I am leading/producing a project to create a Resource Center for the site, tied into the Home Page. The plan is to take all the accumulated knowledge herein and thereout and form a central, easy-to-use depository of everything. It may sound like a huge project, in reality it is just many many tiny bites. Hey, it keeps me off the streets, and it's c-c-c-cold here in... Belize.

In this thread I will be asking things. For volunteers to do specific tasks as the need arises. For links. For permissions to use things. For advice. For specific documents. For feedback. For editing and testing. For pats on the head. NOT the kind of thing Orly does! NOT! Cuz I'm working hard on it too!

I will not be reinventing the wheel. I would like to use content that has already been created where possible. I'm starting with the answers someone quite a lot like me but with another name has posted on Yahoo Answers over the past 18 months. This will serve as the foundation for Answers to Birther Claims. The format is:

Birther Claim
Short answer with links to detailed answers/source documents/TFB threads.

The first section will be about Birth Certificates. (Quelle Surprise!) At the moment, I am looking for the following:

Documents

• Certificate of Hawaiian Birth that isn't Sun Yat Sen's
• Certificate of Foreign Birth (did/does it exist as a separate doc?)
• COLB or BC from 1970s, 1980s

Thanks for all the help and enthusiasm I know you are going to give!

Whatever4

W4

There is a 1957 Certificate of Hawaiian birth at:

http://www.hmdp.com/tng/showmedia.php?mediaID=41&medialinkID=68

and a 1967 one :

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sprin/document/gomes/bmarg.jpg

Those aren't REAL birth certificates. There's no hospital or doctor's signature (also no parents' names...).

Just kidding! Great find WD!

MOST excellent. thanks!

REQUEST: The USSC case referred to here.



http://archives.starbulletin.com/conten ... kokua_line

Whoops, forgot your gold star!

1977 COLB

http://politijab.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=447

1973 COLB

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.anc ... ficate.jpg

1973 COLB. So 38 years ago they were issuing Certificate of Live Birth that gives Name, date of birth, sex , parents names, parents' race, date recorded, city and county of birth. No doctors' signature, no hospital names, no footies. Certificate, not Certification. Good stuff!

I did some work on theHome Page Projectthis morning.

The vision thing (you were dying to know what my vision is, I'm quite certain of it):

1. A hierarchical structure, like the directory structure in Windows Explorer. More on that below.
   
   
2. Our audience is NOT the birthers. We shouldn't be answering every question they have or refuting every stupid conspiracy theory they dream up; that would be a huge waste of time and energy.
   
   
3. Our audience is the media, law enforcement, and the general public. Therefore, we should be relatively light on detail, but heavy on documentation of what we do say.
   
   
4. Navigation will be somewhat simplistic. There are five main categories:
   
   
   • Birth Certificates
   • Kenya
   • Indonesia
   • Cast and crew
   • Other Stuff
   
   In each category, the user will be able to drill down for more detailed information. For example, in Birth Certificates, there will be pages for:
   
   
   • The COLB
   • Fake Kenyan Birth Certificates (and other fakes)
   • Nordyke Twins
   
   ... and so forth. But there won't be a sidebar with detailed navigation; when you've drilled down as far as you can go, you can use the "back" button, or go to the top level of one of the categories.
   
   
5. I also made all the pages full width.
   
   
6. I zapped the Guestbook and replaced it with a form that will send me an email. There were birther comments in the Guestbook. This isn't a resource for birthers. If they'd like to email me, fine.

So much for vision ...





Now, a REQUEST FOR VOLUNTEERS.

This is easy stuff. Anyone can help out. It will be fun! Really fun! I'm not kidding!

The Home Page Project software is a content management system called "Concrete5". The system is easy to use and creates a very slick website. You don't need to know HTML, CSS or other web technologies in order to contribute. It's based on "blocks" of content. The interface for creating content greatly resembles the interface for writing a post on this forum. Here's a screenshot:



And there are a whole series of Vimeos about it, in addition to the software documentation.
Here's a Vimeo, just click the play button, and you'll see what you can do.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/3842045[/vimeo]

See what I mean? Fun!

