Magnify anything enough and it starts to look strange. Maybe you remember when you were a kid and looked at newspaper illustrations under a magnifying glass. It was all little dots that had little relationship to the whole picture.
So it is with computer graphics, only pixels instead of dots. Straight lines become jagged. Grays resolve into whites set against blacks. And when the computer tries to recognize characters things get even more complicated. Strange layers may appear, and for all I know, pixel sizes can vary.
I must sound terribly skeptical about all the theories, but that's usually because something sets me off. In the last round it was people saying that you couldn't get to Pakistan in 1981 on a US passport long after that was proven to be untrue, and people repeating with certainty that "Obama's grandmother" had definitely said that he was born in Kenya (which is questionable) or born in Mombasa (which is untrue), that made me skeptical of the theories -- plus all the faked Kenyan birth certificates.
This time, it was people saying that the document had to be forged because one of the signatures was in felt-tip pen and those either weren't invented or weren't in common use in 1961. Whoever said that had apparently not used a fountain pen recently (or ever).
So yes, the document may be a forgery, but no, nobody's yet proved that it was. You'd have to get a closer look at the actual document, not at the PDF or GIF or whatever the computer image is. Otherwise, it's like looking at those little dots in a newspaper photograph and concluding from them that a picture was faked: very easy to believe, but hard to prove.
That's a great idea. Let's have a look at the actual, paper document--the original with the seal. Why didn't he release that one? There are two possible answers to that: 1) The original Hawaiian birth certificate contained information he doesn't want people to know. 2) The original Hawaiian birth certificate does not and never did exist.
This time, it was people saying that the document had to be forged because one of the signatures was in felt-tip pen and those either weren't invented or weren't in common use in 1961. Whoever said that had apparently not used a fountain pen recently (or ever).
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Obama's mother's signature on the long form birth certificate: I'm sorry to say this, but that signature looks so out of place to me. I'm talking about how "Stanley" is placed in parenthesis to the left and on top of the main body of the signature as if it was an afterthought and not as important as the part of the signature NOT in parentheses.
1. It is difficult for me to believe that the first letter Obama's mother wrote on the long form birth certificate was "A" for "Ann."
2. As far as I can tell , Obama's mother wrote nothing else on the long form birth certificate but her name, because the body of the certificate is typed, except for the signatures of the doctor and the registrar.
3. I have looked at several of Obama's mother's signatures on the web, and it seems to me that the first letter of her signature that she wrote on other documents was either an "S" by itself or an "S" that she wrote as part of her first name "Stanley."
4. NOTE: A poster in another thread thought that Obama's mother may have gone by her middle name "Ann" most of her life like a lot of people go by their middle name, but I saw a picture of Obama's mother that she signed for a friend, and she signed it "Stanley" and not "Ann".
5. In addition, the "Stanley" on the birth certificate, in my opinion, looks different than the way Obama's mother usually signed "Stanley."
6. Maybe Obama's mother resented being named "Stanley" because it was normally a boy's name, but I think she tried to live with it the best she could, that is, I think that when she signed her name, she wrote "S" or "Stanley" first and not Ann.
7. To me, the person who wrote "Stanley" on the long form birth certificate shows no respect for the name "Stanley", because he put "Stanley" in parenthesis, as if it was an afterthought, or he realized that he made a mistake by leaving out "Stanley" when he wrote "Ann Dunham Obama", and he tried to make up for his mistake by clumsily inserting "Stanley" at the top of the main signature, and he made matters worse by putting "Stanley" in the odd looking parentheses.
8. And as most of us know, when we put a word or a statement in parenthesis, we are telling the reader that the word or the statement is not as important as the information NOT in the parenthesis.
9. So, in my opinion, if the person had not put "Stanley" in parenthesis, he might have gotten away with whatever bad thing he was trying to do, but by putting "Stanley" in parentheses, the writer unintentionally attracted a lot of attention to the weird way "Stanley" is written, and, at the same time, he unintentionally added fuel to the theory that Obama's long form birth certificate is a forgery.