text:
This story was originally published on ProPublica by Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg. Co-published with FRONTLINE
This story is part of an ongoing collaborative reporting effort between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes the documentary film "Plot to Overturn the Election." The film aired recently on PBS and can be viewed here.
By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer's office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets.
After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks.
He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties.
After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.
After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. "I want to take a moment to get off the track," said Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas.
"Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?"
"I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth," Salazar answered. "The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies."
"The truth about what?" Sessions asked.
"In this case, it's the manipulation of votes," Salazar said. "And the lies being told to a country."
That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.
Speaking through an interpreter, Salazar said that when he worked for Chávez, he had attended meetings in which the administration discussed how to develop specialized software to steal elections with representatives from Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose founders had ties to Venezuela.
He recalled that during the 2013 presidential election, in a secret counting center in Caracas, the capital, he saw officials use software to change votes in favor of Chávez's successor, Nicolás Maduro, after the polls closed.
Watching the 2020 American election, he said, he noticed votes for Joe Biden jumping in a pattern that he thought was similar.
When Sessions asked if Salazar could draw a connection between the events in Venezuela and the recent American election, Salazar replied, "I can show the similarity."
In the 2020 election, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles, but Salazar explained away this discrepancy.
He claimed that the company's software had been "purchased" by Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in such battleground states as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which had gone to Biden, sealing his victory over Donald Trump.
Salazar said in a subsequent court filing that he had taken his concerns about the election to "a number of reliable and intelligent ex-co-workers of mine that are still informants and work with the intelligence community."
(He did not specify whether he meant the U.S. or Venezuelan intelligence community.)
From there, sources told ProPublica, his concerns reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics and then the conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.
Powell was on the hunt for just such information.
By the second week of November, it had become known in right-wing circles that she was working behind the scenes with the president's legal team to challenge the results of the election.
In an email to ProPublica, Sessions wrote that he "conducted the interview at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell's legal team."
The day after the interview, Trump made Powell's position official with an announcement on Twitter.
The following morning, Powell traveled to South Carolina, where a loose coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and former military intelligence officers were gathering on a plantation owned by the defamation lawyer Lin Wood to search for evidence of election fraud.
One person present at the plantation said that Wood and Powell treated the Salazar video "like the holy grail of evidence."
(In an email to ProPublica, Wood wrote that he was not part of any coalition and that he had only seen "a few minutes" of the video, in which he had "no interest beyond general curiosity." Powell did not respond to requests for comment.)
There was just one problem. Salazar's claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless.
The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: "Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela," "Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012" and "There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic's Software In The 2020 Election Cycle."
Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions. Dominion later released a statement calling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, "baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever."
A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: "There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — plain and simple."
He added that "Salazar's testimony is full of inaccuracies," strongly denied that Smartmatic's technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has "registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach."
(Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)
Salazar's story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics.
Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.
ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.
Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp.
Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump's claims that the election had been rigged.
Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern.
Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they'd been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they'd move on to the next alternative and then the next.
The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known.
Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition's chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press.
Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.
Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden's victory.
Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted.
He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to "conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein."
The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Salazar's declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video.
His claim that he could show "the similarity" between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that "the DNA of every vote tabulating company's software and system" in the United States was potentially compromised.
Wood told ProPublica, "I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell," though his name appears as "of counsel" in all four.
A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that "while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct."
All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn't just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak.
Yet the coalition's failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.
This is the story of how little untruths added up to the "big lie."
When Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the Trump campaign's legal team in challenging the vote, began investigating election fraud in November 2020, they quickly were inundated with tips.
This flood increased once Wood and others began soliciting evidence on far-right message boards and mainstream social media platforms.
Some of the participants at the plantation described the inundation of claims, which overwhelmed their inboxes, as a type of evidence in itself: There must be something to allegations of election fraud if so many people were making them.
ProPublica spoke to eight sources with firsthand knowledge of the coalition's efforts on the plantation, many of whom said they worked relentlessly in a chaotic environment. Tips that easily could have been dismissed as dubious instead were treated as credible.
In examining hundreds of emails sent to the plantation, ProPublica found that some were hearsay or anecdotes seemingly misinterpreting everyday events; others were internet rumors; and many were recycled narratives that some members of the coalition had pushed on social media.
None of the tips that ProPublica examined provided concrete proof of election fraud or manipulation.
One of the first tips Powell and Giuliani promoted came from Joe Oltmann, a Denver-based conservative podcast host who said he had infiltrated an antifa conference call and had heard a high-level Dominion employee named Eric Coomer declare that he would make sure that Trump lost the election.
Powell and Giuliani highlighted Oltmann's claim at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020, at the Republican National Committee headquarters.
By that time, Powell was paying for an investigator to travel to Denver, according to a person familiar with the events. The investigator, the source said, interviewed Oltmann at a brewery in Castle Rock, Colorado, and spent several days checking out his story.
Not long after the press conference, according to the source, the investigator emailed Powell his assessment that Oltmann was at the very least embellishing, but she did not respond.
Powell soon referred to Oltmann's allegations in court filings in Georgia and Michigan; roughly a week later, she submitted an affidavit from Oltmann in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits.
Coomer has denied being on the call and has brought a defamation suit against Oltmann, Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others. Oltmann has never presented proof of Coomer being on the call, and in March 2022, the judge overseeing the defamation case sanctioned Oltmann, fining him almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition.
When Powell was asked in a July 2021 deposition if she had anyone look into Oltmann and "his background," she said she did not recall. (Oltmann did not provide responses to questions about the investigator's assessment.)
Within days of the investigator's Oltmann probe, Powell turned to another dubious witness: Terpsehore Maras, a QAnon-promoting social media influencer and podcaster who goes by the online handle Tore Says.
In September 2020, in a civil consumer-fraud judgment in North Dakota, Maras had been found to have made false online charitable fundraising solicitations and to have created "an entirely fake online persona."
(Maras has claimed that the allegations against her remain "unproven" despite the legal finding and that "false identities were imperative for me to execute my duties," which include being a "former private intelligence contractor, whistleblower, and investigative journalist.")
Powell filed a declaration in early December 2020 from an anonymous individual in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits.
The individual claimed that there was "unambiguous evidence" that "foreign interference is present in the 2020 election" and pointed to a vast and unproven conspiracy that involved Dominion, George Soros, a company with an office in China, and the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations.
The Washington Post later identified the declaration's author to be Maras.
In the weeks after the election, Maras presented herself to Byrne as knowledgeable about election fraud. But he discovered that she was unreliable after he had a team of investigators debrief her. Byrne and Maras said the debriefing occurred after Powell filed the declaration.
In an email to another witness he had debriefed, Byrne described the investigators' assessment:
"Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know from the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side. They came back telling me: 'She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subject rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours.'"
("I tried my best to deceive" the debriefers, Maras wrote on her blog in response to questions from ProPublica. "I was scared.")
Byrne has since repeatedly promoted Maras' right-wing activism, as he does in this September 2021 video, some of which revolves around questioning the legitimacy of the election.
("She's a friend and an ally, and I know that she's a little goofy," Byrne told ProPublica in an interview, explaining that he had recently been impressed by work she had done on their shared causes. "I think she has relevant knowledge.")
Byrne, Powell and other coalition members weren't just relying on witness statements in their effort to prove the election was rigged. Some of them also pointed to multiple mathematical analyses. One that Powell and Byrne advanced came from a man named Edward Solomon.
In the weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, Solomon produced a series of online videos purporting to demonstrate how algorithms adjusted the vote total in Biden's favor.
Before Byrne and Powell highlighted Solomon's voting analysis, he came to public attention briefly in 2016, after authorities seized 240 bags of heroin, 25 grams of cocaine and weapons from his home; he later pleaded guilty to selling drugs. (Solomon did not respond to requests for comment.)
One person who coalition members entrusted to vet Solomon's analysis was Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who was brought into the group by Flynn and who acknowledged to ProPublica that his mathematical expertise drew from "a long track record of baseball statistics."
In the end, his level of expertise didn't matter; because of a server error, the emailed request to vet Solomon never reached Keshel, who said he had no memory of checking Solomon's claims.
Byrne used Solomon's analysis in his book, "The Deep Rig," to make the case that the election was fraudulent.
In February 2021, a month after the book was published, the University of Pennsylvania's FactCheck.org reported that officials at the college Solomon had attended said that, though he had been a math major, he had never received a degree.
