📜 Chronicles of Misrule

Make America Healthy Again (But First, Invent the Sources)

Health Secretary Kennedy’s Commission serves up a steaming poultice of citation confusion, academic necromancy, and peer-adjacent review apparitions

“Gold-standard science,” proclaimed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., referring to the so-called findings of his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission. A 194-page slab of epidemiological improv, the report claims to draw upon over 500 studies and sources in a display of scholarly fireworks. Alas, upon closer inspection, many of those fireworks are duds, and some may in fact be phantoms.

The watchdogs at NOTUS went spelunking into the footnotes and emerged not with confirmation, but a catalog of calamity:

  • 🚫 Seven of the cited sources simply do not exist. They are, quite literally, imaginary friends with journal credentials.
  • 🔗 Numerous links lead to nowhere, the academic equivalent of wandering into a cul-de-sac of broken HTML dreams.
  • 🔍 Many cited studies say the opposite of what the report claims—like citing a paper on seatbelt safety to advocate reckless driving.

👩‍⚕️ “That’s Not My Paper,” She Cried

One especially cursed citation appears to credit epidemiologist Katherine Keyes as the lead author of a study on adolescent anxiety. A curious development, as Keyes herself was unaware she had written it. When contacted by NOTUS, she politely clarified: “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with.”

She does, in fact, study mental health and substance use. But conjuring studies she never authored into a federal report? That’s a new wellness frontier.


📺 Now with 100% More Media Paranoia!


The report’s section on the “corporate capture of media” attempts to illustrate the influence of direct-to-consumer drug advertising on ADHD and antidepressant prescriptions for children. It boldly cites two studies as being “broadly illustrative.” And broad they are indeed—so broad, in fact, that neither study appears to exist.

Much like Kennedy’s prior “documentaries,” these phantasmal studies seem more rooted in vibes than verification. The kind of evidence one gathers while wandering through a Whole Foods with a Ouija board.


⚗️ Conclusion: The Cure for Credibility

This is not science. This is citational cosplay with a booster shot of pseudomedical pageantry. If RFK Jr. wished to emulate the National Institutes of Health, he has instead achieved something closer to the Institute of Wishful Thinking.

The MAHA report is less a compendium of research than a séance in PDF form—channeling academic spirits, misquoting the living, and conjuring spectres from the empty air. It is the bibliographic equivalent of rubbing essential oils on a broken fact and calling it healed.

For a Secretary of Health to endorse such sorcery is not merely concerning—it is a public wellness hazard, now officially footnoted by fiction.





🪞 Senator Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz (R–Zodiac)

Title: The Oozing Oracle of Opportunism
State: Texas — though one suspects it’s trying to secede from him
Domicile: A greasy sheen in the shape of a man
House Style: Damp Federalist cosplay with Canadian underpinnings


🧬 Birthright Baby with Borderline Memory

Though he rails against jus soli citizenship like it’s a communist plot, Cruz himself was born in Calgary, Alberta, to a Cuban father and American mother — a classic case of “birthright for me, but not for thee.” His miraculous transformation from maple-leaf baby to Constitution-thumping Texan is a case study in selective originalism, where the Founders apparently said, “except Rafael, he’s cool.”

He renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2014 — not out of legal necessity, but presumably because his reflection stopped appearing in Tim Hortons windows.


🏖️ The Cancun Caper

As Texans froze in the historic Winter Storm Uri, Cruz did what any man of principle would do: he fled to Cancún, dragging his suitcase behind him like the last vestige of shame. Blaming his daughters for the trip, he made the peculiar choice to toss them under the bus while boarding one headed away from the suffering of his constituents.

One suspects his true emergency was a pool with no camera crews.


🧠 Walking Contradictions, Worn Loosely

  • Porn-Tweeting Patriot: Once “liked” a hardcore porn tweet from his official Senate Twitter account — a moment of unexpected honesty quickly dismissed as a "staffing error" (though not the kind anyone enjoys).

  • Defender of Nothing: Said nothing when Trump insulted his wife’s appearance, suggested his father was linked to JFK’s assassination, and pantsed him repeatedly during the 2016 primaries. Cruz’s response? Phonebanking for him in 2020.

  • Sports Jinx Incarnate: A human curse on Texas athletic franchises. Wherever he appears, defeat follows — as though God himself finds his presence unsporting.

