Archive for February, 2011

The Defense of Language Act


This past Thursday I published here the first column of The Nobeus News Report I’ve written in nine months.

My third article in the column, titled “Holder’s Law,” was about the decision of then California Attorney General Jerry Brown not to defend in court the California Marriage Protection Act — a ballot proposition and constitutional amendment passed in the November 2008 state elections — and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, a U.S. federal act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996.

Because both of those laws make same-sex marriage illegal, an incompetent reading of my article could easily miss the point. My topic was not the legitimacy or wisdom of laws defining the word marriage as only being between a man and a woman. I was writing about the failure of due process, when a lawyer refuses to play his role as a diligent advocate because he doesn’t like his case.

I’m not going to repeat my arguments here when I’ve linked the original article above.

But in this article I do intend to discuss precisely what turned me around from thinking the word “marriage” has a particular denotation that needs to be defended on etymological grounds, and made me conclude that libertarian theory separates me from conservatives in their desire to defend a single traditional meaning of the word “marriage.”

What made me decide to write about this topic today was hearing Fox News Channel host Mike Huckabee — a former Arkansas governor and likely a 2012 Republican presidential candidate — have to fall back on that old liberal standard, statistics, when Fox’s house libertarian Andrew Napolitano strongly challenged Huckabee on why government should be involved in setting the terms of that bedstead contract which is marriage.

Governor Mike Huckabee
Governor Mike Huckabee

Ironically, it wasn’t a libertarian argument, but a conservative argument, that puts me squarely into opposition to enforcing any dictionary definition of a word, the way Governor Huckabee and other conservatives want to do.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard conservatives ranting about how liberals want to shove “politically correct” speech codes down everybody’s throat when it comes to race, gender, nationality, or class.

Some of the most common:

  • We can’t say “girl” anymore; we have to say “woman.”
  • It’s not “illegal aliens”; it’s “undocumented workers.”
  • Forget the “N” word — you can no longer even say “colored” or “Negro”; you have to say “African-American” or black.
  • There are no longer “stewardesses” on airliners; there are “flight attendants.”
  • No more firemen or policemen; now it’s “firefighters” and “law-enforcement officers.”
  • Forget using any word that ends with “ess” or “ix.” Amelia Earhart was an aviator the same as Charles Lindbergh, not an “aviatrix.”
  • And the movie The Matrix is just completely wrong. It should be The Mater. Er, The Progenitor.

Okay, maybe not this last.

The point is, I’ve spent hours and hours of my life having my ear chewed off by conservatives who oppose being told how they have to use some words and not use other words; then turn around and without even noticing that they’re doing it start demanding that there be a politically-enforced speech code for how the word “marriage” is allowed to be used.

Alarm bells (not belles!) go off. The computer on Twilight Zone starts spitting out punchcards and smoking. Robbie the Robot starts ranting “That does Not Compute.”

Contradiction. Hypocrisy. Double standard. French.

Yes, French. The Académie française — worried that the French aren’t preserving the purity of their official State language — urges laws outlawing phrases like “Le weekend” and attempt to snuff out the use of “email” instead of the properly French courriel.

My conservative brethren — er, Genetically Close Relations — beware. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s warning about little minds aside, inconsistency undercuts the righteousness of a cause. If you demand that everybody use the definition of marriage that you prefer — and object to others redefining the word to be inclusive of meanings you dislike — you’re just as much a Speech Totalitarian as those you’ve been calling Politically Correct.

This article is Copyright © 2011 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share

The Nobeus News Report — February 24, 2011

Wrap-up of news and opinion from your not-so-humble correspondent.

An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos,
Founder, President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board, Amazon.com

“J. Neil Schulman has seen the future, and there are no books.”
— Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal,
Jan. 18, 1989

Dear Mr. Bezos,

I’m one of the pioneers of the eBook, according to a 1989 article on me in the Wall Street Journal. I’m also an award-winning author and filmmaker with nine of my books and a feature film I wrote and directed sold on Amazon.com.

