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Baseball, Big Pharma, 30 second ads and We Must All Just Be Sick

At one point it seemed that when you watched sports on television all you saw were either car commercials, truck commercials, insurance company commercials or fast food commercials. Everyone seemed to need both a Ford F150 truck towing off-terrain vehicles and of course – a Big Mac, fries and super-sized Coke. Some gravel road in a mythical mountain scenery with junk food trash strewn around the floor of your vehicle was the idea of nirvana. Those ads have not exactly gone away but now about a third of the commercials seem to be for pharmaceuticals whos names are as forgettable as they are sometimes impossible to pronounce.  Are these the new Greek gods of our era? “Dear Camzyos. Must I have this splitting headache for days? Ask my doctor?” Of course, at some point during the ads you get the warning about side effects. These always include nausea and dizziness, anxiety, diarrhea, muscle aches and frequently unfortunate side effects, things like death.  Oh well. Mortality has arrived, but at least my eczema cleared up and my poops were fine.

During the MLB Playoffs and World Series I have been keeping track of all the drugs advertised. Below is my running list. Remember to ask your doctor, provider or now prescriber about the list below and whether you need any of them.

Calquence – ask your doctor
Camzyos – ask your doctor
Dupixent – skin medicine
Ebdyss – skin medicine
Entyvio – ulcerative colitis
Keytruda – cancer
Panvorya – ask your doctor
Pluvicto – prostate
Ro – weight loss, Serina Williams endoresed
Skyrizi – chrons disease
Sublicade – opioid dependence
Tremphya – ulcerative colitis
Vandos – In the pursuit of happiness (this is a pharmaceutical company)
wegovy – weight loss
Xiafra – eye medicine

The irony of this advertising on such a large stage is that we live in an age of targeted advertising. Online we see ads dependent on what web sites we have visited and what products are in our “carts.” That a company has such deep pockets with niche “products” to buy ads in the expensive World Series market says something about the chicanery in our healthcare system. Health insurance premiums are going up.  Soon, many people will not have health insurance at all. Sorry for the buzz-kill folks. It may be time to pop a few Vandos.

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Rants and More Rants – Everyone is a Customer

We live in a time when everyone is a customer. People are no longer citizens, patients or students.

People do not see themselves as citizens. Sacrifices are just for suckers. Many people voted for Donald Trump because they liked his brand and product and did not like Harris’s laugh. They chose a president like they would toilet paper. They identified with his selfishness and saw themselves or a version of themselves.  Rich, selfish, scatterbrained, pugnacious, white, demanding and full of ego. Game the system. Look out for number one. Greed is the new virtue.

The health care world no longer has patients. Now they are customers. “Would you like a pill for that problem? On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level? After the visit, please fill out this survey to let us know how we are doing.” It is not about health care but more about money.  Customer satisfaction is our goal! Oh. Sorry about that opioid epidemic and all those dead people. We got them hooked on those funny pills.

In universities people are no longer students. If a professor can no longer entertain the class, she gets bad reviews. Make students read books. You must be out of your mind! With the advent of the cellphone, the majority of students go to college having never read a single book from cover to cover. I brought this up online about five years and the parents got quite defensive. It has just gotten worse.

No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Hilarius Bookbinder Mar 31 Guest post – Persuasion Newsletter

The student is now a customer. Anything that makes them uncomfortable and they simply do not show up. An opposing point of view? An angle that is perhaps rarely seen? Reading that is difficult with big words? Learning to expand the mind? No. Sorry. I am here because if I get this degree it will hopefully mean I will not have to work in fast food, microwaving hamburgers for the next thirty years.

The irony is that we live in a world when in past times you were actually a customer. Gas stations pumped your gas. Baggers in grocery stores were common. A travel agent would make sure you got the right flights when things got complicated. When you called a company for information, you could actually talk to a real person. Maybe now we are often just disgruntled customers.

Keep it small and in the neighborhood. That’s what I say.

That is my rant for today. I am sticking with it.

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Rants and More Rants – February 2025

I have created a new category Rants and More Rants. It is where I can write rambling screeds and jump from topic to topic. In George Carlin’s monologues he would often break into these types of rants by starting with “whhhhhhhhhhy”?  Sometimes in this crazy world, you have to just freestyle it.

I don’t know anything and have no perspective, but here is my comment…. I feel better now.
Barnstorm in 2013 on the defunct website Stoke Report

Why do the security people at federal buildings allow Elon Musk and his henchmen in the door? How is it possible that a private citizen can access government systems without security clearances? It is more difficult for a seventeen year-old to get into a bar these days.

Why are half the people interviewed on news shows from the Heritage Foundation?  Does the Heritage Foundation have a monopoly on white guys in ties talking about politics or the state of the news? Rarely do you get the likes of Ralph Nadar, Noam Chomsky or hundreds of other qualified and intelligent people on the main-stream press. Why does David Brookes always get the mic? He is one guy. We all know what he is going to say.

Why was there so little reporting about the avian flu before the election? Before the election many people thought the price of eggs was all Joe Biden’s fault. The media did little to report on what was actually happening. The larger issue is about large agribusinesses and large egg farms with 10.000 chickens all coughing in each other’s beaks in unison.

Why does the media rarely delve into the history of a subject but instead writes about personal narratives and a conflict? You see this with wars, environmental tragedies and the medical world. One after another stories about a transgender person struggles or running from a hostel environment. Endless pictures of transgender people and the narrative is always right versus left. Conservatives versus liberals. Never in the discussion is the recent history of the 2013 DSM 5 which is the real reason for this sea change. Rarely do you hear of the AMA (American Medical Association) or the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) and their medicalization of gender and their ability to profit off of the DSM 5.  Why not interview right-wing doctors and their take on the AMA? Why are the pharmaceutical companies not held to account for the fentanyl crisis? In 2025 the media seems to think that its goal is simply to confirm people’s biases, make issues into binary conflicts and do corporate America’s bidding.

Why are street cleaning tickets in San Francisco $97?
Seems a bit extreme for a situation where the city drives a truck around and mostly just blows the trash and leaves from one side of the street to another. Knock on wood. I have not had a ticket in a long while.

Those are my rants. “I don’t know anything and have no perspective, but here is my comment…. I feel better now.”