  • Child-Evader: His daughters famously recoiled at the sight of him in a holiday video, as if they'd seen the Ghost of Career Past. Their expressions were those of hostages forced to say, “I love my dad,” through gritted molars.

  • Beaked and Bewildered: Waged a public feud with Big Bird after the beloved 8-foot canary endorsed vaccines on Sesame Street. Cruz declared it “government propaganda,” thereby cementing his legacy as the only U.S. Senator to be ratioed by a puppet. His foe? A fictional bird who teaches the alphabet. His loss? Quantifiable in retweets and national dignity.

🎤 Signature Sounds

  • Tone: Smug baritone in a wet cravat

  • Dialect: Harvard Debate Club trying to impersonate a cowboy while reading Atlas Shrugged aloud

  • Catchphrases:

    • “We’re losing our freedom!”

    • “I believe in the Constitution!”

    • “I’d like to revise my statement after gauging the base’s mood.”


🕯️ Representative Quote

“I’m a fighter.”
— Typically said after retreating, apologizing, or throwing someone else under the bus.


🪦 Epitaph-in-Waiting

“Here lies Ted Cruz: Zodiac Unconfirmed, Integrity Undetected, Loyalty Undeserved.”



 

📜 Mr. Rubio, The Shifty Shapeshifter of Foggy Bottom

Proper Title: Secretary of State
Epithet: The Diplomat of Disappearing Acts
Also Known As: Little Marco, The Mouthpiece of Manufactured Clarity, The Thirsty Functionary

DESCRIPTION:

Behold a man once groomed for greatness, now content to mumble clarifications while democracy catches fire. Mr. Rubio appears regularly as the Dignity Wraith in the Oval Office like a stage extra in an off-Broadway adaptation of King Lear and the Golf Cart of Doom. His expression vacillates between mild constipation and polite panic, as though waiting for the ghost of his former self to appear and tell him what to do.

A man caught forever between posturing and vanishing, Mr. Rubio is the bureaucratic equivalent of a buffering wheel—always preparing to speak, yet never quite loading substance. He bears the permanent look of a schoolboy caught cheating off a dictator’s paper. His suits are trim, his spine less so.

Once hailed as the future of a political party, he now hovers awkwardly near the President, clutching a printout and nodding like a hostage mime - a Secretary of State without Portfolio, forevermore recorded as a man who could have been something, but instead chose to become available.

MANNERISMS:

  • Speaks in prepackaged clauses suitable for embassy gift shops.

  • Sweats under pressure, over silence, and occasionally during light cloud cover.

  • Can be seen in press briefings "clarifying" that when the President says, "Mexico will pay us in churros," he really meant “infrastructure partnerships.”

DEEDS MOST DAMNING:

1. The Great Humanitarian Disembowelment:

With a steady hand and a hollow heart, Rubio oversaw the methodical destruction of USAID, slashing life-saving programs under the guise of “streamlining.” His efforts left millions of people—including children with HIV, refugees of war, and famine-stricken families—without food, medicine, or hope. Entire health infrastructures collapsed, not due to war or plague, but because Marco needed a budget line to impress Elon Musk.

It wasn’t policy. It was passive manslaughter by bureaucracy.

2. The Minister of Absurd Apologetics:

While Trump declared that “Belgium owes us reparations for waffles,” Rubio stood nearby and offered this classic:

“What the President meant was a recalibration of transatlantic carbohydrate diplomacy.”
A man who spends his waking hours rephrasing madness into merely actionable idiocy, like a Babel fish choked on Heritage Foundation bullet points.


3. The Ethnic Purifier of Ivy Admissions:

Rubio also found time to dabble in ethnonationalist admissions policy, backing measures to punish universities for “bias”—by which he meant “failing to admit enough legacy applicants from golf-heavy zip codes.” Harvard wept. Trump applauded. Marco blinked three times and refreshed his water bottle.

4. The Shadow Chancellor of Abandonment:

Under his tenure, protections for journalists, dissidents, and entire refugee blocs have evaporated like a Qatari ceasefire. PEPFAR was cut. Ethiopia was left to starve. Global health became a rounding error. But Marco, brave Marco, assures us it’s all part of “the President’s bold recalibration of compassionate disengagement.”

KNOWN QUOTATIONS (EXISTENTIAL SHRUGS):

“The President speaks differently, but the policy is clear…”
“That’s not what he meant. What he meant was…”
“Foreign leaders understand our… style.”


PRIVATE MOTTO (Found Scribbled on a Legal Pad):

“If I agree with him now, maybe I’ll matter later.”


