This masterwork was a classic in 1977 just by being a Marvin Hamlisch work performed by Carly Simon. Dropping it in as the title piece to a James Bond flick, after the single-most awesome opening stunt in Bond history, just added booster rockets to the launch. It peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts that year, and was Simon's longest-charting song.
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| This is one potential question on the NCLEX, the national licensure exam for RNs. Asking this to a CNA is like asking your dog to do calculus. With an abacus. Blindfolded. It's as wrong as two boys f**king. For any RN, it's a lay-up. An easy shot. Follow up questions: Why is this rhythm important? What should the (actual) nurse do next? Answers at the bottom. |
For whatever reason, Angus is under the severely-misled misimpression that a CNA with a one-month classroom and clinical certificate (total, all-in) is functionally identical to an RN with two to four years of upper-division college education and a nationally recognized license.
He states the difference between a CNA and an RN is "Not much."
A CNA is a 60 hour course, and less than 3 weeks' supervised clinical training. In CA.
Florida CNAs need even less than that. (Color me shocked.)
An RN, by contrast, is a two- to four year degree program leading to national licensure, including more clinical hands-on hours in any month than CNAs require for their entire certificate. (Florida RN licensure may be less rigorous, IDK, but that's why an RN from CA, NY, or IL can work in all 50 states, and nurses from the Gulf Coast belt can generally not get hired anywhere else without extensive testing and additional classes unless they go to similarly low-educated states. Mississippi nurses right out of school, for example, can generally not go out-of-state to anywhere else. That's not for nothing.)
Apparently we really have to go into why one of these things is not like the other one.
Starting with CNA's having a state-specific certificate, not a professional license recognized in 50 states and seven territories.
This is the difference between a vet tech, and an actual vet.
One of those cleans animal cages, and the other one diagnoses animal illness.
That's why a CNA (an expired-certificate CNA to boot) passing herself off as an RN is committing criminal malpractice.
A CNA has exactly zero training, experience, or competence in assessing patients, absolutely none in pharmacology, nor in pathophysiology, gerontology, obstetrics, pre- and post-op surgical care, pediatrics, psychology, critical care, or about a million other things large and small that even a new grad RN walks out the door with from school before they can pass their boards.
A CNA literally lacks the knowledge of about a dozen 800-page nursing textbooks, whereas to get a CNA certificate, if you don't put your shoes and socks on in that order, you'll likely pass the class. The number of CNAs anywhere who could take and pass the NCLEX without years of study is going to be 0.000%, nationwide, since ever, even one with 25 years of floor experience behind them.
A CNA literally doesn't know what she/he doesn't know, any more than the guy who sweeps out the hangars at Boeing is a qualified aeronautical engineer. (As recent unqualified DIE hires at Boeing have demonstrated, in case anyone was watching.)
It's that big a difference, and anyone - family or not - telling someone otherwise with a straight face is talking out their other end.
And by "early on", apparently Angus is referring to 150 years ago, when even doctors had less actual medical knowledge than a modern EMT possesses. Yeah, things have changed a wee bit in nursing since Florence Nightingale got the ball rolling in the Crimea. Which is why CNA is a few weeks of night school, and not a college degree plus 3-12 months of directly-supervised clinical hands-on experience that an RN license requires. (CA requires 500 hours, minimum. My program was closer to 1300 hours.)
Putting it gently, Angus kind of stepped in it with both feet.
A CNA takes vital signs (with a machine that does 90% of the work), helps change dirty diapers and linens, and walks patients to the bathroom. That about exhausts their entire clinical skill set, and many of them are hard-pressed to be barely competent at any of that. Like I-didn't-realize-that-a-pulse-of-180-should-be-immediately-flagged-to-the-nurse/doctor barely competent. I've only seen that one - or one like it - about a thousand times in 25 years.
That skill set was covered my first week of nursing school, and they expanded on that to quite a degree over several years. Almost like one was a dead-end entry-level cert, and the other was a bona fide medical profession.
