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I’m very impressed with this woman’s Lao Tzu-inspired approach to preventing her marriage from falling apart:

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

Now, I’m skeptical that this would work for a man dealing with a wife determined to leave, but it makes a lot of sense when the core problem isn’t rooted in a desire for change or strange, but merely a personal struggle to humble oneself enough to accept one’s mortality and mediocrity.

An Infernal Economy II

At the peak of a lofty precipice
A noisome stench wafted high in the air,
And yet my guide commenced to reminisce
As if there was no mirksome foulness there.
It was ever so at the cycle’s peak,
He said with a rueful shake of despair.
Greed, whispered words, and an air of mystique
Brings the innocent lambs to the slaughter.
They hope to catch on to the winning streak,
Doomed, from the start, come hell or high water.
But justice they’ll have, for here it is found,
Payback for each duplicitous fraudster.
He showed me a path that led further down,
Deeper into that corpse-scented chasm….

The bad news: it isn’t in Hawaii after all:

California attorney Orly Taitz, who has filed a number of lawsuits demanding proof of Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president, has released a copy of what purports to be a Kenyan certification of birth and has filed a new motion in U.S. District Court for its authentication. The document lists Obama’s parents as Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham, the birth date as Aug. 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth as Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. No doctor is listed. But the alleged certificate bears the signature of the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Couya. It was allegedly issued as a certified copy of the original in February 1964.

WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.

Well, you have to admit. The Obama administration, however short-lived it turns out to be, has certainly more than lived up to its comedic potential. If this alleged certified document from 1964 – the year Obama’s parents divorced – turns out to be a genuine certified copy of Obama’s actual birth certificate, it would certainly explain why Kenyan authorities were hassling Jerome Corsi the last time he was snooping around Mombasa.

It will be interesting to see how this is explained away. After all, it’s even harder to explain how and why Obama’s enemies planted a document with a Kenyan registrar back in 1961 than it is to explain why Obama’s mother would have played a little fast-and-loose with the truth in order to ensure that her son got American citizenship.

UPDATE – The important question is: how did Bill Maher know this document was on the verge of being found? 1) “‘Birthers’ must be stopped [before they find the real birth certificate].” 2) “No matter how dumb, the people who are questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S. could eventually cause real problems [by finding the real birth certificate].” 3) “Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything [by finding the real birth certificate].”

UPDATE II – If the alleged certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate is another fake – and there appears to be some evidence that it is – I fail to see how this is going to help the Obama administration in its cause to prevent the release of a Hawaiian long-form certificate of live birth. Its goal is to get people to STOP talking about birth certificates, not to draw even more attention to the fact that he is desperately trying to avoid being forced to produce one. And aside from the irrelevant juvenile glee it affords the more devout Obama devotees, the primary impact of the appearance of this document, even if forged, is to increase the pressure on the Obama administration to show its cards. What seems to have escaped everyone’s attention is that if it is a forgery, its release was probably a tactical legal move because now that it has been entered into the court record, it will be up to the other side to show that it is a forgery in court. I found Taitz’s wording to be quite suggestive in this regard: “”I’m forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond. Before, they said, ‘You don’t have anything backing your claims.’ Now I have something.” Notice how she didn’t say she had something conclusive as would normally have been the case if she was certain that the document was real.

It’s not hard to imagine that Taitz suspects the document is fake, but that she can’t be proven to know one way or the other. Now that it’s been entered into evidence, it will serve its purpose by putting pressure on the other side to conclusively disprove it by showing the real document… if they can. I also suspect that she can show how the CERTIFICATION does not necessarily serve as proof of the existence of a Hawaiian-issued certificate, otherwise the tactical maneuver of entering the alleged Kenyan document into evidence would make little sense.

In any case, no amount of forgeries and frauds will make this go away. The determined lack of curiosity among Obama supporters is telling; if they had genuine confidence in the truth of the Obama story, they would not only be mocking the so-called “birthers”, they’d be calling for the release of the birth certificate themselves. They’re not, because they’re rightly afraid that there is something very politically damaging being hidden in his past. And for all the desperate whistling past the graveyard, this hasn’t helped Obama in the least as his approval numbers have been trending steeply down, not up.

The specific level lunacy at WND varies depending upon the subject:

Move over, Birthers. It turns out President Obama is actually part of a far, far more sinister plot, one that will make you long for the days when you only worried that someone had ginned up a phony birth certificate for him. As a breathless new report on the loony World Net Daily makes clear, Obama isn’t just Kenyan — he’s also the Antichrist. And Jesus himself knew it.

First, WND just reported on the fact of the video, it’s not as if anyone there claimed it was accurate. Second, there is absolutely no chance that Obama could possibly be the Antichrist. For one thing, he’s supposed to be amazingly popular. For another, he’s expected to be competent.

It’s always the timing that’s the hardest part to forecast:

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear that England is dead, this should suffice to prove it. The transfer of national sovereignty to Brussels is merely a formality. But don’t be too smug, Americans. Your turn is coming fast. Can you honestly say that the Magic Negro and the Lizard Queen wouldn’t like to do the same?