OFFICE DÉCOR:

  • Diplomatic cables edited in crayon.

  • A map of the world labeled “TRUMP FRIENDS” and “OTHER.”

  • A hydration station containing only Fiji water and bitter regret.

Final Note on Mr. Rubio, The Shrinking Statesman of Suggestibility

In the ledger of history, Marco Rubio shall not be remembered for what he stood for, but for the precise angle at which he leaned while others stood. A man of many positions, all of them adjacent to someone else's opinion, he has at last achieved the pinnacle of his career: curator of catastrophe, chronicler of incoherence, the official librarian of the Emperor’s Derailed Tweets.

Where once he sought to be a lion of policy, he has settled instead for the dutiful tapeworm of power—subsisting on proximity, excreting nothing but clarifications. He wanders the corridors of diplomacy like a debtor in a Dickens novel, clutching briefs he dare not read and policies he dare not question. One can nearly hear the hollow thud of his boots against the parquet floors of State, echoing like a conscience in retreat.

And when the curtain finally falls on this administration—whether through collapse, indictment, or spontaneous combustion—he will emerge from the rubble with a clipboard, a memo titled “Rebuilding Trust with Autocracies,” and a bottled tear marked “for donors.”


Epitaph (To Be Engraved on a Dusty Filing Cabinet in Foggy Bottom):

“Here lies Marco Antonio Rubio, who never let a principle stand in the way of a second draft.”


 

📜 Mr. Stephen Miller, The Clerk of Cruelty & Scribe of Pale Shadows

Proper Title: Deputy Chief of Staff (among other things)
Epithet: Pee Wee Goebbels
Other Reputations: The Eugenic Intern, The Ghoul of West Executive Avenue, That Which Smiles at Cages


DESCRIPTION:

A specter masquerading as a civil servant, cadaverous and severe, who appears to be fashioned from rejected dental wax and resentment. His hair has long since fled the premises, possibly seeking asylum from the cranium it once adorned. His wardrobe is charcoal and ill-fitting, like a child playing autocrat at his father’s funeral.

He does not walk—he emerges, like mildew or subpoenas.


MANNER AND HABIT:

He speaks with the clipped cadence of a malfunctioning metronome and the affect of a DMV clerk explaining why your child is now property of the state. His eyes do not blink so much as retreat occasionally to their lairs. His handwriting, it is said, causes printers to jam out of spite.


DEEDS MOST FOUL:

Or, The Calculated Mischief of Mr. Miller, Who Sought Not Justice but Judgment

  1. The Architect of State-Sanctioned Separation
    Mr. Miller did not stumble into the policy of family separation—he designed it. With precision and intent, he authored memoranda that called for the mandatory prosecution of all who crossed the southern border, regardless of asylum status, age, or cause. The consequence, as he knew it would be, was that children—some still nursing—would be ripped from their parents and caged. And when confronted, Miller did not deny this reality; he defended it as deterrence, as though cruelty itself were a metric of excellence.

  2. The Banishment of Due Process
    In perhaps his most chilling flourish, Mr. Miller sought to remove due process altogether for immigrants—proposing policies that would deny hearings, eliminate legal appeals, and grant border agents the unchecked authority to deport anyone they suspected of unworthiness. He scrawled legal fantasies that transformed the U.S. into a realm where habeas corpus could be suspended by whim, and citizenship status itself became a thing revocable by suspicion. In private, he called such protections “loopholes.” In public, he said nothing at all, preferring silence to scrutiny.

  3. The Ban, The Wall, The Bleeding Pen
    He was the animating force behind the Muslim Ban, its drafts dripping in the language of fear dressed as policy. He conjured the specter of caravans, disease, and invasion—each lie calibrated for broadcast. And while others chattered about fences, he whispered for walls within the law, barriers of statute and executive decree meant to choke off migration as a matter of racial preference, not security.
    He bypassed Congress, flooded agencies with ideological cronies, and once declared that “the powers of the President on immigration are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

  4. The Internal Pogrom
    Not content with persecuting the foreign, he also purged the domestic—or sought to. Miller maintained lists, pushed for the ousting of civil servants who displayed “insufficient loyalty,” and attempted to restructure the very organs of state into a mechanism of personal ideology. Loyalty oaths were contemplated; career bureaucrats were threatened. One former colleague described him as a man “with no empathy, no compassion, and no respect for the dignity of human life.”



