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James Hamilton, M. D.

Larry,​

Nice artwork of a Christmas stocking with the colorful toy soldier. That actually got me to thinking.

Although I never wore the uniform (except as a college freshman in ROTC) I live in a highly military city and worked with them for most of my career. What I fail to understand - and I hope that some of our classmates who did serve and others, like yourself, who are more historically knowledgeable than I can explain - is the connection between  military figures (life size and toy soldier models, etc.) in full dress uniforms as symbols of Christmas. I am sure this goes way back in the annals of history and probably has origins somewhere in Europe.

Any ideas? 

Jim 

David Mitchell

Could be from a famous piece of music, written before 1900 that refer to Toy or Tin Soldiers.

(wasn't sure of the difference so I cheated - looked this up on Wiki ) 

The "Parade of the Tin Soldiers", also known as "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" was written in 1897 by German composer Leon Jessel.

Correct me if I am wrong but I think it was later adapted for the Nutcracker and refered to as the "March of the Toy Soldiers". And I think the Nutcracker has always been sort of a Christmas tradition.  

Then there is the long history of little boys collecting toy soldiers, which was a fairly common Christmas present. 

Do I win something Jim?  Or is there a better answer?

Michael McLeod

Smile and say "cheese":

"The metaphor is easy enough to grasp: Multiple layers of protection, imagined as cheese slices, block the spread of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. No one layer is perfect; each has holes, and when the holes align, the risk of infection increases. But several layers combined — social distancing, plus masks, plus hand-washing, plus testing and tracing, plus ventilation, plus government messaging — significantly reduce the overall risk. Vaccination will add one more protective layer.

“Pretty soon you’ve created an impenetrable barrier, and you really can quench the transmission of the virus,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, executive vice president and chief patient officer at Merck, who recently referenced the Swiss cheese model when speaking at a virtual gala fund-raiser for MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan.

“But it requires all of those things, not just one of those things,” she added. “I think that’s what our population is having trouble getting their head around. We want to believe that there is going to come this magic day when suddenly 300 million doses of vaccine will be available and we can go back to work and things will return to normal. That is absolutely not going to happen fast.”

Michael McLeod

And then there is this.

Opinion

Death Came for the Dakotas

In terms of the coronavirus, they’re a theater of American disgrace.

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

• Dec. 5, 2020

Under normal circumstances, I would have flown to one or both of the Dakotas to write this column, but the whole point is that these aren’t normal circumstances. And I don’t have a death wish.

Too much? Probably. But how else to convey the proper timbre of outrage, the right pitch of grief, over what happened there? Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, when there was no doubt about the damage that Covid-19 could do, the Dakotas scaled their morbid heights, propelled by denial and defiance. They surged to the top of national rankings of state residents per capita who were hospitalized with Covid-related symptoms or whose recent deaths were linked to it.

As of Friday afternoon, South Dakota led the country in the average daily number of recent Covid-associated deaths per capita, with three for every 100,000 people, according to a New York Times database. North Dakota was second, with 1.5.

More than 40 percent of South Dakota’s 1,033 Covid-related deaths to that point occurred in November, according to statistics from the Covid Tracking Project, and the same was true of North Dakota’s 983 deaths.

The Dakotas are a horror story that didn’t have to be, a theater of American disgrace. Want to understand the tendencies — pathologies might be the better word — that made America’s dance with the coronavirus so deadly? Visit the Dakotas.

Intellectually, I mean.

 “It’s mind-boggling,” Jamie Smith, the leader of the Democratic minority in South Dakota’s House of Representatives, told me. He was referring primarily to how politicized such basic safety measures as social distancing and masks became, but also to many South Dakotans’ distrust of science and unshakable belief that the virus wouldn’t come for them.

“We’re dug in,” he said when we spoke recently. Of the 10 counties in America with the most Covid-related deaths per capita, three are in South Dakota.

Lawrence Klemin, a Republican legislator in North Dakota who just finished his two-year term as the speaker of its House of Representatives, told me that people in his state “are pretty much independent-minded about how they conduct their affairs.”

