The Need for Burning Anarchy Isn't Just in Music

 Since punk began as a rebellion against boredom, the dead space of commercial music production and the empty hedonism born of the hippie era’s “great sexual revolution”, it was only a matter of time until it, too, would become corrupted. A yearning for its own prelapsarian state was built into punk’s ethos. As the punk musician-turned-philosopher Simon Critchley tells Gallix, “Because of the acute awareness of the fact that punk . . . would become a creature of the very music industry whose codes it subverted, we knew that it was going to be shortlived. And that was fine”.

The Most Mysterious of the Lost Languages

Of all the literatures in the world, the smallest and most enigmatic belongs without question to the people of Easter Island. It is written in a script—rongorongo—that no one can decipher. Experts cannot even agree whether it is an alphabet, a syllabary, a mnemonic, or a rebus. Its entire corpus consists of two dozen texts. The longest, consisting of a few thousand signs, winds its way around a magnificent ceremonial staff. The shortest texts—if they can even be called that—consist of barely more than a single sign. One took the form of a tattoo on a man’s back. Another was carved onto a human skull.

I Bet You Can't Say "Super Blue Blood Moon" Three Times Real Fast

THIS IS TONIGHT!

Eclipse 2018: When is the Super Blue Blood Moon in YOUR area?  UK, USA and Canada locations

I Expected Flying Cars by the Year 2018, Not This Nonsense

Berserk leprosy bacteria are wildly mutating to become extremely drug resistant

Coincidentally, I used to play bass for Berzerk Leprosy.

Anyone Sentient Knows That Electric Cars are Dirty

Mazda Says Its Next-Generation Gasoline Engine Will Run Cleaner Than an Electric Car 

Sorry, owners of vehicles such as the Toyota Smug Prius, but that lithium is poisonous, filthy, and requires slave labor to mine it.  I'll just fill up with regular, thank you.

Working-Class Men, Too; But That's Not Really New

Feminists have a new target: working-class women

Many of the clergy whom I have known, most of whom would self-identify as feminist, who are educated and mostly white, have had difficulty with working class men and women.  In fact, they tend to mock them behind their backs; Their lack of an Episcopal Church-approved education, their cars [well, and pick-up trucks], their clothing, their jobs, etc.  Episcopal clergy can be afraid of the people who repair things in their churches and related buildings.

One of my fondest moments was when I was moving into a new office.  I had not yet met any member of the parish besides the vestry, including the office staff.  I was dressed in moving clothes, jeans and a flannel work shirt, and powering a hand truck [aka a dolly] topped off with too many boxes of books that I was off-loading from my pick-up truck.  I looked like a mover.  A common, plodding, un-educated member of the working class who probably voted for Trump.

A fellow clergy-person was on the walkway in front of me.  I nodded a greeting and she stared at me for a moment and then rushed to get in front of me.  I thought at first that she intended to hold open the doors for me.  No, that wasn't it.  She was rushing to get into the building ahead of the scary working class man and left me to manage the 200 pounds of books, precariously balanced on the hand truck, along with the two sets of doors.

I've long suspected that the verse from our Baptismal Covenant where we promise to "respect the dignity of every human being" has meant for too many "as long as we perceive them to be members of our social class."

I've Surfed All Over the World; The Only Place I Have Ever Caught Something Potentially Deadly was on the Southern Californian Coast

By which I mean they may have more pressing health issues if the water at their beaches is more toxic than that of Haiti, Vanuatu, or New Jersey.

California may label coffee a cancer risk

Yes, I See This Happening to Gay Witness in the Church

 Please read this entire article:

For a couple of decades, many non-leftists, in the wake of the plague, took more control of the messaging of gay rights. We emphasized those things that united gays and straights, and we celebrated institutions of integration — such as marriage rights and open military service. We portrayed ourselves as average citizens seeking merely the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. We were largely gender-conforming, which is not in any way better than non-gender-conforming, but this helped get the conversation started and sustained. We adopted a much less leftist stance — and few can really dispute that it was one of the most swiftly successful civil-rights movements in history.

