We live in a scaled-up, real-world version of the classic children’s board game “Mousetrap.” The built world is over-engineered, too interdependent, and so precarious that a slight disturbance might bring the whole thing down.

The interconnected, precarious Rube Goldberg contraption that is modern society has more than just rolling balls and baskets and levers. Our real, physical-world interdependencies include reliance on digital algorithms and computing devices that no one can intuitively understand. It’s the worst of both worlds, physical and electronic.

This is a real-world lesson in physics and mechanics that teaches universal principles that can never be altered by whim or historical vogue.

A friend’s internet service went out recently. Even though she was able to get a human staff member on the phone, that human wouldn’t talk to her to even confirm that the company recognized that she was a paying customer.

Why? Because she couldn’t log in to her email on another device and recite a “one-time code.” Remember, she was calling because she didn’t have internet access. Cell signals in rural states are often insufficient for internet use. You see the problem.

Everything is like this, but everyone is acting like this is the way things have always been. It’s not true. There is no reason to live this way. It is not a natural law. The overcomplicated world is not something that just “happened.”

This setup is a result of choices. Disconnected choices, yes. There’s no central mind that has created our society. There’s no single controlling cabal that has engineered the way we live, communicate, procure food, or any of that. There are powerful interests, legal and commercial, that influence our society more than you and I as individuals can influence it. But it’s not a conspiracy in the classic sense. It’s a result of accumulated errors. We need a reset.

Memories of the analog world

1979. My family slipped away from Tully, New York, in the dead of night by means of my grandmother’s silver Buick Electra. The Buick told you that she had a V-8 through the distinctive muffled bass rumble from twin tailpipes. She was what I call an “honest mechanical.”

We boarded the Amtrak to cross the country so my stepfather, a glassblower who specialized in making electrodes, could find a job. There was nothing left for a working-class man in Upstate New York in the 1970s.

On arrival in Los Angeles, my Uncle Lee and Aunt Sherry were waiting in a 1979 lemon-yellow Cadillac Coupe de Ville. A Cadillac. I was going to ride in a Cadillac!

The trunk mechanism on my Uncle Lee’s Cadillac was my first introduction to what I would later think of as overcomplicated or dishonest mechanicals. It did this amazing thing I had never seen before. The trunk lid raised and lowered all by itself, untouched by human hands. After my mother loaded the last suitcase into the cavernous trunk, the enormous yellow deck lid silently, slowly crept downward. When the lid reached the latch, the mechanism slowed down to a crawl to give you a “soft and silent” latch.

Today, my base-model Toyota has all those bells and whistles plus more. The “more” is the irritating part. Nothing in the car is controlled mechanically or directly. Everything is drive-by-wire. The car decides when to spin the wheels when stuck in snow, even though I could do a better job if I were allowed to control the traction. Even the heater fan and lights are programmed to slowly, softly ramp up and ramp down, as if a too-sudden onset of sound or light would strike the driver with apoplexy.

Man and machine

The legend of John Henry both horrified and fascinated me as a child. The steel-driving man of folklore tried to prove he was as good as the new-fangled steam drill at chipping out a tunnel to lay track. John Henry swung his sledgehammer until his muscle fibers broke and he died exhausted on the ground, while the steam piston kept reciprocating.

I understood that this tale from America’s railroad age was really about our present. It was obvious to me even as a kid in the 80s: Machines were crowding out the men. The mechanization of work inverted our values; humans had to live up to the demands and preferences of machine logic, not the other way around.

John Henry’s last act was a way of saying, “I am a man, and I live.”

RELATED: America needs mechanics; here’s where to apply

Getty Images/Heritage Images

Honest mechanicals

Honest mechanicals are machines that can be observed, understood, and intuited. They show their works; nothing is hidden from the hands or the eyes. Compare honest mechanicals to modern digital devices. Call those devices “black boxes” whose function cannot be observed, understood, intuited, or reverse-engineered by human senses alone.

