The thing is also signed by a pen from the future, at least according to this guy:
OK, it’s Optimize for PDF that’s causing the layering. They did it with Trump’s certificate, too.
He would have had a wholly different set of wholly invented problems.
The birth certificate is just a piece of a larger, um, whole. Obama is the Other. Not One of Us. He’s different. He doesn’t represent our America. He is the future mongrel America made flesh.
The birth certificate is only the start. That’s why they go on about the lack of his other records. His entire life must be suspect. Nobody remembers him. That means he snuck up on us or was planted or something. Trump asks how he got into college with his bad grades, ignoring that he was editor of the Law Review. He got into better schools than Trump did. Very suspicious! He was overseas as a kid. So he didn’t learn about normal American value like being a Boy Scout. Even though he was a Boy Scout. Huckabee says that he learned anti-British colonialism from his father and grandfather while living in Kenya. He never lived in Kenya and had almost no contact with his father and grandfather, but that’s a perfect expression of him being an Other. His father’s race is given as African, not Negro. So the birth certificate must be a fake. A good underling would be a Negro like the ones we always repressed. An African who was never a slave or a descendant of them or subject to Jim Crow is an impossible concept to process. Why did they take the O in Obama and turn it into a 0? Because the Zero is not us. We are something. Obama is the Other.
This could go on at book length with better quotes and attributions, instead of stuff I’m remembering offhand. Birtherism is an expression of the age-old expression of hatred toward the Other we find everywhere, not just in America. It wasn’t that long ago that Al Smith couldn’t get elected because he was Catholic. It took until Ronald Reagan that a divorced man could be considered for the Presidency. Jesse Jackson was an object of fear and derision when he ran. Hillary Clinton had to be a bitch rather than a person.
And Obama is every scrap of Otherness rolled into one human being. Racism is part of it, but every other nuance of his biography emphasizes how different his life has been from the other candidates, even the black ones. He is the coming future, part white, part black, born outside the coasts or the heartland, intellectual not physical or manual, assimilated yet looking different. That’s why the Teaparty movement exists. They recognize subconsciously that all the demographic trends will make them a minority, and that globalization will cut them out of the good life, and that the younger generation is moving away from all their beliefs. They have to lash out, but demographics and globalization and youth aren’t really targets. You can only flail futilely against the tide of history washing you away. But there is a target in the White House who is the living expression of that Other and that Future. You can’t reason that away. And they don’t even want to try.
people do realize that the PDF is not the ‘original’ right? that the original is an actual piece of paper and would not suffer from the layering issue…(well, it could, but in an entirely different manner).
Or are people suggesting that the only copy that exists is the PDF itself?
Yes, people are being exactly that stupid.
I think this is a large part of it. I think that we all have troubles dealing intellectually with people outside our cultural group, so that (for example), an urban black American would have trouble dealing with a poor white person from Appalachia, and a Chinese American won’t understand Native Americans. But the Tea Partiers and Birthers have particular trouble with Obama on two fronts: he’s a combination of African American and intellectual elite – two groups that they can’t get on with, but for different reasons --; and he’s been strongly embraced by those two groups, to the extent that he comfortably won the 2008 election.
Oddly enough, Bill Clinton successfully appealed to both of those groups back in 1992 and in 1996, but he looked and sounded like a Southern Good-Old-Boy, so he wasn’t quite so frightening to them, because he seemed more like one of them (though at heart he obviously wasn’t). So Clinton was attacked, but not with the same insanity as Obama has been – and Clinton really did behave improperly with Monica.
Really, what Obama be criticised for? No scandal, just the pseudo-scandal of being born in Kenya. He’s right in the centre of US politics, so you can understand the criticism from the left of him being too moderate. But from the right, you just hear how he’s a socialist and responsible for a huge deficit, when most of what he’s been doing there is a continuation of Republican policies and actions.
Henceforward, all individuals formerly referred to as birthers shall be known as afterbirthers.
Thank you for your cooperation.
So if a foreigner is killed and then reanimated into a perverse, unholy mockery of life in the US, are they a natural born citizen?
I think you may have posted to the wrong thread. That is, if you’re trying to say this is a zombie thread.
No, I was just idly mocking birthers. But I may have confused this with the jus sanguinis thread.
I won’t even try opening the White House-supplied document in my Photoshop, as it is a very old version and may not show the layer phenomena as described.
