 as improved technology made storage systems more flexible and longer lasting.
“This ever-decreasing price of storage has game-changing implications for Africa, which has a dire need for stable and baseload power,” said Van Zuyken.
The gradual removal of diesel subsidies in Nigeria in the past two years also has helped accelerate adoption of solar energy. The policy was implemented sector by sector to cushion its impact, making diesel increasingly expensive and nudging businesses and households toward solar. In September, Nigeria announced plans for a 1 GW solar panel factory, the largest in West Africa. Similar facilities are under construction in Egypt, South Africa and Ethiopia.
As Africa moves to build its own manufacturing capacity, the industry is looking to China to transfer knowhow to help alleviate Africa’s dependence on imported equipment and technology.
Jobs won’t be confined to manufacturing.
“The solar jobs boom is occurring in services including installation, maintenance, distribution and financing, where thousands of small and medium enterprises are emerging to meet rising demand,” Van Zuylen said.
Unlike regions such as the Middle East, where governments publish clear 10 or 20-year energy roadmaps, many African markets lack consistent policy signals. So, uncertainty over policies remains a challenge. Solar firms operating across Africa say unpredictable tax regimes, shifting import duties and unclear long-term energy plans undermine investor confidence.
“The problem is not the opportunity. It’s visibility,” said Amos Wemanya, senior analyst on renewable energy at Powershift Africa. “If a government announces a plan, companies need to trust that it will remain in place.”
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, nearly 40 percent of men and 20 percent of women gamble online daily. Two percent of those bettors gamble more than ten hours a day. Sports bettors have wagered over $600 billion since 2018. The National Council on Problem Gambling notes that about 2.5 million Americans “meet the criteria” for a severe problem; five to eight million more have mild to moderate issues.
As the country’s affordability crisis deepens, individuals and entire families can slide into cycles of addiction and debt. Bank of America warned in a November research note that gambling is creating “emerging credit risks” across the economy; an April paper from UCLA and USC found that credit scores in states that have adopted online sports betting are down, and bankruptcy rates and auto loan delinquencies are up. Eight U.S. studies found that 1 in 5 problem gamblers have tried to commit suicide, the highest rate for any addiction disorder.
Most bettors are men. They’ve gotten younger and younger as sports betting companies gamified gambling. Pokémon, the trading card and video game mega-franchise, co-opted slot machine and casino imagery in the 1990s, and technology companies latched on, eager to bring in young gamblers to replace the old heads. Public schools see problems with boys, and sports betting stokes some school officials’ fears of it becoming as ubiquitous as cellphones and as poisonous as social media.
State politicians have largely looked the other way: The attractive tax revenues from the relative handful of bettors reduce the need for broad-based taxes. Conveniently ignored are the profound contradictions between safeguarding the public welfare and the mental health and financial problems gambling can exacerbate. “It’s a system of taxation by exploitation, and it’s been an epic public-policy failure,” says Les Bernal, the national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a national advocacy group.
….
In most states, excise tax revenues are small, comprising less than 10 percent of a state’s budget, and in many cases 5 percent or less. Sin taxes on gambling, alcohol, and marijuana are especially volatile and can often level off or plummet (as in the case of cigarettes) depending on the market or changes in social attitudes. In the sports betting sector, companies could pass their costs on to bettors in the form of higher odds. Such a shift could drive bettors into grayer areas. “If you can get better odds by betting with the bookie down the street, then maybe you’ll do that instead of participating in the legal market,” says Adam Hoffer, director of excise tax policy studies at the Tax Foundation, a Washington think tank.
But the “legal” market isn’t exactly generous to its customers either. DraftKings uses AI to learn which micro bets will entice users. Apps carpet-bomb promotions for “free” money that cannot be redeemed unless bet multiple times. “There’s been plenty of stories over the last couple of years on the people who do sign up [to bet] and are on losing streaks and get emails from DraftKings bots basically saying, ‘Here’s another $1,000!’” Stevens says. “That kind of business model that essentially poisons you if you are so addicted; it is something to me that the state should have no interest in from a public-health perspective.”
Vermont’s sports betting revenue goes into its general fund, a Responsible Gaming Special Fund, and industry regulation. In 2024, Vermont bettors did well enough that tax revenues were under projections at $6 million, still a healthy sum for a small state.
