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Posted April 19, 2023.
Nicholas Strakon: Yes, I do subject myself to (free) mailings from Garrison Keillor, and I sometimes even read them.
Oppressed as we all are these days by the screaming, crazy-evil Woke, I sometimes forget how infuriating the old mind-meld liberals we grew up with could be.
Here’s Keillor commenting on a cheerful scene of frolickers in Central Park. (I have ventured to highlight a couple passages with bold-face.)
How many of these walkers and runners believe that the Illuminati use vaccines to cause autism, that the government is withholding the cure for cancer as a favor to Big Pharm, that a federal research facility in Alaska is engaged in mind control, that Bigfoot is drinking the blood of small children in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the shots came from the grassy knoll and not the School Book Depository?I’ve noted before the establishment-liberal technique of conflating Flat Earthism and matters of vital public debate. We all saw a resurgence of that during the Covidian frenzy.Not many, I would guess. The constant social interactions of urban life tend to erode the sharper edges of lunacy....
By the way, if you choose to expose yourself to the whole thing, good luck getting past Keillor’s opening: “It was good to see clips of Joe Biden being welcomed by big happy crowds in Ireland, grinning, shaking hands, posing for pictures, kissing babies, quoting Irish poets, busy being beloved by all who waited to
Modine Herbey comments: “The constant social interactions of urban life tend to erode the sharper edges of lunacy”? Boy, there’s a counterintuitive observation if ever there was one. You might even call it lunatic.Henry Gallagher Fields detects some irony: Haven’t the majority of Kennedy-assassination revisionists always been ... old-time liberals?
Nicholas Strakon: Caitlin Johnstone, one of my favorite “righteous leftists,” has been on fire lately — even more incandescently than usual, I mean. Please read: “Free Those Who Expose Government Misdeeds, Jail Those Who Try To Conceal Them” (April 19, 2023). She writes:
It’s just so crazy how it’s taken as a given that governments keep these secrets for good and noble reasons which must be protected with as much force as necessary, when we know for a fact that this is false and have known it for generations. As Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”I urge you to read Johnstone’s
Some of Johnstone’s commentary may resonate with readers of Ronn Neff’s “Polite Totalitarianism,” the most important of TLD’s foundational
Posted April 7, 2023.
Nicholas Strakon: Amid the frenzy over Donald Trump’s indictment, I have to ask: Is he charged with anything that would be a crime in a free
Nicholas Strakon: Ann Coulter offers an interesting and — say I — plausible take on the Left’s indictment of Trump, in her April 6 piece at Taki’s: “You’re Being Played, Republicans!” Ω
Edward Morrison Morley: The Rev. Dr. Greta must be outraged. (Assuming she knows what a “homer” is.)
“Going, going, gone: Study says climate change juicing homers,” by Seth Borenstein, AP, April 7, 2023.Lead: “Climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending an extra 50 or so home runs a year over the fences, a new study
Posted March 23, 2023.
Nicholas Strakon: Doctor ecclesiæ!
“University of Helsinki to bestow honorary degree to Greta Thunberg” (The College Fix, March 21, 2023).What degree? Why, naturally, a doctorate in ... theology! This would be very pointed satire if it were satire, but it’s for real. Reality just keeps getting more and more risible here in Clown World ... No, make that Evil
Posted February 28, 2023.
Edward Morrison Morley: National Geographic soft on ChiComs or just soft in the head? You be the judge!
Mr. Morley, TLD’s cultural correspondent [Ed.: Wait. I thought Edna St. Louis Missouri was ... Oh, never mind.], has taken time off from his busy schedule of mining bit coins to enlighten himself by reading Nat Geo on line. Apparently this was to no avail. — Ed.Here’s the Nat Geo clickbait:
“What’s with the big secret? China uncovered an 800-year-old shipwreck, but for decades, the authoritative government kept the exciting undersea discovery from its people — and the world. Nat Geo looks into the ‘why’ in this story.”
Why, indeed. The “hook” is that Nat Geo seems to be reproving the ChiComs for keeping secrets. Surprise! Wow! However, readers who hope the story will finally confirm that the ChiComs are using slave labor to do dirty archaeological work among other things, or, worse, that the good ship Nanhai Nr. 1 was a Uighur pirate ship that terrorized the high seas before coming to its timely demise, will be sadly disappointed.