In a graduate course I taught for the New School for Social Research in Spring, 1991, I wrote the following phrase: “an electronic reader weighing 9 ounces, with a high-rez, page-white screen.” I got pretty close to describing the Amazon Kindle, 16 years before it existed and three years before you started Amazon.com. Wikipedia tells me that the first Amazon Kindle weighed 10.2 ounces when released November 19, 2007, and that the latest Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces.

With foresight like that, maybe I’m worth paying attention to for a couple of minutes.

Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com and I are in a kind of symbiotic relationship.

As an author my on-demand books are placed on Amazon.com by Ingram and I link to them from my websites through an Amazon.com Associate’s account.

I’ve put one of my most popular book titles on sale in the Kindle store.

I’m also an Amazon Prime member.

As a filmmaker Amazon.com’s IMDb division lists me, personally, and my film projects.

I’m a subscriber to Amazon.com’s IMDb Pro service.

I submitted my first feature, Lady Magdalene’s, to dozens of film festivals using Amazon.com’s Withoutabox division.

Through Amazon.com’s CreateSpace division I’ve made Lady Magdalene’s exclusively available for sale through Amazon Instant Video.

CreateSpace has also made the Lady Magdalene’s soundtrack CD exclusively available on Amazon.com.

In a few months the DVD of my movie Lady Magdalene’s will be released and in anticipation of that I decided I should raise the word of mouth about Lady Magdalene’s on the web. One of the legs of that advance marketing strategy was to run some Google Adwords text ads directing people to the Amazon.com Instant Video page for my movie, with the intent of driving sales and raising its ranking. I used the link code provided me as an Amazon.com Associate to do it. Each click to the Amazon.com sales page cost me around forty-five cents.

Yesterday I received an email from the Amazon.com Associates department.

Did the email thank me for spending my own out-of-pocket money to drive business to Amazon.com?

No.

Did the email offer to enter into a co-op marketing agreement by which Amazon.com would share the costs of the ads with me?

Uh-uh.

The email bitched at me for (a) violating my Amazon Associates agreement (does anyone actually read web boilerplate before clicking “I accept”?) by using my link in an ad; and (b) infringing on Amazon.com’s trademark by using Amazon as key words in web searches. The email told me I wouldn’t be paid any commission on these sales and told me if I didn’t remove my ads my Associate affiliation would be shut down.

Dude, you have got to be kidding me. Read my articles on IP here, here, and here. I’m considered the most vociferous defender of IP in a largely anti-IP libertarian movement. I’m the last guy on earth who would consciously violate your trademark.

I bet, when you and your fellow geniuses figured out — a few years after I did — that digital media and computer networks was going to drive brick-and-mortar booksellers, record stores, and video rental stores into bankruptcy, you never figured that your anal-retentive lawyers were going to mess up your brilliant business model by discouraging your strategic allies from doing business with you by making your employees treat them like crap, but that’s what they’re doing.

I removed my ads that at no cost to you were driving sales to your shop.

Heads up from me to you, free of charge.

Sincerely,

J. Neil Schulman

#

Harry’s Law

I’ve been a resident of Pahrump, Nevada, since 2001. In 2006 I filmed much of Lady Magdalene’s in Pahrump, the rest in Las Vegas, at Hoover Dam, and at Front Sight, which spreads from Nevada’s Nye County (where Pahrump is) into Clark County (where Vegas is).

Pahrump is not like other places.

In January, 2011 the Pahrump Town Manager, Bill Kohbarger, recommended to the Pahrump Town Council that privately owned firearms be banned at town-sponsored events and on official town property.

The next town council meeting Pahrump gun owners, speaking from the floor, refused to let any other town business proceed until that proposal was rejected by the town council. The Pahrump town council permanently tabled the proposal.

At the February 12 town council meeting an extension of Bill Kohbarger’s contract as town manager was voted down, 3-2. Without that vote his contract would have automatically extended another three years. This firing was despite all the town bureaucracy speaking in favor of what a great boss Kohbarger was.

Despite being a decent town manager by all accounts Bill Kohbarger made a fatal political mistake, the sort of thing that in olden days got people tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail.

