I agree with SN basic assertion about the Tea Party associates – they are a rag-tail bunch. However, they do want to hold our government officials to the meaning of the Constitution and they do want freedom. Their problem is that they do not have an intellectual base and tend to be more “common sense” oriented, but don’t present a coherent rational philosophy. They desperately need one, and a large part of our future as free Americans hinges on them getting one.
Most t-party people I’ve seen on TV couldn’t possibly understand the first thing about the Constitution and “freedom” in any rational way. For them representing that cause of liberty which apparently consists of being unable to perform simple math. How does this further the cause?
There’s nothing “common sense” about wanting lower taxes for yourself yet the same exact government. It’s just moronic blabbering, and insofar as it occupies the same space as real advocates for liberty, it is very much a setback for liberty, and does more damage than any organized call for socialism could ever do.
The t-party people are absolutely the same as the “occupy” people in terms of their effect. Neither have any sort of ideology at all–but at least the Occupy people have the (albeit bizarre) honesty to proclaim they stand for nothing in particular except “anger”.
T-party people are Occupy people with better costumes. Neither have anything fundamental to say, and both are either desperately pointless or looking to cash in on the same. One is vaguely democrat and the other is vaguely Republican.
I’ve alluded to this in (another thread), but I’ll reiterate: these days I have much more hope for real rational change coming from the “left” side of the world than the “right” as the latter has turned decidedly against reason in any form. If I have to choose between higher taxes with reason still existing and lower taxes but we have to all pretend that squares are round, then I’ll choose reason any day of the week…
I found an article that has the relevant video at the bottom of the NJ trial. From listening to it carefully (turn the volume up because the sound quality is very bad), Obama’s lawyer admitted that the image presented on the internet was never intended to be a Hawaii certified legal document and would not be offered as evidence for Obama being a natural born citizen. When pressed further, Obama’s lawyer said it would not be so presented because there was nothing in the New Jersey law that stipulated that one’s natural born citizenship had to be legally documented before getting on the Presidential ballot. The spin on the right and throughout the Tea Party affiliates is that therefore Obama’s layer had admitted that the internet image is a forgery, but this was not something Obama’s lawyer agreed to – she only agreed that it was not a certified copy and that it would not be used in court. So, the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what was put on the long-form image, since Obama never said it was a certified copy in the first place.
Here, have an actual analysis of both the birth certificate and the selective service card. (Skip the first video on that page. It’s just an introduction.)
I originally distanced myself from this whole birth certificate issue for the same reasons you guys are: Because I thought it was a redneck conspiracy theory. But this analysis shows the digital copy of the birth certificate to be very suspicious, and the selective service card to be an outright fake. And such a bad fake that a kindergartener could’ve made it.
I don’t know if I accept their dumbed down analysis of the certificate itself as proof. But it definitely seems suspicious. But keeping in mind that the selective service card is a blatant fake, this context makes the certificate seem all the more suspicious to me.
EDIT:
Actually, this youtube video has the presentations themselves without all the talking. But you can still watch the video in the above link to get more context.
Hmm. I suppose I stand corrected on the birth certificate. At least on the white halo. But how does an entire stamp and signature, etc get lifted onto its own layer? Does OCR software or some fancy optimization software lift stuff like that and put it on layers as one coherent piece? Does OCR detecting normal letters but not signatures explain the fact that most of the characters looked smooth, but the signatures looked pixellated?
I should’ve known this was too stupid to be true.
I don’t really buy what you said about the stamp though. So what if it’s possible to just manufacture a new stamp. That doesn’t really explain why the year is in two digits when all post offices were supposed to be using four digits. The fact that you can make a good forgery doesn’t explain why it looks like a bad one.
By the way, those of you arguing that the long-form birth certificate was a fake due to image quality and possible edits, it is now totally beside the point. After the NJ trial shown above, it doesn’t matter one squit what the documents was forged or not (as in not a image of a real document) because Obama will never use it in a court of law to assert that he is a natural born citizen. Maybe it is a fake and maybe it isn’t, but it doesn’t matter what he presented to the American people and to the world because it could never prove his place of birth one way or the other not being a Hawaii certified document. And I do say that the fact that he could assert one thing to the populous and yet something entirely different in a court of law does come from Kantian premises. The idea that reality conforms to the subject and especially conforms to a collective subject is straight out of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Obama’s mannerisms (and the mannerisms of every collectivist dictator in the 19th and 20th Century) comes from the idea that there is no truth independent of human subjective consciousness.
