Jul 16 2008

Birth Certificate Madness

Well, since I dove into this mess of the Obama Certificate Of Birth (COLB) I have become really disturbed at how rank amateurs can go out and make outrageous claims and be taken seriously. One of the worst offenders is someone called “Polarik” over at townhall.com. Today he posted another demonstration of an axiom one of my managers, from early in my career, coined: “A fool with a tool, is still a fool”.  I always like to add “Just more productive”.

You can see this shining example of twisted logic here, but the bottom line is the man is comparing to different version of COLB and claiming the differences in the formats mean one is a forgery (which as I noted here were due to the Real ID Act). He is looking at a 2002 COLB from a Ms Decosta and the 2007 COLB from Obama. He is stunned to find the background colors don’t match – Doh! The borders don’t match, the papers don’t match, either.

As I said before when another expert discovered there have been upgrades to the Hawaii COLB documents and declared “forgery” I have one thing to say – No shit Sherlock!  BTW, that other expert has acknowledged there were upgrades to the COLB formats.

Hey folks, want to see the forgery I found?  I compared two copies of NASA’s logo and discovered subtle differences that could only mean one is a forgery:

 

 

 

Now, if I can only figure out which one is the fake I would be just like these other folks ….

46 responses so far

46 Responses to “Birth Certificate Madness”

  1. AJStrata says:

    Polarik,

    It’s here, had to go through moderation on the first comment. Unlike Texasdarling, I don’t censor comments. Even if I ban someone for bad behavior, their comments stay.

    Not to worry, you will be the centerpiece of an upcoming post.

    Cheers, AJStrata

  2. […] example, look at this longwinded, defensive comment posted here from one of those ‘experts’ the COLB Cult have been rallying behind. It is […]

  3. AJStrata says:

    Polarik,

    Reading your panicked screed I get the feeling you don’t understand the difference between image resolution and pixel resolution. LOL!

    And yes, I did detect the seal image using a simple graphics program. Sorry you had to struggle with it, but when you have existing seals (and yes, I did have them – so did you!) it is easy to discern the proper imprint shape.

    You have shown yourself to be incompetent to those of us who have the technical credentials to know better, and that is what has you so upset. You may fool some naive true believers like TD who have very limited technical depth. You can be the hero to these folks, but deep down you know you exposed something you have hidden behind 20 years of a career.

    You’re not a rocket scientist. You don’t push technology you work feverishly to keep up. You had your moment in the spotlight and you showed too much.

    I did not make you look foolish, I only showed how you made yourself look foolish.

  4. polarik says:

    AJ:

    I didn’t say you did anything to them. I accidentally hit the backspace button

    Ray said:

    “If you had attempted to do that — point out WHERE the imagined copy/paste occurred in the original document we might think that you had a point, but still haven’t pointed to a thing that indicates an original document was doctored to pave the way for a forgery. Without that you have nothing but a lot of word-smithing which virtually no one on the planet believes.”

    Read ALL of my posts, Ray. It’s all there. All throughout my blog. Especially the last post where I provided the problems with the double “S” in “HUSSEIN,” the problem with the word, “BIRTH,” the “S’s” that don’t match, the oddity of differently-sized images, appearance and disappearance of the links on FightTheSmears, the oddity of the border alignment, etc.

    Plus, Ray, it is like I said: if none of you SAW a COLB before other exemplars were provided, and you saw what one looked like, and you did no image enhancements to it, you would NEVER know what the seal and stamp looked like or where the seal and stamp are supposed to have been placed on the document.

    The aruments you make against my analyses are after the-fact, untested, unproven, and unlikely.

    They are opinion judgments, and not empirically-derived conclusions.

    And, what followed were flawed attempts to account for these.

    Instead of empirical evidence, all we got was “blah-blah-blah.”

    The reason that I have not told you WHERE are the alterations is because that is what TechDude is analyzing, and he, myself and TexasDarlin. are working together as a team. I cannot t preempt his anayses.

    But, I can tell you that I saw his analysis, and know exactly where the alterations took place. They will be made public, and any claims that the Kos image WAS NOT ALTERED WILL BE BLOWN OUT OF THE WATER.

    So, go ahead, AJ. Give us your best shot, but the forensic evidence we have does not lie.

    So, tell me, where are the visual proofs that the document is genuine?

    Where are the visual proofs that the Kos image is an original?