“I don’t know if maybe some people are stubborn,” he added, but the deep sigh in his voice said that he knows full well that many people are. And the most stubborn, he said, have been the loudest. Throughout the pandemic, he said, he was deluged with communications from constituents adamantly opposed to any mask-wearing requirement, which North Dakota didn’t even have. He heard almost nothing from the other side.

Lawrence Foster

Toy Soldiers, Christmas Stockings, and the Nutcracker (both the ballet and the story)

Jim - 

Like it did to Dave, your question about military uniforms and their tie-in to Christmas got me thinking so I went and did some searching through my memory, my library shelves, and then on to the internet. 

Memories.

I agree with Dave that there is a link to The Nutcracker but it is to more than just the ballet.  In December 1961 we were in 8th grade.  My second oldest brother, Dick, (FYI, my 3 oldest brothers are Tom, Dick, and Harry, no joke.) had returned from his 3 year Army enlistment as a surgical tech and was at Ohio State.  One of his classes had him working with community groups. He was doing work with Whetstone Recreation Center and they were going to put on a play for children called The Nutcracker.  It was not the ballet but was a watered down version of the E.T.A. Hoffman story.  All the kids who were in the play were 6th grade and younger.  Dick talked me into being in the play.  It turned out they needed a lead and I got the primary role of Godfather Drosselmeyer who narrates the story as he acts in it.     

The Hoffman story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” was written in 1816 just one year after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.  (Now picture in your mind the kinds of military uniforms worn at that time.)  Hoffman’s story includes a story within the story - more about this in the next section.  In the play, Old Godfather Drosselmeyer tells Maria the story of when he was a young man and knew the prince who had been turned into the Nutcracker.  So it was a time-jump/memory story.

In the play at Whetstone, the director brought me two fake goatee beards - one brown and one grey - and asked if I would like to use one for my character.  I suggested that I use both of them and just change them out when we changed scenes.  So there was a plate of glue on a table backstage for me to switch them out.  Learning about that story by being in the play has been one of the pleasures of my lifetime. 

Nutcracker Story and Ballet.
So back sometime in the 1980s our local PBS station broadcast the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 1984 or 85 production of The Nutcracker.  The stage scenery and the costumes were designed by Maurice Sendak.  He is the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are” which many of you might recognize.  A book was published that has the original Hoffman story and the Sendak artwork.  Here is a link to it onto Half Price Books web site.    

https://www.hpb.com/products/nutcracker-9780385348645

It is an outstanding book.  Sendak wrote an excellent introduction that explains many of the differences between the ballet and the book and why theballet ws done differently.   Here is also a link that gives more information about the ballet.  Tchaichovsky did the score but Marius Petipa did the choreography.  And there is information about it here.    

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Nutcracker

The book also includes the “darker” part of the story which the composer and choreographer did not want to put into their ballet production.  The Hoffman/Sendak book tells the story well but I bet there are also good versions of the story somewhere else online.  

The ballet was not successful.  Tchaichovsky’s music was but not the dance and so the ballet rarely got performed until after WW2.  

Christmas Stockings.

Nutcrackers had been used in Europe for a few centuries but they were not necessarily designed as soldiers.  They could be gnomes or other things like shown on this Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutcracker_doll#:~:text=Nutcracker%20dolls%20originate%20from%20late,became%20associated%20with%20Christmas%20season.

With many soldiers returning from Europe during the 1940s and with the US stationing troops there in support of NATO and the Marshall Plan there became more awareness of the Nutcracker story and ballet and of the story and of German culture and history.

I did an online search for images using the terms “Christmas Stockings” and “vintage” and “pre-1950” and came up with many images but they did not have the soldiers on them.

In my mind it may be that as Americans became more aware of the Hoffman story and of the similar concept that American men and women put on the uniform and fought an enemy.  There is an identification with the story of the Nutcracker who fought the Mouse King and protected innocent people from being victims.

I suspect that with the identification there came the use of the toy soldier or tin soldier on the Christmas stocking.  Christmas - a time to give recognition and thanks for the blessings we have and to recognize how hard it was to get them.  And the stocking - the place where the gifts are given.