RUMORED OFFICE DÉCOR:

  • A globe where every country is labeled “Threat.”

  • A signed print of the Alien and Sedition Acts

  • A wall-mounted quote: “No vacancy means no vulnerability.”


LIKELY EPITAPH:

“He kept to himself. Until he didn’t.”
“Most of the skeletons weren’t his. Technically.”
“May this tomb remained locked, and under supervision.”


FUTURE HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE (Presumed, Inevitable):

“Few individuals did more harm with fewer hugs.”



The Age of Incoherence, Part II:

Of Apophenia, Sane Washing, and Media Complicity

In any properly functioning republic, the daily musings of a sitting president would be subject to the rigors of scrutiny, especially if those musings included fevered tales of windmill-induced cancers, the mechanics of annexing Canada & Greenland, or a long-simmering vendetta against anyone who challenges him. But in our present timeline—a mishmash of mass delusion and partisan loyalty—we have entered the era of Sane Washing: a coordinated campaign to present the visibly unwell as merely unconventional.

Where Biden was called doddering for saying “Good morning” after 11 a.m., Trump is called "authentic" for delivering 40-minute rants about Al Capone being treated unfairly. That this grotesque double standard is abetted by much of the press and half of Congress is not accidental—it is systemic acquiescence. The political media, fearful of being labeled biased, has taken refuge in apophenia: the desperate act of finding patterns where there are none, of asserting strategic intent behind verbal flotsam.

When Trump rants about George Washington founding airports or implies that whales are conspiring against oil tankers, he is not speaking in metaphor. He is confused. When he trails off mid-sentence and redirects to a tale about "a very strong man who cried," he is not being rhetorical. He is lost. And when he insists the sound of wind turbines causes cancer, he is not stoking populist rage. He is unwell.

And yet: headlines read like parodies of themselves. "Trump Sharpens Message on Energy Policy" (after a tirade on bird genocide). "Trump Touches on Health Care" (after suggesting bleach as a therapeutic). "Trump Unfiltered" (which is to say, Trump).

What is this if not collaboration? The myth of the man’s lucidity must be preserved for the sake of access, for ratings, for spectacle. Networks, papers, and pundits become accomplices, laundering nonsense into narrative, treating a cognitive car crash as a deliberate detour.

Perhaps no image better captures this phenomenon than the side-by-side headlines that emerged after Trump’s West Point address: one describing a “rambling speech about trophy wives, golf and the ‘great late’ Al Capone,” the other soberly noting he “stressed a new era.”

This is not just editorial spin. It is narrative laundering. It is the construction of parallel realities—one where Trump sounds like a man having an episode on a bus, and one where he is a solemn statesman ushering in a renaissance.

Thus we arrive at the present day, where a man who slurs through public appearances, forgets basic facts, and issues foreign policy by emoji is flanked by a Beltway press corps that nods politely and wonders aloud, "Is this a pivot?"

No, dear reader. It is a pirouette into madness, and they are holding the curtain open.



 The Age of Incoherence, Part I

🥄 The Rambler-in-Chief: A Spoonful of Slurry

In which we examine the oratorical by-products of one man’s mind — now more creamed corn than cogitation.

If President Biden was inspected nightly for signs of slippage — a stumble, a cough, a name misplaced — then President Trump should, by all rights, be declared an open-air sinkhole of cognitive collapse, into which sense, syntax, and solemn duty vanish without trace.

📜 "I Don't Know" — But President Anyway

Asked about his second appointed Surgeon General, Trump offered this clinical diagnosis of his own staffing decisions:

“I don’t know who that is.”

One marvels at the candor. One trembles at the implications. This, from the man who once declared himself a “very stable genius,” now dodging accountability for the man charged with America’s lungs and livers. But who needs public health when you have hydroxychloroquine and herd instinct?

He similarly hedged when reminded of the Constitution, unsure whether his oath included the words “preserve,” “protect,” or “pronounce correctly.” One suspects the parchment lies crumpled in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, under a Diet Coke coaster and beside a torn-up subpoena.

🧠 Phonemic Paraphrasias & Other Goblinisms

What are we to make of a man whose tongue meets English like a trawler meeting a coral reef?
Trump’s speeches have long been linguistic demolition derbies, where syllables are mangled like pretzels in a toddler’s fist.
Highlights include:

  • Referring to “Yo-Semite” National Park

  • Describing “Nambia” as a thriving nation (perhaps between Wakanda and Brigadoon)

  • Butchering “Abu Ghraib” so thoroughly that it sounded like a Fast & Furious villain

Let us also recall the stirring declaration:

Well it means exactly what it says, it's a declaration, it's a declaration of unity and love and respect and it means a lot and its something very special to our country. People don’t know this, but a lot of people signed it… Thomas Jefferson, who a lot of people say was a Republican, actually.”

