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