But since Obergefell? As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left. Above all, they have advocated transgenderism, an ideology that goes far beyond recognizing the dignity and humanity and civil equality of trans people into a critique of gender, masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. “Live and let live” became: “If you don’t believe gender is nonbinary, you’re a bigot.” I would be shocked if this sudden lurch in the message didn’t in some way negatively affect some straight people’s views of gays.

The left’s indifference to religious freedom — see the question of Masterpiece Cakeshop — has also taken a toll.

The moral preening from some members of The Episcopal Church's leadership began this process as well, roiling the institution that I have served since my days as a lowly monk not with unifying change, but with narcissistic self-promotion.  Many of those who take to the microphones at diocesan conventions and who direct the well-funded institutes of the church simply repeat the slogans and ideology of "Problematicism", the endless and eternal search to find someone to blame and punish for a world that isn't perfect.

So much for The Good News.

Tonight's Irrelevant "Jack Kerouac" Reference Trifecta

The Muse, engaging in his favorite hobby

 Marijuana Scientists Are Getting High Wages

and

Interview: Shane Joyce – The Sadness of King Joyce

and

The common thread that binds Leonardo, Franklin, Einstein and Jobs

When you've either nothing to say or are simply crafting a prosaic article, always make a Kerouac reference.  It lends panache to your tedium. 

Agricultural Archaeology

Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven’t simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.

Another Irrelevant "Jack Kerouac" Reference

In Detroit, Motown nights are reborn

And another, this time from Harness Racing Update [yes, that's right]:

Breaking Stride: Parting Words

I Confess That I Missed It Myself

Pity poor John Milton. Last year also marked the 350th anniversary of the publication of Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in English and one of the greatest works of Western literature, and hardly a word was said about either the man or the work....

Archaeological News

WATCH: Israelis Crack the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Ancient Code

Heinrich Harrer

Wherever I live, I shall feel homesick for Tibet. I often think I can still hear the cries of wild geese and cranes and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear, cold moonlight. My heartfelt wish is that my story may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world.

One of the members of my first parish was a respected teacher of autistic children.  She was patient, kind, and extremely helpful to those in her charge.  I once watched her handle a child who was emotionally compromised and disruptive in a local fast food restaurant.  She simultaneously pacified the child, assured the patrons, and convinced the mildly idiotic restaurant manager not to call the cops, all with a preternatural calm.  It really was her calling.

At some point, when attending some civic ceremony honoring local educators, I asked if my parishioner had ever been so honored.  The chairwoman of the organization was horrified at my question.  "Don't you know she used to be a Nazi?  We won't be honoring that."  The chairwoman was a member of the church across the town square from my own, but I don't think her denomination messed with that "reconciliation" stuff.

I was, as they say, non-plussed.  Later, I would hear my parishioner's story.

She was born in Germany in the 1920's to a middle-class family in Leipzig.  When she was placed by Germany's new government in a state organization for young people, one that promoted health and athleticism, the virtues of vegetarianism, and community service, she and every child in her school belonged.  She also noted that it was where one met all of the "cute boys".

It was, as historically sensitive readers will have already surmised, the Hitler Youth.  For this, she was branded a Nazi in perpetuity, even in the United States, traditionally the land of second chances and redemption.  All she ever did in her teenage years was attend camping weekends and help clean roadways of debris and trash.  Despite the great and valuable work she did for the remainder of her days, a choice made for her at fourteen would determine how some would regard her for the rest of her life.  In our small town she was sometimes even shunned, except by the desperate parents of autistic children for whom no one else would serve their needs as well or as lovingly.

I thought of her upon the death of Heinrich Harrer, whose obituaries gave some glancing notice of his fascinating life and highly individual service to the global realities of the 20th century, but preferred to mention that, when he was in his twenties, in order to become a ski instructor to mountaineers, it was necessary for him to join the Schutzstaffel, the quasi-military organization of the Nazi Party.  For this choice, made by an ambitious young man, he was deposited into the bin of history, shunned by historians and not to be mentioned by our moral superiors who make up the fourth estate.  It's a pity, really, as his role is one that deserves some proper notice.

