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“Peter Rehnquist” unmasked

By on October 27, 2012 in Fakes and frauds

Purveyor of fake Obama birth video used fake name

When I talked via a Skype™ video call to the purveyor of the Obama birth video today, my video recording setup was a total bust. Not having an image to work with, beyond my memory, I looked through all the images on the Internet until I found him1 so that I could let other people know what he looked like (and that he was not “Peter Rehnquist,” the former Supreme Court Justice’s son).

Put mine and @ronojoydam’s luggage together we’re sharing this space tonight (at Vice)

The only problem with this photo is that it appears to be a person identified as  Nimrod Kamer. I also found another interesting photo that appears to be of the same fellow:

No Apology (at News Corp Building)

Who knew? The photos are from Tumblr.

Read more:

image

1The description of how I made the connection between my caller and Mr. Kamer in the article is technically accurate, although some deductive reasoning steps that shortened the process have been omitted. At some point, I’ll explain how this remarkable-sounding identification was made. Until then you’ll just have to consider me superhuman. :roll:

Lies, damned lies, and statistics (Part 2)

By on March 15, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Birth Location, Fakes and frauds

Continued from Lies, damned lies, and statistics (Part 1).

In this part we examine a claim by authors Johannson and Crosby at The Daily Pen in their article: Vital Records Indicate Obama Not Born in Hawaii Hospital (Part 3) that there is a program in place where foreign governments report overseas births of children to US residents back to the US, where these births were registered in the United States as if those children had been born there (and thereby invalidating all birth certificates as evidence of citizenship by virtue of birth in the United States). They write:

Foreign Birth Transcript Exchange

Beginning in 1937, four years after the establishment of the standard U.S. vital statistics registration area, the Vital Statistics of the United States Report published the first natal statistics which were provided from thousands of transcripts exchanged between foreign-based vital records offices and domestic Vital Records offices in the U.S. [this is not true]

…

One such table of this data can be seen in the Vital Statistics of the U.S. Report in 1945 which shows there were 52,269 “Resident Transcripts” added to the natal statistics data in the U.S. while the balance of the same number of non-resident transcripts were subtracted. These transcripts were those natal statistics from births which occurred outside of the United States, but which were reported (on the U.S. “Certificate of Live Birth”), filed and allocated to a place of residence in the U.S. The table explicitly cites under footnote 1 that these transcripts include “allocations of births which occurred outside of the United States.”  [this is not true either]

and I reproduce their “illustration” below:

Fake illustration copied from the Daily Pen article

What’s wrong with this picture? It’s a fake. The original is in Vital Statistics of the United States – 1945 – Part II Natality and Mortality Data for the United States Tabulated by Place of Residence, PDF Page 8 (VIII in the document). Here’s what it really looks like (and I have to split this into two parts because in the original, the footnote doesn’t appear directly under the United States totals).

image

image

Johannson and Crosby’s illustration says, “Includes allocations outside of United States.” The original says, “Includes allocations outside of continental United States.”

So precisely what are those allocations outside of continental United States? Japan?? Indonesia??? KENYA??????

For the answer, turn back three pages to page 5:

The tabulations published in both part I and part II are compiled from the same source material, being derived from transcripts of original birth and death certificates received from registration officials of States and cities, and of the outlying territories and possessions of the United States.

This statistical table shows primarily children of residents of one state born in another, but it also includes “outlying territories and possessions of the United States.” The government has never included foreign births as part of the national statistics.

To try to win an argument by faking evidence is a shameful thing, and this is not the first time Johannson and Crosby have been caught red handed. One can only wonder at their motives.

Summarizing  Parts 1 and 2 of this series:

  • Birth certificates are, by law, prima facie evidence of the facts on them, not conveniently adjusted fiction to help statisticians.
  • Births registered in Hawaii in 1961 were, by law, births that occurred only in Hawaii.
  • Foreign births to US Residents were not reported to the NCHS in 1961.
  • Johannson and Crosby lied.

PS: Yes, I’ve already printed out a copy of Johannson’s page.

