Last time around, I dismantled the myth of indestructible buildings—people dream of granite fortresses, their mental models blind to necessary trade-offs—meanwhile ballooning the cost of new construction and keeping more people are stuck in older less safe buildings.  That same flawed thinking now fuels a frenzy over air disasters and my wife’s legitimate grumble over dental bills and paperwork that could choke a horse.  Whether it’s planes plummeting or crowns now costing thousands, folks cling to busted models—piles of regulations, their wild conspiracies, or broken systems—that splinter when reality bites. In my truss design world, I double-check software because it’s half-baked; we should also scrutinize the narratives and red tape the same way, and not add more wreckage.

Air Disasters and the Partisan Haze

The wacky left, not to be outdone by the kook conspiracy right, keeps blaming air disasters on deregulation. Start with January 29, 2025: a Bombardier CRJ700, American Airlines Flight 5342, slammed into an Army Black Hawk over D.C.’s Potomac River, claiming 67 lives. Then a Canadian Dash 8 skidded off a snowy Quebec runway—no deaths, but headlines aplenty. 

Now the April 10, 2025, Bell 206L-4 chopper crash in New York’s Hudson River, six gone, including Siemens exec Agustín Escobar and his family. X posts scream Trump’s crew gutted FAA rules. Never let truth get in the way of a partisan narrative, right? But the facts don’t bend. D.C. hit nine days into his second term—too soon for policy shifts to ripple. The Hudson chopper passed a March 1, 2025 inspection, clean as a new nail. NTSB points to D.C.’s air traffic staffing woes, Canada’s pilot error, New York’s likely mechanical failure—not slashed budgets.

Stats cut the haze. FAA data shows U.S. aviation incidents down since 2020, though Potomac’s toll spiked fatalities. Crashes in media hubs like D.C. or NYC feel like a deluge, but it’s perception, not reality. I’ve seen this hysteria before—folks panicked over food processing fires, but as someone who supplies building components we see many ‘fire jobs’ and not a surge.  Fires due to hot bearings, bad wiring, heaters or dust are quite common and to be expected.  The funny thing none of these food processing fire alarmists reported on the new feed mill near me—non-confirming news doesn’t go viral.  

Then the tinfoil-hat crowd spins BlackRock plots because Escobar was aboard. What are the chances a Siemens exec’s on a chopper? Pretty high, honestly—they’re the ones dropping $500 a seat, not me touring the harbor for free, with my family, on the  Staten Island Ferry. BlackRock’s got stakes everywhere; a link’s no bombshell. As far as the in-flight breakup of the Bell helicopter, my pilot brother snorted, “Never buy an air frame that does 30+ takeoffs and landings per day.”  That is to say there’s a difference between a vehicle with highway miles and the one used as a weekend racer.  Seized gearbox or stress fractures, not sabotage. The SEAL pilot’s fuel call was logistics, not a scream. Yet they weave a blockbuster rather than look at a shop log.

This echoes the indestructible building myth—deregulation won’t make planes drop tomorrow, nor do cabals rig bolts. More FAA rules don’t sharpen mechanics’ wrenches, just like overbuilt trusses don’t scoff at storms. That ELD mandate for trucks?  It jacked costs, no safer roads. D.C.’s staffing gaps brewed for years; New York’s airspace is a madhouse, and always has been. Good design—trusses or aviation—leans on more clarity: sharpen skills, focused goals, while also acknowledging the risk baked in. Pilots should scan skies, not bury their heads in binders. But folks expect oceans to swallow us if one desk job’s cut, their models deaf to reality’s groan.  Failures aren’t a secret plot nor will more rules prevent them all.

Healthcare’s Paperwork Quagmire

That same broken model—thinking more rules fix it all—bleeds us dry in healthcare, where compliance piles up and costs push higher.  My Filipino wife got sticker shock: Over $2,000 for a crown!  What???  Her gut said yank the tooth, but the doc—and me—aren’t keen on losing one of those original equipment food grinders. Before we hit the chair, she was annoyed by those butt-covering forms—shields for liabilities (“We asked about novacaine allergies!”) and traps to hunt you down if you don’t pay their yacht lease. 

Earlier this year, my son’s middle school emailed another form, they’re playing dental cop to prove his exam. We lucked out—they took our word his Philippines checkup happened, sparing me need to send their paperwork to Baguio for my in-laws to wrangle.  There, we’d stroll into a clinic, no appointment, $20 for a cleaning or filling. Ain’t swanky, but it’s sterile, does the job, and fits a $8/day wage world. Here, insurance bloats costs like student loans—dentists hike prices ‘cause the check’s guaranteed.  The poor folks get Medicaid, rich get their implants—me: never had dental insurance in my life, other than my couple year subscription to a scam “discount” that did squat unless I was already shelling out.

Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was turned into law, healthcare costs per capita soared from $10,620 in 2010 to $14,570 in 2023—37.2% up, inflation-adjusted, per CMS. Life expectancy sagged, 78.7 to 77.5 years, says CDC, while costs kept climbing. Rather than keep your own doctor was the promise, choice is diminished.  Big players like UnitedHealthcare—had controlled 15% market share, Statista—grew hungrier and doubled it.  Locally, Evangelical Community Hospital is now under WellSpan, and Geisinger sold to Kaiser Permanente, a $95 billion beast, both 2023 deals. Less choice, more denials, like truss software spitting out only one overpriced and deficient design.

