Thursday, April 28, 2011

Obama's Birth Certificate

Maybe it's just me, but the newly released Obama birth certificate seems to have some problems. Around every word there is white where there should be background. This is not true of the pencil markings on the right side. It is apparent that the whole document did not come with that background. What this means is not clear, but it makes me ask why can't they just play straight?

Interestingly one can see just the white space by copying the image at the link above into a WORD page. For some reason the added text is mostly left out, and the form and some residuals are left with the background along with the white space. I would reproduce that here, but I haven't figured out how just yet. Try it yourself and let me know what you got.

This was the same objection raised about an earlier document which was presented and then pulled. A forgery analyst looked at the white space where background should be. It is everywhere on this document, except possibly one of the signatures at the bottom and the pencil markings on the right.

I don't know what it means, it is just funny business. A respected engineer once said, "If you see some funny operation of your circuit, record the amount of funny". So the funniness is duly recorded.

It is interesting that PZ Meyer accepts this evidence uncritically. Says science teacher Meyer,
"I agree that Obama shouldn't have wasted his time with this nonsense. Besides, you know that wingnuts are next going to argue that his birth certificate is a high-tech fake cobbled up by the geniuses at the NSA. Conspiracy theories simply do not die when presented with evidence — they absorb the evidence and claim that it's further evidence of an even more elaborate conspiracy."
Actually PZ, what we do is analyze the evidence rather than accept it on the basis of its congruence with our ideology and issue pre-emptory Ad Hominems against those who do the analysis.

9 comments:

Martin said...

PZ is correct in this case. Talking about how conspiracy theories are impossible to kill off is not Ad Hominem; Ad Hominem is to attack the person instead of the argument.

And he's right. First, they want the birth certificate. So he gives it. "Not good enough. It's not the long form. Just gives us the long form and we'll be happy." So he gives that. "It's got layers and it looks funny." Then, newspaper clippings showing the birth announcement. "Those must have been planted."

The goalposts are moving so fast I can't keep up. It was said that giving the long form would satisfy, and I said it wouldn't, and of course now I've been proven correct.

It will never be enough to satisfy. Ever.

This is just like when I was an atheist: I would start with the conclusion "theism is false" and look for any premise that supported that and ignored the ones that didn't.

If I scan a document and open it in Acrobat, and choose Optimize PDF from the Document menu, to clean it up, and then I save it and open it in Illustrator, it will have layers.

Stan said...

Being called a wingnut for examining the document is Ad Hominem.

The goal posts are more like a long line of hurdles, all of which existed before the election. There have been virtually no records of Obama's available from any of his life's accomplishments, all kept secret. The only one that could threaten his presidency was his birth, which he now acknowledges that he kept secret - contra all of his defenders.

There is absolutely no reason not to look critically at his "secret" document, now released.

Try not to forget the absolute rabid, frothy frenzy which was devoted to digging out dirt on Palin by these same people who denigrate the rest of us.

Maybe the layers come up in WORD too. Strange. It's not differentiated by color, just by the typewriter. The entire form outline is there.

J Curtis said...

I have questions too Stan. I just brought them up at my blog. Link

Sam said...

When he is revealed to be a secret muslim kenyan socialist marxist anchor baby .. you can brag to everyone how you knew it all along.

Stan said...

Do you have an actual point to be made?

Russell said...

You know, after being lied to repeatedly by this administration, there is no way I'm going to accept anything from them on face value.

To me, being willing to simply accept anything from them smacks of something other than mere naivety.

J.C.B. said...

The document was scanned with Adobe Acrobat with Optical Character Recognition turned on.
This software attempts to break the document into layers and save a text-based version instead of a bitmaped version of the data. This is so vast amounts of data can be searched using a computer.

Here's a picture of the one of the layers the OCR could not convert.

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/files/2011/04/birth-cert-layers4.jpg

The important thing to remember is that the PDF file is not the actual document in the same way a photograph of a painting is not the actual painting.

Hope this helps.

Stan said...

OK. Where would I find a Hi-Res bit map of the document then?

sonic said...

A document scanned with OCR on could end up in layers. This is a possible explanation for what we see with Obama's birth certificate.
In this case neither conclusion (real/fake) is possible from this one piece of evidence.
At this point I would think he was born in Hawaii, but I would like to have a skeptical forgery expert look at the actual document.
I'm not holding my breath.