Drug Culture

I've been watching more uhmmm Television in the evenings only to notice that as a viewer, we are pelted with tremendous advertisements for ......... Drugs. Everything from sleeping pills to pain relief and woody pills. Little kids are growing up knowing all about ED. No not the talking mule, but erectile distastfulness. In one evening I saw commercials for:

Cialis
Lunestra
Ambien
Excedrin
Lipitor
some 36 hour hard on medication
Preparation "H"
Celabrex
and probably another 5 or 6 I've forgotten.

Is it any wonder that young teens look to self medication to deal with their problems?

TAKE A DAMN PILL.

My Home for over a year.

This is where I lived and took care of 163 sailors. I did everything from treating cuts and burns to sowing up torn up elbows and forheads.

Enjoy Your Memorial Day Weekend

In 1973 I was getting really good at guitar. I was getting the Hendrix riffs down really smooth. But my best friend Chuck Owens was going into the Navy. Chuck and I had just spent the summer playing tennis and cruising the strip together. My father could barely afford to feed me so I joined my buddy Chuck and joined the Navy myself and became a corpsman. It's a whole different world in the military but I'm proud to say that I served. Many times I think about guys my age that hit the clubs and started bands like my highschool buddie "Chirs Isaak" and the guys in the GA Sats, but I'll always be able to say that I did my part keep this country great.

My best goes to those who served, those serving now, and those down in boot camp getting ready to serve.

God be with you and Thank y0u.

Ace out......................

Make it ~ Sell it ~ Fake it

For years now I've seen great products "mostly food and alcohol" products that hit the market like a hurricane. It comes out and everyone is talking about it at work the next day.

I remember back around 1987 88'; Miller came out with "Miller genuine draft". My baseball buddies and I stumbled onto it when one of the guys brought a 12 pack over for the thursday night games. This stuff rocked. It was " cold filtered" or so the catch marketing phrase was. What ever it was, it tasted really really good. Now I don't know what happened but somewhere along the way it just started tasting like Miller. (which taste like Bud, or Coors etc...)

In the early 90's Nalleys came out with "Jalapeno Hot" Chili. Now being a chili afficianado; I gave this stuff 2 thumbs up when it came out. Not that it tasted spicey but it actually seemed like it had "stuff" in it. If you've bought a can of it lately; it taste like hormel which tastes like Dennison which tastes like etc..........

The only answer this college educated mind can come up with is; The formula is to make a great short term product. Capture the Market, then contract with a knock-off OEM that makes a so-s0 half the cost version of the real thing. Somebody on Wall street please confirm this if you know. But nothing is ever as good as when it first came out anymore. EXCEPT:

PACE PICANTE SAUCE. Bless their hearts and integrity. It's always been the Bench mark and hasn't gone down in quality since it took over the market back in the early 90's??????


Ace out........

REPRINT FROM JUNE 27th 2005

I thought this went well with the previous post:

I was reminded this week-end of a time I was visiting my favorite Chinese Restaurant . There was large hispanic family that came in and sat down near my table. They were all speaking in spanish, even the little children.

In the back of the restaurant, I could hear the staff speaking loudly above the grills and fans in either cantonese or madarin (I'm sorry, I don't know the difference). What happened next was just as red, white and blue as George Washington.

The waiter came over and both parties started speaking just the weakest English I'd ever heard in my life. The most common word was "What"? or "Huh"? (sometimes a combination of both). But ya know, that's America in a nutshell. America isn't the greatest nation because of our European history, America is great because we've been able to merge the world's culture's with an open mind, gleen the good and learn from the bad. When this country was founded, it was a result of the colonies rejecting England's Tyranny. We learned to perfect Capitalism. The settlers learned survival. We learned that the essence of a civilazation is that "the strong have a duty to protect the weak". Did you know that the founding fathers wanted to create a Monarchy in the 1700's ? They wanted George Washington to be the "King" of America. Washington was glad that he didn't have a son. We were wise to reject England's form of government. We were wise to learn from the advances and failures of the Roman and Greek empires.

Americans invented the horseless carriage. Then 70 years later, we would be relearning how to build cars from a country that we devastated with nuclear bombs just 30 years before. This would lead to a strengthening of our economy. How could we have rebounded from the lethargy and failures of the 70's if we would have continued to believe that "The American Way" was the only or best way to do something. How could Japan, a defeated nation operating on an Imperialistic paradigm turn it's economy around and become a world leader in manufacturing? We gleen from the best and learn from the worst.

As my friend Page Jackson says in his song, "Every single moment is another chance to turn your life around".

Ace out.......

How Long do we have?

How long do we have? About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior: "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship." "The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years." During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:


1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

3. From courage to liberty;

4. From liberty to abundance;

5. From abundance to complacency;

6. From complacency to apathy;

7. From apathy to dependence;

8. From dependence back into bondage. Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election: Population of counties won by Gore: 127 million; Bush: 143 million; Square miles of land won by Gore: 580,000; Bush: 2,427,000 States won by Gore: 19; Bush: 29. Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Gore: 13.2; Bush: 2.1.Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off government welfare..." Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmentaldependency" phase. Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.