I don't know why anyone would lead someone to believe it was otherwise, but anyone so informed has been rather egregiously misled.
In Angus' experience wheelhouse, on the skillset continuum, it's the difference between a tank loader 5 minutes out of school at Ft. Benning (it still makes me shudder that it's not at Ft. Knox any more), and a SFC with 16 years in Armor who's the Tank Commander. (In point of fact, that loader got more - and better - training at his 19K MOS in 8 weeks at Ft. Benning than most CNAs get in school. EVER.)
*(Answer: C. V-tach. It's important because if it's pulseless V-tach, the patient is in cardiac arrest, and the nurse should get the defibrillator and zap that patient pronto while calling "CODE BLUE" loud enough for everyone within earshot to hear and respond to. Total amount of time CNAs get educated and trained to know and do this: Never. Period.
Whereas for an RN, any RN, it should be automatic. Anyone who sincerely thinks the difference between a CNA and an RN is "not much" should let their grade-school-aged kids take out their appendix or gallbladder with kitchen utensils, and get back to us on how well that worked out. That's what expecting a CNA to be an RN is like.)
Today's pick is a Top Five hit from 1977 by quintessential American singer/songwriter Paul Simon. Dedicated to the patient with no quality of life, made a DNR, but kept alive by his family probably out of guilt, long past the time they should have just let go, told him they loved him, and whispered into his ear "Walk towards the light...". There's nothing less fun than watching your patient's blood pressure slide down and circle the drain, without quite bottoming out, and then the family panics, and decides at the last minute they want you to do everything short of actual CPR. For some reason, couldn't get this song out of my head all night.
h/t WRSA
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| Link to Ima Retard's site at the OP. |
Life Is Hard.
It's Harder When You're A Fucking Retard.
Write that on your hand with a Sharpie, lest ye forget.
But let's grant the retarded premise, to illustrate the magnitude of retardation in play here, and the dearth of IQ points behind it.
So, for this to be anything but fever dreams of the insane, we'll just admit that literally millions of pilots have been in on this scheme since the first high-altitude aircraft, like for example the B-17, first flew. Every single one of them, who of course went on to become jet air transport pilots after WW2, along with millions of never-military civilian pilots, first officers, and flight engineers.
All in on the plot.
And all those millions of A&P mechanics, who never spilled the beans.
The engineers who snuck giant chemical tanks onto every aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of them, at companies like McDonnell, Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed, etc. All the people who built the tanks and installed them, along with the spray apparatus. In 100 other countries too.
Then there are the millions of people at hundreds of airports for decades and decades, dutifully filling those tanks at every airport all over the country. The guys who trucked in the chemtrail chemicals, every single day and night.
The guys who designed the chemtrail dispersal systems, and the guys who maintain them 24/7/365.
And not just the drivers who deliver the chemicals, but everyone at all the companies that make them, since ever, dear little retard.
Literally tens of millions of people who service this vast conspiracy, since the first contrails were discovered by flying at altitude, back in the 1930s.
And no one uttered a peep of confirmation, until our intrepid retard single-handedly cracked the case, aided and abetted by a second-grade dropout's misunderstanding of science, held by both the author of this piece of codswallop, and of course, ostensibly, by legendary scientific soopergenius RFKJr hisownself.
Yup, you cracked the case from your mom's basement, after legions of happy internet fucktards tried and failed.
In the words of Dr. Evil:
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Dear Internet Chemtrail Fucktards:
A little Science 101 for ya.
When you combust C(x)H(x)O(x), you get two byproducts, Every. Single. Time.
CO2, and H2O.
And by this barely-understood phenomenon, when H2O escapes as the byproduct of combustion, at altitude, where temperatures are less than 32° F., the water vapor makes this amazing and seldom-found item in nature called ICE.
Usually as crystals, blasted out by the ton, from any combustion engine on a high-flying airplane.