So, we'll begin in 1938, when Harrer, a 26-year-old Austrian, physical and vigorous, was determined to be the first to climb the North Face of the Eiger Mountain with a group of mountaineers.  It was a daunting and ambitious goal, not to mention a tad suicidal, as the Eiger is a legendarily dangerous summit.  However, owing to their training and natural robustness, they succeeded and became, for a few years, the toast of the close-knit world of mountain-climbers.  World War II would intrude on such pursuits, however, as surely as the war would intrude on the lives of Harrer and his contemporaries on all sides of the conflict.

Upon returning from the Eiger, with Harrer on the left

Harrer and a group of other Austro-German climbers had gathered in India to attempt a summit of Nanga Parbat, a 26,000 peak in the Himalayas, when war was declared in 1939.  As India was still a British colony, and as the climbers were all healthy young men of military age, and hence mandated members of the German military, they were captured and placed in a prisoner-of-war camp in Bombay.  While this was not a dire experience for non-combatant military such as Harrer, they were required by German military law to attempt to escape.  [This is common, by the way.  American military can face court-martial for not attempting to escape imprisonment.]  This they did, time and again, only to be returned to the camp.  In punishment for these repeated attempts, the prisoners were relocated to a less temperate environment in Dehradun, about 100 miles from India's border with Tibet.  When Harrer and the others learned that one of their company could speak the Tibetan language, they formulated a more agreeable plan.

Since all of their attempts to exit captivity in India had been in a predictable direction, Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, a rare climber in that he was so self-effacing that his name is rarely mentioned in stories of Harrer, intended to make their way through Tibet to Burma, the latter then under the control of the Japanese, Germany's ostensible ally.  In 1944, disguised as Indian laborers, the prisoners simply walked out of the gates of their camp and into the mountains. This would begin an adventure that, over the next seven years, would bring a previously mysterious and obtuse kingdom, and its enigmatic leader, into the forefront of post-war diplomacy and global politics.

Over a year-and-a-half after their successful escape, living by their wits and abilities, Harrer and Aufschnaiter arrived in Tibet's capital of Lhasa in 1946, unaware that the war had concluded some five months earlier.  Since Lhasa was still so exotic it was only known as the inspiration for the fictional kingdom of Shangri-La in James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, and since Western travelers were so rare as to be a curiosity observed by the locals from behind a yak, Harrer and Aufschnaiter's arrival was certainly noticed.  While initially stand-offish, the very young leader of Tibet [and the branch of Buddhism known as Vajrayana] recognized that, with Tibet's newly Communist neighbor, China, ascendant and expressing an interest in annexing his country, it would be important to know something of the western world outside of the formidable walls of the Himalayas.

Thus, Heinrich Harrer was summoned to an audience with the 14th Dalai Lama, the thirteen-year-old god-king of Tibet.  Being of an open mind and balanced spirituality, and a seemingly insatiable curiosity about...well, just about everything, the Dalai Lama found Harrer and his exploits fascinating.  So much so that by 1948 Heinrich Harrer had become an official agent of the Tibetan government, responsible for tutoring the Lama in math, science, world history, and English.  Harrer would even go so far as to build a simple movie theater for the Lama so that he might show him of life in the outside world.  The two would share a mutual respect and friendship that would last for decades.

The Special Counsel to His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama

By 1952, the Chinese had invaded Tibet and begun a gradual take-over the country.  Realizing that a Westerner would not be treated well by their new overlords, the Lama released Harrer from his obligation and saw to it that he was escorted back to the Indian border.  Harrer would then return to Austria and a very different world from the one he had last seen in 1939.  Things would deteriorate in Tibet to the point that the CIA eventually evacuated the Dalai Lama from Tibet and helped him set up a provisional government in neighboring Nepal, a place that serves as his "temporary" capital to this day.

