I am somewhat at a loss (my normal state on most things birther) to understand a comment made by Jerome Corsi on his Facebook wall. Here it is:
This is the beginning of naming names. The Nordyke twins birth certificates were used as a template — it’s clear — and the evidence is laid out in this article. The first of many more articles to come over the next few days and weeks. The OBOTs are now on the run.
The article to which Dr. Corsi refers is from an anonymous expert. That’s not a very good start for “naming names1.” The anonymous “state programmer2” who provided the information for that article says that the Obama long form was constructed from the Nordyke twins certificates. I guess “Nordyke” is a name, but hardly something new. The Nordyke certificates available on the Internet are much lower in resolution than the Obama certificate, and so couldn’t have been used as a source document. The only way Obama could have used the Nordyke certificates would be to have obtained the real thing from the Nordyke family, and perhaps fear of a defamation lawsuit over that possibility is why our “state programmer” wants anonymity (more likely fear of losing his job for being an idiot).
Corsi expands on his “OBOTS are now on the run” theme by noting that the Politijab website is currently offline.
I don’t know what the deal is with Politijab. The anti-birther content moved from there to The Fogbow years ago and I haven’t visited Politijab in ages. Corsi says that The Fogbow and Dr. Conspiracy are all that’s left. Including this web site, I count at least 9 anti-birther sites (see “The Good” links at the bottom of this page). Further, I can’t quite figure out what OBOTS are supposedly on the run from. Unless the birthers take over and implement their own birther constitution3, we still have freedom of speech in this country. After consideration, I think that Corsi is making a veiled threat of a defamation lawsuit along the lines of the Esquire Magazine suit.
I received an email saying that Corsi has suggested that birthers should save screenshots of this web site and Fogbow because we weren’t going to be around much longer. The number of pages the average visitor looks at hasn’t changed (about 5.5). I haven’t been able to find the specific quotation from Corsi on this.
I’m planning to be here for the long haul. I’ve just ordered 4 conspiracy theory books plus library books , and I’ve overhauled the software I’m using to write blog content. I’m in the planning stages for the DrConspiracy.com brand.
While I can appreciate how a propagandist like Corsi can whip up the faithful into a frenzy, nothing has really happened on the birther front since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009. Corsi can hold out the promise of naming names, but this is the same “any day now” false promise that we’ve seen almost from day 1.
1Corsi naming this name brings back a very old memory. The country singer and comedian Tennessee Ernie Ford had a daytime television show in the 50’s. Ford regularly featured some small town on the show. One day he said that he had received a letter from someone in Wilmer, Alabama. The writer said the town was too small to be featured, but asked for at least a mention. Ford, in his deep, resonant, “16 tons” voice said very slowly:
W I L M E R
2While there are some excellent IT personnel in state government, low salaries and other disincentives cause many of the good ones in some states to go elsewhere, or to come back as consultants. I will share this one anecdote. I was visiting the IT department of a state agency (back in the 90’s) and a software development manager told me that he had a fantasy: that the state personnel regulations were suspended for one hour, and he could fire most of the people that worked for him.
3Preamble to the birther constitution:
Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!
I’m intrigued how the gullible birthers are wowed by some anonymous person who has “programmer” in their job title.
What does this person program in? C? SOA? VB? COBOL? Fortran? Or one of the hundreds of other programming languages on earth? Why would some generic “programmer” have any specialized knowledge of document forensics?
In my experience with programmers, as talented as some are, they are very specialized in one or two languages specific to their training and job descriptions, barring some whiz kid out there.
I know this group is not very tech savvy, but are they really that dumb?
And as far as The FogBow, I dont see any evidence of it going anywhere.
“but are they really that dumb?”
yes.
I corrected your spelling. COBOL been very good….to me.
are birthers that stupid, they accept Corsi’s babblings?
I do CDC 6000 CompAss, FORTRAN, IBM Mainframe assembler, COBOL, Pascal, Rexx, SAP ABAP, some GPSS, MS VBA, a little C++, a bit of Java, even less PL/1, and a few others I’ve forgotten about probably.
Most of those I haven’t seen for ages. I used to be a coding superstar in some of those languages, even if I do say so myself. However, the chops get rusty from neglect quite quickly.
No one is a superstar in more than two languages at a time. I handled CompAss and Fortran and IBM assembler and COBOL, and could do a decent job with Rexx at the same time. But I would have definitely considered myself an expert in Fortran all those years ago (even modifying the compiler at one point), but that was only for a couple of years, then COBOL took its spot and Fortran is but a shadowy memory. Then SAP ABAP, and assembler withered away.