But, assuming the official (White House Official) doc does show layers, and some text is on different layers from the background, is it possible that the White House scanners used a device and/or program that tries to OCR whatever it scans? If so, this just adds fuel to the fire. Why didn’t they just scan to a single-layer JPG and post that? Could this be a stupid mistake on their part?
Most of the latest birther complaints like ‘…Sharon Guthrie, legislative director for a Texas state legislator who has introduced birther legislation, as saying, “What I’ve seen online, what they produced today, still says ‘certificate of live birth’ across the top. … We want to see a ‘birth certificate.’”’ are just absurd, but this one bears refuting.
Musicat - Click on the link in post 22. That explains it. Like I said, most of the PDFs (I finally found a few exceptions) on my computer open up as a single layer with a slew of groups and clipping paths (just like Obama’s PDF), even though I didn’t do anything explicit to create those layers. It appears to be a function of saving as an Optimized PDF (although I assume OCR must be involved at some level.)
The grouping is visible in Adobe Illustrator from at least CS3 onward, but not in Photoshop (at least not in CS3 or CS5).
I can see it in CS2.
I am not a birther or anything, but seriously, WTF? I scan stuff all the time and have never seen anything like this. And it’s clearly not OCRed.
You’ve obviously never seen the “enhanced” versions of compressed JPG files that various loons use to demonstrate proof of alien civilisations on Mars.
Seriously, a JPG would produce all sorts of jaggies and artifacts around the text and within half an hour there would be dozens of websites showing 3000% zoomed versions with red circles around them and all sorts.
Who says to one one the commenters:
“Not interested in GW conspiracy bullshit.”
OK, I’ve loaded this into Illustrator and had a look at the layers in detail.
Each subgroup contains one image and one clipping path.
Layer 1
- Group
- Subgroup 1 - transparent image top left center and clipping path for document frame
- Subgroup 2 - transparent image lower mid left center and clipping path for inner document frame
- Subgroup 3 - “Non” in “None” at 17a
- Subgroup 4 - “AUG - 8 196” in “AUG - 8 1961” at 20
- Subgroup 5 - “Date A AUG - 8 6” in “Date Accepted [snip] AUG - 8 1961” at 22
- Subgroup 6 - “APR 25 2011”
- Subgroup 7 - “I certify” etc. stamp with Onaka’s signature
- Subgroup 8 - All other text and gridlines
- Subgroup 9 - Green background with white/gray knockouts for text, and bottom signatures and other pen marks
So, on investigation I think I can see how the groups are composed: where the text is unambiguously black, in particular typewriter and gridlines, it’s in Subgroup 8 as a hard-edged black bitmap. Where it’s a shade of gray, such as overtyping or handwriting, it’s been snipped out either separately to show its nuanced edges, or included in the background colors of Subgroup 9.
In conclusion: fancy-schmancy scanning software, ill-advisedly used.
Not always. A JPG exhibits artifacts and jaggies only if it was created with high compression settings. At the lowest settings, there is negligible degradation. Not that someone wouldn’t “enhance” it to make it worse.
I saw that article, and I don’t question that’s most likely how the file got that way. But I wonder why – surely that wasn’t intentional? Maybe that is part of the normal workflow in the Whitehouse office (a default setting on a scanner or a program) and some clerk, lacking sufficient technical knowledge, just scanned it the way he always would. If so, that’s unfortunate, and too bad that the WH didn’t call in a consultant to make sure they didn’t add fuel to the fire.
Of course, others will say it’s all a conspiracy. I think it may have been an honest mistake, but that is heresy in some circles.
This line sums it up perfectly:
Yes. In modern day offices, those fancy-schmancy “network document management center” machines you see all over the place that are simultaneously copier/printer/fax/scanner/binder/sorter/plotter/cofeemaker/exercycle/dishwasher will do that, when driven by “document management” software that seeks to “seamlessly” prepare the input so whether the operator wants to do image processing/enhancement/OCR/save to PDF/save to TIFF it can go ahead and do so immediately.
However this is in a way a warning sign about a serious problem for the future, kids: In the digital world, NOTHING is authentic proof because EVERYTHING can be claimed to be simulated.
I just don’t think anyone knew about it, and it wouldn’t even have occured to a consultant that this might be a problem. Like I said, I have a bunch of self-made PDF files and I had no idea that if I happened to open them in Illustrator, they open up with auto-groupings (on a single layer). Even if I knew this beforehand, I would never have thought releasing a PDF in this way would cause people to scream that I “Photoshopped” (especially as it doesn’t show up in multiple layers in Photoshop) it or some such nonsense.