Truly, nothing inspires civic pride like watching a former president confuse America’s founding with a BuzzFeed trivia list.

🎖 The West Point Wandering

At a recent address to cadets at West Point, the Commander-in-Chief offered life advice that one might expect from a concussed uncle at a wedding:

  • Avoid “trophy wives” (a topic on which he is presumably a tenured professor)

  • Ramblings about Al Capone, army drag shows, and “strong generals” who cry when they see him

  • Neglecting, naturally, to shake the hands of the very cadets he came to honor

Instead, he stared blankly, waved at no one in particular, and wandered off as though the podium had personally offended him.

📃 Orders Not Signed, Domes Not Named

Among other recent oddities:

  • A fiery speech about executive orders, delivered with gusto — only for him to forget to sign them at all

  • Taking full credit for naming Israel’s Iron Dome, a system developed and deployed in 2011, well before he’d descended his escalator to proclaim the end of days

These claims, like much of his utterances, belong to the genre known as delusional patriotic fan fiction.

📱 Truth Social, or the Ticker-Tape Parade of Unwellness

If Trump’s Truth Social account is any indication, the Commander-in-Chief spent the weekend in an unbroken scroll of caps lock senility:

  • Accusing windmills of giving him “cancer of the sunset”

  • Ranting that “the Constitution is too long”

  • Demanding someone “call Bill Barr and ask if he’s still fat”

Each post bears the haunted energy of a raccoon loose in a megachurch PA system.

☠️ Conclusion: Not All Who Ramble Are Lost — But This One Is (And They're All Pretending Otherwise)


Let it not be said that we at The Panican Ledger are ageist. We are, however, anti-gibberish. And gibberish is precisely what is issuing daily from the Resolute Desk — if indeed he still knows where it is.

But unlike with President Biden, whose every pause and ankle shuffle becomes a chyroned emergency, the decline of Donald J. Trump is treated as either:

  • A charming eccentricity,

  • A calculated ruse,

  • Or — most commonly — a taboo not to be named.

Behind closed doors, aides whisper concerns. On the Hill, Republican lawmakers privately compare notes on his confusion, his paranoia, his inability to process briefing material thicker than a placemat. But in public? They fall in line like footmen at Versailles, dutifully applauding his tales of Iron Domes and executive orders never signed, as if this is all fine.

The White House itself has become a Potemkin operation — part assisted-living facility, part theater of denial — where staff work double shifts to make sure he doesn’t wander into the Rose Garden naked, live on Newsmax.

They hold back transcripts. They cut camera feeds. They rewrite speeches after he’s delivered them — a sandbag brigade of sycophancy, attempting to dam a river of senile deluge.

And the press? Too often, they follow suit — hedging with euphemisms like “unorthodox delivery,” “colorful phrasing,” or the ever-popular “Trump being Trump.”

But make no mistake: this is not politics-as-usual. It is government by gibbering puppet, cloaked in complicity and powered by a party too cowardly to say aloud what every aide, every lawmaker, and every sentient creature with a Wi-Fi connection already knows:

The man is not well. And they are all pretending he is.

To be continued in



 

🦇 Nancy Mace (R–Transylvania)

Title: Lady Macbeth of the Lowcountry
District: South Carolina’s 1st — Charleston, Hilton Head, and the Festering Lagoon of Contradiction
House Style: Antebellum with Shiplap Fascism


⚔️ Legacy of Exception, Not Excellence

Nancy Mace will be forever footnoted as the first woman to graduate from the Citadel’s Corps of Cadets — a historic moment made suspiciously convenient by the fact that her father was the Commandant of Cadets at the time

In any other context this might be called "legacy privilege," but under the GOP’s current DEI (Don’t Even Inquire) doctrine, such advantages must never be spoken aloud — lest the ghost of George Wallace rise from the grave to denounce affirmative action for rich white girls.


📜 The Deposition That Roared

In a 2024 deposition related to a defamation lawsuit, Mace described how — following a tempestuous affair with a former finance director — she sent nude photos to herself using his phone, then emailed them to her own lawyer, allegedly to protect herself from blackmail.