The article quoted experts who pointed to flaws in Solomon's analysis, especially that the "vote shares" he suggested were suspicious were "not at all surprising," and a Georgia elections official who said that Solomon "shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work."
A paper posted that month by University of Chicago and Stanford researchers found that the numbers Solomon had said were suspicious were normal for a fraud-free election and that by not considering this, his analysis was a classic example of how "fishing for a finding" can "lead an argument astray."
Byrne kept promoting Solomon's work until at least July 2021, when he described him in a blog post as a "Renowned Mathematician."
Five months after the FactCheck.org story and the research paper, Powell was asked in a sworn deposition which mathematicians or statisticians she relied on to support her belief that the election was fraudulent. She cited among others a "Mr. Solomon."
In addition to relying on the flawed claims of Salazar, Oltmann, Maras and Solomon, Powell also promoted the assertions of an Arizona woman named Staci Burk, who had contributed to two fraud rumors after the election.
In the first, Burk claimed that she'd spoken with a worker at a FedEx operations center in Seattle who had observed suspicious canvas bags marked as "election mail ballots" passing through the facility.
The second involved a South Korean airplane flying fake ballots for Biden into Phoenix a few days after the election; Burk said that she had recorded a man who had confessed to the scheme.
A lawsuit that Powell filed in Arizona on Dec. 2, 2020, later included a "Jane Doe" witness who would "testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona." Burk told ProPublica that she was the "Jane Doe."
The same day that Powell filed the Arizona lawsuit, she claimed at a rally outside of Atlanta to have evidence of "a plane full of ballots that came in," and she continued pushing the idea, declaring in a Dec. 5 interview with the host of a YouTube channel, "We have evidence of a significant plane-load of ballots coming in." The judge tossed the case before Burk could testify.
Burk's theories proved false, and at least three coalition members were informed of this. Byrne said that he passed Burk's claims to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who told him about a week later that it "had been looked into and there was nothing there."
This was in November 2020, before Powell filed her lawsuit. Byrne said that he let some of his associates know that Homeland Security had dismissed the claim but was unsure if he informed Powell. (He also said that later his contact showed renewed interest in the idea.)
On a phone call in late December, James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been at the plantation and described himself as working for Wood and Powell, told Burk that he had spent $75,000 on a team of former FBI analysts turned private investigators to check out the theories.
On the call, which she recorded, Penrose said that the investigators had tracked the claims about the South Korean airplane to the person who first made them.
"When he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with. And he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane," Penrose told Burk. "That created the rumor."
The man whom Burk recorded confessing to his involvement in the ballot scheme told Penrose's investigators that in trying to impress Burk "he fabricated everything."
"I mean, are you saying that it — that none of it's true?" Burk asked. Penrose replied: "Yes. I'm saying that the entire thing was fabricated. It's all bullshit."
Penrose's team had also checked out the Seattle FedEx incident, and he told Burk, "We're not able to confirm anything that looked like conspiracy along those lines."
Neither Penrose nor anyone associated with the coalition ever publicly released the findings of the investigation. (Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.)
Burk has since renounced her belief in the rumors she had once backed. "I obviously made a mistake believing lies," Burk wrote to ProPublica. She said she had come to believe that some members of the coalition had manipulated her and her stories to further their ends.
"As things unfolded over time, it became apparent I [was] used as a theatre set piece."
Burk's stories would shape the audit of the election results that Arizona legislators would later authorize — and which Byrne, Flynn, Powell, Wood and other associates helped fund, contributing about $5.7 million.
The 2021 audit was criticized by elections experts and uncovered no proof of fraud.
"You have no idea how widespread the belief is in Arizona to this day that there's 300,000 ballots that were brought in via an airplane," said Doug Logan, a coalition member who worked with Penrose on the plantation and whose company Cyber Ninjas would run the audit. Logan said that Penrose told him that the woman's theories were false.
Still, Logan said, he had auditors examine ballots to check a range of theories, including whether bamboo fibers were mixed into the paper, which auditors believed could show that they were imported from Asia.
"Our goal in the audit was to figure out what's really true and deal with it," Logan told ProPublica. "That's why we did paper examination."
No fibers were found.
Few pieces of evidence were more consequential to the stolen-election theory than a report that claimed to have found evidence of intentional election fraud in Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. It was heralded as technical proof that votes were stolen for Biden.
It was repeatedly promoted by the president. And Byrne and other proponents of the stolen election myth continued to refer to it when speaking to ProPublica reporters.
However, one of the authors of the report recently told ProPublica that the original version never found definitive evidence of election fraud in the Antrim voting machines.
"There was no proof at that specific moment," the author, Conan James Hayes, said. He described finding what he considered a surprising number of errors in the data logs that he thought "could lead to" election fraud.
"But there was no, like, 'There was election fraud,'" he said, "at least at that time in my mind."
Antrim had been the subject of national attention when, on election night, returns showed that Biden had unexpectedly won the Republican stronghold.
The next day, the county clerk, a Republican who supported Trump, explained that officials had discovered that a clerical error had switched roughly 3,000 votes from the president to Biden.
After the clerk's office made corrections, Trump, as expected, had won the county with more than 60% of the vote.
Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that some members of the coalition almost immediately suspected that the mistake in Antrim was not human error.
Rather, it was an incident in which the voting machine software hadn't been surreptitious enough in stealing votes and unintentionally revealed itself.
Their logic was simple: If they could do a forensic audit of the Antrim machines, they could finally establish how the election was stolen. The challenge was how to access the machines.
The day after Thanksgiving 2020, Byrne paid for a private plane to fly two cybersecurity specialists working with the coalition to Antrim: Hayes, a former professional surfer who had taught himself about computers, and Todd Sanders, a Texas businessman with a cybersecurity consulting business.
Hayes and Sanders were turned away from the first two offices they tried, but at a third, a county worker agreed to unroll voting tabulation scrolls, which they photographed.
Highlighting discrepancies in the vote tally produced by the error, a Michigan lawyer won a court order to allow the machines to be formally accessed.
On Dec. 6, Hayes, Sanders, a deputy for Giuliani and data forensic specialists engaged by Wood flew to Antrim, again on a private plane paid for by Byrne, and imaged the hard drives of a computer that was the county's election management server.
Hayes and Sanders returned to Washington, where they examined the data and, in less than a week, assembled a report.
Hayes and another individual familiar with the original version described it as a straightforward technical document, which noted aspects about the data that seemed suspicious but was cautious about claiming election fraud.
Then the report was turned over to Russell J. Ramsland, the head of Allied Security Operations Group, a small security contracting company connected to Texas conservative circles.
When the report was released after a court hearing on Dec. 14, it was a very different document, according to Hayes and the other person familiar with the original version.
It had "REVISED PRELIMINARY SUMMARY, v2" and Ramsland's name at the top and his signature at the bottom, and it made an outright accusation.
"The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results," it claimed.
"This leads to voter or election fraud." Allied Security, it said, had discovered enough proof of election fraud to decertify the results in Antrim.
Hayes' and Sanders' names were nowhere on the report. Hayes told ProPublica that the new "information must have been written by" Allied Security. (Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
It wasn't just people associated with the original report who believed Ramsland's version was flawed.
An analysis commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state found that the report contained an "extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements," including that "the errors in the log file do not mean what Mr. Ramsland purports them to" and were instead "benign" lines of code generated by processes that did not affect the vote outcome.
A bipartisan investigation led by Republican legislators in Michigan declared that the Antrim theories are "a complete waste of time to consider."
(Ramsland did not respond to ProPublica's questions about revising the report. But he did tell The Washington Post that the Michigan analysis only addressed 12 of Allied Security's 29 "core observations.")
Trump supporters immediately seized on the report as definitive proof that the election was rigged. Flynn tweeted, "MI forensics report shows a massive breakdown in national security & must be dealt w/ immediately. @realDonaldTrump must appoint a special counsel now."
Byrne and Flynn lobbied for Powell to become the special counsel.
In a statement, Giuliani said: "This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally. The Electors simply cannot be certified based on these demonstrably false vote counts." (Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.)
Byrne described the report as a "BOMBSHELL," posting it on his blog under the claim: "You wanted the evidence. Here is the evidence."
Trump tweeted: "WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!" Over the next three days, on social media, he promoted the Antrim report and suspicions about Dominion voting machines 11 times.