And now I am going to go back to the Hoffman story and tie that in with the statements just made in the preceding paragraph.  In opening scenes of the Hoffman story (and in the ballet) Maria and Fritz are anxiously waiting to see the Christmas tree and the gifts.  In the story they are reminded, by their older sister Louise, that it is through Christ that these gifts came from their parents.  There is no St. Nick or Santa Claus mentioned.     

1968 New York City Ballet Production of The Nutcracker.
In December 1968 I was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Monmouth, NJ working in the Mental (not Dental, Mental, i.e. psychiatric) Health outpatient clinic at a “Clinical Psychology Technician.”  One of the officer’s wife had a pair of tickets to the NYC production of the Nutcracker but couldn’t go.  I got the tickets and went with one of the pharmacy techs who had a car and we drove up to NYC and went to Lincoln Center and saw the ballet.  Our seats were a number of rows back on the main floor.  The floor curved up high enough that we had a slight angle looking down onto the stage.  

In the first act Maria (also known as Clara) is magically shrunk down in size similar to the toys and the mice.  Kind of hard to do that on a stage in our real-life form.  So…. what I saw was that the stage floor area around the 12 foot high tree had panels that slid open and kept sliding open.  And what was at first a 12 foot tree was actually something like a 50 foot tree, a fully decorated and lit tree, on an elevator platform, and it kept rising and rising out of the floor.  Sure it gave the illusion of Maria shrinking, but actually it created the wonder of magic and belief for all the audience.  

Toy Soldier Link.
In my online searching I also found this link about the history of toy soldiers.  
https://www.toysoldierco.com/resources/toysoldierhistory.htm

*************
Okay, Jim, I would say that I put in my 2 cents worth to your question but it looks like it may be closer to 50 cents.  Of course with inflation that may make it really only 2 cents.    

James Hamilton, M. D.

Larry and Dave M., 

Thanks for those responses. It certainly sounds like those answers would explain the Christmas-military connection and some of the European background which I suspected.

HOOAH and Merry Christmas! 

Jim 

Michael McLeod

sure, Larry. If you get a chance to put glue on your face why not do it as often as possible? 

In other news it's always kinda creepy and a little depressing when you are on line and you get targeted ads like this one I just got:

"Best toenail clippers for seniors."

But cheer up. Just in case you're as sentimental as I am:

Sunday 12/13 at 7:30 PM Eastern/6:30 Central on PBS, it's A Charlie Brown Christmas! 

David Mitchell

Just wrote a long piece and lost it all. Arent you the lucky ones?

It was about today being Pearl Harbor Day. 

Briefly, it reminds me of the vast difference in the way we recall WW2 history as it occured in Europe, and how we recall the history of the War in the Pacific.  

More specifically, the difference in how we learned so much about Nazi brutality, vs, how little we recall (or ever learned in the first place) of the brutal Japnese militrary's "Bushido" culture. We seem to forget how utterly depraved their armies were in various Asian theaters of warfare. I mentioned how barbaric the Imperial Japanese Army was to the Korean people, (the 200,000 Korean "Comfort Women" - sex slaves taken along for troops "comfort" during the war), as well as the people of China, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia.

**this is about what I consider one of the most under-reported events of modern history

I mentioned a book titled "The Rape of Nanking"(1991) by young Taiwanese-American author Iris Chang. In it she documents the history of what the Japanese soldiers did to the poeple of the city Nanking in 1937. Estimates range from about 200,000 to 300,000 innocent Chinese who were executed by the Japnese troops occuping the city. Some of the accounts are so awfull I would not try to mention them. Often in house to house, systematic "execution" parties, sometimes in massive forced gatherings on gasoline soaked rafts pushed into the river and lit by torches. 

But just think about those numbers in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki !

There is another dimension to this story that is also remarkable. There was an international community of businessmen and educators living in the "University District" who the Japanese allowed to live unharmed. Among these American, British, Australian, French, and German citizens was a senior ranking German government offical who argued with the Japanese commanders to stop the atrocities. Of all people?

And the final irony of this sotry is that when those of the intrnational community of Nanking finally returned home and tried to relate what they had witnessed, they were largely ignored by ther own governments. Incredible!

Miss Chang's book brought withering attacks from the Japnese press. The Japanese have denied most of this information for years and still do to a large degree. I read somewhere that Japanese history books contain about two paragraphs about World War II, and a generation of younger Japanese have no idea who won! 