Bill Kohbarger forgot where he lived and who his employers ultimately were. He forgot that Pahrump comes from a tradition that prizes individual autonomy and individual freedom. He forgot that outside Las Vegas — which is filled with a bunch of California immigrants who still haven’t melted into the culture — Nevada is still very much the Old West.

Nevada Senator Harry Reid just made the same mistake.

Harry Reid
Senator Harry Reid (D, NV)

To quote Mark Waite’s story in Wednesday’s Pahrump Valley Times:

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., appeared to pause for a moment during his speech to the Nevada Legislature Tuesday after he said the state should outlaw prostitution, as if to anticipate some applause.

There was none. There wasn’t any applause either from officials representing Nye County or a prominent brothel owner who commented on the senator’s remarks to the Pahrump Valley Times.

My house in Pahrump is a mile from two brothels. They’re not near any schools. The women who work there aren’t allowed into town except one day a week, to visit the doctor for STD tests. They pay taxes and they don’t bother anyone.

Nevada is the only state in the union that still allows its counties the option to allow legal brothels (Nye County does, Clark County doesn’t), which are legal in the UK, European countries like Germany, and in Asian countries like Thailand. Prostitution is illegal in Muslim countries that operate under Shariah law, and in places whose laws are still influenced by other sexually restrictive religious codes.

In this last election for the Nevada Senate seat, Republican “Tea Party” candidate, Sharron Angle, was not only opposed to legal prostitution in Nevada, and — incredibly — even legal gambling in Nevada, but opined in one interview that if bringing back alcohol prohibition was the only way to keep marijuana illegal in Nevada, she would favor bringing back Prohibition.

It was nutty stuff like that which got Harry Reid re-elected in a year when fiscal conservatives were regularly retiring big government spenders.

So now the winner adopts the loser’s platform, in a state which has little tolerance for its elected representatives infringing on what they see as their liberty.

It might take a while, Harry, but wave to Bill Kohbarger on your way out, because if I have to choose between the honest working women of Pahrump or the whore currently representing the State of Nevada in Washington, I choose the honest working women of Pahrump.

#

Holder’s Law

Anybody besides me watching Kathy Bates’ new legal drama, Harry’s Law?

In the fifth episode titled “A Day in the Life,” Kathy Bates’s character, storefront lawyer Harriet Korn — new to criminal law — tries to resign from representing a client charged with murder when she finds out her client really did it. Since the jury has already been empaneled the judge won’t let her — so Harry deliberately scuttles her case by telling the jury her client is guilty, causing a mistrial, a contempt of court citation, and a hearing to disbar her for inexcusable misconduct.

You see, when you’re a lawyer representing a client, you’re supposed to represent your client to the best of your ability, no matter how much you hate the scumbag.

Funny that this standard didn’t apply when California Attorney General Jerry Brown (now the California governor again) — charged to defend the majority of California voters who had passed a proposition amending the state’s constitution to forbid issuing of marriage licenses to same-sex couples — threw the case.

Don’t sidetrack me; I don’t consider that any government should be licensing marriage in the first place, for the exact same reasons I don’t want my own state intruding into the private consentual relations between a man, a woman, and a MasterCard. Or two women, a man, and a MasterCard. Or Two Men and a MasterCard. Or whatever party the holder of the MasterCard can afford. And I apply the same moral and ethical standards to longer-term contracts, like marriage.

Eric Holder
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

But now U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder — the lawyer whose client is Congress when its elected representatives pass a law — has done what Jerry Brown did — what Harry Korn did in a weekly TV drama: betrayed the client and thrown the case, for no other reason than that he doesn’t like it.

I don’t like it, either, but WTF? Are the lawyers who are supposed to be in the business of defending the law now allowed to throw any case they don’t happen to like?

Even an anarchist lawyer in a private arbitration would get sanctioned for that.

#

Look for the Union Label

Wisconsin Education Association Council
Wisconsin Education Association Council

My mother told me as recently as yesterday at dinner that some of the first words out of my mouth when I first learned to speak were, “That lousy union!”

