Have you heard about Vortex Bladeless Ltd.? It’s a Spain (just outside Madrid) based tech company developing a wind power generator without rotating blades.
STRUCTURE & OPERATION ~~~ There is a fixed base and a cylindrical mast that oscillates freely perpendicular to the wind direction, jointed by a carbon rod.
Inner parts never collide with each other, but interact to generate electricity.
ENERGY HARNESS When the wind passes around a structure, vortexes of pressure are created.
The frequency of vortexes depends on the wind speed, and if the structure has a similar natural resonating frequency, it begins to oscillate and harness their energy.
This phenomenon of aeroelastic resonance is called Vortex Shedding, and happens regularly in nature.
ENERGY CONVERSION Similar to a traditional alternator, our device gets an interaction between coils and magnetic fields, generating electricity by electromagnetic induction without need for rotation on a shaft nor a gearbox.
The skybrators, as some wits have amusingly dubbed them, stand at a hair over nine feet (2.75 metres) tall.
“Our technology has different characteristics which can help to fill the gaps where traditional windfarms might not be appropriate,” says Yáñez (Inventor, Founder and Co-CEO of Vortex Bladeless).
These gaps could include urban and residential areas where the impact of a windfarm would be too great, and the space to build one would be too small.It plugs into the same trend for installing small-scale, on-site energy generation, which has helped homes and companies across the country save on their energy bills.
This could be wind power’s answer to the home solar panel, says Yáñez. (source)
Snip-More, Not Too Much, Go Read It, It’s Exciting!
This is a fun half from an Emma Thursday 07-17-2025
This last one is from the Nazi authoritarian cult of tRump maga who I posted a meme of getting fired and asking for money because his boss felt his was not a good fit for the company. FAFO
Allison Gill reported on the newest money runaround the laws on campaign financing. Seems the island of Guam Republican Party got in prior years one donation of $10. This year they got 193 individual donations of $10,000 each. $10,000 is the maximum one person can give to the party. It turns out the donors were all very wealthy republicans many serving in the tRump administration. The island did not suddenly go hard right. No it turns out that the law doesn’t limit party transfers of money between party committees. After the money hit the Guam party coffers, it was transferred to the RNC. Turns out the 193 donors had already maxed out their allowed donations to the RNC. So this was a way to give the RNC an extra 1.93 million for the midterms. Put that with the other ways they plan to rig the election and it seems that the only way they figure they can stay in power is to cheat. Often and repeatedly. Hugs
Very informative and heart felt. Aron Ra is well known for his thought approach to atheism and science, delivering it in a way that a normal person can understand. The things he says at the end and the pictures he shows makes clear that as he says this is not about protecting anyone but about enforcing bigotry. Hugs
Last Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence (sic), released a report she claims showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Donald Trump.
This is bizarre because over the past eight years, the entire Intelligence network agreed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to undermine our elections and to help Donald Trump win the presidency.
Also, it could be treasonous for an American president to manipulate an election, but it’s not treasonous to oppose Donald Trump, which is how the administration is framing this. When Trump lied that Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower, he called it “treasonous.” It could be illegal without a warrant, but it wouldn’t be treasonous. However, it was a huge lie. Maybe lying to the American people repeatedly should be considered treasonous.
President Barack Obama never broke the law. Trump has broken the law repeatedly. He’s breaking the law now.
Trump likes to call what happened in 2016 the “Russia hoax.” Robert Mueller was never able to assert that Trump colluded with Russia, but only because the investigation ended early after then-Attorney General William Barr basically pulled the rug out from under Mueller. But Trump did collude with Russia. The Trump Campaign shared polling data with Russia. Isn’t that colluding? They invited Russians into their campaign HQ to provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Trump even asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing emails.” Does anyone remember, “Russia, if you’re listening”? Does anyone remember that Russia started hacking the Democratic National Committee on that very same day? Asking for Russia’s help, and receiving it on the same day, sure sounds like colluding.
Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the investigations and concluded that during the 2016 election, Russia conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While Russia extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that they attempted to actually change votes.
The Obama administration never claimed that Russian hackers manipulated votes, just that they meddled, as in conducting influence operations to change public opinion, using fake social media posts from the Russian Troll Farm to sow division among voters, and leaking documents stolen from the DNC to hurt Clinton. These are not opinions, they’re facts. Even a Republican-led Senate report said this was true. One of those Republicans today is Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
Obama ordered intelligence officials to review the material they had collected and report what they had learned before he left office. Obama was worried that the incoming Trump regime would bury all reports and facts about Russia’s meddling, and Obama was right to be concerned.
