Sunday, March 19, 2017

Gerbil Report going dark

Birther opponents, what birthers call "Obots," exist only because there are birthers, crazy conspiracy theorists clinging to misinformation and spreading fake news. This site was a spoof of the most prominent birther web site, BirtherReport.com, a domain that has been allowed to expire. So without BR, there's no reason to have GR, and that domain will also expire, on April 17.

It's content remains in the Wayback Machine. To assist in accessing articles, here is an index to Gerbil Report:


Sunday, November 13, 2016

The end is near


You know that moment in a cartoon when the character has stepped off a cliff, but doesn’t start to fall until he realizes there is no ground under his feet?

That’s the state of the birther movement today. They got their way by electing what they thought was a birther candidate for president, only to find out that he could care less about their final vindication.

If anyone fits the image above, it’s Carl Gallups, radio preacher, end-times prophet and birther. For years now, Gallups has been on the radio, and posting on Facebook about the eminent release of the Cold Case Posse’s proof what Barack Obama was not really eligible to be president. But who gives a rat’s ass about that now? On January 20, Obama leaves office. Birther predictions of martial law, or a rigged election, just didn’t pan out. The country will move on, whether over a cliff or not remains to be seen.

Gallups has been promising results for 3 years now, following the debacle that was the Cold Case Posse press conferences, where Mike Zullo presented incompetent evidence, some of which was even fabricated. Now Gallups, thinking that he is still standing on terra firma, tells his followers this past week on Facebook that there is still something to the birther movement:
The Arpaio/Zullo announcement is being meticulously planned. We will keep you poste (sic) and informed along the way. Be Patient. You WILL be vindicated! This is the year of “Revelations!”
On May 24 of 2014 Gallops wrote:
We had announced at PPSimmons that we would have some breaking news, as well as some updated info concerning the upcoming news conferences by Arpaio and Zullo.

So what was being done between May of 2014 and November of 2016 when you should have been doing your “meticulous planning”? You use that word “vindicated” but I don’t think it means what you think it does.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Birther Report site failures drag on into 4th week

On May 3, reports Dr. Conspiracy on his leftist propaganda site Obama Conspiracy Theories, somebody screwed up the DNS records for Birther Report, and now its users have a 20% chance of being unable to reach the site for extended periods of time. He noted that the site may have been failing earlier; May 3 is just the last update to the DNS records.

Dr. Con (as the denizens of Birther Report call him) provided a detailed analysis of the problem and how to fix it over a week ago, and other commenters at BR have pointed out the problem too. Nevertheless, inexplicably, even though Dr. Conspiracy went even so far as to post the information on BR itself, the site remains in its half broken state.

Dr. Conspiracy, known for excessive bragging over his intelligence and technical superiority, has been rubbing salt in BR’s wounds by a series of pedantic, know-it-all comments on the BR site, which have been met with righteous profanity. His mocking remarks citing examples where birthers had attributed the failure to all manner of nonsense, not the least of which included blocking of the site by Obots and Google censorship, were not well received.

Some obots have speculated that the faulty DNS record points to the server in Bob Nelson’s trunk that BR commenters donated money to pay for, so that BR could be free from the threat of Google stopping them from serving malware. Over 2 years have passed and that server was never deployed. Of course deploying the new server would require someone know something about DNS records, which seems to be beyond the technical capacity of the present BR management.

Further speculation says that BR owner Bob Nelson has been incapacitated and is unable to repair the site, noting that he has made no comments on the site since late April, when he made the enigmatic post:
Because it has been under constant attack for over a month now.
The crisis is ongoing.

Update:

Still broken 5/28/2016

Still broken 11/13/2016

Thursday, December 10, 2015

"Original birth certificate"

There are (at least) two very different things being called an “original birth certificate.” It’s important to keep the meaning straight in context.

The seminal article on Barack Obamas’ birth certificate is probably the 2008 piece titled “Born in the USA” at FactCheck.org. They write:
FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate.
They photographed the state-issued paper certificate from Hawaii, with Registrar Alvin Onaka’s signature stamp, the physical impressed seal of the State of Hawaii, and printed on official state security paper; FactCheck didn’t look at a photocopy, or an image on the Internet -- they looked at an “original birth certificate.” However, the document they photocopied didn’t exist before 2007 when the State of Hawaii issued it and in that sense it’s hardly “original.”

In the vital records community, what FactCheck photographed would be called a “certified copy.” The US Department of State uses similar less-ambiguous language in its passport requirements: “certified birth certificate issued by the city, county or state” which they further describe as:
A certified birth certificate has a registrar's raised, embossed, impressed or multicolored seal, registrar's signature, and the date the certificate was filed with the registrar's office, which must be within 1 year of your birth.
A certified copy has to be a certified copy of something, and that something is more accurately described as an “original birth certificate,” something that in times past was a paper document filled out by someone who witnessed the birth, usually a physician, and usually submitted to a jurisdiction by a hospital. The jurisdiction numbered the certificate and if it met certain quality standards,added it to their official file of births within the jurisdiction.  (This is further confused by some hospitals issuing souvenir birth certificates directly to parents, documents with little legal significance except as secondary evidence in the absence of a real certified copy.)