    There are none to be found because the only thing I’ve seen or heard is “Well it could be this,” or “It could be that.”

    Or, it could be that it fell out of a giraffe’s ass.

    WHY has none produced a COLB that looks like the Kos image?

    Find one. Put it on the Net. Show something tangible for a change.

    BTW, this blogger you said was, “Good” also misquoted me.

    I never said that someone took someone else’s COLB and “scribbled over just the data fields.” Not even close.

    And, what proof does he provide to explain the unique border on the Kos image? Nothing more than “blah-blah-blah,” as in “Maybe the reason why the border on Obama’s COLB looks different is because it is different.?

    Yeah, and maybe pigs can fly but we are just not around when they do it.

    Blah, blah, blah. That’s all I ever hear to counter my empirical findings.

    Want to prove YOUR points?

    Find another person’s COLB with the same, blurry border, post an image of it, and then maybe you’d have something to brag about.

    Provide a visual example of how the border got to look the way it does, and not another “What if” game.

    There isn’t anything to verify that this IMAGE is a genuine copy of Obama’s paper document, while there are more things wrong with it than right.

    The only basis for it being authentic is BLIND FAITH, and that’s all.

    I created a blank template in 2 minutes. And in about another 10 minutes, I would have created an image that had Obama’s birth date as August 3, and his father’s race as Negro.

    Now, if this image was posted on the Smears website or the Kos website, all of you would hail it as genuine.

    You know darn well you would.

    And all of you would have been duped because the idea that someone would post anything but a genuine copy is out of your comfort zones.

    Nobody knew at the outset what was the COLB. Everyone in your camp said thought that this was a copy of his birth certificate, when, in reality, a COLB is not a birth certificate.

    It was only the enquiring minds who bothered to find out what is this document, how it was made, how one gets a copy, and why it looks the way it does.

    Meanwhile, the arguments FOR it being real are merely leaps of faith that the Obama campaign would never post an image that was not genuine.

    The one analysis that was done to “prove” it was genuine, did nothing of the sort. ANYTHING that would confirm your faith in it being genuine would be lauded as “proof positive,” even when the analysis was faulty.

    Or, to put it in the vernacular, “Our sh*t don’t smell.”

    They say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” and all of this effort to prove me wrong — even if all of it were correct (which it is not) – still DOES NOT prove the validity of the image.

    Take Michele’s COLB image, reduce it to the Kos image, play with the JPEG compression ratios, and make the text on it look just like the text on the Kos image.

    How hard is that?

    It isn’t, but we’ll hear people exclaim, “Oh, we cannot reproduce it because we don’t know what scanner was used, or whether it was reduced before it was made into an image, or afterwards, and we do not know what was the original resolution, or exposure settings…”

    Or, any number of equally lame excuses.

    The onus is NOT on me or anyone else to prove that it is a fake — it is up to the people who produced it to show that it is real,
    which they HAVE NOT DONE.

    Ask yourself, WHY did they NOT verify its authenticity?

    They could have shown us the actual request form used to get it.

    They could have asked for a more recent copy.

    They could have copied both front and back, at a much higher level of quality.

    BUT, they’ve done SQUAT.

    America STILL has not seen PROOF of Obama’s actual birth record.

    McCain showed his paper certificate to the Media. McCain had his cditizenship verified.

    Obama has not. He and his campaign stonewalled at every turn, creating more suspicion.

    It was only after Jim Gerahty (sp.?) raised the issue on June 10th that a hastilyt prepared image appeared two days later.

    I’ve asked the following questions, as so many others have as well, and we would like to know, “Where are the answers?”

    WHY did the Obama campaign originally post an image that was 1024 x 1000, but replaced it with a 585 x 575 image that is not a proportional copy?

    WHY didn’t they simply reduce the size by 50%?

    Why did it occur AFTER my analyses? (Yes, they had a larger image, and I saved three copies of it to prove it).

    WHY did the Obama campaign realign the borders in that 1024 x 1000 image after the apparent discrepancy was mentioned? (the borders in that image did not overlap).

    WHY did the Obama campaign allegedly give a big image to the Kos and FactCheck, but did not offer a link to it on their website?

    WHY didn’t the OBama campaign post a link to the Kos image after it was posted?

    WHY stick with an illegible copy of a copy?

    WHO in the Obama campaign allegedly provided this image to the Kos and FactCheck? WHY has he or she not come forward?