Its only been 2 years since I stopped doing ABAP and I can’t even remember what it looks like now (I exaggerate just a little). I am most confident in Pascal now-a-days, just working on personal projects and writing a few lines of code a day maybe.
My experience is that young guys think that writing a PHP script or a Google widget manifest makes them a programming expert and that they therefore imagine that they know there is to know about computers and how they work, and what challenges the authors of a particular program or standard needed to overcome.
Just because they can use cutePDF or PDFTools to chop documents into pieces doesn’t mean that they could build a PDF from scratch at the byte level or that they could write one of those tools to manipulate such a document.
I think you are aiming too high in your speculation about this expert’s computer skills. According to the article, he did at least part of his analysis in MSPaint.
Sounds familiar with a few variations. I also do my personal projects in Pascal (Delphi).
BR 14 yall
just before I retired I did extensive programming in C++ and Codebase (Codebase a dbf file library), then generated a PDF file for output. It took less than a second to search a 800,000 item database to produce the PDF. I have more experience with programming and PDF files than any birther expert. (which is why I have so little respect for them)
Corsi can’t possible believe the stuff he makes up to get paypal pushes. (or can he?)
I find it hilarious that we “obots” on the run.
Mr. Corsi, when the team has won the pennant, the game is over.
The bets are settled and the papers have printed the winner.
Everyone has driven away and gone home.
You’re now sitting in the stands cheering a team that is not there, telling yourself you still have a chance.
How pathetic.
We’re not on the run. We won years ago.
It’s you… losers that simply can’t accept the score… that are on the run.
We’re home already, secure in the knowledge that you can’t do a thing about it now but sell your very tears.
You might as well curse the Union for winning the civil war.
It’s all part of history now and you’re nothing but a footnote to a battle fought long ago.
Obama won.
Get over it or chase your tail all day long.
We don’t care either way.
This is the second article by Anonymous State Programmer. The first one was REALLY stupid …. the thesis was that Obama’s mom signature was obviously forged because the script was too perfect for a human. Seriously?
> Why would some generic “programmer” have any specialized knowledge of document forensics?
He doesn’t need to. Since birthers know hardly more about computers than how to switch them on and fire up Internet Explorer (I bet many of them don’t even know that and let their children do it for them), anyone even remotely related to “computer expertise” is a demi-god to them.
I remember talking to some birthers on WND about the allegedly “perfect signature” by SAD. Do you know how they “validated” it was “on a perfect straight line”? They took an actual ruler (a physical object, not one in a paint program) and pressed it to their screen!
Until I read that, I mistakenly assumed they at least were as computer-savvy as to open up MS Paint and draw some lines themselves.
It goes to show you should never overestimate others. 😉
Best IDE ever. I love it. Some day I’ll have my wine database system ready for prime time.
There’s an error in your code, you know. You didn’t set the return code in R0.
#import
int main (int argc, const char * argv[])
{
NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
NSLog (@”Tru Dat!”);
[pool drain];
return 0;
}
That reminds me of the story (possibly urban legend) of a Help Desk call from a customer who couldn’t get his computer to send faxes. He had been holding the paper flat against the monitor while repeatedly pressing Enter. His “cup holder” (with the CD logo) was probably broken too.
I thought that corpulent LSOS Corsi was going to be “naming names” weeks ago or is he still waiting for KBOA Trace to finish his “research” for him?
I wonder if there is an “old programmers” nostalgia forum somewhere. “Old programmer’s never die they just BR 14.”
My all-time favorite programmer/mathematician’s joke is:
“There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
More mathematical jokes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_joke
Always remember, the generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
I think we can all agree that all it takes to be a birther document expert is the ability to not break all of your crayons.
He “knows” the name of the person who forged the birth certificate. Then there is the matter of the license of the supposed Hawaii private investigator.
I know Burnt Sienna. And you sir, are no Burnt Sienna.
Wait a minute. Aren’t we supposed to be on the run?
Shouldn’t we be posting frantically from mobile devices in the car on the way to Commieville?
To be fair, some of them can even open MS Paint!
Ah yes the “name of the forger’ written in seekrit codez in the document and according to Corsi was Mike….(what for the denoument)…..still waiting…….still waiting……any day now……..out in chains….. etc etc etc.