When Birthers demanded (between June of 2008 and April of 2011) to see Barack Obama’s “original birth certificate” they meant a “certified photocopy of Barack Obama’s original hospital-signed birth certificate.”

The difference between a true original and a certified copy becomes important in dealing with birther fly-speck analysis of birth certificate images. Original birth certificates are registered, not certified. They are not generally on security paper, and they do not have seals on them. Stamps and seals are certifying attributes used to certify the copy and security paper is used for such copies to prevent alteration and forgery of the certified copy. There is no concern over unauthorized alteration within a jurisdiction’s files. A moment’s reflection should make it obvious that original certificates in the file are not on security paper, the whole purpose of security paper being to make it hard to copy.

After the April 2011 press conference where Barack Obama presented his certified birth certificate (and put an image of it on the White House web site), birthers use the term “original birth certificate” to mean the paper document residing at the Department of Health in Hawaii. Birthers have moved the goal posts two or three times without changing the words, only the meaning.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

My advice to the birthers

I’m not a real doctor, but I am going to offer some advice to the birthers on your health.

This article is prompted by a disturbing report on deaths in the United States. Like most developing countries, Americans are becoming more healthy and their life span is increasing. It’s not the same improvement across all ethnic groups, genders and education levels, but for all groups there is steady improvement, except for one, middle-aged white  non-Hispanics, especially men with less education. For that group the death rate is increasing (even though deaths from smoking are declining). Here’s the shocking graphic:

image

These guys are killing themselves through alcohol and drug poisoning, liver disease, and literally killing themselves by suicide!

I talked to my pastor about this and he confirmed from his own experience how stressed this group feels, especially the stress of finding a job when lacking a college diploma, and that they feel disadvantaged as non-white workers enter the work force in increasing numbers.

I address this article to birthers because you are part of the demographic that is killing themselves. (The caption on the chart is altered; the original said “non-Hispanic white” rather than “birthers,” but these are largely who the birthers are, plus older persons, whose death rates are higher anyway.)

I don’t have simple answers for your real problems, but I can tell you that self-medication with alcohol and drugs just makes things worse. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Heaven knows that I would like to see fewer birthers in the world, but I want that change to come about through reason and information—I don’t want you dead. So for what they’re worth, here are my suggestions:

  1. Avoid alcohol consumption to excess. If your friends are telling you that you have an alcohol problem, talk to a counselor to find out if they’re right.
  2. If you have thoughts of suicide, contact a suicide prevention hotline or a mental health professional. In the US call 1 (800) 273-8255.
  3. Limit your time on the Internet, particularly on web sites that increase your anxiety level, and make you feel afraid.
  4. Block Fox News from your TV channel list.
  5. Get out more, plan family outings, visit the park and breathe some fresh air.
  6. Join a service organization and enjoy the feeling of helping someone worse off than you are.

I don’t have an answer for your economic problems, except to suggest that you vote Democratic. Republicans are the party trying to dismantle what there is of a social safety net, the ones who don’t want you to be able to afford college, and want you do go bankrupt with medical expenses, and who want you to be unable to earn a living wage if you do get a job.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

More BS

Barry Soetoro, Esq., the Gerbilmeister™ at Birther Report™ has a new interview, continuing his total BS theories that these mass shooting and bombing incidents you hear about in the news (Boston Marathon bombing, Sandy Hook and Charleston shootings) are fake—political theater to affect public opinion on the 2nd Amendment. The general approach is to find something they don’t understand in an image, or take a misstatement, and from there jump to the absurd conclusion that the events themselves were contrived and fake. The story is that the victims are actors, and are alive and well. In the real world, people are connected by family, friends, co-workers, and they don’t just pretend to die en masse.
Conspiracy theorists are erroneously labeling these purported fakes as “false flag operations,” but that is a misuse of the term. False flag refers to a real event wrongly attributed.
Now Soetoro tells Mike Shoesmith, that his fake violence stories fit in with more general birther claims that Barack Obama’s identity is equally fake. The CIA is behind it all, and Obama himself will disappear like the shooting victims. Some people seem to actually believe this BS.

  Note: BSE appears to have deleted all of his gerbil images.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Dr. Deb attacks this site and its author

One of the more unpleasant commenters at Birther Report™ set a new personal best in bigotry yesterday. Dr. Deb [surname withheld] who goes by the internally-redundant screen name drdebdrdeb, commented:
When I read, "We read Birther Report so you don't have to" it told me ALL I EVER needed to know about you.
You are EVIL to the CORE.
The Sheeple don't need to check the facts because YOU do it for them.
Just like Communism. You SHALL NOT think for yourself.
I hope they are paying you a lot to spy on Americans.
You will need this money soon.
Apparently Dr. Deb needed to know very little about me to conclude that I am “EVIL to the CORE.” In fact, it appears that she needs to know nothing about me to come up with her extreme opinion, since she appears not to even understand the site’s tag line.
Gerbil Report™ is a spoof of Birther Report (I thought it would be obvious). The tag line is inspired by the NewsHounds.us web site, whose tag line is “We watch Fox so you don’t have to.”
image
Only a brain-dead literalist (or maybe a poorly written computer program) would conclude that this site’s tag line was meant to dissuade people from reading Birther Report. I just have to shake my head over how clueless Dr. Deb is and how she grasps a straw to justify defaming someone. Maybe the College of Education has lower standards.