Moderated Obama birth certificate CT / SSN CT / Birther discussion

[Mudcat]

I'm new here, and the argument about BHO's birth certificate doesn't concern me very much (and I as a Mexican resident could only register to vote in Kansas where my vote wouldn't matter since everybody else is going to vote for rMoney), but I did read the first twenty and the last ten pages, so forgive me it this has been asked-and-answered earlier.
But: has any birther ever, in the 212 pages here or anywhere else, tried to explain how and why an eighteen year old girl, nine months pregnant, would or could travel to Kenys, have her baby in an African hospital, (when the world-class Queen Kapiolani hospital was right down the road) and immediately fly back to the USA with a mixed-race newborn, explain to la migra that the baby was actually an American, and proceed on to Honolulu to register her baby as born there?

Welcome to JREF, and to answer your question (to the best of my knowledge) no. They have not addressed those concerns.

 

[cwalner]

I'm new here, and the argument about BHO's birth certificate doesn't concern me very much (and I as a Mexican resident could only register to vote in Kansas where my vote wouldn't matter since everybody else is going to vote for rMoney), but I did read the first twenty and the last ten pages, so forgive me it this has been asked-and-answered earlier.
But: has any birther ever, in the 212 pages here or anywhere else, tried to explain how and why an eighteen year old girl, nine months pregnant, would or could travel to Kenys, have her baby in an African hospital, (when the world-class Queen Kapiolani hospital was right down the road) and immediately fly back to the USA with a mixed-race newborn, explain to la migra that the baby was actually an American, and proceed on to Honolulu to register her baby as born there?

Short answer: NO

However, this has been asked many time in the 180 pages that you skipped. And it has gone further that one poster even referenced official entry records for that year and there is no notation of a single entry of a US citizen into Hawaii from Kenya for that entire year (not even alone much less with a mixed race infant)

To paraphrase the likes of Joe Nicol and Ben Radford about paranormal investigations. Don't even bother with the why if you can't even confirm that an event happened.

 

[Robert Prey]

Robert, a single straight question for you: do you think Dr. Onaka is lying?

Not necessarily, but parsing, perhaps. Hawaii officials can swear the information is correct till they're blue in the face, but that doesn't mean the COLB copy is really a copy of an original Birth Certificate.

 

[Robert Prey]

I suspect that if such an issue were to come up in any court, the reaction might be a little like this comment by the court in Rout v. Hutchinson & Ors:

The hypothetical example is similar to the official ruling of the disputed interception at Monday's Packers versus Seahawks contest. Everyone in the world knows very well that Greenbay intercepted the pass, but the official ruling says otherwise. It's cognitive dissonance.

 

[Robert Prey]

That's not a legal theory. That's just sour grapes.

Full Faith and Credit governs how states must interact when, among other things, there is a question regarding a vital record. Such interstate relations are not just a matter of "common sense," but rather of centuries of jurisprudence. You seem to think that the evidentiary case for fraud is both relevant and a foregone conclusion. Neither you nor any of the Birther litigants seems to realize you must first prove the evidentiary case is legally relevant. Can you do that?

There is a Court of Law and then there is a Court of Public Opinion.

 

[Robert Prey]

Then they would be seen as being foolish and could be challenged, but in our little case we are discussing no just obvious failure exists in this case.....unless of course you liked to point out what it is

Give us your reason to think there is a vast conspiracy by that part of the government of the State of Hawaii? We've been over this and over this, there is no 'smoking gun'. Why should an independent investigation be made of one persons documents and not others?

Because the COLB scan is not a scan but a digital creation.

 

[Robert Prey]

Again you show either your lack of understanding of the U.S. Constitution, or your ability to disregard it as it suits your agenda. No court can depose a sitting president. The only avenue to remove a sitting president is impeachment and conviction by Congress.

A court does have the power to keep a candidate off of the ballot. Obviously. And that would in effect depose a sitting president.

