Time lapse

Well, the first thing I need to do in today's post is to figure out if I can correct the timestamp, which is clearly wrong.  Hmmm... let's see... no, it won't let me do it. Okay, then, I'll just have to state for the record that today you should date all of your checks, documents, and correspondence with "December 26, 1718."

What?  How can that be true, you ask?  1718... so, J. S. Bach would still be alive, King George I would just have been crowned king of England, and the USA wouldn't exist for another sixty-odd years?  To which I chuckle gently, and explain: of course that's not what I mean.  You can't just jump backwards in time, that would be ridiculous.  What I'm saying is that the calendar is wrong, not because we've leapt back to the 18th century, but because...

... the years between 614 and 911 C.E. did not exist.

Yes, according to the Phantom Time Hypothesis, devised by Hans-Ulrich Niemitz and Heribert Illig, time actually went from the year 613 directly to the year 912.  Any events that occurred during those years, or people who are alleged to have lived then are:

1. legends being misunderstood as reality;
2. misinterpretations of documents that refer to events or people from other time periods; or
3. deliberate fabrications by a bunch of calendar conspirators.

Some of the people who therefore didn't exist are King Harald I Fairhair of Norway, King Alfred the Great of Wessex, the writers Alcuin, Caedmon, Li Po, and Bede... and Charlemagne.

Why, you might ask, do Niemitz and Illig believe this?  Apparently it's based on hiatuses in historical records (the Early Middle Ages in Europe was a chaotic time, and most of the few records that were written during that time have been lost), coupled with perceived gaps in building in Constantinople.   Niemitz and Illig also believe that the development of religious doctrine in Europe goes into a stall between the 7th and 10th centuries, as does the progress of art, language, and science.  All of these gaps, they say, can be explained if those three centuries didn't exist -- they were inventions of a conspiracy of church fathers in the 11th and 12th centuries, that originated with Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II, and has continued lo unto this very day.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, let me see here.  Where do I start?

Interesting, if three centuries fell out of historians' pockets somewhere along the way, that astronomical records (especially records of comets and solar eclipses kept by the Chinese) agree precisely with back-calculations done by present day astronomers.  The Tang Dynasty -- which coincides almost perfectly with Niemitz and Illig's lost centuries, and which they consider a "Golden Age Myth" -- not only produced art and artifacts, but kept intricate records of observations of events in the sky.  It's a little hard to explain the solar eclipses that occurred during that time, and which line up perfectly with when astronomers know they occurred, if (1) those three centuries never happened, and (2) the Tang Dynasty astronomers were themselves later fabrications.

We also have the problem that this is the period during which Islam spread across the Middle East -- so we're supposed to believe that we jump right from 614 (Muhammad is still alive, but has yet to make his pilgrimage to Mecca) to 911 (the Muslims are in control of territory from southern Spain to Arabia and beyond)?  And I guess they should revoke my master's degree, because the subject of my thesis (the Viking conquest of England and Scotland) occurred during those years... and so is an elaborate fiction, as is the linguistic and archaeological evidence.

Or, maybe I'm one of the conspirators.  I've been accused of that before.

Anyway, this whole hypothesis seems to be a lot of nonsense, and is yet another good example of Ockham's Razor, not to mention the ECREE Principle.  So, you can relax, and cancel any plans to go back and yell at your high school history teachers -- Charlemagne was almost certainly a real person.   As were Alfred the Great and the rest.  Me, I'm glad.  I'm going to have a hard enough time next week remembering to write the correct year on my checks; I don't know what I'd do if I had to remember that it was a whole different century.

Royal baloney

Sometimes I wish that if people want to espouse crazy worldviews, they'd jump right in and do it, and not claim that there's a logical argument and evidence that supports it.

I mean, just go for it, okay?  No half-assed looniness, here.  If you believe that the universe was created by a Giant Glow-In-The-Dark Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, then believe it.  Don't try and convince us by claiming that the DNA fingerprint of rabbits matches the spectral lines of the stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.  Because then you've crossed the line from Interesting Woo-Woo to making yourself look ridiculous.