Late on the afternoon of Dec. 14, Trump's personal secretary sent an email to the deputy attorney general with the subject line "From POTUS." The Antrim report was attached to the email.
An additional document included talking points ("This is a Cover-up of voting crimes") and conclusions ("these election results cannot be certified in Antrim County").
That email launched Trump's attempt to persuade the Department of Justice to assist in overturning the election results, according to a 2021 report by Senate Democrats.
In the end, the deputy attorney general rebuffed the president, and officials in the department threatened to resign en masse if he was replaced.
When Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "find 11,780 votes," enough for him to win the state, in a recorded phone call on Jan. 2, the president mentioned the Dominion conspiracy 10 times.
At the Jan. 6 "Save America" rally on the Ellipse, directly before Trump spoke, Giuliani took the stage and suggested that halting the certification of Biden's victory was justified because of "these crooked Dominion machines."
Trump's speech emphasized the "highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems" and the events in Antrim to explain that the election had been stolen.
Not long after, while Trump supporters made their initial assault on police barricades, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was on the House floor objecting to the certification of his state's electoral votes — the beginning of the effort to block the certification of Biden's victory by Congress.
He cited as evidence "the Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud."
About a minute later, Gosar's speech was interrupted and then cut off. The crowd was storming the Capitol. One person in the throng raised a sign that read, "No Machines Dominion STEALS."
In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many of the same people who had pushed the claims about Dominion repackaged their theory of how the election was stolen. It relied on the same data and the same arguments, except now it had a new name.
This transformation happened after Dominion's parent company filed a lawsuit against Powell for defamation in a Washington court on Jan. 8. She and others began talking less about Dominion and more about voting machines in general.
Dominion would go on to sue Byrne, Giuliani and others for billions of dollars in collective damages, contending that they promoted and in some cases manufactured false claims.
The defendants have each denied responsibility or wrongdoing. (Smartmatic USA Corp. also brought defamation suits against Powell, Giuliani and others, all of whom have denied wrongdoing.)
By the summer of 2021, Hayes and Sanders, the two cybersecurity specialists who had performed the Antrim operation, had become involved in an effort to prove a theory called Hammer and Scorecard.
The theory had been making the rounds in conservative circles for more than five years, and Powell had promoted it before the 2020 election.
It posited that a supercomputer called Hammer had been developed by the CIA and then commandeered by the Obama administration to spy on Americans, including Trump, Flynn and Powell.
Around the time of the election, the theory expanded to suggest that Hammer was using a software called Scorecard to alter results in voting machines and that foreign governments had possibly gotten ahold of it.
Part of the usefulness of Hammer and Scorecard is that built into the theory is an explanation for why it can't be disproven: It is so top secret that the person who could expose the conspiracy can't. That person is a former Department of Defense contractor named Dennis Montgomery.
The people promoting the theory claim he can't reveal the evidence because he's under a gag order imposed by the U.S. government.
Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, a spokesperson for Allied Security and a member of the coalition who worked remotely with those on the plantation, said in an online interview that if the gag order against Montgomery were lifted, "Specifically what that would reveal is the level of foreign interference in the election."
Montgomery has been accused of fraud by former associates, though no criminal charges have resulted from those accusations.
In the aftermath of 9/11, he allegedly duped the Department of Defense and other federal agencies out of more than $20 million in part by selling them software that he claimed could unearth messages to terrorist sleeper cells hidden in Al-Jazeera broadcasts.
(It does not appear that the government ever attempted to get the money back.) Once those claims collapsed, allies of Montgomery began spreading the idea of Hammer.
In 2018, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit Montgomery had filed against FBI Director James B. Comey, which attempted to expose an alleged government spy program, calling it "a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists' complaints."
(Montgomery did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but in the past he has denied the fraud accusations.)
The person behind the 2021 campaign pushing Hammer and Scorecard was Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate who has claimed to have poured about $35 million into efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent.
In July 2021, Lindell announced that he had gotten hold of a mysterious set of data that would prove the election was stolen.
According to sources and messages reviewed by ProPublica, the data related to Hammer and Scorecard, though Lindell didn't publicly name the theory or refer to Montgomery.
Lindell said he would reveal the data at a three-day "cyber symposium" he was hosting in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Reporters, cybersecurity experts and elected officials — as well as anyone tuning in online — would finally see the proof that the election was fraudulent.
Lindell said that independent cybersecurity experts would vet 37 terabytes of data at the symposium and posted an online offer of a $5 million reward to any attendee who could prove that "this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election."
The event, he suggested, would result in Trump being returned to the presidency.
In the run-up to the symposium, before the independent experts did their analysis, the data was given to a group that included Waldron, Hayes, Sanders and Joshua Merritt, a self-described "white hat" hacker — all of whom had been associated with Allied Security at one time or another.
(They called themselves the "Red Team" but coordinated on a group chat named "Purple Unicorns.") Also on the team was Ronald Watkins, who has been identified by two independent forensic linguistic analyses as "Q," the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory.
(Watkins has denied on numerous occasions that he is Q; he did not respond to requests for comment.)
Private communications reviewed by ProPublica show that he was in contact with people at the plantation in November 2020, advising them on how to set up secure systems to transfer information and helping with research into the Dominion theory.
Soon after arriving at Sioux Falls, it became evident to the Red Team that the data Lindell had provided wasn't what was promised. "I have checked them all and they are NOT PROOF," Watkins wrote in a text message to the rest of the team.
"So there are a few files that could potentially be from hammer/scorecard in there, but that is only because it didn't include a source. Since there is no source, it could be from anywhere — or even fake."
"At the 11th hour, why do we still have zero proof," another person on the chat wrote, frustrated that Montgomery hadn't delivered on his guarantees.
"If this software does exist, and the developer" — Montgomery — "is working with us, it shouldn't take him 10 months to figure out how to extract data" that would prove his assertions.
According to Merritt, when the Red Team tried to inform Lindell two nights before the symposium was to start that the data contained no proof, the CEO yelled at them that they were wrong.
For months leading up to the event, conservatives who believed that the 2020 election was stolen had warned Lindell or an attorney working with him that promoting Hammer and Scorecard risked discrediting other efforts to prove the election was rigged.
Two people, including election fraud activist Catherine Engelbrecht, the executive director of True the Vote, cautioned that they had had negative experiences with Montgomery and his representatives and that Hammer and Scorecard wasn't credible, according to documents viewed by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the matter.
On the eve of the symposium, the Red Team learned that Montgomery would not be attending; he said he had suffered a stroke. The final proof of election fraud, which he was supposed to deliver last minute, was no longer going to arrive.
The event drew hundreds of thousands of viewers online, with more than 40 state legislators and others gathering in person.
Onstage with Lindell, Waldron explained that the Red Team had looked at the data and "we've seen plausibility" and that a separate group of independent analysts would now comb through it.
By the end of the third day, the independent analysts — longtime election security and computer experts, some skeptical of Lindell's claims and others sympathetic — appeared to have reached a consensus:
None of the data contained the proof that Lindell had promised, according to accounts from five of them.
In fact, much of the data turned out to be from the Antrim voting machines or harvested from other elections offices and was just a recycling of evidence that had already been discredited.
The data "was some gobbledygook," said Bill Alderson, a cybersecurity specialist from Texas who had voted for Trump.
Merritt told ProPublica that he feared that the hollowness of the data undermined other, more legitimate efforts to prove the election was stolen.
Partway through the symposium, The Washington Times quoted him saying that "we were handed a turd."
Waldron and Lindell, however, did not inform the crowd and those online what the analysts had found. On the last day of the conference, Waldron claimed to have "credible information on a threat in the data streams," implying the evidence could have been sabotaged.
The day after the symposium ended — the day he had suggested that Trump would be returned to office — Lindell dined with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, a photo of which was leaked to Salon.
At a rally, not long after, Trump called the symposium "really amazing," and he has continued to praise Lindell's efforts on his behalf.
Lindell did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica and instead wrote, "The election crime movement started November 3rd when the CCP" — the Chinese Communist Party — "and many others did a cyber attack on our election!"
In March 2022, ProPublica sent dozens of letters to the individuals named in this article and others that asked about factual problems with the evidence many had put forth as proof that the election was rigged.