The punk that just keeps on punking

By on February 1, 2012 in Fakes and frauds, The Blogs, WorldNetDaily

I was searching for something just now and hit upon a web site called “The Thinker” with this on the page:

image

Yup, it’s the old prank road sign that has the backwards word “Hawaii” in Arabic under Kenya and “not the birth place of Barack Obama” in Arabic at the bottom. It was already 5 months old when I wrote about it in July of 2010. Even WorldNetDaily debunked this one!

By the way, researching this article I learned that WorldNetDaily changed the structure of their URL’s in addition to changing the look and feel of their site. Old WND links may fail, but the old content is still around. If you get a 503 Service Unavailable  error, refresh the page and maybe it will work.

Shocking: New Kenyan Birth Certificate for Obama (revised)

By on January 20, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Fakes and frauds, Videos

It’s possible to buy a fake birth certificate direct from Kenya for about $100 (I have one for myself around here somewhere). Real Kenyan certificates typically consist of a government official hand typing information from the birth registry onto a form and then certifying it.

What we see here is a very badly done fake certificate today in a longish video attributed to the anonymous TheSmokingGun. (The new certificate appears at 20:14 in the video.) This certificate is obviously not an official record. First, an official certificate would be typed, not hand written. Second, the date format is in the US order (month, day, year) instead of the Kenyan format (day, month, year). The paper wrinkle pattern is a nice touch in a fake because in some minds wrinkled = old. Real official documents are rarely wrinkled and birth certificates are important documents, not something one wads up and puts in a drawer. But when real documents are wrinkled, the printing gets wrinkled along with the paper!GhostGhostGhost

The big give away is the contradiction in the document itself. It says “BIRTH in Coast Provincial General Hospital in the city of Mombasa” but below it says under Where and when born “King George VI Hospital” (in Nairobi).  A final kiss of death is the legend at the bottom:

THIS DOCUMENT certifies and affirms that the registrant is a native-born citizen of the Kenya Colony of the United Kingdom and is duly a subject of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

Certified and affirmed by Her Majesty’s Office of Vital Documents for Kenya Colony, municipality of Nairobi.

That’s a phrase that only a birther could love, but it’s not from a Kenyan birth certificate. In fact there is not a single occurrence (before this article) of the phrase “citizen of the Kenya Colony” on the entire Internet, says Google and Bing. Why? Because they were subjects, not citizens. (No wonder comments are disabled on the video site, so that folks can’t point out the obvious inconsistencies.)

Most of the video consists of reading authentic excerpts from speeches from the Parliament, one of which appears to say that President Obama was born in Kenya (however, there is no reason to believe that the speaker in Kenya had any actual information about Obama’s birthplace) and rehashing Kenyan stories that we’ve discussed in the past.

Obama’s REAL BC FOUND ~ Kenyan Parliament: Obama NOT a Native American, he is Son of this Soil from TheSmokingGun on Vimeo.

The video is also a classic example of conspiracy thinking, with normal events linked together to form a web of conspiracy (here US efforts to prevent AIDS in Africa are seen as payback to a Mombasa hospital for hiding that the President was born there). Much of what we see from birthers is just a dump of arguments, but here we see the threads of the conspiracy developed.

Expert witnesses in Georgia

By on January 15, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Evidence, Fakes and frauds, Lawsuits, Orly Taitz, Ron Polarik, Supreme Court

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This article is my informed opinion.

Courts in the United States have rules to exclude junk science and cranks posing as experts. At the federal level, experts are subject to what is called the “Daubert standard” defined by three Supreme Court cases: Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, General Electric Co. v. Joiner, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael. These decisions are incorporated in the Federal Rules of Evidence 702 and 703.

At the most  basic level, the Court said that an expert must meet two criteria:

  1. the expert witness used generally accepted practices and standards and
  2. the expert witness was property credentialed.

Their testimony must meet additional standards of relevance and methodology.