No, I wasn’t regurgitating an incident from a past life. My father, concert violinist Julius Schulman, had been the concertmaster and featured soloist of the WOR Mutual Network Symphony Orchestra when it had higher ratings than the rival NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini. I picked the phrase up from my dad because he was still complaing about losing that job — at the time the pinnacle of his musical career — when Musicians Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians struck WOR because the network tried to fire several musicians who got full salary but never were called in actually to perform. In other jobsite situations this is called featherbedding.

The strike was never settled. WOR simply gave up its orchestra and went to “canned” music.

That lousy union.

Like my father, I’m a union member: the Writers Guild of America, East, affiliated wth the AFL-CIO. I have no particular beef with my union, aside from them striking twice within my first few years of membership and the six-month-long strike that wiped out the only job I’d been contracted to write a movie for TV and my never getting another paid job screenwriting for someone else’s company, since. I have a talent agent and a literary manager representing me, plus my own production company. I’ve never understood what a union can do for me that my reps and I can’t do without their help — except lose me job offers from producers who don’t want to sign a union contract.

Everybody misses the point about what a union is and what it does. Unions supposedly raise wages and working conditions by collective bargaining, which supposedly places them on an equal footing with big employers. The natural laws of economics are described to say that when the price of anything, including labor, is raised above what the market will bear the market will replace it with something else or somewhere else. Collective bargaining can’t raise the market value of a worker for a particular job any more than it could alter the laws of motion or thermodynamics. If wages and benefits get too high, jobs are eliminated (like my dad’s job) or outsourced to places which don’t have rules making them bargain with unions.

This too theoretical and complex for you? Try this on for size. Unions have no word for management or bosses as insulting as the word they use for non-union workers: scab. Unions are not organized against management and bosses. Unions are organized to regulate workers and to use force against unregulated workers.

Now, in the private sector — where any “job” is nothing more than a trade of work in exchange for money — interfering with the trade is tyrannical.

Workers should be free to bargain collectively or not to bargain collectively.

Employers should be free to bargain collectively or not to bargain collectively.

Anything that anyone – government or goon — does by force or threat of force or even the implication that force might be used — to compel either side either to bargain collectively, or not to bargain collectively — is tyrannical.

But when the “trade” is between a government and an individual, anything the individual can do to even the odds is an improvement. That includes organizing the government workforce and collective bargaining. It’s just one more separation of powers. It’s one more limitation on government power. It’s one more monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of Leviathan.

Government is force. It is tyrannical and coercive by its nature. It takes its money by force and spends it by fiat. Only the delusion of its officials and employees that they are doing something worthwhile that can’t be done in a private transaction separates government from being a purely criminal operation.

So this pro-capitalist libertarian wishes to extend his support to the members of the Wisconsin Education Association Council in its struggle against the Wisconsin Republicans led by Governor Scott Walker to eliminate their collective bargaining powers.

This article is Copyright © 2011 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share

The Agorist Revolutionary Alternative

Been watching the news? Greece? Spain? Ireland? Egypt? Iran? Mexico?

Revolution is in the air all over the place.

Agorism
Agorism Poster by thorsmitersaw

Back in the early 1970’s Samuel Edward Konkin III, a libertarian activist, editor, and writer — began looking for alternatives to traditional political activism, both electoral and revolutionary — to bring about a free society. Sam’s premise was that electoral participation was a game that paid off not in liberty but in power; and that because the state’s tentacles held society hostage traditional revolutionary tactics resulted in unacceptable collateral damage to innocent bystanders.

Konkin, being a scientist, approached the question logically. To his way of thinking the means and ends had to be one and the same. If the end was a society whose institutions were noncoercive and respecting of voluntary contracts and trade then the means of achieving such a society, likewise, also needed to be noncoercive and respecting of voluntary contracts and trade.

These were the seeds which led Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3, for short) to begin exploring the strategy of countereconomics, and the philosophy of Agorism, as the libertarian means to achieve libertarian ends.