Some of the responses were dismissive. "Stupid article," wrote Michael T. Flynn's spokesperson and brother, Joseph J. Flynn. "No one we care about will read it."
Others contested the article's findings. Russell J. Ramsland wrote, "So much of this narrative is false or highly misleading that I am not willing to respond point-by-point."
Despite repeated requests, others did not respond. They include Sidney Powell, James Penrose, Phil Waldron and Todd Sanders.
Some, like Doug Logan, disputed that they had worked as part of a coalition. Others, however, felt it was an accurate description. "I was a member of said coalition," wrote Seth Keshel.
"'Coalition' may not be the right word," wrote Patrick Byrne, who said that he has spent $12 million on "election integrity" efforts through early 2022, often working in close coordination with Flynn.
"We think of it as a network of fellow-travelers who were all volunteering to work to expose what we believed was a rigging of the election on November 3. But I can live with 'coalition.'"
Messages and documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that the named individuals were in closer contact than has been publicly known, especially in the weeks immediately following the election.
On the whole, coalition members who responded to ProPublica doubled down on their belief in the stolen election myth. "I've not wavered on this," Keshel emailed ProPublica.
"I can spend hours with you showing you point after point after point to demand full investigation of this."
The single exception was Conan James Hayes, who wrote to ProPublica: "I don't believe anything until I have all of the information to analyze, which to this point I do not have. So I can't say either way."
Over the course of months, Byrne acted as a champion of sorts for the coalition's ideas, making himself available for numerous interviews and message exchanges. He also sent a 16,000-word letter in response to more than 80 fact-checking questions.
When presented with evidence that some of his past claims had proven incorrect, he acknowledged that there were instances when he and his allies had been wrong, especially when they were trying to interpret shifting information in the weeks after the election.
He downplayed the weight they had put on claims about Dominion voting machines being exploited by foreign governments, though their own court filings and public statements from the time show this was their major claim.
"I think that it's picking at nits to look back at some of the stuff," he said. He defended the coalition, saying, "I think they got the gestalt of it correct."
Don't pay attention, Byrne argued, to the many parts of the Antrim report that a technical expert commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state had debunked.
(These errors included Allied Security's central contention that Dominion machines were "purposefully designed" to create "systemic fraud" through a process known as "adjudication." The machines in question did not have the "adjudication" software installed, according to the Michigan analysis.)
Instead, Byrne stressed that what was now important was the claim that the voting machines' security logs only went back to the day after the election, making it impossible to rely on any data on them.
(The Michigan secretary of state expert found that logs were automatically overwritten to free up memory and that "the timing appears to be a coincidence," though it said that having a limited amount of memory "is contrary to best practice.")
Dominion voting machines, South Korean jets and Dennis Montgomery, Byrne suggested, weren't central to the case. He repeatedly turned the conversation toward newer arguments for election fraud.
He highlighted a March 2021 interim election audit report from a special counsel hired by Republican legislators in Wisconsin.
The report's primary claim was that a nonprofit had engaged in "election bribery" by providing funds to boost voter turnout in five urban areas, where voters are disproportionately Democratic.
The special counsel raised the possibility that the report's findings were serious enough that Biden's victory in the state could be decertified.
(A federal judge in October 2020 rejected the argument that the nonprofit's work was illegal, and courts have repeatedly come to the same conclusion.)
Byrne continued to bring up new, supposedly bombshell claims.
In his letter to ProPublica, he promoted a forthcoming documentary called "2000 Mules" by conservative activist Dinesh D'Souza that alleged that thousands of shadowy operatives filled drop boxes across the nation with ballots marked for Biden.
"Videotapes of drop boxes, cell phone tower pings, and the testimony of a whistleblower," Byrne wrote, "all point to about one million votes being stuffed" in Georgia.
There was always another report. Another debunking of the debunking.
Byrne acknowledged that no single piece of smoking gun evidence of election fraud had emerged, but he argued that the breadth of evidence that he and those with similar views had assembled made it inconceivable that elections weren't corrupted.
What he was doing was necessary to save American democracy, Byrne had concluded. He was sure of it. "I've got my cards. You got your cards," he said. "I'll go all in."
April 27, 2022: This story originally stated that James Penrose called Staci Burk in late December. According to Burk, the two spoke with each other but the call was initiated by a third party.


text:
With map-reading the most important thing is to orientate yourself on the map and then to always keep track of where you are on the map. Use the features on the map to find your location. Look at the big features first, like peaks, lakes, roads and then look at the smaller details such as buildings, footpaths or small rivers etc.
Use the altimeter function to help pinpoint your location. Once you know your height you can use the contour lines to fix where you are more precisely. Spend some time making sure the features on the ground match those on the map. It's very easy to convince yourself otherwise!
Top tip: it can take a long time to orientate yourself. So once you've done it, fold the map in such a way that your location is visible. To be even more efficient, do what orienteering racers do: carry the map with your thumb on your position.
To be able to read a map, you must first orient it. Turn your map into a position in which the details on the map correspond with the landscape in front of you. The orientation of a map is the key to reconciling the map with the terrain.
To orientate the map, place the compass on the map and rotate the map to align the magnetic compass needle with the northerly grid lines on the map, making sure the red end of the needle points to north on the map.
Also read:
Tutorial Tuesday: Where am I? Determining your location with an Ambit.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
15 cm x 10 cm
About Sayula
Sayula is a Mexican-Canadian company which provides environmentally and socially responsible bath and kitchen products. Sayula provide products that address the need to develop socially, environmentally and economically sustainable opportunities in Mexico. Their products are biodegradable and use plant species that naturally grow in the region, don't require much water or use of harmful practices, like the use of pesticides and fertilizers. They work directly with rural communities to help them improve their quality of life by providing stable income and fair prices that directly benefit people in these communities.


text:
Can you believe the Super Bowl is tomorrow!? Yep, tomorrow is the day that the two Doritos commercial contest winners are announced. This will happen during the game sometime when they air the winning commercials. Unfortunately, it won't be one of our commercials because we didn't make it into the finals. I'm not really surprised. There was some tough competition this year and there were plenty of commercials that were even better than ours that didn't make it into the finals.
Overall, I would say we were in the top 20% of the commercials in terms of production value and story; although much of the story ended up getting cut because of time constraints and I think that really hurt us. I really wish that we could have, at the very least, made it into the finals (and won $25,000) so that we could have paid everyone involved in the project. This was an all-volunteer project. Nobody got paid…from cast to crew. Everyone took a chance with this project and it is greatly appreciated. We couldn't have done it without their combined talent.
Now I know I said that I would be talking more about the making of the commercial, and I will. But because producing the commercial took me off my I-Man cast feature film project for several months, I felt it was more important to put my focus back on writing the treatment to get that project moving again. Naturally, if we had actually gotten into the finals, I would have put my time and energy into promoting the heck out of the commercial and trying to get as many votes as we could so that we could win. But since that didn't happen, I switched priorities.
To all of you who have been supporting us in this contest, I want to give a big thank you. It was because of you giving us five-star ratings that we were able to actually make third place in the popularity ratings for a short time! It didn't last long, of course, because everyone else was trying to get their ratings up too and they overtook us. But it did get our commercial some attention; and that was one of my goals during that phase of the contest.
If you've been following the contest, you know that Doritos had a Nacho Awards contest earlier. There were eight different categories and our commercial didn't really fit any of them so we weren't chosen to compete. To watch the winners, go to the Doritos Facebook app and click Nachos on the "Sort By" drop down menu.
The Finalists
The following video is of Ali Landry introducing the five finalists, giving us some behind-the-scenes tidbits, and explaining how the contest works.
Tomorrow we find out who the two winners are! Which commercials are you rooting for?


text:
There are several hand-drawn maps, and I find this pair particularly interesting because they illustrate something that I don't think I've seen in map form anywhere else. Using information in the printed Official List of 1881,each maps illustrates 100 registration districts. The first shows 100 districts where there were more churches (of the Church of England) licensed for marriages than there were Dissenting Chapels registered for marriages. The second map illustrates the opposite; 100 districts where there were more Dissenting Chapels registered for marriages than Church of England churches licensed for marriages. In both cases each church is represented by a black dot and each chapel by a red dot. The red ink was probably much brighter in the 1880s, but now it has faded to a shade of brown, so it does not stand out so well against the black dots. Despite this, the maps still provide a good visual rendition of the relative popularity of nonconformity throughout England and Wales.