Which make condensation trails ("contrails", numbnuts, not "chemtrails").
Which even dumbfuck high-school dropout flight crew on B-17s could understand in the 1930s and 1940s, before Common Core became the norm for misleading gullible idiot children into thinking basic chemistry was a vast plot to poison the country.
So to anyone to whom this all is news, kindly grow another two or three dozen IQ points to get your chin above the "moron" line, and STFU until you do.
It's embarrassing to have to kick the retards, but sometimes, it's the only way to break the ground circuit when they're peeing on the electric fence. Again.
Word to your mother: Goddamned fetal-alcohol syndrome lead-paint-chip chewing retards on the internet are not a substitute for actual brains, to the same degree that shit is not either, for those who never knew that.
It's actually a slam on the entire species to have to point this out to some people. Please, stop living up to everyone's expectations of the internet.
And while we're up: throw away the tooth under your pillow. The Tooth Fairy isn't coming, since your mommy died, so no more quarters will be forthcoming. Someone had to tell you.
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| Absolutely no points for guessing how I know this to be true. |
England Dan (Dan Seals) and John Ford Coley's easy listening hit from May 1976 that went to #2 in the U.S.
h/t WRSA
What you ordered was a real DoJ.
What you got was the Fuckup Fairies.
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| Redacted White House press release: "No one |
One-hit wonder Fiona Apple's fifteen minutes of fame from 1997, providing her with a #21 hit and the first of three Grammys, along with her first and last moments of actual commercial success, boosted in no small part by this video that played in heavy MTV rotation, back when the channel actually played music videos. Dedicated today to the entire current Department of Justice, from the top down.
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| Dallas police officers rush Oswald to hospital moments after he swallowed poison. Unfortunately, he died within minutes by his own hand. |
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| Apparently, his head just spontaneously exploded. How unlucky. |
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| Commit to the comedy. |
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| "The greatest vexation with communism was not the intricate cleverness of the lies, but rather their ham-fisted clumsiness, which would insult the intelligence of a child or a simpleton, and their endless repetition coerced by those in charge." |
Number 10 hit release from March 1981, released three months after John Lennon's death, and six months after he'd celebrated his 40th birthday.
Scratch an entitled rich brat with delusions of grandeur, and you'll find another communist.
Dedicated to the pilots and ground crew of the 13th Bomb Squadron, in honor of their literally blockbusting magnum opus on their recent Southwest Asia field trip, comes this AC/DC Top 40 6x Platinum hit from 1980.
Ah, what a week.
Despite all the bad wishes and doom porn expended all over the blogosphere, no nukes are falling anywhere, and a lot of folks expecting the worst are really butthurt about that.
Even more folks got their white hoods and robes out of mothballs, and got them all wrinkled and dirty, for nothing.
Israel is satisfied Iran's nuke precursors are destroyed, to the point they agreed to stop bombing the Iranian f**ks back to the 6th century.
We're satisfied of that too, because we've seen the craters we put into their facilities.
Iran is convinced their nuke program is toast, to the point they agreed to stop dropping missile payloads on their favorite JOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooS!!!
People are so discombobulated by Trump ending a war with one phone call, they've forgotten to tell us that Russia's still winning after a mere 1219 days, and counting. Final Victory: Any Day Now™, just like for the previous 1218 days. At this rate, just imagine how much harder they'll be winning on Day 2000! Or 5000!
That's pretty conclusive evidence that 7 B-2s and a couple of SSNs with Tomahawks and a case of the ass, can end a war in about an hour, or your pizza is free.
But cheer up, pessimists: The Democommunists are only behind in either house of Congress by a few seats, and Dopey Joe still oversaw a few trillion dollars' worth of dollars printed three shifts a day, seven days a week, for pretty much four solid years.
So relax, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later, something huge will eventually shit the bed, and make all your apocalyptic fantasies come true, and you won't have all that stuff stocked up for nothing.
Things can always get worse.