Samuel Edward Konkin III Samuel Edward Konkin III
Samuel Edward Konkin III

Konkin first presented his ideas on countereconomics at two “CounterCon” conferences I organized in fall 1974 and spring 1975, during the off-season at Camp Mohawk in the Berkshires, a summer children’s camp owned and operated by my father’s brother and sister-in-law.

The next expression of countereconomic ideas and Agorism were in my novel, Alongside Night, which I began writing in 1974 and which was first published in October 1979 by a major New York book publisher.

One year later Sam self-published The New Libertarian Manifesto, the first formal expression of countereconomic and Agorist ideas. The first edition sold out quickly, and reprint editions have been proliferating in both printed and digital editions ever since. Additional publications further elucidating countereconomics and Agorism followed, and SEK3 worked to refine his work on countereconomics and Agorism until his death in February 2004.

Sam saw Agorism as a revolutionary alternative to Marxism and, like Marx, the impact and popularity of his ideas have only spread and gained new converts after his death.

Me, I’m sort of like Paul McCartney after the death of John Lennon. I was there at the beginning and I’m still here.

Agorism is the idea that if you want a future society based on free trade there is no substitute for trading freely now as a means of getting there. Phrased as a boundary problem it’s obvious that a single individual escaping from the State is not a strategy; but obviously 100% of individuals escaping from the State into free trade would be. Like a revolutionary version of the Laffer Curve, there must be some tipping point where individuals removing their lives and property from State control is sufficient to starve a State thereby collapsing it. Seeking that tipping point in a Starvation Curve is the revolutionary strategy of Agorism in a nutshell.

Agorism looks to what traditionally has been called the black market, or underground economy, as the playing field for revolution.

The problem with this is that the people who trade on the black market are after tangible and immediate rewards – not anything as abstract as freedom — and more often than not they’re not all that scrupulous about how they get it. Lacking anything other than threats of violent retaliation from ripping off someone more powerful, the underground entrepreneur finds no particular market advantage to abiding by rules of honesty and fair play as opposed to getting away with anything one can get away with.

Furthermore, an oppressive — even a totalitarian — state can tolerate a thriving black market. In fact there’s an argument to be made that since command economies violate fundamental economic laws and create massive misallocations of resources, and consequent underproduction of anything people want and need, that a thriving black market is actually an enabler of above-ground economic oppression. The way Mafioso and drug lords buy off law-enforcement officers and judges regularly is a testament to the symbiosis between an oppressive state and a criminally-run black market.

The only thing that can take counter-economics out of this paradigm as a strategy for freedom, and Agorism out of this paradigm as a social movement, is that bringing morally self-conscious actors into the black market brings arbitral dispute settlement, and stable predictability, into the equation. This has the potential of enabling the expansion of markets by drawing new capital into the underground economy that would normally avoid such high-risk investments.

Bringing law and order to the black market is what makes countereconomics distingishable from the normal criminal-run “black market” — or, to use Samuel Edward Konkin III’s distinction, the “red” market.

The market is only truly “black” — run under the Anarchist’s Black Flag rather than the Pirate’s Jolly Roger — when underground markets are more lawful than the capricious and tyrannical rules of the aboveground economy.

Yes, that’s right. The revolution only succeeds when the Anarchist is more for law-and-order than the Statist.

Agorism only works as an alternative to other political philosophies — countereconomics only works as an investment alternative to a statist-controlled above-ground economy — if promises and contracts from traders in the underground markets are more honest and trustworthy than in the above-ground economy.

The Prisoners Dilemma can’t win freedom. Only Trust can do that.

Some may argue that the above argument is utopian or perfectionist — that the success of Agorism requires men to become better than they are. The fact is, it only requires underground traders to adopt business standards common in above-ground markets: consumer responsiveness, honest accounting, and above all peaceful dispute settlement.

If the leftist critique is correct and there is no actual distinction to be made between a businessman and a criminal then any sort of market approach to social organization is doomed.

Agorist traders don’t need to be angels for Agorism to replace Marxism as the Revolutionary Alternative.

Just middlin’ decent.

Updated 9/11/2011

Author’s Note April 26, 2012: Recently I’ve been using a “Devil’s Dictionary” style definition of Agorism: Estate planning for the death of the statist-controlled economy.

