Epitome of the Collectivist Soul


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It isn't that the statue has a beard or not, I think Michael was getting at the detail- smudging as a possible, suspicious sign of photoshopping. Max is right, some bright white article under the same lighting as the rest of a picture, will "burn out". The contrast range of the photo sensor isn't always sufficient to show detail in - both - the extremes of dark and bright areas, it's at it's best for all the medium tones of a picture. 

Not that it can be stated with certainty that the photo wasn't skillfully tampered with, "the absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence", but it looks completely natural.

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1 hour ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

I don't know what your referents are for those statements.

Ellen,

I keep repeating, so this is the last time. See the ends of several of his posts where he snarks about conspiracy theorists.

1 hour ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

Max posted another shot of the scene, in which the statue also appears.  The statue has a beard.

So what? I was talking about a different photo of the same scene.

And I never said the statue didn't have a beard.

Jeez...

Let me go slow. Two shots mean two different photos. Are you with me?

Now, if we can get that one understood, let's try another thought. It is entirely possible, with two photos, that one can be altered and the other not.

Still with me?

Also, it is entirely possible that a photo can be altered for many reasons, not just one. Imagine that. A reason could exist that might even not play into debunking tin foil hat conspiracy theorists.

Work with me now, work with me on this...

I know it's difficult...

:) 

(I love teasing you. :) )

Now back to the beard. You are treating the beard and the artifact as the same thing simply because the same statue appears in both photos. But they are not the same thing.

The beard doesn't explain the artifact in the photo I had trouble with. That kind of artifact, in my experience, can easily happen as the result of sloppy alignment when superimposing images on each other. I've seen that kind of thing before. I can even reproduce it if I really wanted to waste my time. Hell, it might even be something tried and forgotten to be deleted in haste (on a forgotten layer or something--which I find most probable).

Why did someone likely alter the photo I found problematic?

I can guess, but damned if I know. 

btw - Notice how the shadows fall in the second shot Max presented (except for the statue)?

Some of the shadows fall differently than in the first shot. Just so you don't have to scroll, take a look:

First shot:

image.png

Second shot:

image.png

Do you think the lighting changed between shots? Do you think someone changed the lighting while the same people stood there?

It's either that or the top picture was messed with.

The angle of shot certainly doesn't move shadows. (Of course, the angle allows for shadows and parts of shadows to be hidden.)

Michael

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30 minutes ago, anthony said:

 

AS you say, Michael, "angle". The lights haven't changed. Different camera angle, to the right by 20 degrees. That changes the aspect of subjects, such as the fall of shadows. And different focal length of lens (longer tele). Obviously, different photographer. If anyone has been in a tight scrum of photographers at photo ops as I often have been, you'd take it for granted. Subtly different pictures. 

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3 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Not when he can't even see a face-covering artifact that is right in front of his eyes and hasn't even looked at the picture correctly before he sounds off.

Oh, now you are also a clairvoyant? You "know" that I haven't even looked at the picture correctly before I gave my reaction? Well, for your information: I dowloaded the picture first, and opened in my photo editor, tried different settings of brightness and contrast to enhance the details. So you're just lying to dismiss my criticism.

Quote

I also dispute his technical explanations as the only ones valid. Also, I'm not even convinced of the validity of some of what he said. But I don't want to spend long hours delving into this. I merely keep at it a bit because I want to make sure readers know there are different views--valid possible and plausible views--that they can consider. That way they can come to their own conclusions. Independent thinking and all...

If my technical explanations show that there is no evidence that your arguments are valid, that is enough to dismiss those. No, your views are not valid: motion blur in walking persons is no evidence for tampering, sharpness artefacts are no evidence for tampering (except for using a sharpness filter, which may be a default option of the camera), equal fuzziness before and after a walking person is no evidence for tampering, and neither is lack of detail due to overexposure.  I can understand that you dont want to spend long hours, delving into this, yours is a lost cause, and I suspect that deep down, you know that.

 

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1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Now back to the beard. You are treating the beard and the artifact as the same thing simply because the same statue appears in both photos. But they are not the same thing.