I think it just stems from different requirements for proof between the public and a court of law. The court requires original documents in certain cases that most people may not think is necessary.
Obama should sell original-certified copies of his birth certificate. Anyone who wants a copy, send in $100 to his campaign fund and you’ll get a true-certified copy. Might as well clean up some of the opposition’s money while generating a couple of extra jobs in Hawaii!
Right…the point is that if he could have legally asserted under oath via his lawyer that the long-form presented on the internet was a Hawaiian certified duplicate of the actually long-form, then he could have cut to the chase in NJ and told everyone to get off his back. Since he didn’t do that, since he and his lawyer skirted the entire issue by saying it wasn’t required, then he is only adding fuel to the fire against him by those who says he needs to prove that he was a natural born citizen.Andif you noticed, his lawyer tried to get away with saying that the burden of proof is on those saying he is NOT a natural born citizen, that he doesn’t have to prove a damned thing. Fortunately, the Tea Party advocate lawyer and the judge killed that maneuver post hast.
What happened to the side discussion regarding the state of the economy and whether or not we are heading for dictatorship. I think it was off-topic, and I think what needs to be said about Obama’s dealings with his birth certificate has been resolved, but I was going to reply to that part of the thread.
Right…the point is that if he could have legally asserted under oath via his lawyer that the long-form presented on the internet was a Hawaiian certified duplicate of the actually long-form, then he could have cut to the chase in NJ and told everyone to get off his back.
To analogize: years ago I moved out of a rented apartment and the landlord made big deductions from my security deposit. In my state there are some strict rules on how a landlord can do that, one of which is that he has to send the refund by a certain number of days after the tenant has moved out. If they don’t, they lose the right to make any claims against the security deposit, and further, are responsible for the legal fees the tenant incurs to sue. In my case, the postmark on the envelope was past the required date, so I sued. The landlord had all kinds of stories about damages (false of course), but all I to do to win the case was produce the envelope with the tardy postmark. I didn’t have to address any assertions about damage to the apartment, so I didn’t, and I won.
Likewise, Obama’s attorney didn’t have to answer claims about the online birth certificate, and there’s nothing more to it. She was there to win the case, not to do public relations, and above all not to expand the scope of the dispute.
I agree with SN basic assertion about the Tea Party associates – they are a rag-tail bunch.
Do you mean “ragtag”? The Tea Partiers are no more ragtag than those who call themselves Objectivists.
However, they do want to hold our government officials to the meaning of the Constitution and they do want freedom. Their problem is that they do not have an intellectual base and tend to be more “common sense” oriented, but don’t present a coherent rational philosophy.
I’ve known many Tea Partiers who have a much deeper intellectual base than most Objectivists I’ve encountered online. Calling oneself an Objectivist doesn’t automatically make one right or intellectually deep. In fact, there are some people in Objectivist circles who might better be called “OINOs” because they’re Objectivists In Name Only. They do a lot of theorizing, but they’re not very good at translating the theories into reality and putting them into practice. They claim to be Objectivists but go around advocating things like the violation of others’ property rights, for example – they make up something as ridiculous as the claim that their “metaphysical survival” is at stake, and that the only way to stop the “eminent” threat to their existence is to not allow a single building to be built in a specific location! Not exactly what I would call coherently applying a rational philosophy.
I found my original youtube comments on that video. If you haven’t watched the videos yet, I was responding primarily to this guy’s phony authority, hence my use of strong language.
Quote
This is what happens when a non-technical individual watches a few videos on OCR and photoshop and thinks he is an expert. You’re an idiot, and your most basic assumptions about the expected results of OCR are absolutely wrong! You compare an unknown OCR software, unknown version, with unknown settings, to your own selected OCR software, and presume you’ll get the same or even similar results. Why?
