The great thing about birtherism is that it is forever on the verge of reaching its apotheosis, leaving spectators to its surreality-based derangement on the edge of their seats, waiting for whatever daffy new heights this silly little movement reaches.
Well, today, the birthers do not disappoint. In an article posted on birther sweat lodge World Net Daily, they are up with a new claim that -- in their minds, anyway -- definitively proves that President Barack Obama's birth certificate is a total ruse, based on some amazing math:
Entire books have been written about the problems with the “birth certificate” that was released by the White House purportedly documenting Barack Obama’s birth in Hawaii.
Computer imaging experts have found it to be fraudulent and the conclusion of an official law enforcement investigation assembled by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is that it is just not real.
But it wasn’t until now, through the work of the Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, that the world was informed just exactly what the odds are against all of those anomalies occurring naturally.
Yep, entire books have been written, by World Net Daily, for rubes, expounding on this nonsense, so that's part of the structural edifice of these theories, in the same way that entire books written about glittering vampires ultimately prove their existence as well. Plus Joe Arpaio's band of nutters and some "computer imaging experts" (whom you should definitely connect with, on LinkedIn) say the same thing -- Barack Obama is not of this nation. But "it wasn't until now" that someone had the bright idea of handing Great Britain's most celebrated climate-science crackpot an abacus and asked him to start cold crunchin' some numbers. And, sweet fancy Moses, his findings will astound you! What are the odds that Obama is "eligible" to be president?
One in 62,500,000,000,000,000,000. (That’s 62.5 quintillion)
Or, if one prefers, the chances are 0.0000000000000000000016 that those curious developments happened by accident.
One in 62,500,000,000,000,000,000? At those odds, can we be sure that Barack Obama actually exists? Can we be sure that any of us are actually real? Perhaps this world we inhabit is nothing more than a mote of dust in the imagination of a child on "St. Elsewhere," a show that we non-existent people created, or did we? We are through the looking glass, people, if the looking glass, in fact, exists -- which it doesn't! (Probably.)
Here is how Monckton's space algebra works: birthers have basically concluded that the real, live birth certificate is full of sketchy flaws. It's telling that they cannot settle on just one or two things they find off about it. Rather, they have collectively articulated the premise that Obama's birth certificate was one of the most painstakingly frauded-up pieces of government documentation ever assembled. At every turn, the mysterious cabal that apparently decided to aid and abet this great piece of trickery opted to meticulously foul up mulitple parts of their work. So this is a story of a conspiracy whose perpetrators were simultaneously brilliant and hopelessly incompetent.
The piece cites examples of these individual "anomalies" -- such as “Lavishly funded bureaucracy uses wonky typewriter" -- and assigns them odds (in that case, 10:1). Then Monckton stabbed at his calculator for an hour or two to come up with the 62.5 quintillion figure. As a point of reference, it is estimated that the odds of picking a perfect NCAA bracket are a mere nine quintillion-to-one. So if you were smart enough to place a bet on Barack Obama's existence, way back when, you could probably buy the sun today, not that any birthers would honor the bet.
At any rate, the real tragedy here is that the birthers just aren't thinking big enough. Why settle for one in 62.5 quintillion when you could go for nonillions or decillions? It's not like any rational-minded person is going to check the "math."
[Hat tip: Fark]
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