Government's only happy when it's fucking things up massively, and our government is catering the biggest Happiness Party ever imagined, to a metaphysical certainty.
It's just not That Day. Yet.
In a 6-3 ruling (of The Sane Ones vs. Three Crazy Cat Ladies On Crack), SCOTUS has issued a blanket nationwide injunction on local Crazy Cat Ladies on the federal bench issuing blanket nationwide injunctions.
It should be called the STFU And Sit Your Stupid Ass Down ruling, as that is the clear intent, and the main effect will be to force crazy Democommunist appointees with fulminant TDS to stop seeking the headlines, and go back to deciding those boring cases that have the federal docket backed up about three presidents' worth.
The only pity here is that SCOTUS' latest ruling didn't come with complimentary tazer shots to the neck, and a ceremonial ass-kicking all the way to 30 days in the public stocks for the transgressors.
But at least a judicial dick-punch from SCOTUS has career implications.
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| "When you're in a hole, stop digging." "Never pass up a good opportunity to shut up." - Will Rogers |
Some of us remember "experts" telling us about how Iraq had "the world's sixth largest army", and how we needed "half a million body bags" for a ground war there.
And then watched the 72-Hour War finished up by two dozen A-10s on the Highway To Hell in an afternoon.
Take notes, shitheads. Clever readers may note certain trends.
Chances Iran stays smart, long-term: 0%, based on historical trends.
But them having the sense to quit while they're behind is a good sign that some learning has occurred this past week.
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| Suck it, bitchez. |
h/t WRSA
Today's unattributed soopergenius Biff Tannen Award-winner is the upper left panel of this work of Half-Assed Half-Wittery On Parade, which we have helpfully amended for your illumination.
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| You could look it up! FFS, this is even on Wikiretardica. |
...they could rule the world.
And Tom Cruise should see it, and maybe take home a little humility.
Released in July of 1965, barely four months into what would balloon into Mr. Johnson's War, in the heart of the civil rights movement, this epic 6-minute monster transitioned Bob Dylan from folk musician into rock star, and lit up a generation, rocketing to Number 2, and taking a place among the greatest songs of the century. Listen close, folks. This isn't just Dylan's mid-60s bluesy bile as the fantasy of Camelot morphed into napalming jungles. "When you got nothin' you got nothin' to lose." The song's message isn't over yet. You are seeing, and will see, this material again. "How does it feel?"
h/t WRSA
As proof of yesterday's post, we bring you today's Biff Tannen Award winner, and repeat a lesson some people are too stupid to know they're too stupid to know.
Comedy, by which we mean successful comedy, requires two things:
1) It must be funny.
2) It must be true.
When you bring neither, but try anyways, you're just the clown from the Volkswagen who kicks himself in his own ass, and falls flat on his face.
Comedy may happen at that point, but only at your own expense, because you're just a public jackass.
Much like the too-chickenshit-to-sign-it creator of today's ass-tastic meme-fail, by the galactically stupid.
When you resort to building a straw man to get to your punchline, you're about as unfunny as SNL and David Letterman for the last 10 years of Trump Derangement Syndrome On Parade.
I.e., not one fucking bit.
This is what happens when you lie just to get a laugh from Other Stupid People, because the smart people are laughing at you, not with you. You're Alec Baldwin, yelling about how bad guns are, then shooting your own director and DP on your own movie. Which is hilarious to most people, just not the way you intended.
That's what happens when when you substitute the jackassically deceitful set-up of "Because They Have Nuclear Weapons" for the truthful and accurate set-up of "Because They're Trying To Develop Nuclear Weapons".
Which wee bit of bull's eye truth-telling sucks the funny right out of that self-ass-kicking meme, and makes you look like the jackass moron you are for lying about it when you created the original.
Well-played, Anonymous Shit-For-Brains.
This is what happens when you learned civics from a Common Core curriculum, and got your current events news from Tik-Tok.
