Coping: With the “Birther Distraction”

Contrary to what one reader thinks, listening to the rumor mill and then asking logical, well-formed questions is not what makes a person a racist.  Apparently, just being open to asking questions, doing research, and going beyond the spoon-fed pabulum from the mainstream media does, in the minds of some qualify as racism.

Not around here, though.  We try to read widely and to keep our thinking unbounded, so whether it’s Mein Kampf or any other controversial source material, I find myself reading several hours per day not because I believe in a particular point of view, but because I want to understand the alternative views.

Think of it like this:  Having an opinion on crime is something where the persuasion blocks and holders of thought can be broadly divided into two groups.  Those who have been victims of crime, and those who have not.

That said, we continued our research yesterday into this whole [latest iteration] of the ‘birther’ argument and found continued disagreement.

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So here are a few facts that we’ve collected from various readers who have made factual contributions to our inquiry.

First, on the hospital question, here’s an interesting email:

“Hi George,

Just read your article today and thought I could help out. I was born in Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. And yes that’s the name it went by when I was born. When was that….drum roll please….1951. Don’t know when it started that name but it certainly was called that when the Prez was born. Course, I could be part of the coverup. Time to give it a rest don’t ya think.

Try to read you every day….take care

[reader name withheld but lives in]  Keaau, Hawaii “

OK, this one has hi creds with me and it’s good enough to be taken at face value I think.  So, the ‘birthers’ have to roll over on this one and give it up – the point goes to Obama on this.  And, it’s not that just one reader contributed; I got a nice note from a mother who had twins born in the same hospital about the same time so this one is done, gone, off the table.

Next question was about what Kenya was called at the time: A well-studied reader (who’s quite a stamp collector, by the way) sends this:

“Hi George,

Actually National Geographic maps of Africa show Kenya (as well as Uganda and Tanganyika and Zanzibar) from 1935 on (i.e. 1940, 1950, and 1960). I collected stamps in my youth and had stamps from Kenya in the 1940s. So no problem with Kenya on the certificate.”

So, once again, point Obama, birthers trailing two to nothing.

But now comes the interesting stuff from the professional community that does Illustrator for a living. 

“Hi George,

Being a graphic designer that has used Adobe Illustrator from it’s inception, I can tell you that it does not create layers automatically. Never has and I’m sure never will. I downloaded the birth certificate straight from the white house website, opened it up in Illustrator, an lo and behold it opens up with layers.

Layers have to be created by hand. Nothing automatic about it.

Layers should not have happened if the original had been photographed or scanned. It would have been a single layer. The green layer is separate form the background, so if a photo or a scan of the birth certificate was made, this green would not be separate. When you click off of the green, certain letters disappear also, so they weren’t being too careful with their layer creation. This was a pretty poor hack job. They should have flattened the layers before sending it out as a pdf. Any freshman 101 graphic design student would know this. I think the prez has been sandbagged, big time.

And when I think about this it makes sense. If someone ‘high up’ was going to modify anything on the birth certificate, likely one of the inner core would be the one taking up the task, and since the higher ups in any organization don’t necessarily know how to run the powertools involved, this kinda makes sense.

Our Hawaiian source in the MSM out there wandered into the newsroom yesterday and one of the more open-minded reporters pointed to this video on YouTube, after which our correspondent report…

“Watch the video. Examine the layers blanked out and modified. I’m speechless. I know how to do layers in Photoshop, but I find it unbelievable that someone doing such a ‘doctor job’ would forget to ‘flatten’ the image back to a single layer before posting it for public consumption! That’s either a gross error, or a deliberate disinformation ploy. Something is rotten in DC.”

Unfortunately for Obama, it’s not the only mistake in the document.  There’s another pointed out by this Illustrator-savvy reader who’s worried about more than just the ‘layers’ issue:

“One other thing: The green patterned background is completely straight, and does not follow the curve created by the spine of the book. That was put in there. And yes, it’s a rookie mistake.”

Well no, it’s not – IF the State of Hawaii used Microfiche and simply printed the document onto ‘forgery resistant paper” which sure looks like the case to me.  So that one’s not convincing, at all since that paper probably wasn’t around in 1961.

The author of yesterday’s email wrote in admitting that his further research into both Kenya’s name and the hospital’s name were wrong.  But he, too, is stumped by the amateur-level errors in the so-called birth certificate file:

“First, download the birth certificate from the White House website here.

Next, zoom in as far as you can. You will notice that some letters begin to pixilate while others remain completely clear. I was curious as to why this was until I saw a bunch of videos on youtube showing people using Adobe illustrator, and that they found out the document was pieced together in layers. “

Let me slip into “forensic” George mode for a sec:  It’s not proof but I see the point in the pixelation difference between the R and the two A’s in Barack when zoomed 6400% in current Acrobat Reader s/w:

Interesting, but would there be an alternative explanation?  Sure!  The scanner might have ‘averaging’ processing in gray areas and a light touch on the R could have resulted in a different processing mode which went all gray.  A fair question is why would the A’s seem to have double-resolution scan data compared with the R…that’s a good one, especially if the R was on a different layer….

But for now, no.  One pixel off the R is about the same as two off the A’s so could just be how the scanner s/w works. 

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I’ll bet long after Obama leaves office, this will be in the same category as Roswell and the grassy knoll; grist for the Conspiracy Industry.  That is, after all, one of the few industries that we haven’t outsourced.