Harrer, now forty, did what he had done before, with one notable addition.  As the post-war world was being reminded of what peace could be like, and as Harrer, still celebrated within his tight mountaineering community, had now returned from obscurity, he was in demand to climb and explore in a number of places from Alaska to the Amazon to the Mountains of the Moon.  There was also now a deep interest in the more remote parts of the world and he became a celebrated public speaker, detailing his adventures as the special adviser to the Dalai Lama, making the god-king known and accessible to the Western audiences.

[If you're wondering whatever happened to Peter Aufschnaiter, while Harrer and the god-king were watching movies, Aufschnaiter was designing Lhasa's first sewage system and hydro-electric plant, plus contributing to the field of archaeology by cataloging the finds uncovered by the digging necessary for the construction of his Tibetan innovations.  While Harrer would return to Europe, Aufschnaiter would remain in Nepal, eventually becoming a Nepalese citizen, and continue his work for the benefit of the Tibetan/Nepalese people.  The difference between the two men is that, acting upon what we now call "branding", Harrer created a role for himself on the lecture circuit, Aufschnaiter didn't.]

In addition to his continued exploration and lecturing, Harrer wrote 20 books about his experiences, with the best among them being Seven Years in Tibet.  [In testimony to its popularity, it would be made into a movie with Brad Pitt playing the role of Harrer.]  It is still in print along with his journal of the ascent of the Eiger's North Face and his experiences upon returning to Tibet many years after the Chinese occupation.  Additionally, he made several documentaries for German television that informed a new generation about Tibet and its travails, eventually creating the Heinrich Harrer Museum in Austria.

Upon his death in 2006 at the age of 93, Harrer's old student and friend, who had risen in recognition and popularity throughout the world during the remainder of the 20th century, would write the following:

'When I first met him in 1949, he was from a world I was not familiar with. I learned many things, particularly about Europe, from him.'I want to take this opportunity to express my immense gratitude and appreciation for his creating so much awareness about Tibet and the Tibetan people through his well-known book Seven Years in Tibet and the many lectures he gave throughout his life. His love and respect for the Tibetan people are clearly evident in his writings and his talks'.'We feel we have lost a loyal friend from the West, who had the unique opportunity to experience life in Tibet for seven long years before Tibet lost its freedom. We Tibetans will always remember Heinrich Harrer and will miss him greatly.

It's Australia Day!

Today's Irrelevant "Jack Kerouac" Reference

A Taste of Nirvana: Tampa’s Wat Mongkolratanaram Buddhist Temple

Surf Eagles!

Bald eagles casually float down Mississippi river on ice pic.twitter.com/R5daFlStH6

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 26, 2018

I'm Trying to Fit "Fopdoodle" Into a Sentence Today

An A to Z of Noah Webster’s Finest Forgotten Words

Today's Irrelevant "Jack Kerouac" Reference

The Roots of Romanticism in David Bowie's Berlin Triptych

The Older We Get, the More Sense She Makes

Germaine Greer criticises 'whingeing' #MeToo movement, saying in the 'old days' women would 'slap down leering men'

We've All Been There

Hawaii Gov. David Ige slow to correct false missile alert because he couldn’t log onto Twitter

Dependency Makes One a Servant; Work is Liberation

After Denver hired homeless people to shovel mulch and perform other day labor, more than 100 landed regular jobs

“When you take a good person (who’s) down, broken, discouraged, and you give them an opportunity to be proud of their self — to stand up and do something for their self — that’s one of the greatest gifts anybody can give to anybody...."

Perhaps the best government program of recent memory; it's almost enough to make a libertarian trust politicians, again.  Almost.

Today's Irrelevant "Jack Kerouac" Reference

Washington’s current and future poets laureate visit YVC for a ‘passing of the guard’ ceremony

I'm Trying to Compose the Theological Version of This

N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

You'll have to Google this.  Despite Dad being a mathematician/physicist, who trained me well in equations and "ciphering", I don't think I can explain it very well.

