Vanity: "Where's the Birth Certificate" book refunds now?

I have blown it up and I call BS on your claim.

Have you looked at the "F" in "OF"?

The process that produced the text as we see it dropped some pixels. I was going to post the image for you last night but ran out of time.

The only explanation is then that their office is incompetent and using a misspelled stamp

That's one possible explanation.

Or the White House jiggered with it.

And that's another. Another is that the Hawaii office jiggered with it.

But any explanation has to be credible.

Look, you obviously think something is highly suspicious here about the appearance of the word "THE." Okay. Let's go with this for a moment.

That would mean that it was forged - and by somebody OUTSIDE of the Hawaii state Department of Health's offices, who didn't have access to any of their stamps. So they created a fake one.

But after having had three years to come up with a forgery, it was such a rush job that they made a stamp that said clearly "TXE" instead of "THE", and then for whatever reason didn't proofread the most important document to be publicly released since the Emancipation Proclamation. Or they just didn't care, or they did it deliberately simply to try and drive you bonkers.

Then they somehow also managed to come up with a letter from Loretta J. Fuddy, Director of the Hawaii State Department of Health. Maybe they did ask for two certificates from her.

But wait - she would have had to have supplied two real certificates, and she would also have had to keep quiet when what was published didn't match what she was sent.

But no... that would've been way too big a risk. Better to get her on board from the beginning and create the forgery at the Hawaii state level.

But in that case, they have access to all of the genuine stamps and equipment.

You have to ask yourself what makes more sense: that a few pixels were dropped by the scanning program, or the kind of scenario outlined above.

And you're free to choose. If you really believe there's something huge here, then you're free to believe that. So far and until I see some more convincing evidence to the contrary, personally, I think it's probably a matter of a blurred stamp from a possibly uneven physical stamp with unevenly distributed ink and pixels dropped by the software that reassembled the scanned image into its layers.

Am I 100% certain this is the case? No. Of course not.

One person objected to my analyses because I often used the words "probably" and "most likely." Sorry, but that's what we have, not just in this case, but in almost everything in life. Am I 100% certain that the woman I've been told gave birth to me actually did? No. But I'm about 99.99% certain. Could there have conceivably been a situation where, say, her sister gave birth to me and for some reason everybody covered it up? Yes, it's conceivable. Unlikely? Very.

Clearly that thing was made in a word processor with center-justified fields

It probably was. The question I have is what year was it ("it" being an abstract) was produced. The HDOH say the they copied the vital record on a copy machine loaded with security paper. They state in a letter to Obama that they enclosed two of these certified pieces of paper to Obama. Let's assume for a moment that they are telling the truth

The problem is, the green image on the White House website was not produced by color scanning a piece of paper.

It is impossible for the image on the White House website to have been scanned from a piece of paper. If the White House color scanned the paper document produced by Hawaii then it WOULD HAVE chromatic aberrations around the black text because it is IMPOSSIBLE to scan a piece of paper in color without producing some chromatic aberrations around the black text. The green version posted on the White House website has NO color fringing around the black text. None. THE GREEN VERSION ON THE WHITEHOUSE WEBSITE IS NOT A SCAN.
Video That is the first mystery. Why did they "release" two different versions - a black and white piece of paper to the AP, and that green background colored mystery image on the White House website?

Second, the name of the hospital listed did not exist until 17 years after 0 was born.

And third, an "abstract", by definition, is a condensed version of a piece of writing, speech, etc. It is a summary, which necessarily means that certain things are left out. It is not the original birth certificate, if there is one. It could be an abstract of a something as simple as a registration, or whatever information existed when they produced it. It could be accurate as far as it goes, but my question is WHEN did the HDOH produce that abstract, and who decided what would be included and what would be left out?

Perhaps you are on to something with your word processor observation. Although that does not necessarily make it illegitimate, it would necessarily date the abstract to a least after the invention of word processors, even granting for the sake of argument that a vital record with signs of word processing was produced by the HDOH.