Black boxes (computers of various sorts) are not mechanicals at all. They don’t have levers or pulleys or counterweights, or sprockets, or escapements. They have invisible states of magnetic orientation. You cannot see the works with your eyes, and the complexity of a chipset is beyond the human mind’s ability to grasp.

A piece of photographic film with a light-sensitive emulsion that forms an image is an honest mechanical. The image is readable by the human eye.

A .jpg picture file is a black box. The image cannot be read or intuited by humans without another black box we call a computer.

A steam locomotive is an honest mechanical. Observe that you can understand how the machine turns heat into steam, turns steam pressure into lateral force, and then translates lateral force into rotary motion, thus moving the train and its passengers along.

You can intuit an honest mechanical. And if you have children, especially boys, I recommend that you introduce them to honest mechanicals. Show them how steam engines work. Show them a cutaway of an internal-combustion automobile engine. Let them take apart a blender or a stand mixer to see how electric motors produce rotary motion.

Here’s an easy hands-on lesson you can and should do with your kids, starting at about age 4. It doesn’t matter that the lesson uses “obsolete” technology. That is a benefit. This is a real-world lesson in physics and mechanics that teaches universal principles that can never be altered by whim or historical vogue.

Make your own record player

Materials:

1 33 and 1/3 long-playing record album — one that’s scratched that you don’t care about1 #2 pencilconstruction paperScotch tape1 sewing needle

Instructions:

Form the construction paper into a cone and tape together. Tape the sewing needle securely to the small end of the cone. Think of an old gramophone with a needle attached to a brass horn — that’s what you’re doing.

Put the pencil inside the center hole of the record. Spin the record like a toy top, and help your kid lower the needle-in-a-cone onto the guide groove at the edge of the record.

Magically, you’ll hear the sound on the record, slightly amplified by the paper cone. Sure, it’ll be at the wrong speed, and maybe you won’t be able to parse the words. But you and your kid will immediately understand basic sound recording and reproduction. You will understand that sound can be transcribed as a wave form that can take real-world, physical form in the bumps and pits of a piece of material.

Most importantly, your child will understand that the material world actually exists and that it is analog.

This matters. It matters more than you probably know. Modern young people have grown up in a world of portable computers and phone screens that appear to show them reality, but that do nothing but arrange points of light into virtual simulations. Have you noticed that young Millennials and younger seem not only put off and frightened by simple mechanical technology — mechanical telephones, cars that use a clutch and a gear shift — but almost disgusted and embarrassed by devices from just a generation ago?

This is not merely the universal plaint of the old about the shortcomings of the young. The world today is different to an extreme degree from the world of just one or two generations ago. Young people don’t know how to get around town without GPS, they’re frightened to get driver’s licenses at 16, and few can even whip up a basic meal on a stovetop. Why would they know these things when they’ve been reared to believe that food and transportation just “happen” by sliding your fingers along an iPhone touchscreen?

Do what you can to ground yourself (first) and your kids and grandkids back inside the real, physical, material, analog world. Remember what John Henry knew: We are men and women, and we live.

​Lifestyle, Culture, Diy, Build your own, Analog, Digital, Tech, Parenthood, Education, How to, Intervention 

Biomedical research has produced extraordinary breakthroughs that have saved countless lives. But too many promising drugs now stall in federal review, and children with rare diseases are paying the price.

I’m a bioscientist. My work has focused on how healthy cells function and how that knowledge can be applied to therapeutic enzyme development. I’ve spent my career working inside the disciplines that move a treatment from lab bench to patient: protocol design, reproducibility, evidence standards, and layered human testing to ensure safety.

Is this simply bureaucracy doing what bureaucracy does? Or are rare pediatric therapies effectively facing a higher bar inside the system?

Standards, evidence, and process matter. But so does urgency.

Children with rare diseases do not live on regulatory timelines. They lose function month by month — speech, mobility, independence, even the ability to breathe on their own.

Of the more than 6,800 known rare diseases, about 70% begin in childhood. Better-known examples include Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Gaucher disease, and cystic fibrosis.

