My Cousin Elmo says, “‘COFFEE’ spelled backwards ‘EEFFOC,’ which, when prefaced with ‘I don’t give…’ is exactly how I feel before my first cup in the morning.”

Tonney Cooper pulled the old discarded jacket on. Stuffing his hands in the front pockets, he was surprised to find an old COVID-19 mask from 2020 in one of them.

“What a strange year that was,” he thought as he set the mask aside and stretched his arms to see how well it fit.

Though unable to button it, he slipped out the back door of the derelict home. Tonney Cooper had several miles to go as he crossed the wasteland once known as Reno while staying in the shadows to avoid the other scavenging survivors and the United Nation patrols.

In 1984, Sequoia Pacific System Corporation purchased the voting machine business of AVM Corporation (the former Automatic Voting Machine Corporation) and reorganized it as Sequoia Voting Systems. By the time Sequoia bought the AVM voting business, the AVM Automatic Voting Computer (AVC) was ready for market.

Under Sequoia’s ownership, AVC was certified for use in several states in 1986 and 1987, and it went to market as the ‘Sequoia AVC Advantage DRE voting machine’ in 1990.

In late 1997, benefiting from an antitrust action by the U.S. Department of Justice, Sequoia Voting System obtained the intellectual property rights of the Optech line of ballot scanners. It proceeded to manufacture scanning voting machines and developed a touch-screen.

But the product underperformed after several years of losses.

In March 2005, the company was acquired by Smartmatic, which had developed a range of advanced election systems, including voting machines. Since then, Smartmatic has assigned most of its development and management teams to work on retrofitting some of Sequoia’s old-fashioned, legacy voting machines and replacing their technology with proprietary features, resulting in new high-tech products.

As a result, Sequoia sold many next-generation election products and experienced a healthy financial recovery in fiscal years 2006 and 2007. However, in the 2006 presidential election, Sequoia’s voting system was called into question.

• Cook County, Illinois is the second most populous county in the United States. It had many problems using the Sequoia Voting System. Problems were suspected to be related to a software error of the voting system.
• Florida replaced the punch card voting system with a touchscreen system after the 2000 election problems, but the touchscreen system purchased from Sequoia had some major problems.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) opened an investigation into Sequoia only after Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who chaired the subcommittee overseeing CFIUS and who co‐authored the Foreign Investment and National Security Act 2007 (FINSA), wrote a letter to then-Treasury Secretary John Snow inquiring whether the Venezuelan government could use Sequoia to manipulate U.S. elections. Maloney cited the fact that the Venezuelan state had invested in Smartmatic’s affiliates, the company’s current ownership was buried in a labyrinth of offshore trusts, and revelations that Sequoia had flown 15 Venezuelan nationals to Chicago to tabulate votes in a local election.

“There clearly remained doubt surrounding this company, and as long as those doubts lingered, many people would have legitimate questions about the integrity of these voting machines,” said Maloney. “When I first raised this case with Treasury, I thought that it was ripe for a CFIUS investigation, because the integrity of our voting machines is vital to national security. At that time, Smartmatic flatly refused to undergo a CFIUS review. But now it seems the company could not overcome the cloud of doubt surrounding this doubt – had they been able to, we would not be talking about a sale of Sequoia today. As I said in May, it seems that a CFIUS review was in fact the proper course.”

The company replaced its headquarters in Boca Raton in favor of a complex structure with offices in multiple locations. The U.S. State Department said its Venezuelan owners “remain hidden behind a network of holding companies in the Netherlands and Barbados”; its organization is “a complex network of offshore companies and foreign trusts.”

As a youngster, one of the television programs that used to come on in the afternoon was ‘Gilligan’s Island.’ Reruns, but it generally beat out the Merv Griffin Show, as I’d sit the couch with an after school snack of whatever I scrounged the fridge or cupboard.

Years later, my dad and I were watching one of those many reruns when he said, “Tina Louise is the sexiest thing.”

“You gotta be kidding, whadda ‘bout Dawn Wells?” I said.

We never did agree.

More years later, and who’d have known that I would become friends with Dawn. It was a work afternoon and out of all guys there, she sat in my lap, laughed, told stories about her childhood, the pageants she won, the big one she lost, and how it launched her career.

And, of course, I ate every second of her unexpected attention up. It would be later that I’d discover that this is who Dawn Wells really was and it was delightful.

She was far more interesting than her ‘breakout’ character. In fact, she was a bit of a wild child, the hippy-chick she never had the chance to be when she was in her 20’s and a time which had passed her by, once she realized she was more than simply an actress.

One conversation that we had, sticks out. She was explaining to me the downfalls of fame.

“I’ve always been close to the famous, but I’ve never been famous,” I said.

“Good!” she said.

It was her surprisingly down-to-earth response that made me realize – I am fine right where I’m at in this life, but I will however miss having those sort of deep, to the point conversations with the woman I once idolized as a kid but grew to love as a friend.

It began as a distant rumble and a few bangs. Before anyone knew it, Zaxxers were racing through the neighborhood, burning homes, killing people, and looting everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Gene Arlo lived alone and didn’t have much worth stealing, still, they came, smashing in his front door, chasing him out the back. On his way out, he grabbed his 30-30, his bag of ammo and other necessities he kept handy, then retreated to his elm tree where he’d built a platform for bird watching a couple of years before.

“Are you crazy?” a neighbor asked as Gene pounded in the nails holding the platform in place.

Another chided, “You’re gonna fall and kill yourself.”

“But not today,” Gene thought, as he casually took aim at one Zaxxer after another.