Which is something that someone should explain to Eric Dubay, a blogger whose "About Me" states that he is a 32-year-old American who lives in Thailand, teaches yoga and wing chun part time, and is a full-time exposer of the New World Order.  Because Dubay, who predictably enough thinks that the United States is being run by a cadre of Illuminati, has put together an argument for his views using genealogy.

Dubay says that every American president has royal blood.  34 descend from Charlemagne, and 19 from King Edward III of England.  This can't be a coincidence:

If America declared its Independence from the European monarchies in 1776, how is it possible that every single president has descended from European monarchs?  If presidents are democratically elected as we are told, what are the odds that we would always choose members of British and French royal bloodlines to lead us?

The whole thing is one big conspiracy to keep the aristocracy in power, Dubay says:

Researchers like David Icke, Michael Tsarion, and Fritz Springmeier, along with foundations like the New England Historical Genealogy Society, Burkes [sic] Peerage, the Roman Piso Homepage, and other reliable genealogical sources have documented these royal presidential bloodlines.  Actually, by branching out far enough on the presidential family tree, the dedicated researcher will find that all 44 presidents share kinship, belonging to the same general ancestry, often called the 13th Illuminati bloodline, the Merovingian line, and/or the Windsor-Bush bloodline.

The fact that he goes to David Icke as a source should put you on notice right there.  And he goes on to say that not only have the elected presidents all been cousins, so are the people they ran against.  So we'd have elected members of The Family even had the other candidate won.  As an example, he says that George W. Bush and his opponent, John Kerry, are...

*cue ominous music*

16th cousins.

That was the point where I started laughing.  Because if you're not conversant with all the once-removed lingo of the genealogists, "16th cousins" means that Bush and Kerry share one set of great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents.  At an average generation time of 28 years, this means that this set of great-etc. grandparents lived almost 500 years ago.

Let's throw in a few other inconvenient facts.  If all two presidents share is descent from Charlemagne, that pushes back their common ancestry to about 1,200 years ago.  Meaning that Charlemagne and whichever of his various wives and mistresses were involved were the pair's mutual 40-times-great grandparents.

Besides just being ridiculous, which is problematic enough, there's another major flaw in Dubay's argument -- and that is that just about everyone with ancestry in Western Europe is likely to be descended from Charlemagne.  Charlemagne, when he wasn't ruling the Holy Roman Empire, seems to have spent a lot of his time doing one other thing, if you get my drift.  So if you're of western European descent, congratulations -- you have royal blood.

The difficulty is that you're also descended from most of the rest of Europe at the time, including the peasants.  The total population of Europe in the 8th century was about 30 million, give or take; but consider that from a purely mathematical standpoint, if you trace your family tree back that far, doubling at each generation, you would have 2 raised to the 40th power ancestors -- or about 1.1 trillion people.

This means that at that point, you (1) are descended from lots of people multiple times, (2) are probably descended from every single individual who left descendants, and (3) are related to every single person currently alive who has European ancestry.

Including Charlemagne.

Let me put this in a personal way.  I'm a descendant of Charlemagne at least twice, through my descent on my dad's side from the Lyell family (landed Scottish gentry, although they certainly didn't have much money to speak of by the time they got to the United States) and on my mom's side from the de la Tour family (petty French nobility, whose scion kind of blew his reputation by going to Nova Scotia and marrying a Native American).  So is my wife, who not only descends from Charlemagne, but from the aforementioned King Edward III of England (through her descent from the Hylton family, including the "Mad Baron Hylton," about whom I should tell you some time).

So yes... my wife and I are distant cousins.  Maybe one of us should run for president.

I see a resemblance, don't you?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So sorry, Mr. Dubay, but there's no conspiracy going on here, unless you count the fact that every president thus far has had at least some western European ancestry.  Until we elect a president who is of 100% Chinese descent, we're pretty much stuck with Charlemagne's progeny.