(We'll leave out that you tried to make it look, with the American flag, like the U.S. was attacking Iran at all, when in fact the current war is solely Israel's doing, because too much actual geopolitical reality at once might explode your eggshell-thin understanding of the world as it is in such a big dose at one time.)
Own your award with pride, Biff, and you can pick up the picture documentation of it on any roll of TP at the nearest men's room. Right after you wipe. And stop trying to make memes until you do some pull-ups, and can get your IQ up above 70.
Imagine you were any of 90% of the Internet commentariat, and imagine you were a total idiot (but I repeat myself).
Irrevocable Truths:
1) Nations don't have friends, they have interests.
2) Israel has nuclear weapons. (50-100, give or take.)
3) Iran does not have any, yet. Despite trying for 40 years. (Exploding nuclear scientists and Stuxnet virus aren't coincidences, in case that thought never crossed your mind.)
4) Iran has missiles that will reach Israel, and if they get so much as one nuclear weapon, you'll know it just about the time the weather in Tel Aviv hits 1400° F.
So, knowing only those four things, does it make more sense (for the Common Core grads: "Is it in America's BEST INTERESTS...") to let things get to #4, knowing that thirty seconds after that, 50-100 nuclear weapons begin their journeys from Israel to every Arab capitol from Tripoli to Islamabad, to every oil field in the region, and every Islamic holy site, starting with Mecca and Medina, igniting a world wide jihad and a Crusade in response in milliseconds, and sending the worldwide price of oil to $5000/barrel by 2PM that day? Probably inducing Islamabad to launch all of theirs, which in turn prompts India to launch all of theirs? (We will leave aside how much this would affect the nuclear responses of China and Russia, which would then influence the nuclear responses of Britain, France, the United States, and possibly involve North Korea, or what that would all mean for the Northern Hemisphere for the next 100-1000 years, for the moment.)
Or would the world be better served (and more importantly, "Be In America's BEST INTERESTS...") if Tehran and Persian culture were returned to that delightful time when most of the country was lit by fat lamps, fed on goat meat and date cakes, and most of the population travelled by camel between desert oases?
Pick one or the other.
Show all work.
Given the choice between a world without Israel, or a world without Iran as it is now constituted, with all that each choice would necessarily entail, I vote for Iran returning to the stone age.
For but one example of the proposition, consider how marvelously a gentle nudge from civilization improved Japan's interactions with the world circa mid 1945-present, and moderated what had been centuries of militant religious fanaticism and xenophobia.
People have been posting this news with outrage, but the sensible response should be loud cheering and the sound of popping champagne corks.
One can oppose Israel and its policies without descending into unbridled anti-Semitism and flagrantly gross insubordination. This jackass will be lucky to make it to retirement without a general court martial, and we yet live in hope that his CG convenes such. This happily relieved colonel's excretions were exactly such, and correctly recognized as that by his senior commanders, as well as being wholly incompatible with service at the highest and most sensitive levels of this (or any) administration's defense establishment. Huzzah.
Outside the restrictions of the UCMJ, well known and studiously ignored by Colonel Jackass, one may hold and express such rabid Jew hatred freely, but they should understand that to most people, the halo of froth around one's mouth is generally off-puting.
We wish former colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest our best wishes in his future (and happily) non-military endeavors, and our final hope is that his separation from military service comes from his last duty assignment, somewhere involved with the mess and maintenance operations of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, until his inevitable separation from military service, unless the Pentagon finds both a spine and the command determination to bust him to private and saddle him with a farewell BCD or Dishonorable Discharge after a few months in the Military Correctional Facility in Leavenworth, KS, which he so richly deserves, thus zeroing out his future retirement and medical benefits.
Shitheads gonna shithead, but the military is no place to subsidize such shitheadery.
We hope he wears the boot prints on his ass a long, long time after his pending, inevitable, and richly-deserved separation from service.