The dots represent only churches or chapels, however, and give no indication of the size of their congregations, or of the actual number of marriages performed. The first map seems to show that East Anglia was a great stronghold of the Established Church, but the explanation of this cluster probably has more to do with the area's history than its 19th Century present. Norfolk and Suffolk were much more populous and prosperous in the Middle Ages than in the 1880s, relatively speaking. The population had actually decreased during the 19th century, as people moved to the industrial areas of the Midlands and the northern counties, and of course to London. But the churches didn't move with them. Today East Anglia is still full of small towns and villages with magnificent medieval churches, built for the much larger congregations of an earlier age.
Details like this might be interesting to explore further, and all the required statistics are in the Annual Reports of the Registrar General. Some other time, maybe.
100 districts with more churches of the Established Church licensed for marriages than Dissenting Chapels registered for marriages in 1881 |
100 districts with more Dissenting Chapels registered for marriages than churches of the Established Church licensed for marriages in 1881 |


text:
Letting Go of Perfection
sharing from DailyOM.com
Life becomes much more interesting once we let go of our quest for perfection and aspire for imperfection instead.
It is good to remember that one of our goals in life is to not be perfect. We often lose track of this aspiration. When we make mistakes, we think that we are failing or not measuring up. But if life is about experimenting, experiencing, and learning, then to be imperfect is a prerequisite. Life becomes much more interesting once we let go of our quest for perfection and aspire for imperfection instead.
This doesn't mean that we don't strive to be our best. We simply accept that there is no such thing as perfection — especially in life. All living things are in a ceaseless state of movement. Even as you read this, your hair is growing, your cells are dying and being reborn, and your blood is moving through your veins. Your life changes more than it stays the same. Perfection may happen in a moment, but it will not last because it is an impermanent state. Trying to hold on to perfection or forcing it to happen causes frustration and unhappiness.
In spite of this, many of us are in the habit of trying to be perfect. One way to nudge ourselves out of this tendency is to look at our lives and notice that no one is judging us to see whether or not we are perfect. Sometimes, perfectionism is a holdover from our childhood — an ideal we inherited from a demanding parent. We are adults now, and we can choose to let go of the need to perform for someone else's approval. Similarly, we can choose to experience the universe as a loving place where we are free to be imperfect. Once we realize this, we can begin to take ourselves less seriously and have more fun. Imperfection is inherent to being human. By embracing your imperfections, you embrace yourself.


text:
"074 EARLY EVALUATION OF THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN AUTISM AND ALTERATIONS OF MOVEMENT", Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, vol. 16, p. S22, 2010.
, "Active dressware: wearable haptics systems", in Proc. Int. Worksh. on Electroactive Polymers and Biosystems, Lucca, Italy, 2001, pp. 155-158.
, "Active dressware: Wearable kinestetic system", in International Interactive Textiles for the Warrior Conference, Boston, USA, 2002.
, "Active dressware: wearable kinesthetic systems", in Sensor and sensing in biology and engineering, Springer Wien, 2003, pp. 379-392.
, "Active dressware :wearable proprioceptive system based on electroactive polymers", in 5th International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Zurich, Switzerland, 2001, pp. 161-162.
, "Advanced Interfaces to Stem the Data Deluge in Mixed Reality: Placing Human (un)consciuosness in the Loop", in ACM SIGGRAPH 2013, New York, NY, USA, 2013 [Online]. Available: 10.1145/2503385.2503460
, "Alcuni fenomeni di traduzione meccanoelettrica in materiali organici di sintesi: proprietà e analogie con meccanismi di origine biologica", L'ELETTROTECNICA, vol. 80, pp. 619–631, 1984.
, "Approccio bionico allo sviluppo di trasduttori tattili ed attuatori lineari per robotica avanzata", ALTA FREQUENZA, vol. 55, pp. 55–62, 1986.
, "Artificial kinesthetic systems for telerehabilitation", in Wearable eHealth Systems for Personalised Health Management, IOS Press, 2004, pp. 209-213.
, "Artificial kinesthetic systems for telerehabilitation", in International Workshop in New generation of wearable systems for e-Health: towards a revolution of citizen' health and life style management?, Lucca, Italy, 2003, pp. 129-133.
, "An Artificial Neural Network approach for Haptic Discrimination in Minimally Invasive Surgery", in Robot and Human interactive Communication, 2007. RO-MAN 2007. The 16th IEEE International Symposium on, 2007, pp. 25–30.
, "Artificial sensing skin mimicking mechanoelectrical conversion properties of human dermis", IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, vol. 35, pp. 83–92, 1988.
, "A bi-articular model for scapular-humeral rhythm reconstruction through data from wearable sensors", JOURNAL OF NEUROENGINEERING AND REHABILITATION, vol. 13, pp. 1–13, 2016 [Online]. Available: https://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-016-0149-2
, "Bi-modal Transducer-based Wearable System for Cardiac Monitoring", in Fourth IASTED International Conference on Biomedical Engineering, Innsbruck, Austria, 2006, pp. 92-97.
, "Biomedical applications of piezoelectric and pyroelectric polymers", FERROELECTRICS, vol. 49, pp. 49–58, 1983.
, "A Biomimetic tactile array with stress-component-selective sensing capabilities", MATERIALS SCIENCE, vol. 13, pp. 47–50, 1987.
, "Biomimetic tactile sensor with stress-component-discrimination capability", JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR ELECTRONICS, vol. 3, pp. 173–181, 1987.
, "Contractile behaviour of electrically activated mechanochemical polymer actuators", ASAIO TRANSACTIONS, vol. 32, pp. 157–162, 1986.
, "Daily-Life Monitoring of Stroke Survivors Motor Performance: The INTERACTION Sensing System", 2014.
, "Damasio's Somatic Marker for Social Robotics: Preliminary Implementation and Test", in Living Machines - The 4th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Barcelona, Spain, 28 - 31 July 2015, 2015, pp. 316-328 [Online]. Available: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22979-9_31#page-1
, "A Decision Support System for Real-Time Stress Detection During Virtual Reality Exposure", pp. 114–120, 2014.
, "Design and proof of concept for multi degree of freedom hydrostatically coupled dielectric elastomer actuators with roto-translational kinematics for object handling", Smart Materials and Structures, 2018. de_acutis_2018_smart_mater._struct._27_074005.pdf (1.78 MB)
, "Design criteria for ferroelectric polymer sensors and their applications to artificial organ technology", ASAIO TRANSACTIONS, vol. 32, pp. 697–701, 1986.
, "Designing and Evaluating a Social Gaze-Control System for a Humanoid Robot ", IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems , vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 157-168, 2014.
, "Determination of mechanical parameters related to the kinetics of swelling in an electrically activated contractile gel", PROGRESS IN COLLOID & POLYMER SCIENCE, vol. 78, pp. 4–8, 1988.
, "Development and evaluation of a social robot platform for therapy in autism", in Proc. Annual Int Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society,EMBC Conf. of the IEEE, 2011, pp. 4515–4518.
, " Development and Testing of a Multimodal Acquisition Platform for Human-Robot Interaction Affective Studies", Journal of Human robot Interaction , vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1-24, 2014 [Online]. Available: http://humanrobotinteraction.org/journal/index.php/HRI/article/view/142/pdf_3
, "Development of a Wearable System Based on Smart Textiles and GPRS Transmission for Remote Multiparametric Monitoring of Cardiac Patients: Preliminary Results of the WEALTHY Project", in THE 5th International Heart Health Conference, Milan, Italy, 2004.
, "Dispositivo a cristalli liquidi per la realizzazione di maschere ad oscuramento pilotato nella saldatura elettrica", RIVISTA ITALIANA DELLA SALDATURA, vol. 6, pp. 359–366, 1978.
, "Effetti di osteosintesi endomidollari a polimeri piezoelettrico: ricerca sperimentale", ORTOPEDIA E TRAUMATOLOGIA OGGI, vol. 4, pp. 229–232, 1986.


text: Are you a big fan of Salt Lake City hockey games? We make it our mission to provide hockey fans with the best tickets at affordable prices. Check out our array of Salt Lake City hockey games that you will surely enjoy. We have the best selection of tickets, whether you are looking to buy a VIP ticket or the standard one, we have it all sorted out for your hassle-free and time-saving purchase. With Hockeytickets.ca, buying tickets for your favourite game is reliable, secure, and safe. Visit us to keep up with the latest updates on hockey games and book your tickets at the earliest!


