TRACY BLOG
Week 1 archive Week 2 archive Week 3/4 Week5/6 Business Blog week -7 week - 8
Tue 03/03/20
Get ready for my next blog:
Why KATA has a better chance of saving your live than any self defense system!Update of Dave Hebler
I want to thank every one who helped me locate Dave Hebler. Dave gave be a phone call today, and we spent over 1 ½ hours reliving the "Old Day".
If you could have been on the phone with us, you would have learned more about the " Modern History of Kenpo" 1957- until Ed Parkers death, then has ever been revealed. Over 90% is of a personal, confidential nature and will never be made public. I encouraged Dave to put out e-books and DVD’s to gives us a permanent record for important events in the history of Kenpo. When he releases them, I will let you know on my web.
Health Care: The Hospitals!
By now you have probably seen the clips: $1,000 tooth brushes. $140 - 1- pill Tylenol. It gets even worse. I personally got hit with one of these. I was in the hospital for treatment of a ulcer. The gave me for one night - intravenous (Tigamet - an antacid) you can buy over the counter for About $10 for 30 pills. The hospital charge was $3,000. The insurance company actually paid that charge. And you wonder why health insurance costs so much.
The numbers I am about to set down are not a misprint:
For every $1 dollar hospitals bill, they actually only collect 4 cent. That is right, 4 pennies on the dollar. The only one who really keeps Hospital Billing honest in Medicare. Medicare will only pay for what they know the product or service is worth. Who really gets ripped off? People without insurance who pay cash. Now you know why the #1 reason for bankruptcies is medical costs. Big Insurance plans have the power to refuse to pay outlandish price. But the individual has no such power.
Lets get real:
All your life you have wanted to be a Dr. After 8 plus years of college and medical school I will give you two choices:
1. Go into family medicine, where on a daily basis you make life and death decisions, work long hours, get paid at the low rates of Medicare. Or worse yet, treat patients with no insurance, and no money?
2. Move to a very wealthy part of the country and do breast implants, nose jobs and a lot of nips and tucks! These clients have money to pay cash.Selling out America:
More on Senator Bunning (from my state of Kentucky) makes me so proud to team him up with Sen. Mitch McConnell: George Bush’s lap dog. Bunning one man dog and pony show to stop the extension of unemployment benefits goes even further. The bill he has held up also had the following previsions. They unemployed will not get health care cobra protection. They had to lay off 2000 construction workers because they so not have the money to pay them, And here is the one that really PIS_ES me off. The bill would have prevented the government from cutting Dr.'s Medicare payment by 21%
Sen. Bunning claims he is protecting the American people from adding to the deficit.
Here is his record:
1. He voted to give Pres. Bush a blank check to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Final cost will be over $1 Trillion dollars. The general opinion is that IRAN will end up being the winner in the war in Iraq, because the United States got rid of IRAN’S mortal enemy.
2. He vote for George Bush’s tax cuts for his wealth friends. No money, so they borrowed it from the Chinese, and stole it from the Social Security trust fund.
Historical Note: American under Bush was the first county in the history of the world that gave tax cuts during a war. All other countries raise taxes to finance a war!
3. Bunning is now demanding that we enforce (pay-go) which means you have to pay for new expenditure. The hypocrisy is Bunning voted against Pay-go.
4. Closer to home, Bunning voted against bailing out the auto industry. Here are two main reasons: First he hates unions. He blames unions for everything wrong with American industry. Second, he wanted to protect Toyota. Toyota has its main US manufacturing in Georgetown Kentucky about 15 miles from where I live. He loves Toyota because they have no unions. And he believes, that the American automobile industry, can never be successful until we adopt the management style of Toyota. The state of Kentucky gave Toyota millions of dollars in tax breaks to open its plant in Kentucky.We will see said the Zen Master!
Fri 02/26/10
A lot of issues
Obama had better get his priorities straight! The number one concern should be jobs, not health care. It is estimated that millions of people will be unemployed for years! We have shipped to many of our good paying jobs overseas, and they will never come back.
Each month we have record trade deficits. The problem is NOT that we do not export enough of our products to foreign countries. The problem is we do not produce products made by American worker, here in the U.S. that American consumers will buy! Just look around you. Do you see one produce made of manufactured here in the U. S. ? Unless you just ordered a Pizza!
