B ehold the Republic’s latest miracle: a renaissance of remedies that cure everything except ignorance. The week brought panaceas by press conference, committees remade in the image of their hecklers, and a federal steward whose ledger smells faintly of liniment.

The Tylenol Jeremiad

Once more the carnival barker points at the medicine cabinet and cries there, there lies the villain! Today’s suspect is acetaminophen in pregnancy— yesterday it was vaccines—tomorrow it will be moonbeams and miasmas. The evidence, such as it is, remains a rickety ladder of correlations: studies with recall bias, dosing fog, and confounders enough to populate a small frontier town.

The Claim: Tylenol causes autism.
The Reality: Associations are inconsistent and encumbered by confounders; causation is unproven and loudly presumed.
The Grift: Panic sells “alternatives,” panels get stacked, and the public square swaps peer review for a bullhorn.

“Correlation, dressed in lace, calls herself Causation and expects a dowry.”

Editor’s note: Consult clinicians; do not take medical counsel from a press conference with a merch table.

Act II: The Alchemy of Folates

Enter folinic acid—leucovorin—trumpeted by courtiers as a curative banner for autism itself. In the ledger’s fine print, however, one finds a narrow indication for rare folate disorders that may mimic autistic traits. Between a precise therapy and a universal “cure” yawns a chasm across which only marketing can leap.

“From indication to proclamation: a coach and several horses.”

Act III: The Committee Recast

Having failed to defeat vaccines with data, the zealots pursue victory by venue: reseat the review boards, season them with professional skeptics, and declare the stew bipartisan. Thus are recommendations thinned to homeopathy—dilute, dilute, until only the aroma remains.

Act IV: The Shopkeeper at the Treasury Window

Onto the stage strides Dr. Mehmet Oz, sanctified not by peer review but by prime time, now presiding over the nation’s public insurance purse. One needn’t allege a single illicit coin to see the farce: the supplementeer appointed comptroller of science. When the bazaar encircles the hospital, receipts begin to masquerade as evidence.

Act V: The Megaphone & The Medicine Wagon

And through it all, the President rings the bell: numbers inflated to operatic tragedy, anecdotes anointed as gospel, the square of certainty hammered onto the round peg of reality. The show must go on; the script is revised nightly; the audience pays at the door.

Tylenol Jeremiad: a fright without foundation sturdy enough to carry policy.
Leucovorin Leap: a narrow therapy stretched on the rack of hype.
Stacked Committees: when referees join the hooligans’ club.
Oz at CMS: the cashier counting coins beside the examining table.

Finale: The Toll

Panic is a splendid salesman. It buys audiences, sells supplements, and mortgages the future. The cost is measured in missed vaccinations, preventable illness, and a public square where every whisper outsings a library. This is not public health; it is commerce in the costume of cure.

The Week That Was (Or Wasn’t)

September 15–21, 2025

What a week it was, dear readers — a procession of indignities so thick that even the stenographers of Bedlam might hesitate to record them. Yet, in service of posterity and our collective incredulity, The Ledger dutifully sets quill to parchment.

The Late Jimmy Kimmel

The week began with the “cancellation” of Jimmy Kimmel — not the ordinary show-business sort, but the political guillotine kind. His show shuttered under pressure from the regime, a cautionary tale to any entertainer who dares to tell a joke not pre-screened by courtiers in MAGA livery. The chill upon comedy is palpable: laughter itself now requires a permit, embossed with an eagle clutching a golf club.

A Crackdown in Search of a Cause

From Hollywood’s dimmed lights we pivot to Washington’s darker corridors, where the Trump administration flirted openly with designating liberal and progressive non-profits as “terrorist organizations.” Thus the Red Cross and the PTA may soon find themselves in the company of al-Qaeda, their bake sales subject to federal interdiction, their car washes wiretapped.

Tea with the King

Next came the curious spectacle of President Trump’s visit to Buckingham Palace. His Majesty endured the encounter with the sort of strained courtesy reserved for gouty relatives and intrusive plumbers. Trump emerged beaming, convinced he had secured not only Britain’s loyalty but possibly the monarchy itself — a merger he proposed to rename “The United Trumpdom.”

The Price of Silence

Revelations trickled forth that Tom Homan, that stout tribune of deportations, had once pocketed a $50,000 bribe. A Department of Justice investigation was swiftly smothered with a Trump-branded pillow. One must admire the efficiency: bribery and exoneration conducted in the same fiscal quarter!

The Vaccinophobe Rides Again

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still astride his rickety steed of pseudoscience, thundered against vaccines with all the fervor of a medieval barber recommending bloodletting. His followers nodded solemnly, as if polio were but a fairy tale told by Big Pharma to frighten children into washing their hands.

Arithmetic by Hyperbole

The President, never one to be constrained by fact, declared that “300 million Americans” had perished of drug overdoses last year. A remarkable feat, given that the population of the United States is but 330 million. By his reckoning, the nation is composed chiefly of ghosts, voting reliably in battalions.

The Venezuelan Vendetta

All the while, American ordnance continued to rain upon Venezuelan vessels — no trial, no hearing, just summary judgment delivered by missile. The administration insists this is not “war” but “extrajudicial nautical housekeeping.” The fish, alas, were not consulted.

The Apotheosis of Kirk

The week closed with a pageant at State Farm Stadium in Arizona: the memorial-cum-deification of Charlie Kirk. Billed as a solemn occasion, it unfolded instead as a professional wrestling spectacular — fog machines, thunderous entrance music, and the President delivering a eulogy equal parts martyrdom, rally cry, and campaign commercial. The faithful wept, shouted hosannas, and purchased merch in bulk.