text:
During the home buying process, you will encounter many unfamiliar terms, some of which may seem like the same thing. One such pair might be "sales price" and "appraised value." They both refer to how much the house is worth, right? Actually, there is a difference between these words and it is important to understand what they each mean.
Sales Price
The sales price is the exact amount you pay for the home. This could be the list price, but it could be lower or higher depending on the market conditions and your agent's negotiating skills. In a seller's market, you are likely to pay more than the asking price because of stiff competition and bidding wars. However, in a slower market you might be able to talk the seller down to a lower price if they are motivated to sell. If you go under contract and the inspections turn up major damage or problems, you might also be able to have the seller knock off the price to compensate for needed repairs.
Appraised Value
The appraised value is decided by a licensed home appraiser. This professional will come to the house, and evaluate the location, home's condition, features, any improvements that have been made, and will factor all those things into account along with the general market trends.
When the Difference Matters
While the sales price is essentially a measure of how much buyers are willing to pay for the property, the appraised value is supposed to be a gauge of the "true value" of the home. One is all about supply and demand while the other is about the fundamentals of the house. Where this difference could matter in your home buying experience is that if the appraised value ends up coming in lower than the amount you agreed to pay the seller, paying for the discrepancy will be your responsibility, not the lender's.
For example, let's say you have been pre-approved by your lender for a mortgage of up to $400,000. You find a property you want, and you win it with a bid of $500,000. You plan to contribute $100,000 of your own money as a down payment, so the bank should be able to cover the remaining $400,000, right? Yes, unless the appraised value comes in lower than your offer to the seller. Because of the neighborhood or the condition, say the appraiser determines the house is only really worth $460,000. So now you need to be able to pay for the difference on your own as well. Subtracting the appraisal value from the offered price ($500,000 - $460,000) leaves you with $160,000 to contribute instead of just your original $100,000 down payment. If you are unable to do this, the deal will likely fall through and you'd lose out on that sale.
However, in certain cases, the appraised value comes in higher than your buying bid. This does not affect your mortgage financing, but it is great news for you. It means that as soon as you close on the house, you will instantly have more equity in the property than you put into it.
Strategies to Avoid Financing Trouble
If you are buying in a hot market, you may need to stay away from properties that are at the very top of your budget. Otherwise, you could easily over run your loan limit if the appraised value is lower than the sales price.
In a seller's market it can be easy to be outbid, though. So, you could also look to friends and family or non-profit organizations for down payment gift money to help stretch your budget.


text:
This artwork is a limited edition, which means that only a certain number of identical pieces will be made. Once an edition is sold out, no more prints will be made. All works are exclusive to ArtStar and cannot be found in other galleries. This artwork will come with a signed and numbered certificate of authenticity.
All editions on ArtStar are produced to the highest industry standards. This is fine art, not a poster. We work exclusively with archival materials and acid-free cotton rag paper. Our high-end frames are hand assembled by professionals.
Tom Fabia is a french artist living in the south of France. His parents are both artists and he chose to follow their lead. Tom's focus as a photographer is mainly with landscapes. He uses these stunning environments to carry the viewer away on a journey far from reality.By Tom Fabia
Shipping with ArtStar
- Order Fulfillment: Orders are processed and fulfilled within a two-week window by our team of fine art printers and framers.
- Shipping Notification: A tracking number will be emailed once your order ships.
- Damage Resolution: While we cannot control occasional damage by UPS or FedEx, we will work with you to resolve any issues. Damaged works can be exchanged within 14 days.
- Contact Information: For further information or to report damage to your artwork, please reach out to email@example.com or text us at 212-995-5352.
- Packaging: We have developed our packaging systems over the last 14 years to ensure our work arrives flawlessly.
Skip the trip to the framer and let ArtStar handle it. Our artisan framers create each archival frame custom per order.
All Frames Include:
- UV-blocking acrylic plexiglass
- Acid-free, archival materials
- 100% natural wood molding with a deep profile.
Frame Specifications:
- Extra small and small frames: .75" molding, 2" mats, 1.2" deep
- Medium and large frames: 1" molding, 3" mats, 2" deep
- Matless frames have a spacer to prevent print from touching the acrylic.
Return and Exchange Policy
ArtStar does not accept returns. Each order is custom-made just for you.
Damaged or Incorrect Orders:
- If your work is damaged or you received the wrong image, please contact us at email@example.com or call 212.995.5352 within 14 days of receiving your order.
- Please include photos of the shipping box, detailed shots of the damage, and your order number in your email.
Warehouses and 3rd Party Receivers:
- All work must be checked and approved upon arrival if shipped to a warehouse or 3rd party receiver, including art installers, framers, storage, or onsite contractors.
- Ownership of the work transfers once checked in at the warehouse and is no longer the responsibility of ArtStar.
- We recommend shipping to an art storage facility over a non-climate controlled warehouse.


text:
My condolence
3Dear all,
I'have taken over the domain screenfreeze.net due to Andreas Wilhelm' sudden death which came unexpected.
I would like to thank him for his work and emphasize, that all content under this domain has been published by him, Andreas Wilhelm, also if I have changed the author mapping of the article objects because of technical reasons.
My condolence to his family!
Best regards,
Manuel Lamotte-Schubert
0The DeskCon Project makes use of the OpenSSL Libraries on Linux and Android. That means that a Heartsbleed Attack is possible, at least at the Desktop side.
Most Android Versions do not have the "Heartbeat" Feature enabled (only Android 4.1.1) so most are save, but to be sure you can use this App to test your Device.
This has been fixed in OpenSSL 1.0.1g. Please update your OpenSSL Package!
DeskCon PPA
0I created a Launchpad PPA Repository for the Desktop Packages of DeskCon. This Repo is for usage with Ubuntu Quantal, Saucy and Trusty.
To add the PPA, run these in your Terminal
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:screenfreeze/deskcon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install deskcon-server
Gnome-Shell Extension
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-deskcon
Unity Indicator
sudo apt-get install deskcon-indicator
Twitch Browser
0This is just a little Side Project, a Desktop Application that lets you browse through Twitch.tv Streams, Channels and open them in your Video Player (VLC, MPlayer, MPV, …). No need for a CPU heavy Flash Plugin. For now it's for Linux only, but given it is written in Python, a Port to other Systems shouldn't be difficult. You can get the latest from here.
This Project uses "Livestreamer" to start the streams, more information on their website livestreamer.tanuki.se
Background Story:
Sometimes i like to watch a Stream on Twitch or Justin.tv, but the Flashplayer is always acting up, stutters and eats my CPU. Then I came across Livestreamer, which is a Commandline Program.
And to avoid typing the specific Terminal Command over and over, I developed this GUI Software.
Now I will focus more on DeskCon again.
Domain Transfer
0On the 15th of January 2014 our Domain "screenfreeze.net" and Webspace will move to a different Registrar. Some downtime is to be expected, just use this address http://www.screenfreeze.de/ instead.
DeskCon Connection Security
2First of all, I'm not a Security Expert, I just use the well known Encryption and Security standards. So if you find any flaws in how I implemented that stuff, please tell me.
Basically I use self-signed Certificates with a TLSv1.2 SSL Connection. During the "pair"-Process, Desktop and mobile Device exchange their X509v3 Certificate and print out the Fingerprints (sha256), so that the User can verify their Identity. If the User says they match, the Certificates will be stored.
The Certificates are generated from a 2048-bit RSA Key-pair and signed with SHA256 Algorithm.
The SSL Connection is actually over TLSv1,TLSv1.1 or TLSv1.2 depending on your Android Version (TLSv1.2 is supported in Android 4.1 and up) and the OpenSSL Library Version. Server and Client have to authenticate each other with the mentioned Certificates.
So the whole data Transfer is encrypted and the Devices (Desktop and MID) can be sure they talk with the right Machine.


text:
DISCLAIMER: The below technique works about half of the time: For no readily discernible reason, some of the files come out in chipmunk mode. It appears, from what I've been able to determine so far, that mpg123 is playing the original mp3 file at the wrong speed.
As a fan of Librivox, it's frustrating to me that the iPod doesn't recognize audio books in mp3 format as audio books. It wants them in aac format. Converting them is a hassle, mostly because I always forget how. So, here's a little Perl script I whipped up for the purpose.