Broken Government
Polls show 86% of all Americans; Democrats, Republicans, Independents think government is broken
75% do not trust our elected officials - most think they lie to us
60% do not like American style democracy when it goes to the way we elect government officials
AGI - COST Taxpayers billions of dollars to bail out and is now 80% owned by the government. They just announced it has lost another $9 billion dollars. Despite these loses, we (tax payers) are forced to continue to pay millions in bonuses to those who caused all the problems. The argument is: by law we have to pay those bonuses. The question us who wrote those laws. In most cases lobbyists!
Today’s classical example of Lobbyist and special interests:
TOYOTA - Just released internal company documents bragging about how TOYOTA was able to save $100 million dollars. They did this by getting to the right people in the U.S. cars safety division to convince them not to have a full recall on the defective brakes problem. TOYOTA claimed it was just a small problem with the floor mats. The safety division just looked the other way. WHY!
Big brother is out their -
1 in 4 Americans, work for a company that gets government contracts.
The cry of big business: Get the government off our backs, but give us the money, but with no strings attached.
Too Big to fail: 40% of all the deposits in banks are in the 4 largest banks. And who insures those deposits? The American tax payer!
Too Big not to fail. The Hummer, a symbol of all that was wrong with the Automobile industry was being sent to the scrap yard. The proposed deal to sell it to a China Company fell through. But GM is still looking for someone stupid as they were to buy it.
It has now been shown there is no correlation between Wall Street and Main Street (the American People). Having been bailed out by taxpayer money Wall Street is turning in record profits and record bonuses. But notice this has not created one new job, except for wall street companies! Why should they be concerned about creating jobs? That is not where fast, easy money us made, especially when there is all that cheap money out there. Money that small business cannot get to expand and create new jobs. Lets face it, loaning money to small business has a high risk. Loaning money to big Wall Street companies is safe, when you know the government will bail out their bad investments. 708 small banks are now in serious financial trouble.
The next finical bubbles:
1. Commercial real-estate. You are going to see many big shopping malls close down!
2. Pension funds. Both private and government. Local government pension funds are in the worse shape. For years they have been under funding the plans. The latest recession and collapse of the stock market has made it impossible to pay for all the benefits they promised. You are going to see more examples, like in California, a where Major city, had to declare Bankruptcy because it is broke.
Monday will show how dysfunctional our government is
1. 1.3 million workers are due to loses their unemployment if congress does not extend payments for another 30 days, for the long term unemployed.
Congress on Friday tried to pass a bill extending the programs for one month. The House had now already passed the bill and sent it on to the Senate where they had the necessary votes to pass the bill. Thinking it was a done deal, many Senators left Washington to go home for the weekend. When the bill came up in the Senate, they used the standard procedure to call for a unanimous voice vote. When the standard procedure was made, they asked the standard question: are there any objections. Then came the bomb shell: Senator Jim Bunning. He objected each time they asked for unanimous consent. The Senate, could not overcome the objections of a single lawmaker, Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky.
The Democratic senators, who are trying to a pass a 30-day extension for the unemployed, have literally stooped to begging the Kentucky Senator to drop his objection and give consent to make the decision unanimous. But the stubborn senator simply replied,
"Tough Sh*t."
This really shows how dysfunctional our Senate is - when just one man can stop payment of unemployment benefits to over 1.3 million laid off workers. That means 1.3 million unemployed will have nothing to help them in these critical times.
2. Medicare is due to cut reimbursements to Dr.’s by 21%. Already many Dr’s are making plans to bail out of Medicare or not take any new Medicare payments! Medicare already has the lowest reimbursement rates paid by anyone to Dr.’s.
Here is my main reason to defeat the proposed Health Care bill:
The proposal to cover the cost of the new health plan:
Takes $650 billion dollars from Medicare -
Medicare and Social Security Trustees annual report released today now projects that the Medicare HI trust fund will be exhausted in 2017, not in 2019 as predicted last year. The evidence is clear that the recession’s impact on healthcare benefits may be even deeper and more dramatic than hoped.
That is only 7 years from now! How do get medical coverage then. One solution is to move to Canada! That’s were everyone is covered by government run health insurance. We sure would not want that here.