This is Getting Real Interesting for Those of Us Who Respect Free Thinking and Verbal Precision

Attacking ramparts in war of words

It's About Time

Puerto Rico to privatize its power system

Having just returned from there, I found it disheartening to see that, at night, lights were on only in Old San Juan and around the casino.  The lights from houses and streetlights that used to illuminate the surrounding hills were dark.  In fact, I was sad to see one of my favorite places suffering from a general societal disintegration.

I Appreciate a Good Protest as Much as the Next American, but at Least Clean Up after Yourselves

I always enjoy it when Communist-affiliated organizations protest on behalf of "the people", but also expect "the people" to clean up after them.  It shows what's behind the red mask, doesn't it?

Male/Female Relations are a System; It Will Require the Work of Both Genders to Restore Dignity to It

The point is not that British prudery represents an antidote to gender inequities. Modesty and propriety are not enough to make a magnanimous society, as contemporary Islamic republics demonstrate. But the relationship between a grounded, transcendentally moral sexual ethic and the protection of women from exploitation and abuse may not be the inverse relationship our twentieth-century sages believed it to be.

Just a year ago, protesting simulated sexuality in films and television was thought to be nothing more than anti-female fundamentalism. In the past year, however, Hollywood has yielded some of its non-secrets, and we know that the entertainment industry is littered with voyeuristic men in charge of screenplays and production companies. All that skin and coarse talk that befuddled audiences with its excessiveness now becomes explicable, and the explanation does not flatter those who cheered the naked bodies as victories over repression.

Everything You Know is Wrong

Worst climate warnings ‘will not come true’

Today's Irrelevant Jack Kerouac Reference

Trust me, there will be a lot of these.

Slam poet of the San Juans

Twitter, According to St. Augustine of Hippo

"They speak as they do, not because they are men of God, or because they have seen in the heart of Moses, your servant, that their explanation is the right one, but simply because they are proud. They have no knowledge of the thoughts in his mind, but they are in love with their own opinions, not because they are true, but because they are their own."

And People Think Archaeologists are Nerdy

Meteorite Hunters Find First Fragments of Michigan Meteor: "Two days ago, this was hundreds of thousands of miles past the moon, and now I'm standing here holding it in my hand."

Yes. Next Question, Please

Did America Get Fat by Listening to Government Experts?

Back from the Hurricane Zone; Postings Will Resume Shortly

My spiritual home while away: St. Mark's Anglican Church in Bridgetown, Barbados.

An Obituary of Note

Lawrence Stager, the Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, emeritus, at Harvard University, died on December 29, 2017, at the age of 74.  

Unsung outside of archaeology, he studied, in particular, the ancient city of Ashkelon.  His excavation revealed much of what we now know of the Old Testament world.

Number Nine is Particularly Interesting

Top 10 Recent Finds Made By Archaeologists On Islands

Hiatus

Currently on a mission trip in a part of the world where the Internet is still a fond memory, rather than a casual reality.  So, intermittent postings will be the standard for the next fortnight.

However, there is a biography this week that will be posted on Friday.

Dear Media

"Alot" is not a word that exists in the English language.  I believe you mean "a lot".

It's not a "new record", it's simply a "record".  As in "We have record temperatures today".

One cannot "center around" something.  That doesn't make sense.  It's "center on".

John Wilson Murray

“I will follow criminals to any place and run them down.”

My uncle was a trooper for the Ohio State Highway Patrol.  He covered, with only two or three others, the 700+ square miles of Ohio's largest county, seemingly always on duty and always driving that beast of a Ford Fairlane or Chevy Impala.  In the trunk was the standard array of safety equipment, from highway flares to a first aid kit to a three day food and water pack in case he was lodged in a snow drift [that would happen enough that, when I first received my driver's license, we were required by law to have emergency food and water in our cars in the winter].  There was also a Remington pump-action shotgun and a Thompson Sub-Machine Gun in there.  My cousins and I liked to look in that massive trunk and imagine Uncle Roger's adventures.