Developing therapies for these children is difficult, expensive, and slow even under the best conditions. Treatments such as Ultragenyx’s UX111 for Sanfilippo syndrome, Sarepta’s Elevidys for Duchenne, and Regenxbio’s RGX-121 for Hunter syndrome can take decades to develop, years to move through trials, and still more time to reach the children who need them.

That reality makes avoidable regulatory delay even harder to defend.

Too often, applications do not stall because the underlying science has failed. They stall over manufacturing or procedural concerns — in many cases, issues that are fixable and not directly tied to whether the therapy is clinically helping patients. Those delays can undermine the purpose of the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway, which exists to move critical treatments to patients faster while additional data is collected.

As a scientist, I was particularly troubled by the FDA’s recent rejection of a promising Hunter syndrome treatment and by yet another clinical hold placed on its development despite positive trial results.

That raises an uncomfortable question: Does the review process itself need review?

RELATED: The FDA is undermining a culture of life inside and outside the womb

Bill Oxford via iStock/Getty Images

The approval path for UX111 is another example. The therapy went through the rigorous biologics license application process, only to be delayed by a manufacturing hold.

Elevidys offers a similarly painful lesson. More than 1,200 Duchenne patients received the treatment over three years. Then, after two non-ambulatory patients (including one with underlying complications) tragically died, the FDA pulled the treatment from all patients, leaving families crushed and panicked.

Children are waiting too long for access to potentially life-changing therapies.

Yes, medical breakthroughs have increased. But so have regulatory burdens tied to approval and release. By the time many of these therapies reach the market, a decade or more has passed. In rare pediatric disease, that delay has a name: time children do not have.

Sometimes, it is their entire lifetime.

Manufacturing processes can be improved. Facilities can be upgraded. Paperwork can be corrected.

Lost neurons and muscle fibers cannot be replaced.

FDA leaders, along with Congress and the White House, should push for a smarter accelerated approval process — one that allows multiple requirements to be addressed simultaneously when appropriate, instead of serially dragging out timelines. If regulatory review had moved more efficiently, the Sanfilippo treatment might have cleared on its original 2025 approval timeline. Duchenne patients might not have lost access to the only available gene therapy. Hunter syndrome patients might not still be waiting.

This debate is not about abandoning safety or efficacy standards.

Ultragenyx has said manufacturing improvements are addressable and not directly related to product quality. Sarepeta responded to FDA concerns over Elevidys by requesting black-box warnings while allowing treatment to continue for ambulatory patients. In the RGX-121 Hunter syndrome case, the FDA rejected the use of a long-accepted biomarker (cerebrospinal fluid) used in the trial.

RELATED: ‘Hold Big Pharma accountable’: Vaxx giants are sure to be nervous about Rand Paul’s new bill

Drs Producoes via iStock/Getty Images

These decisions do not help children with rare diseases. Timely, science-based approvals would.

And the stakes go beyond today’s patients. Regulatory efficiency also affects whether companies continue investing in rare-disease therapies at all. Orphan drug development requires major upfront investment, long timelines, and often poor financial returns. In many cases, these programs are closer to philanthropic science than blockbuster pharma economics.

When developers face repeated slowdowns across different diseases, sponsors, and technologies for reasons unrelated to core clinical safety or efficacy, the signal to the market is clear: Don’t take the risk.

That is how innovation gets smothered.

At some point, the pattern at the FDA becomes impossible to ignore. Is this simply bureaucracy doing what bureaucracy does? Or are rare pediatric therapies effectively facing a higher bar inside the system?

Those are scientific and ethical questions that deserve honest answers.

Accelerated approval does not mean lower standards. It means applying standards intelligently. It means allowing earlier access while confirming evidence continues to accumulate. It means recognizing that “wait and see” is not neutral. It is a choice that guarantees disease progression in children who cannot afford delay.

Good science and compassion are not competing values. We can maintain rigor and still act with urgency.

The FDA has the authority. The science is moving. The children cannot wait.

Accelerated approval is not cutting corners. It is using every tool we have to save time families do not have.