Later in Helsinki, Donald Trump stood next to Vladimir Putin and took his side over that of America, and defended Putin from accusations of meddling in our election.
Garbage, I mean Gabbard is upset by an email from an assistant to then-Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, that said Obama was seeking a new assessment of the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.” Gabbard believes that’s treasonous, but then again, she’s always been a useful idiot for Putin.
How exactly is it treasonous or even A-ha, to ask, “How did Russia do it?”
Now, the CIA is referring James Brennan, the former CIA Director, to the FBI, run by conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, for a criminal investigation. How is conducting an investigation, not on Trump but on Russia, criminal?
Gabbard’s report highlighted that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count,” then contrasted that with the spy agencies’ ultimate conclusion in December 2016 that Putin “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”
The report is saying that our election system (pay attention, MAGAts) wasn’t manipulated, just that Putin tried to manipulate the results of the election.
The report focused on a decision intelligence officials made at the time against producing an article for the president’s daily intelligence briefing that would have said that the Russians “did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” That report was not added to President Obama’s daily briefing because they didn’t know if it was true. It wasn’t.
While Russia did not impact the vote count, it did affect the results. How is Obama having these investigations done, which were to protect our nation, treasonous? A better question might be: Is it treasonous for a president to engage in real estate deals and accept free jets from monarchies?
If an American president (sic) acted treasonously, it’s Donald Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election he lost.
One of my senators, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard’s report compared two different things: Russian attempts to hack into voting systems and Russian influence operations meant to sway public opinion. If Gabbard can’t understand that difference, and we know Trump can’t, then she’s not qualified to be the Director of National Intelligence.
Good luck explaining the difference between hacking into a voting system and swaying public opinion, as Gabbard’s comprehension skills are on the same level as your attic-dwelling MAGA uncle.
The Director of National Intelligence should have some intelligence. She’s as qualified for her position as Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi are for theirs.
Warner said, “This is one more example of the director of national intelligence trying to cook the books. We’re talking about apples and oranges. The Russians were not successful at manipulating our election infrastructure, nor did we say they were.”
Warner pointed out that as recently as March, the intelligence community reported that Russia is still using influence campaigns to sow dissent in the West. Duh. They never stopped. And why would they when it works? They’ve hacked into other Western nations, but they had their greatest success with our elections, probably because American voters are more gullible. And not just conservatives. Raise your hand if you believed Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert are going to do a show together because you saw it on Facebook.
The report found that “Moscow probably believes information operations efforts to influence U.S. elections are advantageous,” and that undermining the integrity of American elections was a key goal.
Warner said, “They acknowledged that Russia’s effort to meddle goes on. That was an assessment under her watch,” he said, referring to Gabbard. See? She’s stupid.
Warner said his committee found no attempt by Obama or senior officials to manipulate the findings.
William Barr appointed a special counsel shortly before Trump left office in 2021 to investigate the investigators, and none of this came up.
You know what Harry would say? This is some bullshit.
Trump and his goons, like Tulsi Gabbard, have weaponized National Intelligence, which we used to trust, against democracy.
I hope this MAGA conspiracy theory works out even better for them than the Epstein Client List theory.
Creative note: I wanted to hit this subject after seeing that nearly every MAGA cartoonist went after it with Trump’s talking points and without any context. All their cartoons said is that President Obama committed treason. They don’t even understand the issue. These MAGAt cartoonists have a better chance of explaining quantum physics in Greek than they do of understanding this issue.
Here’s onecartoon on this, and here’s another one, and here’s one more(it wasn’t a DOJ investigation, dum-dum), and hey…I found another one, and another one(by our favorite racist duo), and here’s one by another of our favorite racists, and an idiot to boot. Nice label, dumbass. There’s not one bit of context in any of these six cartoons.
Context is hard for MAGAts, but talking points are easy.
Trailblazing Illinois Democrat reflects on political career and says party is ‘in a daze’ about how to combat Trump
Carol Moseley Braun speaks after Rahm Emanuel wins Chicago’s mayoral race in February 2011. Photograph: Nam Y Huh/AP
“Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton … ”
Carol Moseley Braun was riding a lift in the US Capitol building when she heard Dixie, the unofficial anthem of the slave-owning Confederacy during the civil war. “The sound was not very loud, yet it pierced my ears with the intensity of a dog whistle,” Moseley Braun writes in her new memoir, Trailblazer. “Indeed, that is what it was in a sense.”