Stevens believes that young men, the targets of all this psychological warfare, think they can handle betting constantly on their phones, but they ignore the ever-present dangers. It’s the same for state officials, who dismiss the negative impact of gambling because it brings in money they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. Can Vermont decouple itself from these revenues?
“What it really comes down to is we would rather tax, whether it’s by choice or not, with lotteries and gambling,” says Stevens. “That’s the way our culture is, and I don’t see that changing.”
So basically, the entire nation is now dependent on mostly young men ruining their lives through addiction. Might as well just promote smoking, at least it looked cool in black and white films.
Tucker is an infectious diseases physician at UNC Chapel Hill.
Seeing infectious disease patients at a North Carolina hospital on Christmas Day 2025 could easily make a doctor cynical.
In recent months, I walked through the Raleigh airport where a patient with measles travelled a few days before. I have watched research colleagues wind down promising work on adolescent HIV because of funding priorities shifted. I see patients in communities where the nearest rural hospital operates one bad quarter away from closure, and where families quietly ask social workers whether food assistance will still be there next month. These are the same patients that I saw over the holiday period this year at UNC Health in Chapel Hill, N.C.
You might think this is the wrong moment to ask patients or their families what they are grateful for. You would be wrong.
Year-round, I ask every patient that question, regardless of income, diagnosis, or background. I do it for three reasons.
First, asking about gratitude strengthens the doctor-patient relationship. Research suggests that even simple expressions of gratitude can build trust and connection. At the end of a clinical visit, the question often lightens what is otherwise a heavy, frightening conversation.
Second, I am genuinely curious about what my patients value most. What anchors them? What gives meaning to their lives beyond lab results and imaging studies?
Third, gratitude can be contagious. In clinics and hospitals, reflecting on gratitude often spills outward into generosity — toward family members, caregivers, and strangers alike. Unlike gifts distributed by chance, generosity has a way of finding where it is most needed.
And yet, over the December holiday period of 2025, the question landed differently.
Three adult patients wept openly when I asked what they were grateful for. This had never happened before in the two years I’ve been asking the same question. These were not quiet tears in private rooms. They were full-bodied sobs, witnessed by family members, trainee physicians, and nurses.
The reactions surprised me. On Christmas Eve, I returned to speak with each of these patients. I gave them each chocolate and tried to understand why a question that usually comforted had instead opened a wound. One wife of a Latin American migrant patient mentioned how the world felt less safe now compared to before. Another said that things felt heavy now. A third was terrified about losing her leg to infection.
For many Americans, being asked to name what they are grateful for now feels uncomfortably close to being asked to accept losses that were preventable: illnesses that should have been stopped, hunger that should not exist, hospitals that should not be closing. Gratitude, when untethered from justice, can sound like a request to look away.
The tears I saw were not a rejection of gratitude. They were grief for what gratitude used to rest upon — an expectation that basic protections would hold. That children would be vaccinated. That preventable disease would, in fact, be prevented. That access to food and medical care would not depend so heavily on income or geography. Gratitude is easier when people believe the floor beneath them is solid.
In medicine, we sometimes talk about moral injury — the distress that arises when clinicians know what patients need but cannot reliably provide it because of systemic constraints. That injury does not disappear on holidays. If anything, it sharpens. Decorations go up while safety nets fray. Celebration proceeds alongside quiet loss.
And yet, gratitude still matters — perhaps more than ever. But not as a demand placed on patients or families who are losing ground. Gratitude should instead be understood as a responsibility borne by those of us with relative stability, institutional voice, and the ability to influence how resources are allocated and protections maintained.
True gratitude is not passive. It is active. It asks: What have we been given, and what would it take to keep it intact? What obligations follow from living in a society where some people are cushioned from loss while others absorb it?
My patients cried not because they had nothing to be grateful for. Each person who cried also told me that asking about gratitude was a good idea. They spoke of family, faith, kindness from strangers, and the presence of loved ones at the bedside. “I am thankful for all of it,” one patient replied. My impression was that they cried because they sensed that the conditions making those things possible were becoming less reliable.
Gratitude, properly understood, is not about pretending everything is fine. It is about noticing what is fragile — and deciding whether we are willing to do the work required to keep it from breaking.
Joseph Tucker is an infectious diseases physician at UNC Chapel Hill writing a book about contagious generosity.
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced on Friday that it is revoking grazing permits in Phillips County that American Prairie had been using to sustain its herd of bison.