    WHAT proof is there that Photoshop CS3 was ONLY used to put a black rectangle on the Certificate number and to crop the image?

    WHY is it that both the Kos image and FactCheck images have identical Exif information when the FactCheck image is not the same size listed in the Exif information?

    WHY is FactCheck trumpeting their image as the “original,” when it is identical to the Kos image, minus the extra green?

    WHAT proof do you have of the chain of custody in this image?

    WHY wasn’t the reverse side of the COLB also posted?

    WHY hasn’t the Obama campaign posted a copy of the REQUEST FORM for the COLB? A document verifying that it was ordered in May-June 2007?

    WHY is Obama Sr.’s race listed as AFRICAN instead of Negro or Black?

    With all the brouhaha about this one image, WHY has there been no other copies of his COLB made and posted after six weeks of doubt about its validity?

    WHY should an image, that a eight-year old could alter, be accepted, prima facie, as genuine

    WHY is the word, “AFRICAN” larger than CAUCASIAN?

    WHY does the text on the Kos image have virtually no green pixels, when repeated testing of Michele’s COLB, at every JPG compression level, shows much more?

    Why does the border appear smeared when the rest of the image appears clean?

    WHY is there one, and only one, FOLD LINE, when every other COLD examined has at least TWO? (Hawaii trifolds the document and inserts it into a $10 envelope. If they wanted to send it any other way, it would have been in a Manila envelope, and tey would not have folded just the top).

    WHY is the Certificate Numer blacked out? The nujmber cannot be used for obtaining or verifying any individually-identifiable information.

    WHY is it that I was the first one to discover that the Certificate Number contains the BIRTH YEAR?

    WHY is it that I was the first one to discover that Hawaii only gives you back what you specifically ask for?

    WHY is it that I am the only one with the guts to admit his or her initial mistakes?

    HOW can ANYONE claim that the Kos image is the original scanned image of a COLB, when it is absolutely a copy of a copy?

    I’m sure that you, Ray, or that you, AJ, cam come up with any number of “reasonably-sounding” reasons why.

    I’m equally sure that you will not provide any empirical evidence using the actual images referenced.

    To me, it’s like someone handing you a copy of a $100 bill, and you proceed to use it as if it was just the same as an actual $100 bil

    In other words, “we’ve ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

    Adios.

  5. AJStrata says:

    Polarik,

    Hmm – you seem to be quite scared given the length of your ‘rational’ outburst.

    Let’s do some fisking. You said

    “If none of you SAW a COLB before other exemplars were provided, and you saw what one looked like, and you did no image enhancements to it, you would NEVER know what the seal and stamp looked like or where the seal and stamp are supposed to have been placed on the document.”

    Actually, it did not take any specialized SW to find the seal, date stamp and signature area. And I did not know where to look for it, it comes through clearly in the image. What we see from YOUR inability to detect it is a lack of basic skills. And what we see from YOUR inability at a mea culpa is the inability to admit your initial reasons for claiming a forgery where ALL WRONG. If you want to grow a pair and admit you were dead wrong on your initial claims then we can move onto why you have been wrong or completely befuddled on all your other claims.

    Like when you compared the 2002 Decosta COLB to the 2007 BHO COLB and claimed you were comparing ‘apples to apples’. I found that to be quite the humorous irony! And Techdude himself has admitted there have been updates to the COLB since the 2002 Decosta, and they ALL have the same 2001 version control number – another one of your priceless screw ups.

    If I find the time I might educate you and answer your silly questions. But since you have demonstrated an infinite capacity ignore the facts when they debunk your Chicken Little cries I find you more useful as an example of how to screw up and what not to do.

  6. Ray_in_Aus says:

    polarik wrote:

    =============
    Ray said:

    “If you had attempted to do that — point out WHERE the imagined copy/paste occurred in the original document we might think that you had a point, but still haven’t pointed to a thing that indicates an original document was doctored to pave the way for a forgery. Without that you have nothing but a lot of word-smithing which virtually no one on the planet believes.”

    Read ALL of my posts, Ray. It’s all there. All throughout my blog. Especially the last post where I provided the problems with the double “S” in “HUSSEIN,” the problem with the word, “BIRTH,” the “S’s” that don’t match, the oddity of differently-sized images, appearance and disappearance of the links on FightTheSmears, the oddity of the border alignment, etc.
    ===============

    That isn’t addressing my comment. I’m referring to the masking of the original text with light green background. I’ll look at those other issues separately.