Keep in mind that Congress has already learned from ramming the banking and automotive bailouts down the throats of an unwilling public that they can ignore the electorate with impunity.

Next week’s reading is Chapter Eight, “Liberal Fascist Economics”. The quiz for it will be posted on Saturday, August 8th.

Paul Krugman continues his quixotic campaign to be the first so-called economist to be stripped of a Nobel Prize:

It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

Yes, that’s why it’s necessary for the federal and state governments to pass scads of laws granting various partial monopolies throughout every aspect of the system. Because if they didn’t prevent the free market from operating, everything would collapse overnight. Krugman not only doesn’t understand economics, he doesn’t even understand what “insurance” is; it’s not supposed to be a financial vehicle for having someone else pay for all of your medical care.

Krugman actually cites “satisfaction with Medicare” as if it is somehow relevant. Wow, people enjoy receiving subsidized goods and services paid for by other people? Do I detect a sign of Nobel Prize No. 2 on the horizon?

I know that you, like me, are probably excited about the National Income and Product Accounts release of the first Comprehensive Revision since 2004: “1929 Through First Quarter 2009“. Here’s the most interesting part:

“For 1929-2008, the average annual growth rate of real GDP is 3.4 percent, 0.1 percentage point higher than in the previously published estimates.”

That doesn’t sound like much, about as small as a meaningful modification as an economic statistician could possibly make. I didn’t understand how this worked, so I called up the BEA and one of their statisticians helpfully explained that I was coming at the problem backwards. I don’t think I could explain it in a manner that makes sense yet, but the short answer is that compounding the 0.1 percent average increase as if it were interest isn’t applicable here. Which makes sense, because GDP is still being reported around $14.1 trillion rather than $15.4 trillion.

In other news, the economy only contracted by one percent in Q2 2009, while the Q1 Revised figure was downgraded to -6.4 percent from the Final number of -5.5. Calculated Risk points out: “This is the fourth consecutive quarterly decline in GDP; the first time that has happened since the government started keeping quarterly records in 1947.”

NRO Contributing Editor Andy McCarthy corrects National Review’s error regarding the Obama birth certificate:

The relevance of information related to the birth of our 44th president is not limited to his eligibility to be our 44th president. On this issue, NRO’s editorial has come in for some blistering criticism. The editorial argues:

The fundamental fiction is that Obama has refused to release his “real” birth certificate. This is untrue. The document that Obama has made available is the document that Hawaiian authorities issue when they are asked for a birth certificate. There is no secondary document cloaked in darkness, only the state records that are used to generate birth certificates when they are requested.

On reflection, I think this was an ill-considered assertion…. To summarize: What Obama has made available is a Hawaiian “certification of live birth” (emphasis added), not a birth certificate (or what the state calls a “certificate of live birth”). The certification form provides a short, very general attestation of a few facts about the person’s birth: name and sex of the newborn; date and time of birth; city or town of birth, along with the name of the Hawaiian island and the county; the mother’s maiden name and race; the father’s name and race; and the date the certification was filed. This certification is not the same thing as the certificate, which is what I believe we were referring to in the editorial as “the state records that are used to generate birth certificates [sic] when they are requested.”

To the contrary, “the state records” are the certificate. They are used to generate the more limited birth certifications on request. As the Jeffers post shows, these state records are far more detailed. They include, for example, the name of the hospital, institution, or street address where the birth occurred; the full name, age, birthplace, race, and occupation of each parent; the mother’s residential address (and whether that address is within the city or town of birth); the signature of at least one parent (or “informant”) attesting to the accuracy of the information provided; the identity and signature of an attending physician (or other “attendant”) who certifies the occurrence of a live birth at the time and place specified; and the identity and signature of the local registrar who filed the birth record.

It’s good to see someone at NRO setting the matter straight. As for Certifigate, it just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser….

Since some of you appear to wish to grace everyone with your knowledge of various subjects from time to time, I think the time has come to revive the old concept of the guest blog, albeit with a new and competitive spin.

I’m contemplating a new feature called Put Up or Shut Up. I will put out a call for volunteers once every two weeks, those who are interested in writing on a specific topic can throw their name and subject in the ring, and everyone can vote on which one is posted. The post should be between 500 and 5,000 words and will be rated and criticized by everyone.

Here’s the benefit to contributing. If you write a post that is given a rating of 7 or better by both me and the blog voters, you will have the right to call “put up or shut up” on an interlocutor. At that point, the individual called upon to make his case can either present his case in his own writing within two weeks or be henceforth mocked as a coward and an incompetent incapable of defending his own ideas. Since it’s the mutinous YECers who are so interested in being able to present their case for their favorite theory of origins, I invite them to either settle on a champion and have him present the first one or collaborate on a piece and present it together. If it’s longer than 5,000 words, PDF it and upload it. We’ll post an excerpt here with a link to the full text.

If there’s enough interest and this works out well, we may eventually expand the concept to incorporate written debates scored by a panel of respected judges of varying creeds and ideologies. But, we’ll see if anyone is actually interested in attempting to present a coherent case or if everyone is all talk.