You read that correctly: she leaked her own nudes, preemptively, as a legal strategy — a congressional first, unless one counts the numerous times history has exposed lawmakers with no clothes.

“I was trying to protect myself,” she explained under oath, presumably while clutching a lace kerchief and gazing mournfully at a gas lamp.

Yet she also accused the man in question of threatening to release the photos — a claim he denies, noting that she already beat him to the punch. What Mace calls evidence, others call a performance art piece in masochism. The contradictions pile like unpaid interns in a Freedom Caucus broom closet.


🎭 Piety & Provocation: A Career in Contradictions

Mace enjoys the coveted slot between “moderate in press release” and “reactionary in practice.” She condemns the far right — while voting with them. She decries sexism — while weaponizing hers. She talks of compassion — and then tweets "TRANNY" like she’s calling for her dog.

She has:

  • Called for rape exceptions in abortion bans, only to side with groups opposing them

  • Made vague noises about "unity" while sneering at marginalized communities

  • Held up gender-critical talking points like medieval relics at a tent revival

🎭 Performance Art Highlights

  • Wears Scarlet Letters to Prayer Breakfasts: Not satire, just South Carolina.

  • Cries “Tranny” in Committee Hearings: Claims to fight for women while punching down like a Victorian pugilist hopped up on laudanum.

  • Votes With the Far-Right While Denouncing Them on CNN: Like a fireman who also sells matches.

She sways between extremes like a haunted pendulum, forever seeking the sweet spot between base-pleasing cruelty and mainstream palatability. Spoiler: she finds neither.


🏛️ Congressional Contributions

  • Co-sponsored bills destined for death-by-subcommittee

  • Goes viral regularly for yelling, rarely for legislating

  • Spends more time on cable news than in policy briefings


🔮 Representative Quote

“I want to save the Republican Party from itself.”

— She declared, while setting herself ablaze in the town square and blaming the arson on cancel culture.



 

🗞 The Week That Was (or Wasn’t)

A Digest of Degeneracy, a Catalog of Catastrophe

May 19–24, 2025

“What fresh hell is this?” — a bipartisan sigh


🏛️ About That Grift, er, Gift

Private jets, meme coins, and diplomatic dignity sold separately.

Fresh off his return from Qatar (a visit reportedly devoid of camel sightings but rich in speculation), it has emerged that President Trump’s inner circle sought a private jet from the Qatari government for official travel. While the request was not fulfilled, the stench of transactional diplomacy now wafts from the West Wing like week-old hummus left on a radiator.

Meanwhile, Trump hosted a meme coin dinner in DC for crypto-fabulists, washed down with steak, shrimp cocktail, and light treason. Attendees included a who’s-who of digital hucksters and pseudonymous avatars, gathered to praise Trump’s new meme coin as if the economy could be run on Doge fumes and delusion. 

White House aides defended the soirée with the grim determination of mid-level cultists, offering increasingly surreal justifications: It was a fundraiser, It wasn’t official, He thought Bitcoin was a type of sandwich


🤝 White House Ambush 2: South Africa Edition

When diplomacy is a surprise party without cake—or dignity.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was ambushed in the Oval Office this week when Trump, with no prior coordination, announced a joint trade agreement that does not exist. The stunned Ramaphosa stood silent as Trump detailed fantasy tariffs and mutual cooperation, all without a translator or briefing, and with an onlooking aide frantically texting “WTF” to Pretoria. 

The BBC called it "a diplomatic mugging" and noted that Ramaphosa's expression cycled through all seven stages of foreign policy grief. 



💸 Tariffs for Thee, Not for Xi

America First, Consumers Last.

Trump announced this week that he’s not pursuing a trade deal with the EU—which is at least consistent with not pursuing literacy, reality, or competent governance. 

Meanwhile, 25% tariffs are set to strike iPhones, meaning your next screen crack will come with a surcharge for patriotism. 

And in a bizarre twist, a massive drug shipment subject to new pharmaceutical tariffs has vanished—presumably smuggled out under a pile of expired insulin and dreams. 


🌩️ Stormy Weather

Tornadoes, floods, and FEMA slow-walking the paperwork.

The skies turned vengeful this week as thunderstorms and tornadoes ripped through the Midwest & South flattening towns and twisting trees into modern art. 