Bet you did not now this: If you have any group health insurance plan you cannot sue the insurer for refusing you medical care - even if it was requested by your Dr.
Wonder who put that into the laws? Does Lobbyists and special interests mean anything to you?
SANTA JUST DIED!
There is bad news for all the big spending bureaucrats in Washington - for both parties! Since the days of the "Great" Ronald Reason - each year the government - took all the extra Social Security not used to pay immediate benefits - put it into the general fund and in its place gave Social Security an IOU.
How do you think Bush was able to give all the rich a $1 Trillion dollar take cut? Largely paid for by stealing our Social Security trust fund money.
That is all over - this year Social Security paid out more than they brought in. There was no money left over to steal! That is why the deficit will get even larger. Worse than that, someday all those IOU will have to be paid back. The problem; there is no money to pay the IOU’s.
Thur 02/25/10
A matter of seniority
One name overlooked in Kenpo/American Kenpo seniority - and his influence and knowledge of Kenpo/American Kenpo history that no one else knows is Dave Hebler!
Dave and I both studied with Ed Parker during the time of "Traditional Kenpo": Late 1950's - early 1960's.
As I remember it Dave was always around - especially for freestyle. Dave was fast, could hit and loved to mix it up. This is probably one of the reasons Elvis Presley in 1972 asked him to become a personal bodyguard not only for Elvis, but his entire family. Dave would be with Elvis 1972-1976. But this period of his life is best told by Dave who co-authored the best selling book, Elvis, What Happened which was released two weeks prior to Elvis' death in 1977, the book, at this time, held the distinction of being "the best selling original non-fiction paperback book" in the history of publishing.
Mr. Hebler, was one of the originators of the annual International Karate Championship held in Long Beach, California, personally developed the set of rules for the first, and many subsequent, IKC competitions, and served as a Director of the IKC for 12 years.
As President of Senior Grandmaster Ed Parker's International Kenpo Karate Association for a number of years, Dave was instrumental in developing the basis of the ever-evolving curriculum of the Ed Parker American System of Kenpo. After one of the first major splits in the Ed Parker American Kenpo System, Dave was among the few who stayed with Ed and taught for him for over 7 years at the Pasadena School. Mr. Hebler's first school was in Glendora, California, and for years, many students were attracted to his school in Laguna Hills, California.
It is this period of history that Dave has more personal knowledge then anyone in Kenpo/American Kenpo, including myself. I simply was not there when Ed Parker was making the transition from Traditional Kenpo he learned from professor Chow, followed by the period of Chinese Kenpo, then eventually American Kenpo.
Dave came up under the original white belt/tip system teaching only traditional Kenpo! Dave is the only senior Black Belt that was constantly there (almost 20 years) and saw every phase of transition and development of American Kenpo1
Here are many of the unanswered question I hope that Dave will be able to fill us in with.
1. When and how did Ed Parker start involving the system that would eventually become American Kenpo! And over what period was it developed?
NOTE: Ed Parker did not create the name American Kenpo. Dick Willett in San Diego was the fist to use this name.
2. When did Ed start using new terminology such as "Neutral Bow"?.
3. Who actually wrote the original 32 technique American Kenpo Manuals? When were the original new manuals used. Ed had the habit of not putting dates or copyright on much of his material.
4. Who determined what techniques would no longer be taught, and Why?
5. When did they the stop teaching rolling and falling as part of Kenpo?
6. During this period of change (1964-1972) who was Ed Parker influenced by?
7. What manuals were used by Ed before the New 32 technique manuals were developed
These are just a few of the question that only Dave has the answers too. It would be great if he would write and article - to keep history straight - about this period of time.
During this same period of time I was very aware of what Ed Parker was doing from a business stand point because from about 1966 forward we would be Business competitors. To stay in business you had to know what your competitors are doing and planning.
From my point of view the one thing Ed Parker never developed was a comprehensive business and sales system. He would bring in one business adviser after the other and they would all end up leaving!
If someone can get a current e-mail or phone Number for Dave Hebler, I would love to personally get in touch with him.
One thing I know for sure - Dave is not afraid of telling the truth. Not after all the heat he got for his book about Elvis.
I would like to recommend Dave’s book - Elvis: What Happened? by Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler (Paperback - 1977), but Amazon has only 1 used from $105.00