patrick.net

Smartmatic is a privately owned company.

The majority of its shares (around 83 %) are held by the families of its founders — particularly the Mugica and Piñate families, who started the company. The rest is owned by employees and outside investors.

Founders:

Antonio Mugica – co-founder and long-time CEO.
Alfredo José Anzola – co-founder.
Roger Piñate – co-founder, involved in leadership.

It's never complete without the war porn, faked or otherwise. It's all part of the fog of bullshit.

Cartel de los Soles” translates literally to:

“Cartel of the Suns.”

Why “Suns”?

In Venezuela, “los soles” (the suns) refer to the sun insignia worn by high-ranking military officers, especially generals.

The name implies a drug trafficking cartel involving senior Venezuelan military officials.

So while the literal translation is Cartel of the Suns, the meaning is closer to:

A cartel associated with (or run by) high-ranking military officers.

The Invoice of Power

For all the crying haters of U.S. power projection. You mistake American peace for a donation.

Peace is not mailed out like aid packages. It’s underwritten. By carriers you don’t build, by logistics you don’t maintain, by men and women you didn’t raise, and by a debt of blood you never agreed to pay.

You mortgaged your future and outsourced your security. Now you project morality instead of power and call it “sovereignty.”

You cry foul when America decides the bill is due. When we choose to remove a parasite like Nicolás Maduro from the bloodstream of a hemisphere we’ve kept stable for generations. You say it’s illegitimate, unfair, and that it violates norms.

Norms are written by those who can enforce them.

You ask if we think peace is benevolent. No. Peace is transactional. The price is alignment, stability, and order. If you don’t pay it, someone else will, eventually with interest.

This is the sickness of the postwar world: a civilization feminized by safety it did not earn, mistaking feelings for force and outrage for deterrence. You boo and hiss about sovereignty while cheering mass migration, institutional decay, and the slow motion rape of the West. Your moral vocabulary is loud; your martial vocabulary is empty.

So understand this clearly: If you disagree, do something about it. Because your boos mean nothing to a nation that has seen what you applaud.

This is a mask off moment. You don’t have to respect America. Fear will suffice.

We are not cruel, merely structural. Gravity does not apologize to the weak for pulling them down. Fire does not explain itself to straw.

America is strong. You are not. That’s not personal. That is simply the way of things.

Power is the rent you pay to exist unmolested in a violent world. If you refuse to pay it, don’t be shocked when the landlord shows up.

I sometimes blackpill too hard. But lately, I’m starting to see America might not be in total decline, just hitting puberty. So yea, it’s about to get weird. But we aren’t going anywhere.

For the soft among you out there, I guess you’re just gonna have to deal.

Patrick says

You know the saying “if it’s free, you are the product”.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly responded to Moscow's outrage over the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. He made it clear that the Kremlin's opinion on the matter was of no concern to the White House.

The response was published by the U.S. State Department. Rubio made it clear that Moscow, bogged down in its war against Ukraine, is now capable of nothing but words.

"We don't care about escalating conflict with Russia over Venezuela. We thought they would give rhetorical support to the Maduro regime. I think they have enough on their plate in Ukraine as it is. And if Lavrov is watching, Sergei, Merry Christmas. At the end of the day, I expected exactly what they said. The rhetoric that we heard (...) is not a factor in our understanding of everything that's going on," the US Secretary of State said.