FEMA has yet to declare disaster zones in multiple counties, citing “review processes” and a lingering dispute over whether flooding counts as a vibes-based event


☢️ What Could Go Wrong? Glow-in-the-Dark Edition


The NRC, now powered by prayer and plutonium.

With minimal oversight, the Trump-aligned Nuclear Regulatory Commission has quietly approved experimental reactors with weakened safety protocols, leading one expert to observe: “It’s not as if, it’s glowing.” 

A spokesperson assured the public that nuclear is “clean, safe, and misunderstood”—much like Trump's legal defense strategy.


🧪 Department of Magical Thinking

Or, Hast Thou an Apothecary, Sir Kennedy?

RFK Jr. took the stage at the Midwest Agriculture & Holistic Alchemy (MAHA) Festival, where he warned of pesticides that "reprogram the soul" and urged farmers to consult gut feelings before applying science

Elsewhere, he claimed that chemicals in water make children allergic to truth (and potentially transgender), and that swimming in contaminated rivers builds immunity to lies.

Pressed for clarification, Kennedy replied, “Do your own research.” He did not clarify if this included drinking the river water or consulting the moon.



📜 Chronicles of Misrule

Dispatch the XXth: "The Midnight Riders of Fiscal Fatuity"

“Or, How Congress Balances the Books With Invisible Ink”


⏳ The Hour of Misdirection

Under the jaundiced dome of Capitol Hill—shielded not by truth, but by the cloak of procedural obfuscation—all major budget votes have reportedly been scheduled between the hours of 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. It is during this time, when even C-SPAN slumbers and the Capitol cafeteria serves only stale pretzels and conspiracy, that Congress scrawls its most ruinous runes into the national ledger.

“Our constituents can’t object to what they can’t stay awake for,”

— Majority Whip Steve Scalise, allegedly

💸 The Big, Beautiful Bill: A Manifesto of Magical Thinking

At the heart of the chaos lies the absurdly named Big, Beautiful Bill, a fiscal chimera cobbled together from supply-side gospel, patriotic sloganeering, and a truckload of expired Reaganomics.

  • The Tip Tax Repeal Act, ensuring servers may now be stiffed twice: once by customers, and again by future Medicare collapse.
  • The Social Security Liberation Clause, eliminating taxes on benefits while quietly indexing payouts to Confederate currency.
  • The Billionaire Empowerment Adjustment, allowing deductions for private yacht fuel, island security, and clairvoyant consulting fees.

The Congressional Budget Office, when asked to score the bill, reportedly lit itself on fire and leapt into the Reflecting Pool.


🕯️ Voices in the Night: The Lament of the Sleep-Deprived Caucus

Opposition voices—largely barred from daylight debate—have been forced to stage what’s now known as “Insomniac Filibustering.” Representative Jasmine Crockett was spotted muttering expletives into a half-empty coffee cup while Greg Casar attempted to project a bar graph using the flashlight app on his phone and a cocktail napkin.

Meanwhile, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, back from a week of explaining to confused colleagues what a spreadsheet is, delivered a midnight soliloquy about the ethical implications of giving yachts a child tax credit. Her remarks were met with a deafening silence, broken only by the sound of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene snoring into her tactical throw pillow.


📡 Even the Golden Dome Blinks

The Pentagon’s astronomically expensive Golden Dome—intended to intercept incoming missiles, solar flares, and bad vibes from Canada—was reportedly unable to detect these late-night votes, as they were conducted “below the radar of fiscal reality.”

The system, designed by a joint task force of SpaceX interns and hallucinating lobbyists, failed to register “anything less than an intercontinental ballistic brainfart.”

Next Up in This Ledger: The Immigration Tariff Scheme — or, How Asylum Now Costs $1,000 and a Soul Fragment

Dispatch from the Department of Cheery Continuance

“It Still Works, and Isn’t That Wonderful?”

“There is no power so enduring as a machine which has been forgotten by its masters and left to do its job in peace.”
— From the flight log of Voyager I, probably.

Somewhere beyond the veil of the solar system, past Neptune’s last lonely sigh, and far past the reach of service plans or sensible accounting, Voyager 1 has done the unthinkable:

It woke up a set of thrusters last fired when ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ was still considered a major release.

Yes, after 20 years of cosmic hibernation, the spacecraft’s attitude control thrusters—long presumed to be fossilized relics from the disco age of rocketry—have sputtered, hissed, and come gloriously back to life. They responded to a distant command from Earth, requiring no spare parts, no roadside assistance, and no firmware update. Just hydrazine, guts, and the eternal hum of a Plutonium-powered pension plan.