The same thing is necessary if you rip an audiobook from CD.
Share and enjoy:
#!/usr/bin/perl opendir F,"."; my @files = readdir(F); closedir F; foreach my $chapter (@files) { next unless $chapter =~ m/.mp3$/i; my $filename = $chapter; $filename =~ s/.mp3$//; $filename = $filename . '.m4b'; `mpg123 -s "$chapter" | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o "$filename" -`; }
Note that while this retains the track name, it seems to lose the album name and author, so you may need to add that back. Presumably faac has command-line arguments for this, too, but I haven't found them yet. Haven't looked, either.


text:
Chapter 29 - I Visit Steerforth At His Home, Again
I mentioned to Mr. Spenlow in the morning, that I wanted leave of absence for a short time; and as I was not in the receipt of any salary, and consequently was not obnoxious to the implacable Jorkins, there was no difficulty about it. I took that opportunity, with my voice sticking in my throat, and my sight failing as I uttered the words, to express my hope that Miss Spenlow was quite well; to which Mr. Spenlow replied, with no more emotion than if he had been speaking of an ordinary human being, that he was much obliged to me, and she was very well.
We articled clerks, as germs of the patrician order of proctors, were treated with so much consideration, that I was almost my own master at all times. As I did not care, however, to get to Highgate before one or two o'clock in the day, and as we had another little excommunication case in court that morning, which was called The office of the judge promoted by Tipkins against Bullock for his soul's correction, I passed an hour or two in attendance on it with Mr. Spenlow very agreeably. It arose out of a scuffle between two churchwardens, one of whom was alleged to have pushed the other against a pump; the handle of which pump projecting into a school-house, which school-house was under a gable of the church-roof, made the push an ecclesiastical offence. It was an amusing case; and sent me up to Highgate, on the box of the stage-coach, thinking about the Commons, and what Mr. Spenlow had said about touching the Commons and bringing down the country.
Mrs. Steerforth was pleased to see me, and so was Rosa Dartle. I was agreeably surprised to find that Littimer was not there, and that we were attended by a modest little parlour-maid, with blue ribbons in her cap, whose eye it was much more pleasant, and much less disconcerting, to catch by accident, than the eye of that respectable man. But what I particularly observed, before I had been half-an-hour in the house, was the close and attentive watch Miss Dartle kept upon me; and the lurking manner in which she seemed to compare my face with Steerforth's, and Steerforth's with mine, and to lie in wait for something to come out between the two. So surely as I looked towards her, did I see that eager visage, with its gaunt black eyes and searching brow, intent on mine; or passing suddenly from mine to Steerforth's; or comprehending both of us at once. In this lynx-like scrutiny she was so far from faltering when she saw I observed it, that at such a time she only fixed her piercing look upon me with a more intent expression still. Blameless as I was, and knew that I was, in reference to any wrong she could possibly suspect me of, I shrunk before her strange eyes, quite unable to endure their hungry lustre.
All day, she seemed to pervade the whole house. If I talked to Steerforth in his room, I heard her dress rustle in the little gallery outside. When he and I engaged in some of our old exercises on the lawn behind the house, I saw her face pass from window to window, like a wandering light, until it fixed itself in one, and watched us. When we all four went out walking in the afternoon, she closed her thin hand on my arm like a spring, to keep me back, while Steerforth and his mother went on out of hearing: and then spoke to me.
'You have been a long time,' she said, 'without coming here. Is your profession really so engaging and interesting as to absorb your whole attention? I ask because I always want to be informed, when I am ignorant. Is it really, though?'
I replied that I liked it well enough, but that I certainly could not claim so much for it.
'Oh! I am glad to know that, because I always like to be put right when I am wrong,' said Rosa Dartle. 'You mean it is a little dry, perhaps?'
'Well,' I replied; 'perhaps it was a little dry.'
'Oh! and that's a reason why you want relief and change - excitement and all that?' said she. 'Ah! very true! But isn't it a little - Eh? - for him; I don't mean you?'
A quick glance of her eye towards the spot where Steerforth was walking, with his mother leaning on his arm, showed me whom she meant; but beyond that, I was quite lost. And I looked so, I have no doubt.
'Don't it - I don't say that it does, mind I want to know - don't it rather engross him? Don't it make him, perhaps, a little more remiss than usual in his visits to his blindly-doting - eh?' With another quick glance at them, and such a glance at me as seemed to look into my innermost thoughts.
'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'pray do not think -'
'I don't!' she said. 'Oh dear me, don't suppose that I think anything! I am not suspicious. I only ask a question. I don't state any opinion. I want to found an opinion on what you tell me. Then, it's not so? Well! I am very glad to know it.'
'It certainly is not the fact,' said I, perplexed, 'that I am accountable for Steerforth's having been away from home longer than usual - if he has been: which I really don't know at this moment, unless I understand it from you. I have not seen him this long while, until last night.'
'Indeed, Miss Dartle, no!'
As she looked full at me, I saw her face grow sharper and paler, and the marks of the old wound lengthen out until it cut through the disfigured lip, and deep into the nether lip, and slanted down the face. There was something positively awful to me in this, and in the brightness of her eyes, as she said, looking fixedly at me:
'What is he doing?'
I repeated the words, more to myself than her, being so amazed.
'What is he doing?' she said, with an eagerness that seemed enough to consume her like a fire. 'In what is that man assisting him, who never looks at me without an inscrutable falsehood in his eyes? If you are honourable and faithful, I don't ask you to betray your friend. I ask you only to tell me, is it anger, is it hatred, is it pride, is it restlessness, is it some wild fancy, is it love, what is it, that is leading him?'
'Miss Dartle,' I returned, 'how shall I tell you, so that you will believe me, that I know of nothing in Steerforth different from what there was when I first came here? I can think of nothing. I firmly believe there is nothing. I hardly understand even what you mean.'
As she still stood looking fixedly at me, a twitching or throbbing, from which I could not dissociate the idea of pain, came into that cruel mark; and lifted up the corner of her lip as if with scorn, or with a pity that despised its object. She put her hand upon it hurriedly - a hand so thin and delicate, that when I had seen her hold it up before the fire to shade her face, I had compared it in my thoughts to fine porcelain - and saying, in a quick, fierce, passionate way, 'I swear you to secrecy about this!' said not a word more.
Mrs. Steerforth was particularly happy in her son's society, and Steerforth was, on this occasion, particularly attentive and respectful to her. It was very interesting to me to see them together, not only on account of their mutual affection, but because of the strong personal resemblance between them, and the manner in which what was haughty or impetuous in him was softened by age and sex, in her, to a gracious dignity. I thought, more than once, that it was well no serious cause of division had ever come between them; or two such natures - I ought rather to express it, two such shades of the same nature - might have been harder to reconcile than the two extremest opposites in creation. The idea did not originate in my own discernment, I am bound to confess, but in a speech of Rosa Dartle's.
She said at dinner:
'Oh, but do tell me, though, somebody, because I have been thinking about it all day, and I want to know.'
'You want to know what, Rosa?' returned Mrs. Steerforth. 'Pray, pray, Rosa, do not be mysterious.'
'Mysterious!' she cried. 'Oh! really? Do you consider me so?'
'Do I constantly entreat you,' said Mrs. Steerforth, 'to speak plainly, in your own natural manner?'
'Oh! then this is not my natural manner?' she rejoined. 'Now you must really bear with me, because I ask for information. We never know ourselves.'
'It has become a second nature,' said Mrs. Steerforth, without any displeasure; 'but I remember, - and so must you, I think, - when your manner was different, Rosa; when it was not so guarded, and was more trustful.'
'I am sure you are right,' she returned; 'and so it is that bad habits grow upon one! Really? Less guarded and more trustful? How can I, imperceptibly, have changed, I wonder! Well, that's very odd! I must study to regain my former self.'
'I wish you would,' said Mrs. Steerforth, with a smile.
'Oh! I really will, you know!' she answered. 'I will learn frankness from - let me see - from James.'
'You cannot learn frankness, Rosa,' said Mrs. Steerforth quickly - for there was always some effect of sarcasm in what Rosa Dartle said, though it was said, as this was, in the most unconscious manner in the world - 'in a better school.'
'That I am sure of,' she answered, with uncommon fervour. 'If I am sure of anything, of course, you know, I am sure of that.'
