Theodoric of York Jr.
An essay about medicine, the hidden costs of savings and, of course, the Beatles...
Over the weekend I read yet another article about fired government workers having to be rehired because Elon Musk and His Merry Band of Tech Bros didn’t understand what those workers did before cutting them loose and in this case it was Department of Agriculture employees involved in the federal response to the avian flu outbreak.
Turns out…
The avian flu has now spread to dairy cattle in 16 states and while cases in humans remain relatively rare, if you’re like me (as always, you have my sympathy) you probably remember when we were hearing about some weird infection that started overseas, but seemed unlikely to ever reach our shores so we had absolutely nothing to worry about.
A description which applies to both COVID-19 and Beatlemania.
And in both cases you want to get on this stuff right away or it might kill over a million Americans or your son might learn to play drums and form a rock band that makes up in volume what they lack in talent.
(My mom let us practice in our garage as long as we played Folsom Prison Blues once a practice which seemed to work out OK for my mom and sucked for the neighbors directly across the street.)
Quick story for those of you who have yet to give up on humanity, but are right there on the edge:
When the Beatles gave their last live performance – that free rooftop concert – it was shut down because of noise complaints.
One more time:
THE BEATLES WERE GIVING A FREE LIVE CONCERT AND SOMEONE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE NOISE.
Anyway…
Right below that story about the DOGE firings was a story about RFK Jr. and his announcement that he planned to investigate childhood vaccine schedules and anti-depression drugs and if there’s anyone who should be in charge of preventing the next pandemic, it’s someone who thinks penicillin is a Communist plot and the earth just might be flat.
RFK 2.0 also announced the Department of Health and Human Services workers should keep an “open mind” while he revisits “settled science” because maybe we gave up on phrenology and bleeding people with leeches way too soon.
And if you’re now asking yourself “Where the hell did RFK Jr. get his ideas about medicine?” I’m guessing he was watching Saturday Night Live while high as shit and thought this sketch was a med school documentary:
All of which raises the obvious question:
Just how nuts is Cheryl Hines?
I liked Cheryl on Curb Your Enthusiasm – she was the calm, logical one, which compared to Larry David describes everyone in the Continental United States – but she has stayed married to Theodoric of York Jr. which raises questions about her judgment, although I guess she’s not all that nuts because according to the following article, she and Theodoric Jr. held a holiday party and Cheryl urged invited guests to get vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 and when he was asked about it, Theodoric Jr. said he wasn’t always boss in his own house.
Good to know and I think we can all agree we want Cheryl to put a foot up Theo’s ass on a regular basis.
And Speaking of Show Business People…
Whenever something makes no sense (like Pauly Shore having a comedy career) I tend to think there must be something I don’t know and if I knew that thing it would all seem logical (like Pauly’s mother Mitzi Shore co-founding and owning the Comedy Store). So whenever you’re confused about something, reverse engineer the situation and ask yourself what would have to be true for what’s going on to make sense.
And to demonstrate, I’ll now ask what would have to true to explain what’s currently happening with our federal government and just like Jeopardy I’ll present my answer in the form of a question:
What if Donald Trump and Elon Musk just aren’t that bright?
As sports team owners prove on a regular basis, you can be smart about one thing and dumb as a stump about others, so keep that in mind as we explore this theory.
We tend to assume rich people are rich because they’re smart and made good decisions, like being born into wealthy families and if you made the mistake of being born into a poor one, that’s clearly your fault and you deserve to work the counter at your local McDonald’s for the rest of your life.
Donald Trump has one of those Born-On-Third-Base-Thinks-He-Hit-A-Triple success stories and Elon Musk was also born rich and made even more money when he co-founded Zip2 (a company that provided online maps and business directories to newspapers) and sold it for (according to the internet) approximately $300 million and then used that money to muscle his way into a series of companies and obviously made some good choices.
He also made some really dumb ones.
Like buying Twitter and changing one of the most recognizable brand names in the entire world to “X” because he thinks the letter “X” is really really really cool and after Elon bought Twitter and started making brilliant business decisions like changing its name, Twitter lost 80% of its value.
OK, so maybe not as bright as advertised, but what both Musk and Trump appear to be absolutely great at is self-promotion and taking advantage of lazy media members who accept whatever they say and as an example we’ll take a look at what DOGE has accomplished so far.
The Hidden Cost of Savings
It was recently claimed that DOGE has saved the federal government $55 billion—a number that was widely reported—but fortunately for the rest of us a National Public Radio analyst did his homework and said the numbers don’t add up and if you want to read all about that, here you go:
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates-savings-federal-contracts
Just in case you didn’t read the article and I feel confident that most of you didn’t: NPR quoted a retired contracting officer who said the DOGE team members might be geniuses when it comes to coding (and there also are people who disagree about that) but here’s what he said about their budget cuts:
"They don't understand the processes, they don't understand how things work, they don't understand contracts, they don't understand grants.
NPR also spoke with six other contracting officers who said DOGE is misleading the public by overemphasizing the worth of cancelled contracts and leaving inconvenient information out of their calculations.
And a sane-sounding person said that DOGE was doing more harm than good because if you really want to save money and clean up government it would initially mean spending more money because you’d first conduct audits and do some analysis and figure out new ways of doing things and build new systems
Instead DOGE is using a chainsaw to conduct heart surgery and just randomly firing people without fully understanding what those people do and as soon as I wrote that description I decided to draw this cartoon:
And now it’s time for one of my famous digressions and this one is about…
Sally The Nurse
Back when companies still cared about employees and didn’t see them as disposable pawns on their corporate chess boards, the Kansas City Star employed a company nurse named Sally and Sally was (and this is a medical term used by healthcare professionals) fucking awesome.
If you had a medical issue you could pop downstairs to Sally’s office and nine-times-out-of-10 Sally would have an answer and 15 minutes later you’d be back at your desk.
But the company decided we could no longer afford a nurse and I’m guessing that looked like saving money when you deducted Sally’s salary from the budget, but the thing that didn’t show up (at least obviously) was all the time employees now had to spend away from the office at medical appointments and the work that didn’t get done when they had to leave the office and sit in some doctor’s waiting room reading two-year-old People magazines dealing with some medical issue that used to get dealt with during a coffee break.
So on paper, letting Sally go saved money; in reality it cost money, but the numbers on paper were the ones that counted even though the cost of not having her do her job was significant.
It’s popular to think government employees don’t actually do anything, but I’m guessing we’re about to find out just how much they did once they stop doing it.
Today’s Lesson
Being smart about one thing doesn’t make you smart about everything, doing things cost money, but not doing things can too and if you don’t believe me try not changing the oil in your car and see how that works out for you and all things considered, we’d be better off if Cheryl Hines were Secretary of Health and Human Services and if she’d spent more time kissing Donald Trump’s ass she probably would be.
As always, hang in there.
All the cuts these evildoers are making are in areas that affect perhaps some 5% of the overall budget, so it’s not saving money they’re interested in, it’s creating pain and misery to the non-white non-wealthy. If anybody was serious about actually cutting the deficit, they’d start with the ridiculously overinflated military budget, but of course, that’s sacred. The only cuts they’re considering for the military are firing top brass and replacing them with Trump toadies, ones that will be happy to turn the military against citizen protestors when that bloated buffoon ironically invokes the insurrection act against the protests will soon become legion.
Outstanding piece today. I really like your depiction of Elon. It leaves absolutely no question about who it is. Sometime, could we see your interpretation of him with his ever present shades? It's hard to believe the world has reached the point where a cartoon, chainsaw wielding Musk is probably the best thing I'll see this week. Thanks for the sanity saver!!