The beard doesn't explain the artifact in the photo I had trouble with. That kind of artifact, in my experience, can easily happen as the result of sloppy alignment when superimposing images on each

You don't understand the importance of the second photo, although I've told you that already. When you compare (enlargements of) both statues, you see that the viewing angle is slightly different (can best be seen in the shadows), but on the face of the statue the difference is practically imperceptible. However, there is an important difference: the resolution. Compare the light distribution on both photos, then you'll see that they are completely in agreement, only is the first picture far less detailed. But there is nothing in the first picture that you cannot find back, in much greater detail of course, in the second picture, so there isn't any artifact in the first picture, it's just a rough, overexposed picture that may stimulate the imagination, like clouds in the sky may do. There is a nice example in astronomy of this effect: the "face on Mars". In a first, low resoluton picture, it did resemble (with a bit of fantasy) a face. But later photos showed that this was just accidental in a noisy picture, the "face" disappeared, no artifact, no sculpting Martians. 

 

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27 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Max,

Actually, come to think of it, you're the one lying. I won't speculate why, though. You must have your reasons.

At least I showed how you were lying, you just utter wild accusations without substantiation.

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On 7/25/2019 at 1:10 PM, Max said:

There is just not enough information in the picture to predict where exactly shadows should be seen.

There's an overwhelming over-abundance of more than enough information. And that's just in any single frame of the video. Consider all of the content of all of the frames, and there are multiple, layered, redundant means of determining whether or not any entity, attribute, action or effect seen in any frame conforms to reality. The space, the objects within it, and the motions are all precisely measurable.

Then add all of the visual information from other cameras at other vantage points...

Each participant on this thread who has commented on the visual evidence is right about some things, yet wrong about others. The issue is not that the visual evidence is insufficient, but that none of you has the technical knowledge to be making any conclusions, or to be dismissing anyone else's observations or concerns, or to be throwing accusations of kookiness or conspiracy theorizing at anyone who thinks that something in a photo looks a bit odd.

J

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2 hours ago, Jonathan said:

Would you all mind choosing a different word than "artifact"?

Jonathan,

I had a specific reason for using that word and I borrowed it from audio processing for cleaning up sound and mixing (which I know more about). I knew they used this word in image, and I skooched it over without looking it up, thinking they used it in the same way. I just now looked it up for image, though, and it is the wrong word. In sound, artifacts don't have to come from compression.

So I don't mind using a different word at all.

Any suggestions?

btw - Dum da dum dum...

I just went back and now I have a bit of egg on my own face. (Meaning a lot... :) )

I've been talking about a still. I didn't realize it was a frame from a video. (I tend to scan too quickly copy/pastes when there is a lot of blown-out formatting and the mention of video was in that kind of text, so I skipped right over it. I only commented on, and worked with, the picture Jon posted. So how would you like your eggs? Suddenly I have plenty. :) )

I just went and looked at the video (here). Despite everything, my instincts are right on. One of the comments written on the video is:

"This is three separate video feeds overlapping into one."

It was pretty obvious for me to detect two feeds on first blush before I even got to that message. I still don't see the third just by watching. (I'm not counting the text.)

During the discussion above, as a still, I could see there were overlapping layers (and to be honest, qua still on the frame Jon posted, I can still see the possibility of little segments cut out from the original and copy/pasted mostly on blank layers, then merged with the original, along with separate images likewise on different layers and merged, but that is no longer true when looking at this as overlapping video feeds.  

I just looked at several stopped frames. Yup. Overlapping video feeds (with some alpha channel or greenscreen erasures made by hand) has to be the reason for what I called an "artifact" on the statue face. (I mess with video editing, although I'm not posting my mistakes, not even on YouTube. :) ) They simply didn't erase all of the face on one of the feeds where it needed erasing and the small differences in overlapping the same image on top of itself resulted in distortion causing a separate thing (the thing I called an "artifact").

Different resolutions would obviously result in the blurred walking people.

btw - The idea of people walking right through a rope (which the video kept calling "robe" in an obvious misspelling), is a humdinger.

Now I feel everything falling into place. I'm sane! :) 

I know you see a lot more in this video than I do, but I'm sane! The image was cockeyed. :) 

I see this video more as a montage, though, i.e., a video editing job, than an artificial intelligence deep fake like the ones I have seen done with the Deepfakes software.