 

[Robert Prey]

Please list his qualifications in refuting the PDF of BHOII's COLB.

Experienced in graphic arts presumes experience in such programs as Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Acrobat among others. But perhaps no experience in PDF Woo, nor scanners with x-ray vision. But it does not take a genius to notice objects in a layer, zoom in on them, and discover that what is revealed is not the opaque as with other objects, but the background layer of the document. Anyone could have done this and pointed it out. A child could have done it. But Harrision actually did it. Does not make him a forensic genius. Just a guy who proved the COLB to be a fraud.

 

[Tolls]

Here is the Google Maps readout of his "business" address -- a very nice-looking Oregon farmhouse, but not the office of a "computer expert." https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&so...382763,-122.557951&spn=0.003442,0.006534&z=18

Not to detract from the rest of this post, but I would argue that you can't tell one way or the other. Because if the type of registered office you have determines whether you are an expert or not would imply I'm seriously over-charging my clients. As is the chap behind me, whose office is (funnily enough) a farm. We're both IT contractors.

 

[Dcdrac]

Mr Prey it has been expalined to you time and again that you cannot use Illustrator or the other Adobe creative non PDF based applications to examine a PDF, they handle the files totally differently so much so that it is not possible to draw a useful conclusion from opening a PDF in Illustrator.

 

[Tomtomkent]

Experienced in graphic arts presumes experience in such programs as Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Acrobat among others. But perhaps no experience in PDF Woo, nor scanners with x-ray vision. But it does not take a genius to notice objects in a layer, zoom in on them, and discover that what is revealed is not the opaque as with other objects, but the background layer of the document. Anyone could have done this and pointed it out. A child could have done it. But Harrision actually did it. Does not make him a forensic genius. Just a guy who proved the COLB to be a fraud.

Pressumption of experience is not a qualification. How about you list the qualifications asked for?


And you are right, it does not take a genius to make ill informed opinions based on misunderstanding.

 

[abaddon]

Experienced in graphic arts presumes experience in such programs as Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Acrobat among others. But perhaps no experience in PDF Woo, nor scanners with x-ray vision. But it does not take a genius to notice objects in a layer, zoom in on them, and discover that what is revealed is not the opaque as with other objects, but the background layer of the document. Anyone could have done this and pointed it out. A child could have done it. But Harrision actually did it. Does not make him a forensic genius. Just a guy who proved the COLB to be a fraud.

This has been explained to you ad nauseum. It is nobodies fault but your own if you fail to understand it.

I have dismantled the COLB PDF. It is entirely consistent with an optomised PDF of a scan. It is not consistent with a designed document. You have been shown exactly why in this thread.

 

[TjW]

There is a Court of Law and then there is a Court of Public Opinion.

You are advocating mob rule in preference to the Constitution?

 

[Hans]

Because the COLB scan is not a scan but a digital creation.

Nope, you haven't been keeping up. What does the State of Hawaii keep saying about it?

 

[JayUtah]

Hawaii officials can swear the information is correct till they're blue in the face, but that doesn't mean the COLB copy is really a copy of an original Birth Certificate.

Under Full Faith and Credit that's exactly what it means, Robert. And it is upon those grounds that so many of the Birther lawsuits are lost. You have yet to provide any legal theory that changes this, or even affects it. Full Faith and Credit exists for a reason, and no Birther argument yet has managed to apprehend that reason.

This is not a lightly dismissed matter. Back in 1861 a sizable number of the states felt it important enough to take up arms over it. So don't expect that to change on behalf of a few disgruntled arch-conservatives with deeply questionable motivation.

The hypothetical example is similar to the official ruling of the disputed interception at Monday's Packers versus Seahawks contest.

No, that's a terrible analogy because there is nothing like Full Faith and Credit clause in the NFL. Nor has any of the teams involved tried to invent new rules for playing football that they believe should apply in their favor retroactively to the play in question.