​Opinion & analysis, Fda approval, Fda regulations, Rare diseases, Childhood disease, Sick kids, Food and drug administration, Bureaucracy, Red tape, Science, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Gaucher disease, Cystic fibrosis, Healthcare, Hunter syndrome 

After an incredibly eventful week of Olympic victories for Team USA, one leftist outlet got what it had coming when it said that feeling patriotic was “yucky.”

While hundreds of accounts roasted the author and the article, one three-word reply from a restaurant stole the spotlight and left the HuffPost the clear loser in the exchange.

‘This is the only acceptable response to HuffPost.’

HuffPost’s original post on Saturday, captioned, “If waving the American flag or chanting ‘USA’ turns you off right now, you’re not alone,” received a simple comment from Jimmy’s Famous Seafood.

“Go f**k yourself,” the family-owned restaurant’s account said Sunday.

RELATED: HuffPost gets absolutely scorched over article saying Olympics patriotism feels ‘yucky’

Photo by Carolyn Van Houten/Washington Post/Getty Images

Many major accounts announced that Jimmy’s Famous Seafood had earned a follow in the wake of the viral reply.

“This is the only acceptable response to HuffPost,” Nick Sortor said.

“Okay do you have locations in Florida patriot?” BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre asked.

“Only one location — family owned and operated. We ship to all 50 states however!” the account replied.

Jimmy’s Famous Seafood is based in Baltimore, Maryland, where it has been operating since 1974.

At the time of writing, Jimmy’s Famous Seafood had just under 360,000 followers on X. Its reply received over 13 million views, compared to 10 million views of HuffPost’s original article.

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​Politics, Jimmy’s famous seafood, Huffpost, Olympics, Usa, America, United states of america, Patriot, Nick sortor, Crabs, Social media, X, Auron macintyre 

Virginia police said a meat cleaver attack in Virginia left a scene described as a “bloodbath” after they shot and killed the alleged attacker.

Fairfax County Police responded to a call Monday from inside a residence at the Margate Manor apartment complex in Mantua, as well as from a neighbor.

‘I can’t imagine anything would compel anyone to butcher a family.’

The alleged attacker was described as a man in his fifties who used a 10-inch knife similar to a meat cleaver to attack his wife as well as his daughter, according to Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis.

The man’s son-in-law was outside clearing snow from the top of his car when he heard the commotion coming from inside the residence, according to police.

When he responded, he found his father-in-law stabbing his wife and then turning to attack the son-in-law.

Davis said officers found the man attacking the son-in-law when they arrived, and he ignored commands to stop.

“Our officer gave repeated commands — one after another after another — to this perpetrator, the father-in-law, to drop the knife, drop the knife,” he said. “Not only does he not drop the knife, but he proceeds to stab the son-in-law.”

An officer opened fire on the man and killed him.

All three victims were transported to a hospital, where the two women were later declared dead. The injured son-in-law remains in critical condition.

Police also found a child in the residence, but the 1-year-old baby of the younger couple was unharmed. The baby is under the care of child protective services while police seek to identify family members.

“To describe this scene as bloody would be an understatement,” Davis said.

RELATED: 19-year-old drove for 22 hours straight to kidnap 2 underage girls he met on Roblox game, police say

Davis said there had been no previous domestic violence calls at the residence, or any other calls. He defended the actions of his officer and said the bodycam footage supported that he followed use-of-force policies.

Police have not yet released the names of the alleged assailant or of the victims.

“We don’t know yet what turmoil, what strife is happening in their lives, but I can’t imagine anything would compel anyone to butcher a family,” Davis added.

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​Man butchers his family, Fairfax county cleaver attack, Bloodbath butcher stabbing, Crime, Meat cleaver attack 

The Trump administration has rescinded the Obama administration’s 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding for gases such as carbon dioxide. You may now exhale without worrying that the carbon dioxide in your breath will contribute to global warming.

After all, with 8.3 billion people on the planet exhaling an average of 2.3 pounds of CO2 per person per day, roughly 9.5 million tons of CO2 are respired into the atmosphere daily. That is a lot of hot air — literally.

If you have been holding your breath while waiting for more sensible environmental regulations that focus on both people and the planet, you may now breathe easier.