This article is Copyright © 2011, 2012 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share

Are the Birthers Right?

This article has been rewritten from one I posted yesterday then deleted. My conclusions on the grammar of a constitutional clause in that article were false, based on extra commas being added that weren’t in James Madison’s original notes from the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention on September 4, 1787. — JNS

Is Barack Obama qualified under the Constitution of the United States to be President of the United States?

President Barack Obama
President Barack Obama

Last Thursday a writer friend forwarded me an email he’d received from a “birther” email list — people who argue that Barack Obama isn’t qualified to be President of the United States because he wasn’t born on United States soil and is therefore disqualified by the Constitution of the United States to serve as president. I guess these people want Obama disqualified from serving so Vice President Joe Biden can ascend to the presidency. Or maybe they never even thought that far.

My friend did not endorse the contents of the email, and just forwarded it to me as an “FYI,” so I’m not going to tangle him up in this controversy by mentioning his name.

I’ve never taken the birthers seriously. It always seemed ridiculous to me to suggest that some deep communist conspiracy existed half a century ago to take a Kenyan-born baby and raise him to be a Manchurian Candidate. But history is based on documents, and facts do matter, so I read the email.

The email contained jpegs of documents, and made an argument based on those jpegs, that I’d never heard before. They did not argue that Barack Obama did not have a birth certificate issued by the State of Hawaii, which is the only debate we’ve heard.

They argued that the birth certificate issued to Obama’s American mother by the State of Hawaii was a duplicate issued after Barack’s actual birth in Kenya four days earlier, and that a Kenyan birth certificate was also issued in the name of Barry Soweto.

Here are the jpegs that were forwarded to me in email along with the accompanying text (all text in
red is from the original email:

Obama Jpeg 001

Here’s a close-up of the top of the document where you can plainly read his name and his parent’s names, etc….

Obama Jpeg 002

A British history buff was asked if he could find out who the colonial registrar was for Mombasa in 1961. After only a few minutes of research, he called back and said “Sir Edward F. Lavender” Note the same name near the bottom of the photo above.

Source(s): “ Kenya Dominion Record 4667 Australian library.”

And here’s a close-up of the bottom of the document where you can read “Coast Providence of Kenya ” and the official signature of the Deputy Registrar…..

Obama Jpeg 002a

The above document is a “Certified Copy of Registration of Birth”, but below is a copy of the actual Certificate of Birth… the real-deal legal kind of certificate.

The Mombasa Registrar of Births has testified that Obama’s birth certificate from Coast Province General Hospital in Mombasa is genuine. This copy was obtained by Lucas Smith through the help of a Kenyan Colonel who recently got it directly from the Coast General Hospital in Mombasa , Kenya . Here it is…..

Obama Jpeg 003

Note the footprint!!

The local Muslim Imam in Mombasa named Barack with his Muslim middle name Hussein so his official name on this certificate is Barack Hussein Obama II.

The grandmother of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. reveals the story of his birth in Mombasa , Kenya , a seaport, after his mother suffered labor pains while swimming at ocean beach in Mombasa ……

“On August 4, 1961 Obama’s mother, father and grandmother were attending a Muslim festival in Mombasa , Kenya . Mother had been refused entry to airplanes due to her nine month pregnancy. It was a hot August day at the festival so the Obama’s went to the beach to cool off. While swimming in the ocean his mother experienced labor pains so was rushed to the Coast Provincial General Hospital, Mombasa, Kenya, where Obama was born a few hours later at 7:21 pm on August 4, 1961. Four days later his mother flew to Hawaii and registered his birth in Honolulu as a certificate of live birth which omitted the place and hospital of birth.”