If you are interested in an incredibley interesting, however gut-wrenching book, here is Miss Changs cover. Sadly, some years after pubishing this book and a few others, she fell into a deep depression and took her own life.

(added later - -  I forgot one little interesting factoid in this narrative. In several other books I have read, and perhaps one movie scene - all from a Japanese point of view - the Japanese refer to this matter as the "Nanking Incident", and claiming that a much smaller period of Chinese "insurrection", with far far fewer deaths is all that occurred)

David Mitchell

Okay Joe,

I think we could use a funny right about now.

Michael McLeod

Like your ballbuster story larry. sorry - I mean nutcracker.

In the meantime, my fellow "co-benefiters": Feel like a number? You are. And not a very important one

The Trump administration finalized a rule Wednesday that makes it harder to enact public health protections by changing the way the Environmental Protection Agency calculates the costs and benefits of new limits on air pollution.

The new cost-benefit analysis, which applies to all future Clean Air Act rules, instructs the agency to weigh all the economic costs of curbing an air pollutant but disregards many of the incidental benefits that arise, including avoided illnesses and deaths. In other words, if reducing emissions from power plants also saves tens of thousands of lives each year by cutting soot, those “co-benefits” should be not be counted.

David Mitchell

I wish we could go a few days without any kind of the events in Boise these last few days. Hate to see the re-emrgence of Hitler's Brown Shirts. But Racism has been the one of the main activities (besides fly fishing) of northern Idaho - especially up around Priest Creek - for a generation. 

Both stories - Very disturbing!

Mark Schweickart

Since Dave suggests we could use something funnny, let me try this song I call Clueless on you. Well, I suppose it's not really funny so much as a tongue-in-cheek look at male-female relationships, although I fear it may be all too sadly true about many. "How would I know these particulars," you might ask? Well I'm not admitting to anything autobiographical here, you understand. Let's just say I've had my own share of cluelessness down through the years and leave it vague like that. I wouldn't want to ruin my macho-man reputation with all of you fine folk. And "What reputation is that?"  I hear you ask.  Uhh... I think I will stop digging this hole any deeper and just shut up now. Here's the song:

John Jackson

It would be wonderful, now that all of Trump’s delusional attempts to overturn the election have failed spectacularly in the courts, to think our experiment with fascism is over.

From an article in The Atlantic by Ron Brownstein with the provocative subtitle  “In elections going forward, not trying to steal the election will be seen as RINO behavior.”

Republicans’ tolerance, if not active support, for President Donald Trump’s ongoing bid to overturn the 2020 election has crystallized a stark question: Does the GOP still qualify as a small-d democratic party—or is it morphing into something very different?

Even with the Supreme Court still deciding whether to consider a last-ditch legal effort to invalidate the results from the key swing states, there appears little chance that Trump will succeed in subverting Joe Biden’s victory. But Trump’s failure on that front has obscured his success at enlisting a growing swath of his party to join his cause—a dynamic that is already prompting new Republican efforts to make it more difficult to vote and raising concerns about the party’s commitment to the basic tenets of Western democratic rules and conventions, including the peaceful transfer of power…

Like other experts, Stokes says the Republican Party is on a continuum toward the kind of “democratic erosion” visible in other countries, including Turkey under Recep Erdoğan, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or, in the most extreme example, Russia under Vladimir Putin. In those nations, a party that wins office through a democratic election then seeks to use state power to tilt or completely undermine future elections.

Michael McLeod

It would be wonderful if Americans use this opportunity to see just how far powerful people with no principles will go to get what they want.  The world at large can see it and other countries are uniformly horrified by how our democracy has been assaulted. Now that he's lost, Trump continues to reveal himself for what he is - a schoolyard bully who uses insults to attack good people and uses millions of dollars, greedy cohorts and a dumbed-down populace to generates this immense and complex web of propaganda to protect himself and hide the truth. You'd think even his most devout followers would see through him. Yet many of them do not. In future generations, volumes and volumes will be written about this time. That's assuming we wise up, and the great democracy that is being attacked in our generation survives. 

James Hamilton, M. D.