And thus, the week passed: laughter outlawed, dissent criminalized, monarchs bemused, bribes forgiven, science denied, numbers inflated, ships obliterated, and a fallen pundit canonized with the pomp of Rome and the showmanship of WWE. Truly, America remains the greatest show on earth — though one fears the tent poles are splintering.

Try to Remember the Kind of September

A Ledger of Inanities, Pageantries, and Preventable Plagues

September, once a gentle custodian of cider and remembrance, has arrived instead as a carnival barker with a cracked bell. Behold a month where Nature performs catastrophe, Officialdom performs competence, and Everyone Else performs for the camera. We have set quill to parchment to swirl it all together—storms and sermons, moonwalks and mandates, pomp and poltroonery—into a single ledger of the ludicrous.

I. Processions of the Preventable

The Surgeon General of Freedom™ trumpets a new dispensation: mandates banished, childhood diseases invited. In the public square, a parade of Little Deaths—Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio—carry pennants like alumni returning for Homecoming. “Personal choice,” he intones, and the viruses curtsey. Leeches polish their resumes.

ASIDE: On Pedagogy & Tablets. In Texas, pious décor is once more proposed as pedagogy—Commandments mounted like antlers in a schoolhouse. We await the appendix tablet reading, “Special Terms & Conditions Apply,” signed by an attorney who moonlights as a prophet.

II. Pageantry for the Camera, Penance for the Clerk

Cabinet courtiers beam compulsory “praise reels” to the provinces. Somewhere in a ranger station, a bear signs for the parcel while a junior naturalist mouths along to the weekly encomium. Elsewhere, a Superintendent preaches rectitude to a lens he forgets is still on—like a bishop explaining thrift from a chaise longue.

Supplementary curios: A town-hall petitioner moonwalks into a tax speech; a mountaineer in an ice-cream cone costume ascends with dry ice and mercy; a tote bag declares “Definitely Not A Bag Full of Drugs” with all the sincerity of a campaign promise.

III. Nature’s Theatre & the Bureaucrat’s Umbrella

Floods rehearse for their Broadway transfer; a tornado auditions in a coastal town; solar farms quarrel with forests as if trees were a rumor. Bridges shrug beneath trucks, rails argue with schedules, and the paperwork, ever diligent, insists all was compliant on page 7, subsection (b).

FIELD NOTES. When the waters come, the press conference arrives in matching jackets. The podium is waterproof; the truth is not.

IV. Diplomacy as Pantomime

In the North, a summit unspools like a holiday pageant: applause too loud, concessions too quiet, a map redrawn in the footnotes. Far across seas, a state visit arrives with carriages, plumes, and a hat brim deep enough to hide an era. The crowd is kept at a respectful distance; the irony is not.

V. The Culture of Consequence, Deferred

A pundit is harmed on a podium, and the nation sprints to its corners to assign omens. Another ex-chief finds himself in a courtroom measuring the length of history in sentencing guidelines. Grief is real; so too is the choreography that follows. Our politics remains a church of spectacle with a collection plate for rage.

VI. Accounts Receivable: September

Tally the ledger: Public health in arrears, infrastructure in dudgeon, decorum in receivership. The month presents its invoice in triplicate and requests immediate remittance of our attention. We pay it, of course—dearly—because absurdity is legal tender and spectacle, the national bank.

Housekeeping. If you spotted an absurdity we missed, leave it with the clerk by the door; it will be indexed under Chronicles of Misrule and shelved beside “Festival of the Preventable.”

💉Chronicles of Misrule:
Florida Declares War on Germ Theory

In this latest entry from our national asylum, Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has decreed that vaccine mandates — those dusty old bulwarks against polio, measles, and the poxes of yesteryear — are nothing more than a modern form of slavery. Thus, with a flourish of rhetoric more fit for antebellum melodrama than epidemiology, he proposes to strike them down.

One can almost hear the bacilli cheering.

Governor Ron DeSantis, flanking his medical freedom crusader, nodded along as if he were announcing a tax rebate, not the unraveling of a century of public health safeguards. Together they declared Florida to be the first state in the Union to dismantle all vaccine mandates, including those required for children to attend school. Why stop with smallpox eradication when you can invite it back for a victory lap?

Of course, some mandates are bound up in the dull cords of statute law. These, alas, require the Florida legislature’s complicity before being cast aside. But given the state’s political mood, one suspects the only debate will be whether to replace the school immunization form with a “Choose Your Own Adventure” pamphlet.

Health experts have sounded the alarm, warning that this gambit all but guarantees a revival of outbreaks thought buried with the phonograph. Their voices, alas, carry little weight in a political bazaar where “medical freedom” is hawked as though it were a tonic from a carnival tent.

To gild this farce, a new commission — styled the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) committee — has been conjured, chaired by First Lady Casey DeSantis. Its charter? To enshrine “parental rights” and “informed consent,” while leaving “community health” to fend for itself, like an orphan abandoned on the courthouse steps.

Thus Florida strides boldly into the 19th century, where maladies roam free and the physician’s kit once more features leeches, bloodletting, and perhaps a tincture of snake oil.

Note from the Resident Satirist

Contrary to popular belief, the Resident Satirist is not a pseudonym for an unpaid intern with a thesaurus and unresolved grievances. They are a wholly unreliable narrator with access to archives, anecdotes, and just enough historical knowledge to be dangerous.

Their work is powered by irony, indignation, and a steady diet of headlines that read like parodies but aren’t. All errors are deliberate, all metaphors mixed with purpose.

“We write it because it’s true. We wish it weren’t.”

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