Letter from Kitau in Mombasa , Kenya ……

“I happen to be Kenyan. I was born 1 month before Obama at Mombasa medical center. I am a teacher here at the MM Shaw Primary School in Kenya . I compared my birth certificate to the one that has been put out by Taitz and mine is exactly the same. I even have the same registrar and format. The type is identical. I am by nature a skeptical person. I teach science here and challenge most things that cannot be proven. So I went to an official registrar today and pulled up the picture on the web. They magnified it and determined it to be authentic. There is even a plaque with Registrar Lavenders name on it as he was a Brit and was in charge of the Registrar office from 1959 until January of 1964. The reason the date on the certificate says republic of Kenya is that we were a republic when the “copy” of the original was ordered. I stress the word “copy”. My copy also has republic of Kenya . So what you say is true about Kenya not being a republic at the time of Obama’s birth, however it was a republic when the copy was ordered.

The birth certificate is genuine. I assure you it will be authenticated by a forensic auditor. We are very proud Obama was born here. We have a shrine for him and there are many people who remember his birth here as he had a white mother. They are being interviewed now by one of your media outlets.

Fortunately they even have pictures of his parents with him immediately after his birth at the Mombasa hospital with the hospital in the back ground.

It will be a proud day for us when it is proven that he was born here and a Kenyan became the most powerful man in the world.

I encourage anyone to come here and visit. I will be happy to take you and show you the pictures at the hospital myself as well as my document and many others that are identical to what Taitz posted. God Bless. Kitau”

So, how much more proof do we need?

WELL, HERE IT IS….

Lolo Soetoro, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, baby Maya Soetoro, and 9 year old Barry Soetoro.

Obama Jpeg 004

This registration document, made available on Jan. 24, 2007, by the Fransiskus Assisi school inJakarta, Indonesia, shows the registration of Barack Obama under the name Barry Soetoro made by his step-father, Lolo Soetoro.

Name: Barry Soetoro
Religion: Islam
Nationality: Indonesian

Obama Jpeg 005

How did this little INDONESIAN Muslim child – Barry Soetoro, (A.K.A. Barack Obama) get around the issue of nationality to become President of the United States of America ?

PART 2:
In a move certain to fuel the debate over Obama’s qualifications for the presidency, the group “Americans for Freedom of Information” has released copies of President Obama’s college transcripts from Occidental College …

The transcript indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia while an undergraduate at the school. The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California . The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program.

To qualify for this scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship.

This document provides the smoking gun that many of Obama’s detractors have been seeking – that he is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States – necessary to be President of these United States. Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya, here we see that there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship.

Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has released the results of their investigation of Obama’s campaign spending. This study estimates that Obama has spent upwards of $950,000 in campaign funds in the past year with eleven law firms in 12 states for legal resources to block disclosure of any of his personal records.

Mr. Kreep indicated that the investigation is still on-going but that the final report will be provided to the U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder. Mr. Holder has refused comment on this matter.

Now, just for a moment, let’s assume that these jpegs are not forgeries. I don’t have original documents; all I have is jpegs sent to me in email, from an original source I can’t even identify.

Let’s assume that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to an American mother who couldn’t get a flight home so her baby could be born in her native home, the fiftieth American State of Hawaii.

So what?

Here is what the Constitution of the United States says about the qualification for President of the United States:

No Person except a natural born Citizen or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Nowhere does the Constitution say you have to be born on American soil to be a natural born citizen.

These jpegs, even if not forged, list Barack Obama’s mother as an American citizen. That makes Barack Obama a natural born citizen, not a naturalized citizen.

His mother filing a birth certificate for him in Hawaii four days later, when she returned home, shows her intent to preserve his American citizenship.

Any claims made for aid based on Barack Obama not being a U.S. citizen while he was under eighteen are not binding on him. His choice of citizenship between his two parents — an American mother and a Kenyan father — would only be made by him when he was eighteen. He would enjoy dual American and Kenyan citizenship until his eighteenth birthday when he would have to decide.

As an adult Barack Obama resided in the United States and did not return to reside in Kenya.

That’s that.

Even if the birthers are right about where Barack Obama was born, they’re wrong about his being disqualified to be President of the United States because he was born on foreign soil.

He’s a natural born citizen of the United States because one of his two parents, his mother, was a natural born citizen of the United States.

Tough thing when you actually read what the Constitution says, huh?

This article is Copyright © 2011 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share