Fortunately, plants use the air we exhale. It is part of the life cycle that sustains a healthy biosphere. Add the full carbon cycle — in which carbon is sequestered and released throughout the living and nonliving components of the global ecosystem — and a natural balance is generally maintained.

The serious question has been whether human activity, especially the increasing use of fossil fuels since the late 1800s, has tipped that balance.

The major “consensus science” conclusions tied to the endangerment finding include the confident assertion that modern climate change can be attributed to people burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to one professional organization, these human-caused changes “are larger and faster than any humanity is known to have endured over the last 10,000 years.” The same view also holds that many harmful impacts already under way will intensify and outweigh any benefits.

Yet another perspective deserves consideration. One of the greatest forces lifting people out of poverty has been the burning of fossil fuels. The progression from coal to oil to natural gas — along with advances in pollution controls — has helped produce dramatically higher living standards in societies that use their energy resources well.

Arguably, the human-caused improvements in comfort, productivity, and longevity made possible by fossil fuels are also “larger and faster than any humanity is known to have [enjoyed] over the last 10,000 years.”

As for harmful impacts, the rhetorical pattern often looks familiar: find an extraordinary weather event and blame it on anthropogenic global warming. Extreme heat? Human activity. Extreme cold — as the United States recently experienced? Human activity again.

At least most scientists acknowledge that positive effects exist. These include substantial increases in global vegetation and the advantages of warmer temperatures over colder ones for human well-being and development.

RELATED: 5 truths the climate cult can’t bury any more

Khanchit Khirisutchalual via iStock/Getty Images

Any honest assessment of climate change and its effects on people, infrastructure, and the natural world should weigh both benefits and harms. Complex systems demand that kind of accounting.

The current retraction of the endangerment finding will be a particular breath of fresh air for the auto industry. In essence, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that it “lacks statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act to prescribe standards for [greenhouse gas] emissions” from “new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines.”

According to the EPA:

As a result of these changes, engine and vehicle manufacturers no longer have any future obligations for the measurement, control, and reporting of [greenhouse gas] emissions for any highway engine and vehicle, including model years manufactured prior to this final rule. This final action is only related to [greenhouse gas] emissions and does not affect regulations on any traditional air pollutants. Rather, this action realigns EPA’s regulatory framework with the best reading of the CAA, which does not authorize EPA to regulate [greenhouse gas] emissions from new motor vehicles.

As the agency notes, traditional health-based air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, lead, and carbon monoxide — not CO2 — are unaffected by this EPA action.

So if you have been holding your breath while waiting for more sensible environmental regulations that focus on both people and the planet, you may now breathe easier.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.

​Opinion & analysis, Epa, Environmental protection agency, Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Carbon dioxide, Co2 emissions, Breathing, Regulations, Supreme court, Greenhouse gas endangerment finding, Barack obama, Donald trump, Science, Clean air act, Humanity 

The alien debate has taken a turn after former president Barack Obama casually stated in an interview with Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens are “real” — but they’re not where the public may believe them to be.

“Are aliens real?” Cohen asked Obama on “No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen.”

“They’re real, but I haven’t seen them,” Obama told Cohen, before adding that “they’re not being kept in … Area 51.”

“There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” he said.

However, while Obama confirmed the existence of aliens, President Donald Trump went on to criticize the former president’s admission.

“He gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that, you know. I don’t know if they’re real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake,” Trump replied when asked about Obama’s claims by a reporter.

While Trump’s initial reaction was not to discuss Obama’s admission, he then went on to announce on Truth Social that he would be releasing government files on aliens to the public.

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump wrote in his post.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is thrilled that both Obama and Trump seem to be alluding to the existence of aliens as a fact — and that the public may soon finally know what’s really out there.

“We now have a former president who has said, ‘Yes, aliens are real, but they’re not at Area 51.’ And now we have a current president saying, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have shared that; that’s classified information.’ It feels like we now have two presidents, two people who would know, admitting that aliens exist,” Gonzales comments.

“It feels a whole lot like Donald Trump let it slip,” she adds.

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