Alas, the “secret” turns out to be that the ChiComs are meticulous scientists (cf. Wuhan Lab) who “took 20 years just to develop an excavation plan that preserved this priceless time capsule.” Obviously a model for enlightened scientists everywhere and a timely rebuke to capitalist archaeologists who are in it for a quick buck. The piece concludes, “To many Chinese people, the Nanhai Nr. 1 reflects both the glories of China’s mercantile past as well as its ambitious projects for the future,” such as the “Belt and Road Initiative, a massive China-funded scheme launched in 2013 to invest in infrastructure in dozens of countries [in] a conscious updating of both the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road.” (In contrast to capitalist or neo-capitalist countries that just exploit these countries and steal their resources.)
No word on how we capitalist swine and our exploited masses should respond or think, but one would guess that cowering in shame at our multi-millennial systemically deplorable past would be a good start, followed by buying their profusely illustrated archaeological manuals (ChiCom or Nat Geo, you pick ’em), while offering to pay reparations to the ChiComs and pretty much every country in the world.
Some readers will be slightly puzzled by the fact that Nat Geo doesn’t think the ChiComs are a brutal Communist regime, or a rapacious totalitarian dictatorship, but are merely an “authoritative government.” They might suppose this to be a typo for “authoritarian,” but they would be wrong.
You see, “authoritative,” according to the authoritative American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, means the following:
1. Having or arising from authority; official.So it’s clearly not a typo, my dear fascist pig readers. That pretty accurately describes how the highly reliable Nat Geo (and probably the demonstrably official American Heritage) think about the acknowledgedly excellent ChiComs and their authoritative leader-for-life.
2. Of acknowledged accuracy or excellence; highly reliable.
3. Demonstrating authority; commanding.
Next Week: TLD will carry Mr. Morley’s partially live interview with George Orwell conducted while he (Orwell not Morley) spins in his
Posted January 23, 2023.
Edna St. Louis Missouri: Good news ... and bad news.
Ms. Missouri is TLD’s Cultural Correspondent. Her last international posting was to an undisclosed location. — Ed.Claims have proliferated that Harry Windsor’s memoir was the best-selling book of all time in the United States in its first week. The good news is that this is untrue (i.e., false, a lie, an inoperable statement, etc.). According to the Wall Street Journal on
Edward Morrison Morley: Pinocchio Award nominees.
Mr. Morley is TLD’s Economics Correspondent. He is currently on a long-term leave of absence, but insists that this does not mean he is actually deceased. Time will tell. — Ed.Gov. Gavin Newsom, D(unce) California, recently claimed that “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” The impertinent Sacramento Bee on
Newsom still has a ways to go to actually complete with Sleepy Joe Biden as dissimulator in chief, but once JB shuffles off this mortal coil, he could be a serious contender (Newsom, not Biden) in being economical with the truth. Joey is such a teller of tales that the Washington Post’s “fact-checker” stopped “fact-checking” after the first 100 days of the Biden monarchy, while it relentlessly pursued Orange Man throughout his full term. And, mirabile dictu, CNN recently published “Fact check: A look at Biden’s first year in false claims”
Posted December 28, 2022.
Edward Morrison Morley: Death, oh Death, where is thy stink?
Mr. Morley is, or was until his recent reported demise, TLD’s Death Correspondent. — Ed.“Is Death Even Real?
A mind-blowing scientific discovery could change what it means to die.”
That is the question raised in the
Short answer: Ask civilians in Ukraine, Nigeria, China, Yemen, and Chicago.
BTW, since when did Popular Mechanics become a health sciences rag instead of telling us about the latest muscle cars, how you could build a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of tooth picks, and how to heat your home with the latest perpetual-motion machine or tooth-pick scale models? (Hint: how about when gas-guzzling muscle cars were placed on the planetary naughty list?) Ω
Posted December 13, 2022.
Anonymous sources and the New York Times
as told by an anonymous source to Edward Morrison Morley.
Mr. Morley is TLD’s Anonymous Sources Correspondent and vouches for the anonymous source cited below because said source has never failed to provide scandalous information in the past and, other than certain financial incentives, has no other motivation for telling Mr. Morley stuff that he could have made up himself. — Ed.Here is what the New York Times uses to evaluate use of anonymous sources, according to my exclusive anonymous source. [Editor’s note: Actually, we later discovered that the quoted material below was published by the Times as a sidebar to a story on the trade of Brittney Griner (basketball player and role model for LGBTQI+@let’smakeadeal**<™ and other intersectional people everywhere except in Russia) for Viktor Bout (Russian arms dealer who according to our anonymous source is nicknamed “Merchant of Death”). However, the source obviously knows the information and seems like a good guy/gal, so we are running this S&t as is.]
Here is the NYT policy: “What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.”