The decision comes after a three-and-a-half-year battle between the Montana livestock industry, backed by Gov. Greg Gianforte and the Montana Department of Justice, and American Prairie, a conservation nonprofit working to restore the prairie ecosystem of north-central Montana.
The Montana Stockgrowers Association cheered the news, describing it as a “win for public lands ranching in Montana.”
“MSGA is thrilled to see this decision by the BLM to restore grazing allotments back to their intended usage for production livestock grazing,” MSGA President Lesley Robinson said in a Friday afternoon press release. “MSGA is proud to defend sound, lawful land management. This decision is an incredible win for public lands grazers, ranching families and rural communities across the West.”
American Prairie called the decision a “troubling precedent” for those reliant on consistent, predictable federal land management decisions.
“This decision is not grounded in new impacts or new information — it appears to be completely arbitrary and is unfair,” American Prairie CEO Ali Fox wrote in an emailed statement. “When federal agencies begin changing how the rules are applied after the process is complete, it undermines confidence in the system for everyone who relies on public lands. Montana livestock owners deserve clarity, fairness and decisions they can count on.”
American Prairie’s statement also emphasized bison’s ecological significance to prairie ecosystems, describing it as “a relationship that has been extensively studied and well documented over time.”
In its Jan. 16 letter to American Prairie signed by Sonya Germann, the State Director for the Bureau of Land Management’s Montana/Dakotas office, the Interior Department took issue with how American Prairie has characterized its herd of bison, estimated in 2024 at approximately 900 animals.
American Prairie had been grazing bison on four leases for about three years as the high-profile case wound through the Interior Department’s Office of Hearings and Appeals, a quasi-judicial body that considers issues related to federally administered grazing permits. (American Prairie pointed out in a statement to MTFP that it first received permission to graze bison on BLM land using other leases that were also revoked by Friday’s decision in the mid-aughts and has “done so successfully for the past 20 years.”)
In December, Trump administration Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed the BLM to reconsider the grazing authorization approved by the Biden administration in 2022, arguing that the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act requires that grazing on publicly owned federal lands be “limited to cases where the animals to be grazed are domestic and will be used for production-oriented purposes.”
That distinction was the justification BLM provided for its decision this week.
“There are multiple times wherein by the applicant’s own admissions it is clear that these are not managed for production-oriented purposes and so do not fall within the meaning of the terms livestock and domestic as those terms are used in the applicable statutory authorities,” Germann wrote in her 24-page decision letter Friday. “Reissuing cattle-only permits on allotments where bison or a combination of cattle and/or bison were previously authorized … ensures that the BLM is acting within the limits of its statutory authority.”
In its 2022 record of decision approving American Prairie’s Montana bison grazing plan, the BLM noted that bison grazing is permitted on leases it administers in Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
“Though the proposal to allow domestic indigenous livestock grazing conflicts with views and opinions expressed among some users of public lands, such unfavorable views of the proposal itself do not constitute a scientific controversy, disagreement about the nature of effects, or provide evidence that the project is not in conformance to BLM’s statutory and regulatory requirements,” the agency wrote then.
American Prairie, which aims to connect 3.2 million acres — “enough to support a healthy prairie ecosystem”—has amassed a vast collection of land holdings and leases to facilitate its rewilding and biodiversity-restoration vision since its founding in 2001. In late 2024, the nonprofit announced that recent large ranch purchases had helped it cross a notable threshold: between its private landholdings and federal grazing leases, it has assumed control over more than half a million acres.
In recent years, the organization, previously titled the American Prairie Reserve, has garnered pushback from Republican politicians and neighboring livestock producers wary of the nonprofit’s substantial — and growing — influence on the cultural, land-ownership and property tax dynamics of central Montana. American Prairie critics, including the United Property Owners of Montana, have rallied support for their cause under a “Save the Cowboy” slogan.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Gianforte, who have fought the 2022 decision, described the agency’s reversal this week as a victory for Montana agriculture.
“Canceling the American Prairie Reserve’s bison grazing permit will help to protect the livestock industry and ranching communities in Northeastern Montana from the elitists trying to push them out,” Knudsen said in a statement.
American Prairie hinted in its Friday statement that a legal challenge to the decision in the federal court system might be coming, writing that it is “reviewing the decisions and determining its course of action.”
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This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
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