Thursday's Columns
March 19, 2026
The Scrapbook
Our
Story
by
Lawrence Abby Gauthier
ace reporter
The Westphalia Periodic News
Part 1: 1979
the five paragraphs
Suddenly I'm 78 years old. It's taken 78 years to think and be what I am today. Things don't happen overnight. Turn the page...
Leafing through a scrapbook of my old newspaper columns, I found what I was looking for. It was 1979. I was an investigative reporter and columnist at the Oakland Press in Pontiac, Michigan. Iranian revolutionaries had just taken 52 Americans hostage. I remembered that the column had been entitled "A Sickness in the Land." I remembered that the editors had wanted me to cut the final five paragraphs. We argued about it over beers and shots of cheap whiskey after work. It was my column, I argued, not news. It's where I was free to say what I think. They said I'd be called a conspiracy theorist. I said I didn't give a shit. I threatened to quit. They ordered another round and the five paragraphs stayed. So, here's the five paragraphs I wrote when I was 31 years old, 47 years ago...
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To put the whole thing in perspective, one only has to take a look at the ‘Project 80’s’ report recently released by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a group formed in this country in 1919 as an adjunct to British Intelligence networks.
The bottom line of this mammoth document is that the most critical problem facing the world during the coming decades is the gulf between the developed industrial nations and the so-called ‘Third World.’
The solution, according to this group of elites, is not to foster growth and progress throughout the world, but to begin bringing the industrial sectors down to Third World levels through a policy of "controlled disintegration."
The method to be employed is a ‘return’ to outdated technological levels — biomass (or wood burning), coal gasification (the technology used by Hitler to fuel his war machine), windmills (like in a tulip field) and solar (the technology used by my mother to dry clothes on the backyard line).
The excuse employed is the ‘energy crisis,’ coupled with the press-created anti-nuclear hysteria. The natural’ consequences will not be the fiction of "energy independence, but bankruptcy and despair — the creation of a national consciousness that will accept anything, including wars like the planned invasion of the Persian Gulf region.
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Part 2: 2026
the punch line
Culley Jane was upstairs at her computer working on the next chapter of her latest novel. I could hear her laughing. I called out: “Writing something funny?” She just laughed.
I think there’s no better feeling in the world than a good laugh. It was my birthday. I was suddenly 78 years old. To have made it this far after the way I’d lived my life seemed like a joke waiting for the punch line.
What I wanted for my birthday was to write something funny so everybody could have a good laugh.
But I couldn’t get myself into the mood.
I’ve been reading Michael Steinberger’s recent best seller, “THE PHILOSOPHER IN THE VALLEY.“
No, it’s not about my favorite philosopher, Leibniz. It’s about Palantir CEO Alex Karp, subtitled “the Rise of the Surveillance State.”
Right away you get the feeling that the book is dealing with an unbalanced mind. The first chapter of the book is entitled: “MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR HIMSELF.” Karp is the archetype of all the Alex Karps of the world, lacking the ability to feel part of anything larger than themselves.
Kind of sad, you know.
In the language of Wikipedia: “Palantir Technologies, Inc. is an American publicly traded company that develops data integration and analytics platforms enabling government agencies, militaries, and corporations to make decisions by combining and analyzing data from multiple sources.”
Not very funny.
The way it works, the DOD, now the DOW, asks Palantir a question, like: “Given the givens, what’s the quickest, most efficient way to destroy Persia… the only way to bend it to our will, or at least our best bet to ger ‘er done?”
The DOW follows orders.
According to former CIA analyst/IAEA weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Palantir most likely supplied the targeting data for World War Three’s opening attack… on a school for young girls in southern Iran, an algorithmically calculated act to spiritually and demographically demoralize and break the will a population to resist the inevitable, according to a tech company’s creation. The soldier on a ship at the end of a long chain of command passing down orders via Starlink doesn’t even have to think, just push a button and hope the Alex Karps of the world know what they’re doing.
Not very funny at all.
Ironically, the State of Israel was born the same year I was born. That’s not funny, either. Kind of spooky, actually. But Leibniz said things are destined to be better because it’s possible and what’s possible demands to exist.
A rabbi and a priest walk into a neighborhood bar together. The muslin cleric behind the bar says, “What’ll it be?” They all laugh at one another’s jokes. Off in their own dark corners sit the Alex Karps of the world, alone, but safely protected behind their walls.