Mrs. Steerforth appeared to me to regret having been a little nettled; for she presently said, in a kind tone:
'Well, my dear Rosa, we have not heard what it is that you want to be satisfied about?'
'That I want to be satisfied about?' she replied, with provoking coldness. 'Oh! It was only whether people, who are like each other in their moral constitution - is that the phrase?'
'It's as good a phrase as another,' said Steerforth.
'Thank you: - whether people, who are like each other in their moral constitution, are in greater danger than people not so circumstanced, supposing any serious cause of variance to arise between them, of being divided angrily and deeply?'
'I should say yes,' said Steerforth.
'Should you?' she retorted. 'Dear me! Supposing then, for instance - any unlikely thing will do for a supposition - that you and your mother were to have a serious quarrel.'
'My dear Rosa,' interposed Mrs. Steerforth, laughing good-naturedly, 'suggest some other supposition! James and I know our duty to each other better, I pray Heaven!'
'Oh!' said Miss Dartle, nodding her head thoughtfully. 'To be sure. That would prevent it? Why, of course it would. Exactly. Now, I am glad I have been so foolish as to put the case, for it is so very good to know that your duty to each other would prevent it! Thank you very much.'
One other little circumstance connected with Miss Dartle I must not omit; for I had reason to remember it thereafter, when all the irremediable past was rendered plain. During the whole of this day, but especially from this period of it, Steerforth exerted himself with his utmost skill, and that was with his utmost ease, to charm this singular creature into a pleasant and pleased companion. That he should succeed, was no matter of surprise to me. That she should struggle against the fascinating influence of his delightful art - delightful nature I thought it then - did not surprise me either; for I knew that she was sometimes jaundiced and perverse. I saw her features and her manner slowly change; I saw her look at him with growing admiration; I saw her try, more and more faintly, but always angrily, as if she condemned a weakness in herself, to resist the captivating power that he possessed; and finally, I saw her sharp glance soften, and her smile become quite gentle, and I ceased to be afraid of her as I had really been all day, and we all sat about the fire, talking and laughing together, with as little reserve as if we had been children.
Whether it was because we had sat there so long, or because Steerforth was resolved not to lose the advantage he had gained, I do not know; but we did not remain in the dining-room more than five minutes after her departure. 'She is playing her harp,' said Steerforth, softly, at the drawing-room door, 'and nobody but my mother has heard her do that, I believe, these three years.' He said it with a curious smile, which was gone directly; and we went into the room and found her alone.
'Don't get up,' said Steerforth (which she had already done)' my dear Rosa, don't! Be kind for once, and sing us an Irish song.'
'What do you care for an Irish song?' she returned.
'Much!' said Steerforth. 'Much more than for any other. Here is Daisy, too, loves music from his soul. Sing us an Irish song, Rosa! and let me sit and listen as I used to do.'
He did not touch her, or the chair from which she had risen, but sat himself near the harp. She stood beside it for some little while, in a curious way, going through the motion of playing it with her right hand, but not sounding it. At length she sat down, and drew it to her with one sudden action, and played and sang.
I don't know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out of passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still. I was dumb when she leaned beside the harp again, playing it, but not sounding it, with her right hand.
A minute more, and this had roused me from my trance: - Steerforth had left his seat, and gone to her, and had put his arm laughingly about her, and had said, 'Come, Rosa, for the future we will love each other very much!' And she had struck him, and had thrown him off with the fury of a wild cat, and had burst out of the room.
'What is the matter with Rosa?' said Mrs. Steerforth, coming in.
'She has been an angel, mother,' returned Steerforth, 'for a little while; and has run into the opposite extreme, since, by way of compensation.'
'You should be careful not to irritate her, James. Her temper has been soured, remember, and ought not to be tried.'
Rosa did not come back; and no other mention was made of her, until I went with Steerforth into his room to say Good night. Then he laughed about her, and asked me if I had ever seen such a fierce little piece of incomprehensibility.
I expressed as much of my astonishment as was then capable of expression, and asked if he could guess what it was that she had taken so much amiss, so suddenly.
'Oh, Heaven knows,' said Steerforth. 'Anything you like - or nothing! I told you she took everything, herself included, to a grindstone, and sharpened it. She is an edge-tool, and requires great care in dealing with. She is always dangerous. Good night!'
'Good night!' said I, 'my dear Steerforth! I shall be gone before you wake in the morning. Good night!'
He was unwilling to let me go; and stood, holding me out, with a hand on each of my shoulders, as he had done in my own room.
'Daisy,' he said, with a smile - 'for though that's not the name your godfathers and godmothers gave you, it's the name I like best to call you by - and I wish, I wish, I wish, you could give it to me!'
'Why so I can, if I choose,' said I.
'Daisy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think of me at my best, old boy. Come! Let us make that bargain. Think of me at my best, if circumstances should ever part us!'
'You have no best to me, Steerforth,' said I, 'and no worst. You are always equally loved, and cherished in my heart.'
So much compunction for having ever wronged him, even by a shapeless thought, did I feel within me, that the confession of having done so was rising to my lips. But for the reluctance I had to betray the confidence of Agnes, but for my uncertainty how to approach the subject with no risk of doing so, it would have reached them before he said, 'God bless you, Daisy, and good night!' In my doubt, it did NOT reach them; and we shook hands, and we parted.
I was up with the dull dawn, and, having dressed as quietly as I could, looked into his room. He was fast asleep; lying, easily, with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.
The time came in its season, and that was very soon, when I almost wondered that nothing troubled his repose, as I looked at him. But he slept - let me think of him so again - as I had often seen him sleep at school; and thus, in this silent hour, I left him.
- Never more, oh God forgive you, Steerforth! to touch that passive hand in love and friendship. Never, never more!
— Susan Hurn
David recalls Steerforth as he had known him in happier, more innocent days at school. The conclusion of the chapter builds suspense as readers wonder how David's friendship with Steerforth eventually had ended and what Steerforth had done that inspires David to say, in retrospect, that Steerforth needed God's forgiveness.
— Susan Hurn
Steerforth's words foreshadow trouble between him and David and suggest that he expects it to occur.
— Susan Hurn
Rosa's internal conflicts and emotional turmoil are expressed in the song.
— Susan Hurn
Rosa is speaking ironically, and there is bitterness in her tone, which is not hard to understand considering her personal history with Steerforth and his mother. In her continuing conversation with Mrs. Steerforth, Rosa's tone remains sarcastic and bitter.
— Susan Hurn
"Patrician" refers to characteristics of the aristocratic or high born in society. In context, it gently satirizes the firm where David clerks.


text:
The running sock for understated comfort. Perfect for warm days and race days. Your new secret weapon.
Your new secret weapon
With the benefits hidden, the Low Sock is for runners who let their results make the statement. Merging ultralight minimalist design with anatomical shaping for gentle support, it's the ideal choice for warm days or race day. Or whenever you want understated comfort.
Technical mesh
On Performance Socks combine a polyamide and elastane blend with technical mesh paneling. The mesh sections help keep foot temperature in perfect balance. Cooling when things heat up, warm enough that you won't get cold feet - whatever you're about to take on.
Tell your feet it's go time
Your running sock might not win you the race, but it could lose you one if it doesn't perform. That's why we set out to see how much performance we could put into a running sock. Turns out, a lot. Like the pattern at the arch which triggers sensory receptors to prime your feet for the run. Plus Swiss Engineering to then keep the sock firmly in place. For performance standards that don't slip.


text:
The Old Spice brand from Procter & Gamble announced it is introducing an all-new lineup of manly scented bar soaps to the brand's collection of male grooming products. Arriving in stores April 2013, new Old Spice bar soap is available in the brand's three most popular scents—Fiji, Pure Sport and Swagger.
"With new Old Spice bar soap, we wanted show the more than 40% of guys who are bar soap loyalists that we have their backs when it comes to manly scented shower equipment," said Joe Arcuri, vice president, North America beauty care at P&G. "We know many guys are living with an unspoken shame—that they simply use whatever bar soap is already in the shower based on what the woman in their life purchased and is often using. I guess we're also in the business of helping guys reclaim their territory in the shower."
The new Old Spice bar soap launch also will be supported by a cinema and dedicated online campaign with media banners bringing the marketing creative's tagline—"The Bar Soap You've Been Smelling For"—to life.