NASA, ever the stoic steward of deep-space mischief, announced the resurrection with the quiet pride of a civil servant who has just gotten the boiler to work using only a spoon and sheer will.

In a world where even toasters require firmware updates, this act of ancient defiance feels positively heroic.

Read the full story here on SciTechDaily →

🚀 Implications (Beyond “This Is Awesome”)

The resurrection of Voyager 1’s backup thrusters is more than a feel-good story in the age of software rot and disposable tech. It’s a whisper from the analog past reminding us that well-built things, cared for or forgotten, can endure far longer than we imagine.

It affirms:

  • The value of engineering with margins.

  • The glory of institutional knowledge, where engineers rummaged through four-decade-old documents to send the right command.

  • The power of continuity in science: Voyager 1 is still returning data from beyond the heliopause, giving us our only direct measurements of interstellar space.


📜 And So We Inscribe…

Let it be noted in the official scrolls of the Department of Cheery Continuance, that on this day, against every reasonable expectation:

Voyager 1 did not die. It cleared its throat.

Long may it drift, long may it ping, and long may we listen.


🏷️ Filed under: Cheery Continuance
Et adhuc operatur — mirabile dictu!



 

 🗞 Chronicles of Misrule Dispatch 🗞

Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive—and DOGE

Where Efficiency Means Eviction, and Savings Come at a Human Cost

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), conceived in a fever dream between Trump and Musk, has unleashed a whirlwind of cuts under the guise of modernization. Their latest target: the Social Security Administration (SSA), a lifeline for millions.

Field Office Closures and Layoffs
DOGE's cost-cutting crusade led to the closure of 47 SSA field offices, primarily in the South and Southeast, and the layoff of over 10% of SSA's workforce. These actions have disrupted services for countless beneficiaries, especially in rural and underserved areas .

Phone Service Cuts and Public Outcry
In an attempt to combat alleged fraud, DOGE proposed ending phone services for retirement and disability claims. However, after backlash from older claimants, advocates, and lawmakers, the plan was abandoned .

Dubious Fraud Claims
DOGE's justification for these cuts hinged on claims of rampant fraud. Yet, after implementing new anti-fraud checks for phone claims, only two cases of potential fraud were found out of over 110,000 .

Data Access and Privacy Concerns
DOGE's data collection efforts have raised alarms. The agency's push to access sensitive personal data, including Social Security and bank account numbers, has led to concerns about privacy and potential misuse .

Savings or Smoke and Mirrors?
While DOGE boasts of $170 billion in savings, analysts argue that the actual savings are substantially lower. Critics contend that the reported figures are inflated and that DOGE's actions have caused more harm than good .

In summary, DOGE's aggressive measures have disrupted essential services, sparked public outcry, and raised serious questions about the true cost of their so-called efficiencies.

Efficiency is the Excuse. Death is the Dividend.

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—a name that sounds like a punchline and now reads like an epitaph—turned its sharpened shears toward USAID, the last thread connecting America’s conscience to the world’s poor.

DOGE gutted global health aid, slashing vaccine programs, HIV clinics, and malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa. Food aid was halved, clean water initiatives shelved, and maternal health support tossed into a catch-all spreadsheet cell labeled “non-essential.”

The result? Death, not metaphorical or bureaucratic, but actual. Measurable. Predictable. And, according to Bill Gates, avoidable.

“They’re killing poor children,” Gates said bluntly—a line as damning as any obituary.

And he’s right. The programs being dismantled aren’t symbolic or bloated—they’re the reason 2 million children didn’t die in 2019 of preventable disease. They are why infants born with HIV lived long enough to go to school. Why villages had nets. Why mothers delivered safely.

DOGE offered no rebuttal beyond a bar chart and a slogan. Elon Musk, from whom all things DOGE flow, shrugged it off as “globalist bloat” and returned to tweeting about Martian architecture. While he sketches domes on dust, children’s graves are being dug in silence.

In a sane nation, this would be scandal. Here, it’s a line item.

USAID is not perfect—but it is real. And now, in the name of “efficiency,” we have replaced medicine with math. We have decided that saving lives doesn’t scale.

And so the spreadsheet wins. The ledger balances. And the graveyard grows.





🕯 The Scandalous Superintendent or, A Symphony in Schadenfreude 🎼 Hashtag: #IngloriousHypocrites “And lo, the moralizing minister of...