My anonymous source raises the following questions for you to stop and think about:
1. “Do the sources know the information?” And how would they know that? And if they did, why resort to an anonymous source?
2. “What’s their motivation for telling us?” Right. As if anybody could determine that.
3. “Have they proved reliable in the past?” If he/she/it/them/etc is really anonymous, how can they tell?
4. “Can we corroborate the information?” Again, if they can corroborate the information, why not use the corroboration source rather than the anonymous one? Unless the corroboration is also anonymous?
5. “Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. — a “last resort,” presumably, to losing a scoop of some sort, being able to smear some opponent or holder of views the Times doesn’t like, or would stand in the way of “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Bravo NYT. You’re a credit to Third World “journalism.”
Posted December 2, 2022.
Edward Morrison Morley: “The most pro-union president you’ve ever seen” acts to squelch rail unions.
Mr. Morley is TLD’s Foolish Consistency correspondent. He is currently reporting from an undisclosed location. — Ed.Congress just passed a bill forcing railroad unions (AKA the good guys) and Big Railroad (AKA the bad guys) to accept a proposal by the Biden administration that Big Railroad and most of the rail unions had accepted. Not surprisingly, Big Railroad (now AKA the reasonable good guys) was backed by the Wall Street Journal, which deemed the prexy’s proposals reasonable and essential to the future prosperity and welfare of the people. None of the print media took the trouble of pointing out that Sleepy Joe was just passing the buck in a situation/pending crisis caused by his regime’s incompetence.
More surprising was self-proclaimed “most pro-union president” ever Joseph Robinette Biden’s siding against the unions (now AKA the unreasonable bad guys jeopardizing the nation’s already tottering economy). Quoth he in a statement after the vote: “I know that many in Congress shared my reluctance to override the union ratification procedures. But in this case, the consequences of a shutdown were just too great for working families all across the country.”
No word on whether this metric (rejecting proposals with horrible consequences for working families) will be followed in the future or applied retroactively to the first two years of the Brave New World of Bidenism. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was unavailable for
Posted November 28, 2022.
David T. Wright: Forgiveness? Really?
The COVID panic seems to be mostly over. Sure, here in the seat of the Empire I still see anxious-looking people wearing masks in public places, sometimes even outdoors. But most people are going about their daily lives, it seems, pretty much as they did before the great catastrophe.
Of course, that’s ignoring the catastrophic damage wrought by our rulers during two long years of lockdowns, threats, mask mandates, destruction of small businesses, reckless monetary inflation, forced inoculations (often causing injuries and even death), and official lies about treatment options such as ivermectin (also causing deaths).
Perhaps worst of all was an all-out campaign of demonizing and canceling anybody who dared to dissent from the COVID official orthodoxy. Prominent, highly respected physicians and researchers such as Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, and Pierre Kory were mercilessly attacked and deplatformed for daring to disagree publicly with the official line that the mRNA “vaccine” was the only way of dealing with the virus. (As one wag pointed out, the declaration by the Regime that the “vaccine” is safe and effective is not a lie. It’s two lies.) State medical boards revoked physicians’ licenses for daring to use or advocate the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID — treatments that numerous physicians claim work quite well. Hospitals suspended and fired doctors for the same reason.
So here we are, nearly three years later, shell-shocked, impoverished, suffering from runaway price rises, our savings decimated, many of us with our futures ruined, many having friends or family members dead either from the virus or the standard hospital treatment for COVID. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies are billions of dollars richer, as are Amazon and the big tech companies. The ruling class and its hangers-on are sitting pretty. And nobody responsible for the damage — including the lying little weasel Fauci — has been held to account. But now that the panic has run its course, the truth about how we’ve been lied to, manipulated, and harmed by our rulers is, perhaps, beginning to sink in with some of us.
So it’s interesting that the Atlantic, a prestigious and reliable organ of the Ministry of Truth, recently published an article titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” by Emily Oster. Yes indeed. Let’s just forget about the horrific damage visited on us by our betters, and “focus on the future.”
After its publication on
Generally, as a Christian, I’m in favor of forgiveness. But would we be forgiving repentant sinners, or sincere people who made mistakes and acknowledge the errors of their ways? Or would we be allowing arrogant, contemptuous rulers to continue destroying us? After all, they don’t seem at all repentant, and they’re certainly not very forgiving themselves. Nearly two years after the “insurrection” of
Then there’s their outrageous behavior in the recent election. When I was young, the votes all got counted in a few hours. Now we’re supposed to wait for days. The Zombie Emperor pompously informed us that it would take a long time to count the ballots, and in closely contested states controlled by Democrats, that’s exactly what happened. Just as in the previous election, dragging out the count miraculously seemed to swing elections away from Republicans to Democrats. It looks to me as if they know they’re not fooling many people, and they just don’t care. And they’re such sore winners; they don’t seem to be ready to forgive at all.