Our project manager is Whatever4, "The Belize Bombshell".

If you can't work with her, you can't work with anybody. So send her a PM, and let's get 'er done!

Just to toot my own horn again I wrote a birfer diary on the Great Orange Satan with lots of links to pics, newspaper articles and documents.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/23/756088/-De-bunking-birther-talking-points

That had slipped my mind, but it IS awesome, Highlands.

There WILL be a prominent link to that somewhere in the HPP.

I was just hoping the links would be useful, since there are so many in one place. Really, no need to link unless you insist.

That's wonderful, High. Somehow I never saw that before.

Also, too. Thanks so much to everyone who is working on this project. I know we've been kicking this idea around for awhile and I am thankful that Whatever4 took it upon herself to spearhead this endeavor so we can finally see it come to fruition.

Well, at the risk of Foggy saying again, "Wait just a darned minute there son, you said you were a hydrogeologist!", let me say that my career has been varied. In the mid 1990s, I was asked to support a vital records consulting company. I wrote software for data entry and data validation for birth, fetal death, marriage, and death certificates. Many states were moving from paper to electronic equivalents for their vital records.

In Whatever4's link above to a June 2009 Star Advertiser article:
http://archives.starbulletin.com/content/20090606_kokua_line


In my experience what Ms. Okubo states is correct. The states whose vital records that I wrote programs for were anxious to move to a paperless record keeping form. Back then, the new certificate was called an Electronic Birth Certificate. In addition to eliminating the need to manually copy and certify vital records, the Federal government was interested in having electronic "copies" of each state's vital records.

The Feds were NOT interested in the personal the information on the certs! They were interested in items such as the Industry and Occupation of the parents. They had devised elaborate coding schemes for those items and were very much interested in obtaining that information in an electronic format. In addition to data entry, I developed coding algorithms to automate this process. Before, the coding was done manually. It took skilled coders to do the work correctly at great cost. IIRC, the Feds provided financial grants and incentives for the states that decided to "go electronic". No big conspiracy, just a more efficient and cost-effective way of handling and archiving vital records with the added benefit of simplifying the generation of vital statistics.

Anyway, I still have my programs on floppy disks and likely on my old 386 machine! I won't divulge which states I worked on, but I can provide information on what data was captured and note some of the changes in the certificates through time. For example, in 1962 one state had headings of "Color or race" for both parents and a box to check if the birth was legitimate. Because I had to account for all the "irregularities" in the actual records, I have examples of amended certs, and court actions. In one case, an abstract from a legal change of name was taped to the top of the birth cert. Oddly, the name change was from "Stanley" to "Rebecca"!

I need 4 more volunteers to edit for content and clarity, several pages of a word document. Get your community obligation met early! PM me with an email address. I have assignments already for Obots Mari, Mr. Gneiss, and Kate520.

We have pie.

We have our volunteer crew for this round -- THANKS!!!

No pie for the rest of you this time.

Today is National Talk Like A Grizzled Prospector Day, dagnabbit.

Also National Compliment Day, you wonderful woman, you.

I thought this was worth dropping in here in case We4 wants it at some point. Of course, there is no evidence an adoption ever took place, and the only official reference we've seen is in Strunk and is a denial of an adoption:

US Department of State/US Department of Homeland Security:


http://www.scribd.com/doc/14597639/Strunk-Answer

But here is the Hawaii law concerning adoption and birth records:



http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurren ... 8-0020.HTM

Thanks, Addy -- entering it now.

Didn't know where to place this snippet I just picked from elsewhere on the web:

That's the oddest thing I've ever heard, in a odd world. Perhaps the person's father was left of for a different reason?

Do you have a link for that - I'm curious to see the context.

You probably already have this one:

http://politijab.com/phpBB3/download/file.php?id=447

It was just a statement as such, within a discussion what the "longform b.c." does contain, of course as part of the AZ law proposal, within a forum with a handful of die hard birfers.

Just in case you wish to have a good laugh: The Big Picture, use the Guest option to read if available, else it would require a free signup (no need to give true personal info on the signup page, part of which is used to serve ads, email addy will not be verified).