It doesn't help, though. I still feel like a goddam doofus...

:) 

At least I know how to bicker.

:) 

Michael

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1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

So how would you like your eggs? Suddenly I have plenty. :) )

Emulsified with the oils from your face?  I never get that hungry. 

RBG dead for 5-6 months, replaced by a look-alike for public appearances…that’s BATSHIT CRAZY.  I’m told eggs are good with truffles, maybe add some foie gras and call it an “alla Rossini” recipe...but no one flavors them with guano. 

https://www.sfcv.org/article/top-10-alla-rossini-recipes

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57 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Dennis,

And the Deep State with 3 years of "muh Russians!" in the mainstream news isn't batshit crazy?

We live in a batshit crazy world, my friend.

:)

Michael

No one disputes that Russians attempted to hack voting systems, and that they spread memes, however incompetently.  This has given rise to a narrative that the losers of the 2016 election cling to.  That the election was stolen.  It's false, but no, I wouldn't call it batshit crazy. 

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2 hours ago, 9thdoctor said:

No one disputes that Russians attempted to hack voting systems, and that they spread memes, however incompetently.  This has given rise to a narrative that the losers of the 2016 election cling to.  That the election was stolen.  It's false, but no, I wouldn't call it batshit crazy. 

I'm calling it batshit evil.

--Brant

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The media is batshit crazy stupid.

--Brant

and fascist servers of corporate masters

the corporation itself is essentially fascist; there is no room in libertarianism or Objectivism for public corporatism as opposed to purely private--the government is for criminal, not tort

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6 hours ago, 9thdoctor said:

I wouldn't call it batshit crazy. 

It's worse. It's mass delusion on a batshit crazy level engineered by warmongers on people who are lulled into compliance by the drug of normalcy bias. Those dumbass frogs have boiled before they could jump.

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

I'm calling it batshit evil.

 

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

The media is batshit crazy stupid.

Brant,

Ditto and ditto.

Michael

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5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

It's worse. It's mass delusion on a batshit crazy level engineered by warmongers on people who are lulled into compliance by the drug of normalcy bias.

I don't believe "batshit crazy" is defined in any edition of the DSM. It's not a technical term, so we might have to agree to disagree.  What I say is that the "Russian Interference" narrative has surface plausibility, and evidence to back it up, however exaggerated that evidence has become in the media reporting.  Roughly half the electorate wants to believe it, so it gets clicks and eyeballs, and those things mean revenue to the media companies.  You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain it.  Parenthetically, I don't dispute that there are bad actors in the media, people who (like Gail Wynand) think they control public opinion.

Imagine how Russians felt when they saw this magazine cover:

1101960715_400.jpg

And how our media would glom onto a Russian publication with Trump on the cover and a comparable headline. 

How plausible is it that an RBG imposter has been able to fake having the legal knowledge of a Supreme Court Justice, for months now?  That's like finding a Martha Argerich look-alike, who can actually play like Martha Argerich.  

 

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14 hours ago, Jonathan said:

There's an overwhelming over-abundance of more than enough information. And that's just in any single frame of the video. Consider all of the content of all of the frames, and there are multiple, layered, redundant means of determining whether or not any entity, attribute, action or effect seen in any frame conforms to reality. The space, the objects within it, and the motions are all precisely measurable.

Then add all of the visual information from other cameras at other vantage points...

I was just talking about the picture with the red and green circles. In that message it was claimed that a shadow was "missing" and that that would be evidence of tampering. That picture (I didn't know then it was a still of a video) does not contain enough information to predict where the shadows of the walking people would fall on the wall behind.them. For that you should have to know where on the floor their feet are (what their x-y position is), and that information is missing. When I later saw the video and other photos, it became clear that the tall man (whose shadow was supposedly  "missing") was walking farther away from the wall than for example the small woman who followed him, just as I had expected. 

 

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18 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Jonathan,

I had a specific reason for using that word and I borrowed it from audio processing for cleaning up sound and mixing (which I know more about). I knew they used this word in image, and I skooched it over without looking it up, thinking they used it in the same way. I just now looked it up for image, though, and it is the wrong word. In sound, artifacts don't have to come from compression.