Everyone in the world knows very well that Greenbay intercepted the pass, but the official ruling says otherwise.

No, that doesn't fit. "Everyone in the world" does not know that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a forgery. In fact only a very small number even of whose who want Obama out of office make that accusation. No matter how much you wish otherwise, it is not a foregone conclusion that the document is forged. The evidentiary case -- irrelevant as it is -- has been examined in depth and found not only wanting, but ludicrously short.

If you want to continue the sports analogy, it would be as if there were replay after replay after replay showing, say, a receiver's foot landing clearly out of bounds, and every official in the NFL and every other player and owner in the league (including the rest of the player's team) agreeing with the out-of-bounds call -- but for some reason the player's mother won't let it go and keeps calling press conferences.

It's cognitive dissonance.

No. It doesn't take any stretch of the imagination or any willful ignorance of fact in order to conclude that Barack Obama II has presented to the appropriate officials all the documents necessary to prove he is eligible as President. I've studied the evidentiary case for longer than you've been in this thread, and there is simply no merit to it. It is based entirely on patently uninformed people begging the world to accept their judgment.

The better sports analogy is to baseball, to a team's manager kicking dirt on the umpire's trousers after a perfectly good call. Birtherism is just a sour-grapes tantrum.

There is a Court of Law and then there is a Court of Public Opinion.

And the Birthers are losing in both. Or rather, having had zero success actually making a difference in government, they have been relegated to the tabloids to rant to an uncritical and irrelevant audience.

 

[Border Reiver]

Not necessarily, but parsing, perhaps. Hawaii officials can swear the information is correct till they're blue in the face, but that doesn't mean the COLB copy is really a copy of an original Birth Certificate.

So, your theory is that Hawaii has taken a bit from one birth certificate, a bit from another and certified for the courts that "all the information is correct?"

 

[Arus808]

There is a Court of Law

Which in over 150+ failed birther cases has shown that birthers are nothing more than idiots.

and then there is a Court of Public Opinion.

Doesn't matter, because as we have seen with birthers, their opinions are based on lies, hearsay and propaganda.

 

[R.A.F.]

There is a Court of Law and then there is a Court of Public Opinion.

Both of which agree that Obama was born in Hawaii.

 

[Arus808]

Because the COLB scan is not a scan but a digital creation.

Evidence? Over 200 pages and you have not provided a shred of proof of this claim.

A court does have the power to keep a candidate off of the ballot. Obviously. And that would in effect depose a sitting president.

Wrong, and you've been told why.

Experienced in graphic arts presumes experience in such programs as Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Acrobat among others.

Wrong. Experience in graphics arts can mean a lot of things. Not necessarily experience in all programs. I have worked with Photoshop since 1.0 (and have been current with their versions since) but never used InDesign (they are programs that have VASTLY different usages and reason for use). I used Macromedia Freehand instead of Illustrator (better tools at the time) before Adobe bought out Macromedia and incorporated Freehand as Illustrator. I now use Illustrator, but will fall back to Photoshop (vector programs piss me off). Acrobat isn't a graphics program.

Just a guy who proved the COLB to be a fraud.

He absolutely did not.

 

[JayUtah]

Experienced in graphic arts presumes experience in such programs as Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Acrobat among others.

Adobe has thousands of customers, most of whom can't tell you anything about the file formats or underlying mechanisms of the tools they use, and almost none of whom are Birthers. Tom Harrison is one of many thousands of ordinary users of a popular and widely available computer program. It doesn't make him a "computer expert."

On the other hand, training and experience in computer science, including studying and teaching at the school responsible for that product, followed by decades of industry experience, give me and others the insight to point out where your pseudo-experts are making a mistake. So far you have no answer for that explanation other than to demand that we aren't "really" experts, even though the expertise is being demonstrated to your face.

But perhaps no experience in PDF Woo...

