Quote:
Originally Posted by Jesus Christ Superstar
A new computer systems analyst/web designer expert by the name of Garrett Palpit recruited by the Maricopa County Sheriff Departments CCP has released a 'Comprehensive Analysis of Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate PDF File'.
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How funny. Let's first talk a little bit about Garrett
Papit (note the spelling).
He has no experience in any field having anything to do with digital document forensics. In fact, during the MCSO briefing, Lead Investigator Zullo apologized that Papit was
not an expert, but he the best they could find since every
real expert they approached told them to go pound sand.
Now let's have with a review of the sprinting Birther goal posts on this particular issue.
For almost a full year... from April of 2011 to March of 2012... the resolute Birther position was that the presence of "layers"...
any layers at all... were proof of forgery. This was the position that Papit himselfmaintained in the comments section on WND for months even after the first MCSO "rport" had been issued. It was the position promoted by Mara Zebest in her first "report" on the long form PDF. It was the position vigorously promoted by Karl Denninger in his videos. And it was a position Birther debunkers such as your truly demonstrated was objectively wrong within days of it first having been proposed by the amateur Birther analysts that popped up out of nowhere after the original Whitehouse release.
But then at the first Arpaio "press conference" in March the Cold Case Posse jerked Greater-Birthistan into a complete 180 degree reversal. Finally having noticed what everybody else knew for a year (that simple optimization of a flat digital image file into the PDF format does create "layers" after all) a new and
different objection was raised to take its place. Suddenly the Birther complaint was not that "there were layers," but that there were not
enough layers. The reversal was humorously sterile of any acknowledgment that all the Birther "experts" had had their heads up their collective asses for eleven months.
But now, in the second Arpaio "press conference" the story has again mutated profoundly. Not once was the pathetic and purely subjective "not enough layers" argument even mentioned. Like the "all layers are proof of forgery" assertion before it, it was hidden in the attic, unacknowledged and unmentioned like an embarrassing step child.
Now, the objection has shrunk to "not all layers are created equal." It is the equivalent of what I used to call "The Incredible Shrinking Creation Model" when I used to debate creationists in the 80s. It is an attempt to salvage one last scrap of utility from an argument that was never true, but at least got the rank and file excited. There is no genuine argument here... but the word "layers" has always managed to set Birthers buzzing so it must be preserved in the discussion at all costs.
Sadly, Garrett's newest "analysis" is merely the vestigial version of the now debunked (by Birthers) Karl Denninger videos and Marla Zebest report. It is ultimately nothing more than an an argument from ignorance. As Nietzsche observed, "'I cannot comprehend it, so it must be incomprehensible.' All fish think like this."
His analysis fails with this single observation... the "600 tests he performed" are barely dipping his toe in the water. The variables available that contribute to the details of any resulting PDF are simply too many and too diverse to be controlled and accounted for by a mere 600 tests... most of which I get the impression from his paper were actually redundant. There are hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of hardware, software and switches... and he tested 600 of them? Register me formally and transcendently unimpressed. Such an argument does not prove that the PDF is not recreatable. It proves only that Garrett Papit is not competent to recreate it.
I believe I have already used this analogy elsewhere, but it's a good one so I will repeat myself. What he has done is the equivalent of dropping a fishing line into Lake Meade, reeling in an empty hook ten times, and then declaring the entire lake devoid of fish.
It is merely more Birther fail.
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