The first African American woman in the Senate soon realised that “Dixie” was being sung by Jesse Helms, a Republican senator from North Carolina. He looked over his spectacles at Moseley Braun and grinned. Then he told a fellow senator in the lift: “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”
But clearly, Moseley Braun notes, the senator had never tangled with a Black woman raised on the south side of Chicago. She told him calmly: “Senator Helms, your singing would make me cry even if you sang Rock of Ages.”
Moseley Braun was the sole African American in the Senate during her tenure between 1993 and 1999, taking on legislative initiatives that included advocating for farmers, civil rights and domestic violence survivors, and went on to run for president and serve as US ambassador to New Zealand.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian from her home in Chicago, she recalls her history-making spell in office, argues that sexism is tougher to crack than racism and warns that the Democratic party is “walking around in a daze” as it struggles to combat Donald Trump.
As for that incident with Helms, she looks back now and says: “I had been accustomed to what we now call microaggressions, so I just thought he was being a jerk.”
Moseley Braun was born in the late 1940s in the post-war baby boom. Her birth certificate listed her as “white” due to her mother’s light complexion and the hospital’s racial segregation, a detail she later officially corrected. She survived domestic abuse from her father, who could be “a loving advocate one minute, and an absolute monster the next”, and has been guided by her religious faith.
In 1966, at the age of 19, she joined a civil rights protest led by Martin Luther King. She recalls by phone: “He was a powerful personality. You felt drawn into him because of who he was. I had no idea he was being made into a modern saint but I was happy to be there and be supportive.
“When it got violent, they put the women and children close to Dr King in concentric circles and so I was close enough to touch him. I had no idea at the time it was going to be an extraordinary point in my life but it really was.”
Moseley Braun was the first in her family to graduate from college and one of few women and Black students in her law school class, where she met her future husband. In the 1970s she won a longshot election to the Illinois general assembly and became the first African American woman to serve as its assistant majority leader.
But when she planned a historic run for the Senate, Moseley Braun met widespread scepticism. “Have you lost all your mind? Why are you doing this? But it made sense to me at the time and I followed my guiding light. You do things that seem like the right thing to do and, if it make sense to you, you go for it.”
Moseley Braun’s campaign team included a young political consultant called David Axelrod, who would go on to be a chief strategist and senior adviser to Obama. She came from behind to win the Democratic primary, rattling the party establishment, then beat Republican Richard Williamson in the general election.
She was the first Black woman elected to the Senate and only the fourth Black senator in history. When Moseley Braun arrived for her first day at work in January 1993, there was a brutal reminder of how far the US still had to travel: a uniformed guard outside the US Capitol told her, “Ma’am, you can’t go any further,” and gestured towards a side-entrance for visitors.
At the time she did not feel that her trailblazing status conferred a special responsibility, however. “I wish I had. I didn’t. I was going to work. I was going to do what I do and then show up to vote on things and be part of the legislative process. I had been a legislator for a decade before in the state legislature so I didn’t at the time see it as being all that different from what I’d been doing before. I was looking forward to it and it turned out to be all that I expected and more.”
Carol Moseley-Braun watches the delayed launch of the space shuttle Discovery in Chicago in October 1998. Photograph: Michael S Green/AP
But it was not to last. Moseley Braun served only one term before being defeated by Peter Fitzgerald, a young Republican who was heir to a family banking fortune and an arch conservative on issues such as abortion rights. But that did not deter her from running in the Democratic primary election for president in 2004.
“It was terrible,” she recalls. “I couldn’t raise the money to begin with and so I was staying on people’s couches and in airports. It was a hard campaign and the fact it was so physically demanding was a function of the fact that I didn’t have the campaign organisation or the money to do a proper campaign for president.
“I was being derided by any commentator who was like, ‘Look, this girl has lost her mind,’ and so they kind of rolled me off and that made it hard to raise money, hard to get the acceptance in the political class. But I got past that. My ego was not so fragile that that it hurt my feelings to make me stop. I kept plugging away.”
Eventually Moseley Braun dropped out and endorsed Howard Dean four days before the opening contest, the Iowa caucuses. Again, she had been the only Black woman in the field, challenging long-held assumptions of what a commander-in-chief might look like.
“That had been part and parcel of my entire political career. People saying: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you here? Don’t run, you can’t possibly win because you’re not part of the show and the ways won’t open for you because you’re Black and because you’re a woman.’ I ran into that every step of the way in my political career.”
Since then, four Black women have followed in her footsteps to the Senate: Kamala Harris and Laphonza Butler of California, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware.
Moseley Braun says: “I was happy of that because I was determined not to be the last of the Black women in the Senate. The first but not the last. That was a good thing, and so far the progress has been moving forward. But then we got Donald Trump and that trumped everything.”