No "woo," just the widely-available but technically challenging facts. You were handed the official Adobe description of the PDF system on a silver platter and asked to reconcile it with Birther assumptions for how PDF imaging should work. You have failed to do so, and you have ignored the summaries of it provided by others.

An expert knowledge of the Portable Document Format is required to evaluate claims pertaining to suspicion over a PDF file's composition. None of your so-called experts has been able to demonstrate such knowledge. Nor have you been able to address our criticism of their findings by any means other than begging everyone to believe that it's nonsense.

Naked denial of the refutation is not an effective rejoinder.

...nor scanners with x-ray vision.

None needed. The Magic Scanner theory is the Birther straw man. I have instead provided several explanations and descriptions now of how PDF optimization typically works. You have willfully ignored it, hence you may not insist that I must believe in magic scanners. I refuse to wear the argument you keep trying to pin on me. When you're ready to discuss the argument I actually made, let us know.

But it does not take a genius to notice objects in a layer, zoom in on them, and discover that what is revealed is not the opaque as with other objects, but the background layer of the document.

No, he couldn't even get that right. It took me a while to duplicate what he was doing, until I figured out that he was toggling the clipping mask within the object and not the object itself.

In any case I answered this question at length. Kindly stop simply repeating your non-expert's claim as if it hadn't been debunked. What we see in the PDF is the expected behavior for an optimized PDF, and I have explained at length why. Your Oregon farmer with the made-up credentials and the home car-repair and web-design business has, like all the other Birther pseudo-experts, made the classic common-sense amateur's mistake of assuming the PDF rendering engine works like the more common z-buffer compositing algorithm. Nope, it doesn't.

Anyone could have done this and pointed it out. A child could have done it. But Harrision actually did it. Does not make him a forensic genius.

No, you said:

Tom Harrison is a computer expert...

You play this dishonest game every time one of your pseudo-experts is debunked and deposed. When you first presented his claims, we pointed out that they were technically naive and were just being used by a tabloid to lend an air of authority to their sensationalist claims. "No, no, no," you said. (paraphrasing) "He's an expert and his judgment has to be respected." Now you want again to back away from the expert-witness claim and say that the "evidence" speaks for itself.

No. The evidence you wished at first to present was Tom Harrison's allegedly expert judgment that the only way that PDF could have arisen from a scan is if the scanner somehow had x-ray vision. But the judgment to that effect was based solely upon Harrison's lack of imagination to consider other explanations that a real expert could instantly list. The claim, "I can't imagine how else this could have arisen, therefore fraud" is valid only if the witness's imagination is sufficiently informed.

So now you've tried to move the goalposts. Now you want to say that the evidence is instead the "anomalies" in the PDF that you say are somehow self-evident, require no judgment to interpret, and cannot be refuted. The earlier evidence comprising allegedly expert judgment is simply a recitation of layman's ignorance. Your change of argument suggests you understand this but you do not acknowledge it.

The observations and facts, upon which Harrison's former judgment was made and which you now say are the uncontestable evidence of forgery, have their explanation not in Photoshop layers, as Zebest has claimed, or "x-ray scanners" as Harrison has claimed, but instead in the ordinary and expected behavior of optimized PDFs. You have this explained to you multiple times by me and others, but you deny any obligation to consider it. You have been handed the official Adobe reference manual for the PDF language, but you refuse to read it.

You may trot out as many layman as you wish to attest to "common sense" interpretations that deny the published facts, but it will not convince anyone. You may deny to your heart's content that no expertise is required to understand what goes on in the Portable Document Format, but everyone else can see it being shown otherwise.

Just a guy who proved the COLB to be a fraud.

No, just yet another guy you've trotted out who patently doesn't know what he's talking about.

To sum up:

You have no legal basis for an accusation of fraud.
You have no factual basis for an accusation of fraud.

What is it that you think you have, that someone who isn't already a Birther would consider compelling evidence?