Now, to look at this with an open (and curious) mind, does not make one a “racist”.  I’d be asking the same questions if any other human, purporting to be an American citizen, had done the same thing:  sitting on college transcripts and the birth cert for three years. 

There’s another election just ahead, and even though the lesson of Florida is that voting may not matter, we still get to decide who the next guy in the White House will be when time comes.

Turning over transcripts and the long-delayed birth cert is a non-starter in terms of making up my mind on that.  Getting a Nobel prize for peace and not stopping any wars (or Gitmo)?  That’s another matter.

Friday At the WuJo:

Workings of The I-Ching Inbox

Apparently I’m supposed to say something this morning about the Sunday or Monday major earthquake to come and apparently I’m supposed to mention Puget Sound/ Vancouver Island.

First, our correspondent in Oklahoma, up in the 10-14″ of rain area, sent an email about the Quileute Indians who are working toward moving their community to higher ground because of fears over coming earth changes/tsunamis….

NPR interview YESTERDAY about implications of a PNW great quake.

“Quileute elder DeAnna Hobson says she loves living by the water….Like everyone else, Hobson watched the unforgettable images of destruction from the Japanese tsunami last month.…”

I heard it yesterday on the drive into T-town & thought, “hmmm, I should tell Clif & George about this.” Then I read George’s column this morning (Thurs-g)  &, well, you get the drift.

Either curious timing & nothing more or really curious timing & synchronicity. Either way, curious.

And even though you guys didn’t think it was a big deal (or never read the email-LOL!), I still maintain that the green fluorescein river on Vancouver Island a couple months back was NOT a prank, & someone was tracking water flow on an industrial-strength level. Even now, when I wrote that last sentence, I got a flutter up and down my spine.

Second step was I didn’t follow the dye reference mentioned, so I called up and said what was that part?

Turns out there was a spill of green dye into a river up on Vancouver Island about 20-miles from Victoria in January.  The email on this was sent to me in Janujary but didn’t show up until a resend yesterday.

My friend being the math whiz PhD type figures the cost of the dye in the river would be somewhere well north of $5,000 since it would take several 55-gallon drums of the stuff.  Doesn’t it seem a bit frigging odd that someone would pop $5,000 (or more) on a “prank”?  Sure does to us.  Especially temporally on the wrong side of Christmas and long before St. Paddies, know what I mean?

In fact there was a tiny in-town dyeing event then too, so it was all thought connected…but just too damn beyond the outliers.  We kept coming back to “Who’s gonna drop $5-grand worth of chemicals on a nothing prank within driving distant of nowhere?

While this was glossed over as a “prank” in the MSM, my science-savvy friend points out that the fluorescein dye used in the river was not something that needs to be visibly green to be useful.  It’s something that is used with a fluoroscope and there are water-born devices for seeing how layers of water mix, and so forth.

But THAT  while interesting (downright conspiratorial grist) it wasn’t what floored me as I dug a little deeper into the background of the dyed river case on Vancouver Island.  It was THIS:

THAT is a picture of the old Lubbe Power House 20-miles from Victoria B.C.  which supplied power to Victoria around the turn of the century.

And what’s so special about the picture?  Oh, not much except that I had a vivid dream about this exact spot in one of those vivid dreams of mine more than two-years ago, that’s all. 

I can remember the land falls away down a short valley from this side of the building and that there was another building, which I got the sense in the dream was a machine shop of sorts.

And, in the dream there was a kind of trail down the valley, behind, and what would be to the left in the picture.  And what I had in the dream as a curving walkway down the valley with posts and a rope of some kind on top of it was this picture.   Woo-woo at its finest and the hair on the back of my neck still stands up when I think about it.

(Thanks to Kiwibirdman for the photos which he generously shared on the net. They really weirded me out.)

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I don’t mind being a laughing stock, but remember that the last time there was a major celebrity wedding (Jenna Bush’s 2008 hitching) we had a major quake – the 7.8 in China shortly thereafter?  Like 37-hours later?

Given the celeb wedding this morning a large number of readers have been asking “Could we get a wedding quake?”

Beats me, but I’m apparently supposed to mention Vancouver Island just by the odd way information rolled in and my precise recall of the two year old dream it set off.

Be sure and drop by after a completely uneventful weekend, since as we’re fond of saying “If George can imagine it, it probably won’t happen.”  Like our prescient warnings about the “Wedding quake” which predictive linguistics nailed in advance of the 2008 shaker, and the wedding pictures from that temple came out two weeks later, if you recall.

Still, no reason to be totally freaked out.  The Chief Time Monk thought yesterday that the arrival of an unusual storm system up in the PNW might have set off that mass bird flocking we mentioned yesterday.

Good.  Fine by me.  Don’t need any super quakes going off this weekend.  I’ve got too many other things on my plate right now, thank you.

Still, just as I was writing this, a note from Nightingale-Conant (the big MPA/motivational) publishers popped in with a curious ‘quote of the day” given my question about the timing of this and how a misplaced email from January triggered total recall of an incredibly vivid dream about a place on Vancouver Island:

“There are no accidents… there is only some purpose that we haven’t yet understood.”  -Deepak Chopra

Write, then.  On to Monday we go….I’ll spend the weekend continuing to watch the Inbox I-Ching.

Send Ure comments to george@ure.net

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Last week’s report is always here.