By then several people he knew and lived near were laying in their yards, their driveways, and in the street, each dead. Houses, up and down the many streets, were burning and he could hear the agonized screams and cry of survivors.

Gene Arlo laid on his perch, watched his home burn as the military picked up the dead bodies, then after nightfall, he silently disappeared into the rocky desert.

Brad Chambers was on his fifth beer, seated on his Panther Valley back porch, looking out over the Nevada scrub. His yard ran adjacent to Bureau of Land Management property.

He watched the green headlights creep along the distant ravine.

“Ain’t no vehicle’s supposed to be out there,” he said, deciding to investigate.

It didn’t take him long to find the lights.

“Yeah,” Brad told the 9-1-1 operator, “I found that missing sculpt…”

The call dropped.

The Spider-Bug stood over the smoldering pile of dust, knowing it must find a more isolated location while it waiting for its final instructions.

Smartmatic first established a presence in the United States in 2000 in Boca Raton, Florida, then moved its headquarters to Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2004, before opening new headquarters in London in 2012. Smartmatic’s voting solution was first implemented in the August 2004 recall referendum against President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and was successful in helping Chávez secure 59% of the votes.

This result was met with accusations of electoral fraud. At the time questions were only raised about the election process and patterns, however nobody focused on the Smartmatic voting system.

According to Wikipedia: “although Smartmatic has made different claims about whether they are American or Dutch, the U.S. State Department notes that the owners of the company remain hidden in a network of holding companies in the Netherlands and Barbados”.

The New York Times notes that “the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less obvious and that its organization is an elaborate network of offshore companies and foreign trusts.”

BBC News noted that while Smartmatic says the company was founded in the U.S. and “its roots are firmly fixed in (Venezuela), the ownership structure is opaque.” Smartmatic maintains that holding companies in multiple countries are used for “tax efficiency.”

WikiLeaks provides some more detail, “…they have a list of about 30 anonymous investors …. the silent partners are mainly upper-class Venezuelans, …. then Defense Minister Jose Vicente Rangel …. the Vice President’s daughter Gisela Rangel Avalos, Chávez’s political mentor Luis Miquelina is also a shareholder in the company ….”

The true identity of most of Smartmatic’s shareholders remains a mystery.

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske says there is no truth to the allegations that she forwarded private voter information to a Pakistani-based intelligence company.

Talk about parsing words. While not a Pakistani intelligence company, she did send the information to a Pakistani tech company with tied to that country’s intelligence agency.

As she’s claiming this, she is also calling ‘True the Vote (TTV),’ a liar by claiming with TTV placed the cc’d foreign email address on the email sent by the SoS’s office.

“The automated program then sent the information as requested,” Cegavske’s office wrote. “The SOS IT staff has confirmed there have been no hacks or other reasons this could have occurred. This incident has been referred to appropriate law enforcement.”

TTV’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht said that no one at her organization had manually added the foreign email address in their email request to the secretary of state’s office.

“We welcome the opportunity to talk with anyone at NV SOS and encourage them to look at the IP address from whence the request(s) originated,” she said in a message. “It was not from us. And that is why we reported it.”

In early December, True the Vote sent a letter to the Department of Justice regarding the email and the cc’d address, saying it “appears to be evidence of a breach within the Nevada Secretary of State’s email system.”

Cegavske has published a “Facts vs. Myths” PDF pushing back against all the allegations she’s facing regarding Nevada’s 2020 election.

As an added note, Cegavske faced similar allegations during her 2018 race against Democrat Nelson Arajuo, who claimed she had provided private voter information to a Trump administration election integrity commission.

INDEX:
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/?fbclid=IwAR0OUods10WvpELCtIMQ1InSHzIwivqDLvqrN_A46XAzeXwHufEyaL-N8Ys

CLINTON EMAILS:
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/clinton-emails/?fbclid=IwAR1Y8XJDuP9t6SdnzOBwFojeOkN5Gn_w9Odj-AywxSgyxrys2ych03taIOE

Reporter’s Notebook: I’m so glad I don’t have a child in post-secondary school anymore, I’d be in prison by now…

A Las Vegas, Nevada high school senior is suing a taxpayer-funded charter school over its Critical Race Theory-based curriculum.

Filed Dec. 22 in federal court, William Clark claims his First and 14th Amendment rights are being violated after being told that by refusing to identify with an oppressive group, he is exercising his privilege and underscoring his role as an oppressor. The student at Democracy Prep, whose mother is black and deceased father was white, said there’s a hostile classroom environment, and is being discriminated against in the mandatory, year-long “Sociology of Change” course required for graduation.

The courses require students to ‘unlearn’ and ‘fight back’ against ‘oppressive’ structures in their family arrangements, religious beliefs and practices, racial, sexual, and gender identities, all of which they are required to divulge and subject to non-private interrogation. He was also required “to reveal his racial, sexual, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious identities” by his teacher, who greeted students by saying, “Hello, my wonderful social justice warriors!”

Clark was told the next step would be to determine if parts of his identity “have privilege or oppression attached to it,” and where privilege was defined as “the inherent belief in the inferiority of the oppressed group.” The school repeatedly threatened Clark “with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements.”

The lawsuit comes after President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13950 on Sept. 22 prohibiting the military, federal agencies, and federal contractors from promoting the “divisive concepts” that are part of Critical Race Theory in workplace training sessions.

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman, an Obama appointee, however, issued a preliminary nationwide injunction against the order, agreeing with an LGBT diversity training organization that argued the order violated its free speech rights.