Whether or not the text is readable depends entirely on the OCR software. It’s much easier to program recognizing a block of text without actually translating it into text. The number and content of the layers that result from OCR depend on the tolerance/fineness settings used in the OCR software. It’s obvious that this layering is from OCR - if you move the text, you see empty white underneath, rather than the detailed green background of the document, because there’s no data to display.
And your mysterious white halo effect is just a basic sharpen filter that was probably automatically applied by the scanner software. Oversharpening routinely produces a white halo effect along dark edges.
I cannot emphasize enough how baseless are your basic assumptions. It indicates your lack of technical experience in this area. Try OCRing an old book and converting it to text. It’s a constant battle with the settings in the software. In other words - the results change dramatically depending on the settings you’re using in the software. And you don’t even know what software was used, let alone the version or the settings that were used. That authority in your voice is completely bogus.
Well said! The video clip on the OCR software appears to have been created to fool people who are easily fooled. And it’s pretty shocking how many people are easily fooled.
What’s with all this blubbering about Kant? When did Obama’s attorney say that his birth certificate is a forgery? Either give us a reference, meaning a verifiable quote from the hearing, or admit that you didn’t know what the hell you were talking about when you started this thread, with its breathless opening salvo: “Obama’s Birth Certificate *WAS* Faked”.
Hey hey, the thread title has been changed! I note this here so future readers will understand what I was referring to in the quoted post.
Well, now that I have more context, I take back what I said. It probably still is just a redneck conspiracy theory. And the redneck investigators with little technical knowledge producing the “proof” that they are is just going to make everyone with a rational beef with Obama look like fools.
The burden of proof -is- kind of on the people who think Obama’s certificate was faked. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. He and/or his lawyer(s) can skirt the issue as much as they want, and it’s still up to the opposition to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Whatever the effect on his public relations.
Related to this thread, someone posted a question on FB: does the FBI do background checks on presidential candidates, or at least on the final nominees? Forget the birth-certificate – what about things that matter? For instance, before someone is appointed to a senior post in the CIA, they probably go through a background check. So, what about the President who is their boss and who will get all their information. I’m not sure I’d support such a check, but I’m curious whether anything like that is done.
There is no office at the federal level to definitively say who may or may not run for president. At the state level there are formal requirements such as forms and filing fees and petitions with enough signatures to get on a ballot, and it is up to each state government to make their elections correct with qualified candidates.
Related to this thread, someone posted a question on FB: does the FBI do background checks on presidential candidates, or at least on the final nominees? Forget the birth-certificate – what about things that matter? For instance, before someone is appointed to a senior post in the CIA, they probably go through a background check. So, what about the President who is their boss and who will get all their information. I’m not sure I’d support such a check, but I’m curious whether anything like that is done.
One would think that the candidates themselves would support such a check. Anything they find will undoubtedly be found by someone. Better to find out sooner, rather than later.
The media and the rival candidates have always done this and done it well. (Doesn’t a candidate know his own background without hiring someody to investigate it?) The question seems to reflect the notion that if we need a job done or information provided, we need government to do it. I wouldn’t have expected this in an Objectivist forum.
The burden of proof -is- kind of on the people who think Obama’s certificate was faked. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. He and/or his lawyer(s) can skirt the issue as much as they want, and it’s still up to the opposition to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Whatever the effect on his public relations.
No, logically, this isn’t true. The burden of proof is on he who asserts the positive. Obama is asserting the positive by saying that the long-form image on his website is a digital image of a paper birth certificate – and when called upon to do so, he would have to prove that he did indeed have the copy (legit or otherwise) and that he did indeed scan it and did indeed post that scanned image on the internet. Those claiming it is a fake do need some evidence for their claim, but to prove it is a digital image of an original paper copy is up to Obama to prove.
There is no office at the federal level to definitively say who may or may not run for president. At the state level there are formal requirements such as forms and filing fees and petitions with enough signatures to get on a ballot, and it is up to each state government to make their elections correct with qualified candidates.
Let me expand on this. States administer their own elections but the House and Senate each decide whether or not to seat their own members. Since technically it is the electoral college that casts the ultimate votes for the president, it is those electors who have the last say by casting their vote. If the Electoral College is tied then then the House of Representatives gets to pick the President, and qualifications can be debated then. The Congress could technically impeach an unqualified President but that would require political courage which is in scant supply.