It is easy to forget the undemocratic way the ACA was formed. It was rushed to get around the results of a special election that would cost Democrats their filibuster-proof Senate. The Democrat Congress rammed through a trainwreck bill to circumvent their loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat.  The last thing we needed, in healthcare, was another layer of management.  Upset Americans—54% of the country wanting repeal—rose up in the mid-terms in opposition to this government takeover of their healthcare choice. 

Unfortunately the oligarchy won and we were stuck with a deeply flawed bill, sold with lies, passed in the dark of night, that nobody wanted—results in more mergers while costs continue to explode.

Obama, getting creative to deal with the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, created what was called United States Digital Service to fix the issues. This basically gave the Executive Branch a backdoor access to the newly minted government agency that was convenient for the Democrats at the time it was formed. And this, ironically, is now what gives DOGE the authority to do what they have been doing over the past few months.  Whether you see DOGE as a phoenix rising from the ashes or a monster coming from the abyss—you have Obama to thank for it. 

It’s like engineers, for compliance, ditching practical talks for nonsense specs that lead to an incoherent mess of conflicting interpretation—it produces more hassle for everyone downstream, not a sturdier roof or better structure.  This compliance Kabuki—fancy waiting rooms, school nurse cops—doesn’t make better teeth or safer streets, it just bloats our bills and increases our taxes for nothing in return. Philippines clinics run lean on cash, keep it real. Here, we’re buried under a pile of paper. 

Good design—trusses, planes, healthcare—cuts the fat, bets on need of good judgment over more forms.  Models that preach more rules will save us or seeing secret plots are as off as thinking properly engineered roofs can never cave.   The FAA didn’t fix Boeing’s focus on DEI over properly installed bolts in doors and the ACA only added to the cost of healthcare.  We must quit chasing fixes that will only add more dead weight to an already strained structure—and ask: what’s propping this whole mess up? And why’s it heavy enough to crush a man’s soul?

A Different Blueprint: Stripping Away the Myths

Things on the periphery are tough to flesh out, like trying to find out what is happening beyond the event horizon of a black hole. We all live in this big bubble—a commonly shared safe space—where folks will bicker over set topics, blind to how both sides are tangled in a bigger myth. The structures we take for granted, holding us up, are just assumptions we gotta question. These bad models—rules to save planes, forms to fix teeth—are flawed assumptions like thinking buildings never fall. If we want to see reality clear, we’ve got to strip away these biases, prejudices, blind spots, layer by layer. That’s my design philosophy: ask silly questions, and then take ‘em seriously. I mean, why don’t banks handle healthcare instead of employers? Why can’t we get checkups at the local bar? No rule says payers have to be governments or bosses.

Most folks can’t see past their battle lines, let alone a third path. But if we look beyond the forms we know, we might find a better way. It’s about exploring our foundations—digging into the functional fixedness of old ideologies, dusty processes, and our creaky systems. In truss work, I don’t simply trust software math ‘til I test it; in life, and I don’t buy models ‘til I poke ‘em. We can do better by imagining something different—say, healthcare that’s cash-simple, like Baguio, or an aviation culture that trusts pilots over paper. Models preaching conspiracy plots or encouraging more red tape are as wrong as thinking roofs don’t cave. 

In Japan, the electronic toll system on the Tomei Expressway and other routes crashed for 38 hours across Tokyo and six prefectures. The toll gates froze, smart interchanges shut, congestion piled up. And the operator, Central Nippon Expressway Company, had no fix in sight, so they threw open the gates, let drivers pass free, and simply asked them to pay later online. Most places, you’d expect folks to floor it and forget it. But over 24,000 drivers—some say 28,000—went online and paid up, no cops, no fines.  An honor system.

That’s not just a country; that’s a different approach to problem solving. They didn’t lean on a coercion model—chasing violators or piling on rules. The culture is what made the difference.  They could trust people to square up and people did. It’s a glimpse of what happens when you question our own status quo.  Why are our systems so heavy, so distrustful, in the first place?  Why does a Christian nation need government to solve all problems yet Japan does not?  This may be a difference between our individualistic frontier mindset and their group harmony formed of rice cultivation.  But it’s also the communal approach of Amish as well.

Mutual aid in Amish country is organic, not institutionalized, they don’t need bulky and wasteful organizations.  They have built an identity together (like the Japanese have) and thus they voluntarily go along with the program.  This may sound stifling, but is it really?  Americans pay a boatload of taxes so that their bought off national leadership can bomb Gaza’s hospitals.  Did we ever vote for that?  No.  The general public is just as indoctrinated and controlled by ideologies as a strict religious sect.  The big difference is that Amish get their barn back days after a fire whereas the rest of us will spend the year sifting through insurance paperwork. 

A sustainable future requires effective and efficient resource allocation that does not rely on costly bureaucracy or enforcement agencies.  Governance is best internalized—something we do voluntarily as part of our collective identity or being part of a larger group.  This will require discarding models and myths that aren’t beneficial.  This idea that the world’s problems are either solved by some undefined ideal regulatory regime or are all caused by it’s evil twin of a secret world spanning scheme is simply fantasy that prevents reasonable discussions and pushes away from solutions that will better harness our human potential.

Cooperation doesn’t need to be top down or cumbersome and artificial.  No, love for our own and self-sacrifice love is as coded into human DNA as conflict.  And we should be taking a closer look at Japanese and Amish blueprint.  Honor, a common code of ethics, shared cultural values, an internalized joint identity and being respectful to others can’t outsourced.  Diversity is only strength when it harmonizes and follows the same tune.  It is a combination of building a familial trust, deeper human relationships, and a societal mission that is worthy of fuller investment—not more programs, systems and rules.