So I don't mind using a different word at all.

Any suggestions?

I don't know. Maybe keep it really broad. "Phenomenon"? "Effect"?

J

 

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3 hours ago, Max said:

That picture (I didn't know then it was a still of a video) does not contain enough information to predict where the shadows of the walking people would fall on the wall behind.them.

False.

3 hours ago, Max said:

When I later saw the video and other photos, it became clear that the tall man (whose shadow was supposedly  "missing") was walking farther away from the wall than for example the small woman who followed him, just as I had expected.

I suspect that you're misidentifying either the number and positions of lights in the room, or whose shadows are whose, or both, and also maybe the depth of the room and the variations of its surfaces.

J

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4 hours ago, 9thdoctor said:

How plausible is it that an RBG imposter has been able to fake having the legal knowledge of a Supreme Court Justice, for months now?  That's like finding a Martha Argerich look-alike, who can actually play like Martha Argerich. 

I take it all back.   Look how easy it was for Ethan Hunt to do it on the fly:

Now if the Ginsburg double has legal experts feeding her lines through an earpiece...shit this would be easy! 

I wonder why they call it Mission Impossible

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4 hours ago, 9thdoctor said:

What I say is that the "Russian Interference" narrative has surface plausibility, and evidence to back it up, however exaggerated that evidence has become in the media reporting.

Dennis,

You keep saying that as if pointing to how dangerous that small hammerhead shark over there on one side of your boat is since it is a shark while ignoring the big ass killer whale and school of all kinds of sharks, say about 500, swimming alongside the other side of your boat.

Here's who interfered in the 2016 US election: China, North Korea, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Cuba, Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, the Ukraine, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Sweden, and just about every country on earth that has a covert foreign operations department. What's more, most of them interfered to the same extent Russia did if not more, and they have all done that for well over a century.

So reducing everything to "Muh Russians!" is not only silly, it's delusional. That much emphasis on one element to the exclusion of so many others is a complete corruption of rationality. And that's what makes it worse than batshit crazy. 

If I tell you there is a boogie man, so be afraid, very afraid, and I mean it and harp on and on about it, I come off as silly. Why? Boogie men don't exist and everyone knows it.

But if I not only tell you to watch out for a specific normal traditional enemy as if that were the only enemy on earth, it's a far easier sell. The propagandist can get availability bias plus gaslighting (and God knows what else) to kick in because there is an element of truth to the fact that enemies are dangerous, including the one the propagandist is pointing to. 

That's what's behind it all. The entire "Muh Russians!" scandal is engineered blindness on a massive scale. And when a large mass of people get as nasty to their neighbors and fellow citizens as the mainstream press, Deep State, anti-Trumpers, etc., have become over this issue, the sell worked far, far better than expected. People no longer sip the poison, they gulp it down and demand more.

The behavioral engineering project side of this attempted coup by the bad guys has turned normal modern science-based citizens into fanatics who can look at a crowd of thugs in ski masks wielding baseball bats and smashing and drawing blood from disarmed people, and see this right in front of them, and call them normal and peaceful while yelling about "Muh Rissians!" 

In other words, this is huge-colony-of-bats-with-burning-asshole-diarrhea crazy.

Michael

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33 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Dennis,

You keep saying that as if pointing to how dangerous that small hammerhead shark over there on one side of your boat is since it is a shark while ignoring the big ass killer whale and school of all kinds of sharks, say about 500, swimming alongside the other side of your boat.

Are we still talking about the RBG doppelgänger?  I'm only claiming that the "Russian Interference" narrative is/was plausible, in comparison to the RBG story, as presented on this thread, which I call Batshit Crazy.  In other words, utterly implausible.  

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This ought to clinch it.  For any rational mind.  Here she is talking about recent events, events that post-date her death 5-6 months ago.  Why are they so desperate to prove she's still alive?  Why else would they have her doppelgänger talk about events the real RBG couldn't have talked about, if she's not already dead?  Oh, and the collegial words about Kavanaugh, I mean who could fall for that? 

 

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