Unk's ride.

When I was older and driving to visit my parents back in Ohio, I would spend the better part of the journey covering that big county that was my now-retired uncle's former beat.  The idea that a few troopers kept law and order in those small towns sprinkled throughout the snow, most of which had no police department or even a town sheriff with a nervous, incompetent deputy, amazed me even more than it did in childhood.  What a remarkable charge that was, and what remarkable men they were who kept some semblance of peace among the boondockers, hillbillies, moonshiners, common and career criminals, and inebriates who could make life unpredictable in the towns surrounding the "big city" of Ashtabula.  [Before any scolding social justice warriors lose their water, my uncle and I are hillbillies, too, thus we can use the "H-Word".]

Now imagine what it was like to serve as the sole agent of the law in a 400,000+ square mile Canadian province with no car, machine gun, radio, or even highway flares.  That was the charge of John Wilson Murray, who became a remarkable and celebrated detective at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It should come as no surprise that Murray was a Scotsman, not just because of his surname, but because of the rather offhand manner in which he approached a daunting responsibility.  Born in Edinburgh in 1840, Murray came to the United States with his family while still a child and, when of age, joined the U.S. Navy as a common sailor.  As most of his experience was realized during the Civil War, he performed his duty in the Great Lakes as part of the flotilla guarding a prisoner-of-war cantonment on an island in Lake Erie.  After the war's end, he joined the Erie, Pennsylvania police department, eventually serving as a detective.

With the planned completion of the Canadian intra-continental railroad, there was a general call for all sorts of workers, not just engineers, conductors, and boiler-men, but also personnel for the railway's own security force.  As it was backed by an eager government's budget, the salary was higher than that of a small city's police force [$1500 a year], so Murray became a railroad detective.  His service was so exemplary that he was hired to a rather particular job created in 1875, that of Detective for the Government of Ontario.  He was the only detective from Toronto to Pickle Lake, from Wood Creek to the border of Manitoba, responsible for investigating crimes committed among the 2,000,000 residents, from the cosmopolitan to the tribal.

From the official Ontario government history, we learn the reasons for the creation of this position:

Murray’s appointment was a response to weaknesses in the existing system of policing and prosecution. The major urban centres had introduced police forces from the 1830s, and the 1858 amendments to the Municipal Corporations Act had required towns of more than 15,000 people to establish their own constabularies. In rural areas law enforcement was the responsibility of local justices of the peace and county constables, who were remunerated by a system of fees. In all areas prosecution was the responsibility of county crown attorneys, who did no investigative work but prosecuted on the basis of whatever information the police could provide. Detectives were not a major feature of the system. Prior to Murray’s appointment the provincial government had employed private detectives on an ad hoc basis, and specialized “detectives” had been used for political purposes, for example in the observation and suppression of Fenian activity. They were also used by the new dominion government for the guarding of public buildings and the investigation of counterfeiting operations. Some municipal forces and county constabularies employed them from the 1860s, but they were not systematically used.

By the 1870s three principal weaknesses had been perceived in this system, especially in rural areas. First, in the words of Hugh McKinnon, chief of the Belleville police, the constable, who was “usually a poor man,” could afford only to “take a look about the immediate neighbourhood”; he went no further because the fees were “totally inadequate to reimburse him for either his time or necessary expenses.” Secondly, localism resulted in patronage, corruption, and jurisdictional disputes, which hampered the investigation of crimes involving prominent figures and of many major crimes. Thirdly, there was an increasing perception that rural constables were simply not capable of investigating anything but minor offences. [1]

Murray proved peripatetic in the pursuit of justice, well-known not only on the streets of Toronto but in many of the remote outposts in the province.  A stern and abiding presence, he also showed an aptitude for self-promotion that ensured that his story and photo were often in the newspaper.  I'm sure that was necessary for the job, too, as it was as much political as investigatory.