Cordially,

That is curious, and I think it does belongs on the short list of not-entirely-explained anomalies that we do have at this point. I should make some notes regarding that in my larger post. Probably won’t do so now (need to get moving), but will try to do so later.

I see about 3 possible explanations, offhand.

1) That it’s an artifact of Adobe’s scanning/ layering process. Of the two possible explanations, this one seems the more likely to me at the moment.

Note that it is very similar to the R in BARACK. Whatever happened to the 1 on the end of the birth certificate number seems to have also happened to the R.

Freeper reegs did a physical print of the certificate (which would necessarily be of reduced quality from the original paper document) and then scanned it back in using his own office equipment and software.

Interestingly, both a piece of the word BARACK AND an area of the birth certificate number were split out into separate layers when he did this.

See: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2711500/posts?page=46#33

So there’s something about the graphics of those two areas that seems to invite splitting out pieces into a separate layer.

I should add here that more investigation could be done on the splitting-into-layers phenomemon to see whether that particular explanation holds. I am particularly concerned here with a) the non-anti-aliased, some-pixels-eliminated nature of most of the text, b) the fact that some text actually got anti-aliased and appears different (e.g., the 1 and the R), and c) the white “outline” around the text. We have plausible explanation for these things, but someone ought to test that comprehensively. This would best be done with a similar green-security-paper long form birth certificate from Hawaii, but I’m not sure whether any similar green-form certificates exist.

It should also be done having keenly in mind that we may not be able to produce identical results even in a best case scenario, since we don’t know precisely what equipment, what software, or what version of software was used. But a more comprehensive test ought to at least get us a bit further down the road in terms of confidence as to whether our plausible explanations really are good plausible explanations.

2) It’s possible that it’s an artifact of forgery at the Hawaii state level. At this point, though, this seems less likely to me than explanation 1.

Why? Well, for one thing, if I were going to forge such a document (including altering the final number), I would do a better job of it.

If I had access to an original number-stamping device, I would use that. Of course, 50 years later, I probably would not have, and would have to do the job digitally.

If we go with this assumption, at this point it makes almost no sense to me to manipulate the image after separation into layers. Why? If I were forging the number, I would make certain that it was on the same layer and had the same appearance as the other numbers. That would be easy enough to do.

Unless... unless I decided I actually wanted people to question the document, that that it was to my advantage. But honestly, I think we’re getting into the realm of convoluted and complex explanations here, when more simple explanations will do.

It’s possible, though, that what we see is an artifact of graphic manipulation done BEFORE the document was scanned, and that such manipulation produced a digit different enough that Acrobat handled it differently, separating it into another layer.

But this I find highly unlikely. Why? Because the same thing also happened to the R. There would have been no reason to manipulate the R. What were they trying to correct there? Certainly nothing that I can think of.

Okay, so perhaps they were trying to cover their tracks by doing similar manipulation on the R, so that the 1 wouldn’t be the only thing that split into another layer. But if they did this, then they would’ve had to know that the 1 WOULD split out.

And if they knew that, then they could’ve avoided the whole issue by either doing a better job on the 1, or just making sure the document was released in a single flat layer. So once again we are back to a convoluted, complicated theory that just doesn’t make as much sense as the simpler (but perhaps not yet adequately tested ) theory #1.

3) It’s possible that (as someone else suggested) it could be an artifact of touching up of the original document, without changing the original information, whether before or after the scan.

If this were the case, my money would be on “before.” Honestly, I doubt it’s the case. I don’t think anyone would have bothered. But I could be wrong about this.

To summarize: at this point, I don’t see any better explanation than #1. However, I do note that this explanation ought to be tested better by someone with an original document as close to the original as possible and with equipment and software as close as possible too, but with the realization that not knowing the specifics or having an identical document, we may be very limited in how close we can get to the original results.

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