Harris left the Senate to become the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president, then stepped in as Democrats’ presidential nominee after Joe Biden abandoned his bid for re-election.
Moseley Braun comments: “I thought she did as good a job as she could have. I supported her as much as I knew how to do and I’m sorry she got treated so badly and she lost like she did. You had a lot of sub rosa discussions of race and gender that she should have been prepared for but she wasn’t.”
Trump exploited the “manosphere” of podcasters and influencers and won 55% of men in 2024, up from 50% of men in 2020, according to Pew Research. Moseley Braun believes that, while the country has made strides on race, including the election of Obama as its first Black president in 2008, it still lags on gender.
“I got into trouble for saying this but it’s true: sexism is a harder thing to change than racism. I had travelled fairly extensively and most of the world is accustomed to brown people being in positions of power. But not here in the United States. We haven’t gotten there yet and so that’s something we’ve got to keep working on.”
Does she expect to see a female president in her lifetime? “I certainly hope so. I told my little grandniece that she could be president if she wanted to. She looked at me like I lost my mind. ‘But Auntie Carol, all the presidents are boys.’”
Still, Trump has not been slow to weaponise race over the past decade, launching his foray into politics with a mix of false conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace and promises to build a border wall and drive out criminal illegal immigrants.
Moseley Braun recalls: “It was racial, cultural, ethnic, et cetera, backlash. He made a big deal out of the immigration issue, which was racism itself and people are still being mistreated on that score.
“They’ve been arresting people for no good reason, just because they look Hispanic. The sad thing about it is that they get to pick and choose who they want to mess with and then they do. It’s too destructive of people’s lives in very negative ways.”
Yet her fellow Democrats have still not found an effective way to counter Trump, she argues. “The Democratic party doesn’t know what to do. It’s walking around in a daze. The sad thing about it is that we do need a more focused and more specific response to lawlessness.”
Five years after the police murder of George Floyd and death of Congressman John Lewis, there are fears that many of the gains of the civil rights movement are being reversed.
Over the past six months Trump has issued executive orders that aim to restrict or eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He baselessly blamed DEI for undermining air safety after an army helicopter pilot was involved in a deadly midair collision with a commercial airliner. Meanwhile, Washington DC dismantled Black Lives Matter Plaza in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress.
None of it surprises Moseley Braun. “It should have been expected. He basically ran on a platform of: ‘I’m going to be take it back to the 1800s. Enough of this pandering and coddling of Black people.’”
But she has seen enough to take the long view of history. “This is normal. The pendulum swings both ways. We have to put up with that fact and recognise that this is the normal reaction to the progress we’ve made. There’s bound to be some backsliding.
More than 30 years have passed since Moseley Braun, wearing a peach business suit and clutching her Bible, was sworn into the Senate by the vice-president, Dan Quayle. Despite what can seem like baby steps forward and giant leaps back, she has faith that Americans will resist authoritarianism.
“I’m very optimistic, because people value democracy,” he says. “If they get back to the values undergirding our democracy, we’ll be fine. I hope that people don’t lose heart and don’t get so discouraged with what this guy’s doing.
“If they haven’t gotten there already, the people in the heartland will soon recognise this is a blatant power grab that’s all about him and making a fortune for himself and his family and has nothing to do with the common good. That’s what public life is supposed to be about. It’s public service.”
July 22, 1756 The “The Friendly Association for gaining and preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures.” was founded in Philadelphia. It was comprised primarily of Quakers (members of the Society of Friends who wished to pursue peaceful coexistence between the native peoples and the European immigrants to the Pennsylvania region. Quakers and Indians
July 22, 1877 A general strike, part of the railroad strike that had paralyzed the country, was called in St. Louis, where workers briefly seized control of the city. Within a week after it began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the railroad strike reached East St. Louis, Illinois, where 500 members of the St. Louis Workingmen’s Party joined 1,000 railroad workers and residents. Strikers in St. Louis continued operation of non-freight trains themselves, collecting the fares, making it impossible for the railroads to blame the workers for loss of passenger rail service. More about the 1877 general strike
July 22, 1966 Federal Judge Claude Clayton issued an injunction ordering the police of Grenada, Mississippi, to stop interfering with lawful protest, ordering them instead to protect demonstrations, and requiring certain rules to be set down for the conduct of marches. This ruling followed weeks of arrests and beating of demonstrators who had been attempting to integrate all the businesses and other institutions in their town.
July 22, 1987 President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act (named for a member of Congress from Connecticut) which provided emergency relief provisions for shelter, food, mobile health care, and transitional housing for homeless Americans. More about the act
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