Canada's largest city, circa 1890

In 1890, Murray was involved in solving the most notorious murder in the province, the infamous Birchall Case [2], made more prominent due to the advent of Ontario's nascent tabloid newspaper industry.  As all reporting needs a hook to draw in readers [and advertisers], and the best hook is an inspiring hero, Murray's fame was solidified throughout all of Canada.  So much so that, from that time forward, he was often referred to in the press as "The Great Detective".

Murray would, with the aid of some journalist ghost writers, author an autobiography entitled [what else?] The Memoirs of the Great Detective.  Since it was meant to be a general part of tabloid ballyhoo, it cannot be trusted as an accurate source, but it sold papers and enabled Murray to enjoy job security.  Upon his death at the age of 66 in 1906, he was still serving as Ontario's detective, albeit sharing the responsibility with a few others as the provincial population had increased.

The Canadian Broadcasting Company produced a successful TV show in the early 1980's, "The Great Detective", about Murray's exploits, most of them based on factual cases.  The even more popular CBC show, "Murdoch Mysteries" [also available on streaming services and syndicated on U.S. television] is an extrapolation of Murray's work.  As designed for modern tastes, Detective Murdoch uses science and psychology to solve his turn-of-the-century crimes; it should be noted that Murray more often used the more physical and coercive tools of his era to earn confessions.

Nowadays, detection is the responsibility of the Ontario Provincial Police, or OPP, who can boast of over 6200 officers addressing issues of crime and disorderliness.  In their museum, one may read of the prominence of John Wilson Murray's contribution not just to the development of Canadian policing, but in maintaining a sense of lawfulness for which Canadians are still well-known.

So much so that each year an honor guard of the OPP meet at Murray's grave to throw him a salute, replace the OPP, traditional and contemporary Canadian flags that adorn it, and honor his memory in a manner appropriate to such a pre-eminent lawman.

This is a Spoof, Yet It Just Fooled a Collection of Experienced Media Elites

That's About Right

No Christian is Surprised by This

THE UNIVERSE IS FAR BIGGER THAN WE THOUGHT, AND IT HAS 10X MORE GALAXIES

And I Thought 2017 was Weird

Chelsea Clinton denies worshipping Satan

Today It's Satire, but Tomorrow, Who Knows?

LifeWay Releases Fitbit For Tracking Spiritual Health

And Next Door to Australia

New Zealanders build island in bid to avoid alcohol ban

Yes, I Still Miss Australia

Warning note leads man to find red-bellied black snake in car engine

Archaeological News

Israeli archaeologists find 2,700-year-old 'governor of Jerusalem' seal impression

But, But, But...Christians Don't Believe in Science or Something

The Big Bang theory of the universe was developed by a Catholic priest–and the Pope approved

There are too many people who think that Christians exclude the realities of science from their appreciation of the world.  There are too many people who are, essentially, dumb as livestock.

Of the Increasing Emptiness of Episcopal Pronouncements

By "episcopal", we mean in its actual definition, which is "that having to do with bishops".

Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man*

It is entirely right that the Archbishop should express his thanks to the emergency services for their courageous presence during terrorist attacks and at terrible public disasters such as Grenfell. Likewise, his concern for the poor and the sick is something required of him by the faith which he professes. I just wish he would profess the Christian faith rather more than he does. Christian morality is derived from Christian doctrine. And the most fundamental Christian doctrine is that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but we can take comfort and hope from the fact that Jesus Christ died to save us from our sins. So, if we repent and turn to Christ, we shall be saved,

Not a word about this from Welby. As if a chemist were to talk about chemistry while avoiding all reference to chemicals, or England’s opening batsman should walk out to bat – only without his bat.

* The article's title is from a skit by the now-ancient "Beyond the Fringe" comedy troupe, who specialized in playing dotty vicars, that is familiar to English audiences.

People Who Reject Religion Will Always Find Something to Replace It

‘Mindfulness’: Corporate America’s Strange New Gospel