And of course, it still doesn't matter, because anyone of Chinese descent almost certainly has Genghis Khan as an ancestor, because old Genghis proved pretty conclusively that you can make love and war more or less simultaneously.

So that's that.  And now I'm going to go get some breakfast, and figure out how many people my wife would have to bump off in the line of succession before she could become Queen of England.  I wouldn't mind spending the rest of my life as Prince Consort.  Seems like a good gig.

Time lapse

Well, the first thing I need to do in today's post is to figure out if I can correct the timestamp, which is clearly wrong.  Hmmm... let's see... no, it won't let me do it.  Okay, then, I'll just have to state for the record that today you should date all of your checks, documents, and correspondence with "July 25, 1715."

What?  How can that be true, you ask?  1715... so, J. S. Bach would still be alive, King George I would just have been crowned king of England, and the USA wouldn't exist for another sixty-odd years?  To which I chuckle gently, and explain: of course that's not what I mean.  You can't just jump backwards in time, that would be ridiculous.  What I'm saying is that the calendar is wrong, not because we've leapt back to the 18th century, but because...

... the years between 614 and 911 C.E. did not exist.

Yes, according to the Phantom Time Hypothesis (sources here and here), devised by Hans-Ulrich Niemitz and Heribert Illig, time actually went from the year 613 directly to the year 912.  Any events that occurred during those years, or people who are alleged to have lived then are:
1) legends being misunderstood as reality;
2) misinterpretations of documents that refer to events or people from other time periods;
or 3) deliberate fabrications by a bunch of calendar conspirators.

Some of the people who therefore didn't exist are King Harald I Fairhair of Norway, King Alfred the Great of Wessex, the writers Alcuin, Caedmon, Li Po, and Bede... and Charlemagne.

Why, you might ask, do Niemitz and Illig believe this?  Apparently it's based on hiatuses in historical records (the Early Middle Ages in Europe was a chaotic time, and most of the few records that were written during that time have been lost), coupled with perceived gaps in building in Constantinople.  Niemitz and Illig also believe that the development of religious doctrine in Europe goes into a stall between the 7th and 10th centuries, as does the progress of art, language, and science.  All of these gaps, they say, can be explained if those three centuries didn't exist -- they were inventions of a conspiracy of church fathers in the 11th and 12th centuries, that originated with Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II, and has continued lo unto this very day.

Well, let me see here.  Where do I start?

Interesting, if three centuries fell out of historians' pockets somewhere along the way, that astronomical records (especially records of comets and solar eclipses kept by the Chinese) agree precisely with back-calculations done by present day astronomers.  The Tang Dynasty -- which coincides almost perfectly with Niemitz and Illig's lost centuries, and which they consider a "Golden Age Myth" -- not only produced art and artifacts, but kept intricate records of observations of events in the sky.  It's a little hard to explain the solar eclipses that occurred during that time, and which line up perfectly with when astronomers know they occurred, if (1) those three centuries never happened, and (2) the Tang Dynasty astronomers were themselves later fabrications.

We also have the problem that this is the period during which Islam spread across the Middle East -- so we're supposed to believe that we jump right from 614 (Muhammad is still alive, but has yet to make his pilgrimage to Mecca) to 911 (the Muslims are in control of territory from southern Spain to Arabia and beyond)?  And I guess they should revoke my master's degree, because the subject of my thesis (the Viking conquest of England and Scotland) occurred during those years... and so is an elaborate fiction, as is the linguistic and archaeological evidence.

Or, maybe I'm one of the conspirators.  I've been accused of that before.

Anyway, this whole hypothesis seems to be a lot of nonsense, and is yet another good example of Ockham's Razor, not to mention the ECREE Principle.  So, you can relax, and cancel any plans to go back and yell at your high school history teachers -- Charlemagne was almost certainly a real person.  As were Alfred the Great and the rest.  Me, I'm glad.  I have a hard enough time remembering to write the correct year on my checks when January 1 rolls around; I don't know what I'd do if I had to remember that it was a whole different century.