Well, pardon me, a member of the "dumbed-down populace", for wanting to see if the mounting evidence for election fraud is sufficient to provide proof to the SCOTUS that it occurred. Whether it changes the winner of the election or not, I think that it is important and mandatory for the future of our country. Moreover, if we are to respect our sysyem and be respected by the rest of the world, we should all want to know that answer.

Jim 

Michael McLeod

It's a fantasy, Jim. I'm not at all surprised that you're convinced because they've done a great job of fabricating. But truth will out. And thank goodness the system - including Trump's own supreme court - is standing up to Trump's greatest con job ever.

Which will fail in the end, but not without extending the damage he's already done.

I promise you I will appear on this forum and abjectly apologize if proof emerges that tens of thousands of fraudulent votes and a systematic, nationally-organized, far-reaching conspiracy was created to dump Trump. Because there's no way something that pervasive, involving hundreds of clandestine operatives, could possibly be pulled off without being exposed at some point. Somebody will squeal and tangible proof (not phony math or laughable lawsuits or wackadoodle witnesses) would inevitably emerge -- and we'll have a televised national hoo-haw  that will make the watergate hearings look like a Judge Judy rerun -- and your man Trump will be re-ensconsed on his thrown.

But that ain't gonna happen. Weeks ago I said truth will out. And it has, and it will, and more's the pity, millions will continue to pretend that it didn't. 

David Mitchell

"mounting evidence" ?????????? 

Golly, I must have missed something here. 

"respect our system"  ??????

 Surely you are not referrring to his throwing his own political party allies and supporters in the Georgia State House under the bus for refusing to violate their own state constitutiton - and carrying out three - count 'em, three ofiicial recounts.  

John Jackson

Jim, one after the other, Trump-appointed federal judges have laughed these cases out of their courts.  Trump's attorneys talk big about fraud to the media before they go into the courtroom but then they stare at their shoes and raise trivial technical issues when they're before the judges because they don't want to be sanctioned for lying to a judge.  And then, time and again, the judges have summarily dismissed the cases.

You're living in the totally divorced-from-reality Hannity/Ingraham/Carlson world if you think the Supreme Court (right wing as it now is) is going to take this seriously.

Biden is ahead now in the popular vote by more than 7 million votes (Hilary won by 2.9 million).   If cheating on this grand scale occurred, irrefutable evidence wouldn't be hard to find.  And use your common sense - if the Dems were going to cheat, why wouldn't they have also cheated to elect enough senators so the Dems would control the Senate and pad their lead in the House (which instead they barely won) so they could get something done? 

Too many people believe Trump's and his right wing media enablers' lies. I never would have thought it possible five years ago, but democracy is hanging on by a thread in this country.

John Jackson

This just in - the Supreme Court, in a brief unsigned order,  rejected a lawsuit by Texas and 16 other red states (and endorsed by more than half of the Republicans in the House) asking that election results be thrown out in four swing states that voted for Biden 'because of election fraud'.

Jim, can you  provide whatever “evidence of the mounting election fraud” that you have that the (6-3 Republican-dominated) Supreme Court might have overlooked?

David Mitchell

How ironic that this recent case was brought before the Supreme Court by a man who himself has been under investigation for the past several years for briibery and misuse of public office. The charges have been leveled by - - wait for it - - several of his own staff members - - yet again. 

And what timing?

Just this (yesterday) morning, the FBI issued a subpoena for his (Paxton's) own records while investigating an entirely new round of allegations against him - while some of the older charges are also still pending after years in the legal process. It should be interesting t see how that plays out.

And silly me.  I thought Rudi was the bold one.  

Speaking of that darn cat - I mean Court - is it just me, or are Neil and Brett and Amy not bringing the hoped-for return on Donald's "invest-ment". (He should'a offered her the deal on a 30-day refundable trial?) 

    ('scuse that typo. I was having one of my Disney moments.)

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Over the past few weeks sufficient evidence has been presented in the various state senate hearings in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Georgia, through sworn affidavits given by ordinary American citizens, who recounted countless irregularities and interferences in the 2020 election. 