Far be it from me to knock expertise, but no matter who the person is and what their background, if they use an unvalidated or invalid methodology, what they have to say is without value. I have a PhD in Molecular Biology and have spent a couple of decades working in the filed, but if I set up a DNA analysis lab and didn’t validate my methods, my conclusions would be garbage.
Until someone takes a representative set of 1960s typed documents, scans them into a pdf using the same software that the White House used and shows that the Obama b.c. is somehow meaningfully different, they could have 3 PhDs in comp sci and have worked 40 years in the field and their analysis would be worthless. And even if a rigorous analysis showed there were “issues” with the pdf, they would have to deal with the jpeg as well. And then, they would still have to face the fact that the only actual legall document is a paper, not a computer file.
The “forgerists” have an Everest to climb and none of them have even left sea level yet.
On a slight side note….I met a real computer expert recently. None other than Dr. Krawetz (it was for something unrelated to birtherdome). Genuinely a nice guy (and knew more about anything related to computers than I could care to know. Even the some of the things he for the computer just as “fun” blew me away). In passing I mentioned that I enjoyed his various birth certificate analysies, and he just smiled and said, “love the birthers.”
WND states that Farah is hosting G Gordon Liddy show today, as Liddy is on vacation. Doesn’t say anything about topic or guests. Just rambles about awesome both of them are.
How is that a story?
I post it here because, who knows, he may speak on birtherism.
Me, too.
If COBOL = expertise
then
move “expert” to my-title
perform forgery-analysis varying truth until cows-come-home
else
go to hell-you-commie-usurper.
“I greet you in the name of the Lords of Cobol…and Fortran…and Basic…and C++….”
I guess I was briefly a Lord of Cobol; I was on the ANSI Standard Committee from around 2001 to 2004. As a compiler developer, the only COBOL code I wrote was for testing. The committee is still meeting and working on a 201x standard.
Is a 1970’s moustache the only requirement to host that show?
OK, I am dutifully impressed.
Speaking of government programmers, I once worked for state government myself and I was trying to hire an experienced COBOL maintenance programmer. The State Employment Agency sent this fellow around for me to interview. He said he was a COBOL maintenance programmer, but the interview was going strangely and I finally handed him a copy of American National Standard programming language COBOL (ANSI X3.23-1974) and asked him if he recognized any of it. He said he didn’t recognize any of it, but he could learn. It turned out that he had formerly programmed maintenance for machinery by entering data into a system that he had heard was written in COBOL. He was really quite offended when I told him that he wasn’t really a COBOL maintenance programmer.
Isn’t that like a Hawaiian temp. worker trying to make something of the title of Senior Elections Clerk?
Ahhhh! So you’re the guy that messed up objects in COBOL? It really didn’t hafta be that hard. 😉
Actually, I know not of what I speak, since I haven’t really used COBOL since objects were introduced and it was probably before your time on the committee anyway. I have just seen a description of it, and while it does ‘look like COBOL’ it is way too cumbersome IMHO.
Cool! I could be a host.
Oh no, wait… mine is from 1967. Does that count?
A couple of years ago I had to extend some Fortran. My initial thought was to maybe port it to Java. When I dived into it, I found it easier to just work in Fortran. This really surprised me.
High level languages are so nice, almost like having a chat with a computer. Much easier than talking to a birther.
Hey Doc, is that image in the article the “Unknown Comic” from The Gong Show?
anything is easier than working in the ‘C’ family syntax (C++, Java). I hate it. You would have had more success trying to port it to Pascal. But if you don’t need to rewrite the entire program, but just change a small portion, why bother? Fortran is fine.
Especially with embedded machine code. Ah, those were the days.
It’s obvious that Corsi meant starting to name names, in terms of the composite BC’s used to compile what he alleges is a forgery, and in terms of developing more evidence towards the potential identity of the forger. Maybe he’s got nothing…maybe not. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
He’s got nothing.
naming names? You mean like Mike? Who he said he was going to release his name in a week and that was over 2 months ago. Corsi is pulling your leg. What’s zero times zero Wookie? That’s exactly how much evidence Corsi has.
Embedding Assembler in Fortran is a doddle! I called Fortran subroutines from Cobol programs in CICS. IBM said it couldn’t be done.
I had to modify the Fortran runtime library for that so it would issue a CICS wait instead of an OpSys wait; no big deal ;-).
IBM never did grasp the concept of mixing language routines. CDC had it down as a matter of course, IBM just couldn’t figure out why you would want to use the best tool for the job.
Ahhh, fun times.