They’re not even backing off on condemning so-called anti-vaxxers for resisting a “vaccine” that has been shown to neither protect from the virus nor prevent its transmission. Here’s a screed condemning the state of Florida for discouraging vaccination of young people owing to the threat of heart damage. And here’s an article acknowledging that such a threat exists — from the very same organization.
And don’t get me started about Ukraine. The Russians have apparently decided that grinding up the Ukrainian military slowly in hopes of negotiations isn’t going to work. So they’re preparing to finish the job once and for all and eliminate Ukraine as a NATO-allied threat. But Minitrue continues to insist that Russia is on the brink of defeat. After Russia made a tactical retreat from Kherson, the U.S. propaganda organs practically wet themselves with joy. In fact, the Empire is losing not only the Ukrainian conflict, but its position as the world hegemon. And our rulers seem to be determined a) to keep the American public from discovering the truth, b) to continue confronting not only Russia but China as well, risking nuclear war, and c) to isolate America as the rest of the world gets fed up and takes a different path, accelerating our economic decline.
Speaking of Ukraine, the FTX financial scandal, in which a nest of rich, entitled sexual degenerates ran a crypto-currency Ponzi scheme, apparently involved a scheme using “aid” to that benighted country to launder money stolen from customers, much of it stolen from private investors. The laundered funds were then used to finance U.S. political campaigns. The fact that FTX was based on a pyramid was clear back in July, but nobody important seemed to be interested. You can bet that our Ministries of Truth and Love will make sure that we’re never even given the chance to forgive that outrage.
And let’s not forget the continuing tidal wave of foreigners bestowed on us by our benevolent rulers, despite the overwhelming opposition of the people who already live here. Nothing we say or do, no matter who is voted into office, stems the flow, completing our ruin as a civilization. If you stick your head out in opposition, the people in charge will do their best to destroy you. No forgiveness there.
It just goes on and on. It seems to me that forgiveness isn’t the point here. The question really is: how do we defend ourselves against our rapacious, evil rulers and their smug, vicious allies in Minitrue and academia? I have to admit I’m
Notice. In September 2021 when I announced the death of Ronn Neff — TLD’s co-founder and my close friend for half a century — I noted that the future of our website was uncertain. That was largely because of questions involving the ownership of the Thornwalker domain (which Ronn created) and how it was to be sustained after his death.
I am happy to say that a friend of The Last Ditch has donated some of his cyberspace as a home for the Thornwalker domain, including TLD, and that he and another friend have completed the daunting technical task of moving the domain to that new home.
I am not just happy, of course, but also most grateful to those two generous stalwarts.
The TLD site will never again be as active with respect to new writings as it was in its heyday. As editor and publisher, I continue in semi-retirement. But the intellectual legacy of Ronn Neff and our other writers, smart and courageous, will continue to have a place on the Net for the foreseeable future.
Tom McPherren
(“Nicholas Strakon”) Ω
TLD is a forum of opinion, edited by hard-core market anarchists, that does not flinch from any of the most pressing issues of our time. We are especially interested in questions of culture and ethnicity, our Polite Totalitarian ruling class, and the homicidal humanitarianism of the U.S. Empire.Our writers include anarcho-pessimists, Old Believers in the West, unreconstructed Confederates, neo-Objectivists, and other enemies of the permanent regime. We are conscientiously indifferent to considerations of thoughtcrime. Thus, from individualist and Euro-American perspectives, we confront the end of civilization — and do our level best to name its destroyers.
TLD was founded as a print newsletter in 1994 by Nicholas Strakon and Ronald N. Neff (1949–2021). We discontinued the print version in 1998. (More about who we are.)
— Nicholas Strakon, editor-in-chief
General e-mail to The Ditch: Nstrakon@hotmail.com.
“If this government cared about ideas, it would crack down on The Last Ditch. It could be called The Joy of Thinking.”
“Whoever said ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ didn’t realize it, but he was thinking of The Last Ditch.”
— Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance
Permanently recommended readings
"What Is Austrian Economics?" (Mises Institute)
"I, Pencil," by Leonard E. Read (Liberty Fund;
scroll down for text)
"The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,"
by Roy A. Childs, Jr. (TLD)
"Polite totalitarianism," by Ronald N. Neff (TLD)
Published by Thornwalker at thornwalker.com