The Standard

The Supreme Court’s ruling sets up the following standards for relevance and reliability of expert testimony:

  1. whether the theory at issue can and has been tested,
  2. whether the theory has been subjected to peer review and publication,
  3. whether there is a known or potential error rate, and
  4. whether the theory has been generally accepted within the scientific community

Farrar v Obama

The “witness list” presented by Orly Taitz for the January 26 hearing of Farrar v. Obama includes two individuals, Dr. Ron Polland and Douglas Vogt; both have published papers in which they claimed expertise in forensic document analysis. Dr. Polland concluded that President Obama’s short form was created from images of other certificates (no actual physical certificate exists), and Mr. Vogt has said that the PDF copy of the long form birth certificate released by the White House is not a scan of any real document but rather something composed electronically. Both allege criminal fraud by the President and Hawaiian officials. Neither have any credentials as document experts.

The rule in Georgia

In 2005, the State of Georgia adopted tort reform that, among other things, established standards for expert testimony in civil cases similar to the Supreme Court’s standards in Daubert. Georgia law now essentially adopts the Federal Rules of Evidence  702 and 703 with minor differences in wording from Federal Rule 703. (Georgia has not adopted the entire Federal Rules of Evidence or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, so the context under which Rule 702 and 703 are applied is different.) The Georgia statute also states:

(f) It is the intent of the legislature that, in all civil cases, the courts of the State of Georgia not be viewed as open to expert evidence that would not be admissible in other states.  Therefore, in interpreting and applying this Code section, the courts of this state may draw from the opinions of the United States Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993); General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997); Kumho Tire Co. Ltd. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999); and other cases in federal courts applying the standards announced by the United States Supreme Court in these cases.

The Georgia statute also provides for an optional pre-trial hearing hearing to assess proposed expert testimony.

Conclusion

If Orly Taitz tries to present Polland and Vogt as expert witnesses I would expect an objection to be made by Obama’s attorney. There is also the issue of relevance. I cannot imagine anyone presenting a JPG or PDF image of a birth certificate as evidence at the hearing. If a birth certificate is presented, it will be on paper. Looking rules, I don’t see any chance that either Polland or Vogt will be allowed to testify as expert witnesses.

Read more:

Date formats in Kenya

By on July 14, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Debunking, Fakes and frauds, Inspector Smith

Lucas Smith, still trying to recover from the fatal mistake of using the wrong date format on his fake Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama, the POSFKBC, wrote a new article where he claims to prove that Kenya uses both MM/DD/YYYY (US date format) and DD/MM/YYYY (most everybody else’s date format).

So I watched a couple seconds of his video, and recognized where he was going. It was a Kenyan Government website, something I had looked at in detail some time back (and I guess never wrote up). Rather than wading through the video, this little screen shot (click to enlarge) should explain Smith’s argument, and mine.

OPC Screen Shot

It clearly shows a date in Kenyan format (16/2/2009) and one in US format (8/29/2008) and one in which the reader has no idea at all what the format is (4/2/2009). That last date is the problem. No one would mix date formats on a page intentionally because it is impossible to know which is which.

Indeed, this is why a country wouldn’t mix date formats because people reading them couldn’t be sure what the date means. That would be utter chaos.1

Continue Reading →

Vital records fraud

By on June 23, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Fakes and frauds

Someone mentioned in comments here that you can get anyone’s birth certificate in California, but unless you are an “authorized person” (such as the person named on the certificate) the document is marked in large letters: “INFORMATIONAL, NOT A VALID DOCUMENT TO ESTABLISH IDENTITY.”

It wasn’t always that way. Around 1989 a Swiss immigrant walked in to a California office with the name and birth date of someone he found who was about the same age, paid a few dollars and got a birth certificate for that person. Then he took the birth certificate and applied for a drivers license. With the birth certificate and the drivers license he obtained a passport. Things went well for him until somehow the man whose identity was stolen got wind of it and filed a complaint. The New York Times reported the story in 2000.

And that is why states are careful about who they give certified copies of birth certificates to.

By the way, did you know that Hawaii was the first state in the nation to adopt a photo ID for voters? It’s true, over 20 years ago. Fraud-fighting Hawaii was one of five states in 1997 that fingerprinted drivers license applicants.

Try as I might, I have yet to find a single instance of a person obtaining a birth certificate from the State of Hawaii by fraud. (Hawaii was not a state in 1904.) The best I could do was the example in this article of a man who used faked California documents to get a US Passport while living at the time in Hawaii.

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