In the Pennsylvania hearing, retired Army Colonel Philip Waldron, a cyber warfare specialist, "gave a master's class in how the Dominion voting systems are set up to enable election fraud on a massive scale. He talked about fraudulent elections in other countries (e.g. Venezuela), voting machines being connected to the internet making them hackable, stolen USB drives used for hacking voting machines, and inexplicable anomalies that showed that votes were preloaded for Biden before the election began. Col. Waldron's testimony gained added heft when the senators got to see a declaration from an intelligence analyst at the 305th Military Intelligence Unit. The declaration has specific evidence showing that, on November 8, 2020, Dominionvotingsystems.com, which is Dominion Voting Systems' proprietary URL, was connected over the internet to Belgrade, Iran, China — and to "the Indivisible  political group (formerly ACORN)."

Furthermore, it looks as if the Chinese government has an ownership interest in Dominion. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/chinese-parts-hidden-ownership-growing-scrutiny-inside-america-s-biggest-n1104516

In addition, these irregularities were reported in sworn affidavits :

• Biden ballots in Michigan were scanned 8 to 10 times.
• Over 100,000 Wisconsin late ballots backdated to November 3.
• Dominion, by failing to pay taxes, was not allowed to operate in Missouri.
• Michigan poll watcher watched dollies full of Biden ballots arrive at 4 a.m.
• Two trailers full of completed ballots went from Pennsylvania to New York, with one traveling on November 4.
• Georgia election officials alleged filmed destroying evidence.

The following YouTube video features personal testimony of election fraud which was given in Michigan by African-American woman who has 25 years experience working directly with various Secretaries of State and Michigan elections:

Linked article below provides information on how American vote counting was outsourced overseas to a bankrupt Spanish company.  Why??

https://greatgameindia.com/us-election-bankrupted-spanwolise:40 mark

Michael McLeod

Ooooh sworn affidavits! Lions and tigers and bears, o my! Those boxes under the table! They MUST be secret biden ballots because - well, because say so! Well I knew I was going to have to do this but I just couldn't stay silent any longer given the importance of the calculated poison we are up against. I'll work through selected falsehoods over the next couple of days. Then, I swear, not to sound like Tommy Lee Jones in "No Country for Old Men," I'm done. I can't take it any more. You were probably right, Jack. We should hav let this go and we're not going to change anybody's mind by pursuing it here.  But it's my profession that is being assaulted - and challenged.  Politicians and monied interests -- and it's key to remember that Republican have the much larger share of monied interest -- have always lied. Nobody's "dumbed down." We're all just being overwhelmed by a level of mendacity that has been cultured into a technological art form. I mean they have really gotten good at it, I'll give them that. Which only means that we have to get better at seeing through it. 

Michael McLeod

Ok here is the first fake evidence thingie I want to deal with. This one is easy:

Surveillance footage of ballot processing on election night in Atlanta is fueling a false social media narrative of “suitcases filled with ballots” hidden under a cloth-covered table and tallied without supervision, even as top state officials confirm election workers followed standard procedure.

The video showed regular ballot containers on wheels — not suitcases — and both a state investigator and an independent monitor observed counting until it was done for the night, finding no evidence of improper ballots, state and county officials said on Friday.

Next I will take on one that involves math, which I absolutely suck at, but I'm making myself do it as penance for all the time I blew off geometry and algebra at watterson. Plus I love it that the Texas attorney general who pitched it in that lawsuit that just got shot down by Trump's own supreme court is under investigation for bribery and the statistician who came up with the bogus figures has been ridiculed by his peers and is a Trump donor. 

Michael McLeod

I’ll let this guy do the talking about the Dominion ballot system thing. It’s John Poulos, CEO of the Denver-based company. He doesn't mention the Chinese thing - he mentions the first thing they came up with, the supposed Venezuela connection.  But my lord, the Chinese own every damn thing in this country and others. Food, computers, drugs (including 90-plus percent of the antibiotics we use!) -  you name it. So that's equally wackadoodle.

"Accurate, transparent and accessible elections—this is the objective that motivated me to create Dominion Voting Systems 18 years ago in Canada. From the start, the company was focused on improving paper-based voting, and it continues to pursue vote-tabulation solutions that enhance accuracy and transparency through audits and reviews, as well as by allowing voters to create, verify and privately cast a marked paper ballot. But if you’ve heard about our role in the U.S. election on Twitter , it’s likely you’ve heard something different.