PS: #9. If the Senate grants Amnesty and citizenship to 20 million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then goodbye USA in less than 5 years!!Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the success and the survival of liberty.John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Depression~Suicide and Righteousness

Is Zoloft or Effexer really the answer? Isn't taking an anti-depressant sort of like having oxygen pumped into the caverness space that you're trapped in? This is great if the E.M.Ts are racing to excavate you from your wreckage. But depression isn't always the result of a chemical/enzyme imbalence. Depression was designed to be a normal part of the healing process. It's your bodies way of dealing with issues (albeit not the best way).



But in America, we've developed an industry that accepts the chemical approach to making you feel better. Anti-depressants are the most over-prescribed medications in the world. What's truly aweful is that not a fraction of the cure is ever focused on the cause of the depression.



Sometimes it means leaving a stressful job. Sometimes it means acute psychoanalysis. But most of the time, it means facing your fears in a healthy manner.



I was reading a quote from Eddie Vetter after he had written the song "Jeremy". Vetter said that he felt it was tragic that all you get when you sacrifice your life (suicide) is one small paragraph in the paper.

"It came from a small paragraph in a paper which means you kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you're gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper...it does nothing...nothing changes. The world goes on and you're gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself. Be stronger than those people. And then you can come back" Nicely said Ed.


Ace out...............

RED NECK 101A

Why come "my ol' man" as in " I came to blows with my ol' man" almost always refers to Dad; and "My Ol' Lady" always refers to the wife?

Saturday Morning

What ever happened to Saturday Morning Cartoons? Remember back in the 60's the Beatles had a cartoon. I remember Warner Brothers use to have the humor that is found in the Simpsons and King of the hill. And the violence was extreme. Remember the roadrunner? Poor Coyote got crushed by an ACMI boulder every episode.

And remember the little black Native with an attitude? His cousin must have been Marvin the Martian. The Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker of the 60's didn't know the meaning of political correctness.

Ah those were the days.

Ace out.......................

Rules for doing cover songs

1. Never cover a song that has Chakkah Kahn in the back ground. You'll kill it.

2. Never cover "My Girl" unless the whole band is black.

3. Never cover a love song if there are none to very few women in the audience.

4. Never try fretboard tapping if you aren't proficient at it.

5. Never cover a song "just because it's popular".

6. Whenever possible cover as many Terry Anderson songs as you can.

7. Don't cover it note for note. Make it your own.

Mommy, I wanna be a nurse when I grow up.

That's what all little girls say at one time or another when they're playing with their dolls and horses. A rare few actually care about people and become doctors. But aside from those whose last name end in the initials M.D. , the medical profession is dominated by frustrated females that either regret getting into medicine or have gone so far in nursing that they've priced themselves out of a job.

A wonderful nurse wrote an article on me that was published in the Sunday paper a few years back. It's funny because she asked me what I did as a day job and I told her I was in the medical industry. I laughed and said, like every other nurse, I'm trying my hardest to get out of it. It turns out that she had been a nurse before writing for the Oakland Tribune.

Whoa is the male sub-professional. My heart goes out to the specialty trained techinicians that get slapped around by those whose last name are actually R.N. . There is a huge insecurity in the RN sector that fears technology. Nursing is no longer giving shots and mesuring out 5 cc's of cough syrup. It's about recording Kvps of radiation and Joules of Laser energy. This is usually done by a male technician. You know; the guy that liked to tinker in his dad's work shop in the garage. But an idiot with 4 years of college and the ability (or not) to speak some english, merits the technician a status of "subordinate".

What truly makes the medical system in America poor, is that neither doctors nor nurses are taught anything about management or business in their perspective schools. Doctors have it the worse in that they are faced with the responsibility of billing for tremendous wealth; while nurses end up in positions of management in the hospital. These seem to be the common weaknesses of both professions. Fortunately, if a doctor is smart (and lucky) he or she will hire a really good business manager.

As for nurses, most of them rely on books on management, leaving them clueless about leadership.


Ace out....................

The Deity of the Medical society

Patient care in the medical arena today ranks somewhere around 8th or 9th with 1 being the most important issue. Here is my list of the 10 persuits that drive doctors.

Of course 1 is money. 1 defines the 2nd most important issue:

2. Your god complex. This is the same whether it is the Stanford University Medical Center, or a community hospital in Rhinelander Wisconsin. The god complex is derived from having the ability to kill someone or save them. How many doctors get away with murder under the guise of "misdiagnosis"? How many doctors have repressed images of getting their asses kicked in highschool for being nerds? How many doctors would not have those desperate "trophy" house wives if not for their billing agent? How many doctors are walking around with a chip on their shoulders (or even more pretentious, a stethescope)? They're worshipped by not only their patients but nurses as well.

3. Power within one's realm of reality. This power is the power to rule another person's behavior. The ability to demand that they be addressed as Doctor. Do clergy demand that they be addressed as Reverend or Pastor when you first meet them? The only threat to a doctor's power is the administrator where they practice.

4. The car they drive.

5. The neighborhood they reside in.

6. The office building they practice in.

7. The academic societies they belong to.

8. Patient care. Good patient care now days is more of a marketing tool to get repeat visits.

9. Reputation in the Medical Community

10. Being a principal centered member of society. I only put this on the list as most doctors have no clues what it means to be principal centered.

Tomorrow we learn about the fuel that drives the MD's ego: The nurse.