The allegations against Dominion are bizarre, but I’ll set the record straight. Dominion is an American company, now headquartered in Denver. Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists. It has no ties to Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify.

There is no secret “vote flipping” algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications. Postelection canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote totals’ accuracy.

The part of the election process on which Dominion focuses is highly regulated and certified. The company doesn’t work in noncertified areas such as voter-registration systems, poll books or signature-verification software, and it doesn’t provide vote-by-mail printing. Dominion voting machines do one thing: accurately tabulate votes from county-verified voters using a durable paper ballot controlled and secured by local elections officials.

Some of the main counties where results have been contested, like Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh), don’t even use Dominion voting systems. In fact, across the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion systems, President Trump received 52.2% of the vote."

Michael McLeod

Ok one more for today. This is a fact check from Reuter's on the supposed Spanish company vote counting thing. Notice the reference to "social media posts." If you are basing your opinions on a social media post it's like buying a watch from a dude on the street. It could be a good deal. But you're better off a) shopping around and b) looking for watches in a store you trust. This is why Trump and kindred truth manipulators encourage the "fake news" notion. Disagree with creditable journalists all you like. But your chances of getting to the bottom of something - as opposed to being lied to and manipulated - are a hell of a lot better if you consume a variety of news sources from a variety of professional and philosophical arenas. Because yes, sure, different publications have what I'll call different tendencies in their perspectives. But they play by rules of engagement that others ignore - such as basing their information on logic and supportive detail instead of, let's put it bluntly, making shit up. 

Reuters Fact Check. REUTERS

Social media users have been sharing posts which allege that the U.S. military raided the offices of electronic voting company Scytl in Germany to seize their servers for evidence of manipulation in the 2020 U.S. elections. However, Scytl said in a statement that the U.S. army has not seized anything from them and they do not have offices in Germany.

An article called “INTEL: US Military Raided Scytl Servers in Germany For Evidence After Vote Switching Scandal”, was published by GreatGameIndia, and shared on social media . The article claims, “According to intelligence sources US Military raided voting machine company Scytl servers in Germany for evidence of manipulation in 2020 US Elections […] The votes cast by Americans in 2020 US election were counted by a bankrupt Spanish company Scytl in Spain.”

As supposed proof, the article references comments made without supporting evidence by Representative of Texas first congressional district Louie Gohmert’s on Newsmax , and also allegedly on a video call shared widely on social media. Gohmert said, “I don’t know the truth. I know that there was a German tweet in German saying that on Monday, U.S. army forces went into Scytl and grabbed their server.” He claimed Scytl had information that could show how many votes had allegedly been switched from Republican to Democrat.

The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council said in a statement that election security officials have no evidence that ballots were changed, deleted or lost by voting systems in the Nov. 3 U.S. elections, and that this election “was the most secure in American history.“ Republican President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud 

Scytl, headquartered in Barcelona, delivers election modernisation projects for the US elections, including but not limited to online election worker training, electronic ballot delivery for remote voters and real time online visualisation of electoral results The Scytl website shows that the company has eight offices around the world but none in Germany (www.scytl.com/en/contact/).

Scytl published a statement on its website (here) refuting all of the claims made in the article and social media posts: “Following several erroneous statements that have been published in digital and social media, Scytl would like to clarify the following […] The technologies implemented by Scytl in the US are both hosted and managed within the US, by a local subsidiary, SOE Software, based in Tampa, Florida; We do not tabulate, tally or count votes in the US; We do not have servers or offices in Frankfurt; The US army has not seized anything from Scytl in Barcelona, Frankfurt or anywhere else.”

The U.S. army was not immediately available for comment.

The article shared on social media also cites a tweet (here) by George Papadopoulos, the former Trump campaign adviser who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials, (here) which says, “Breaking: Congressman Louie Ghomert has stated that The U.S. Army has seized servers for Dominion in Germany”, referencing Dominion Voting Systems, a company that supplies election technology (www.dominionvoting.com/about/). This tweet and this claim are also being shared on Facebook (here , here)