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| This is almost as big a mystery as why commercial music folded when it went to all-rap, all the time |
There was no way we could know the week we picked Kokomo as Sunday Music would be the same one in which Brian Wilson passed away a few days later. But it's definitely the reason we're putting this classic up as today's choice the Sunday after that, having also been written and produced by Wilson, with lyrics by fellow Beach Boy Mike Love, after becoming the longest and costliest studio track in production history to that point in time. After taking most of 1966 to nail down, it was released in October of 1966, and became the Beach Boys' third ever #1 hit by December of that year, spending seven weeks at the top of the charts, and eventually becoming one of the most influential singles of all time after double platinum status.
From a question in comments to the previous post today.
In order:
First Tier
1. The ACEP First Aid Manual Start here. PERIOD.
2a. Wilderness Medicine: Beyond First Aid, Forgey
2b. The Prepper's Medical Handbook, Forgey
3. Special Operations Forces Medical Handbook
4. Survival Medicine Handbook, Alton and Alton
5. Auerbach's Wilderness Medicine (2 vol.)
7a. Where There Is No Doctor *Medical care for the Turd World, but that may be you someday.
7b. Where There Is No Dentist *One of the only texts I know of that deals with dental care under austere circumstances.
Honorable Mentions:
The entire medical section in the classic SAS Survival Handbook.
Also, any Red Cross medical handbook from before 1960, solely for the sections on bandaging and splinting, which cover techniques that still hold up, and are no longer covered by anyone currently. Forget anything from that era having to do with snakebite treatment, or whatever CPR was called then, but the bandaging and splinting techniques, though old, are just as good now as they were then, and you won't find them easily too many other places.
Secondary
There are a ton of second-tier texts out there, seldom actually bad, but not anywhere near the same league as the above texts. If your favorite isn't listed above, bummer. I've seen a lot of books that are okay, but the ones I named above are comprehensive, and good. You can do worse, but you won't do better.
You may find some utility in military medical manuals, for some purposes. Other than the two I mention last, there may frequently be found some utility in learning geared towards someone who dropped out in 9th grade, working in Turd World conditions. As long as the text isn't pre-Vietnam, you might get your hands on something worthwhile in some aspects. But check anything found against the comprehensive and modern references listed at the top of this post first.
The next level is actual medical texts, used by doctors, if you have a licensed practitioner (MD, PA, RN) in your midst.
The go-to for my career field is Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine Handbook.
2160 pages, $189, and geared for an ER doc with access to Xrays, ultrasound, CT scanners, MRIs, plus a lab and a pharmacy. But still how residents learn how to do ED medicine.
Other good choices would be a nursing pharmacology handbook, and standard medical manuals on primary care and diagnosis, orthopedics, an atlas of skin disorders, and on and on.
Anything beyond primary and preventative care is either going to require definitive treatment beyond what you can do yourself (which you may or may not have access to), or your patient(s) are going to have problems ranging from chronic to terminal. You're not going to solve surgical problems, most infectious diseases, major burns, or most critical traumas, because you don't have the resources to do much beyond initial stabilization, which assumes access to secondary and tertiary care.
Which means if you're beyond access to 1st world care, including anesthesia, antibiotics, and general pharmacy needs, like you will be in extreme circumstances - people will die, including those nearest and dearest to you, and you can't prevent that.
So mortuary texts on handling bodies, prevention of outbreaks after people die (potentially with infectious diseases), and strong disinfectants, aren't a bad idea. Burial and cremation activities become more important as life spans shorten, in austere circumstances.
Bottom Of The Barrel
Books that are mostly a complete waste of time and money, except as historical reference:
Special Forces Medical Handbook ST 31-91 (1982) - any version
50 years out of date, this is about as currently useless as medical texts from the Civil War, or ancient Greece. If you want to learn things from 1982, go ahead on. After you're completely fluent in the first ten or so books at the top of this post. In your ample spare time.
If you're a doctor, you know better medical texts. And if you aren't one, you aren't going to be doing anything in this book, and if you do, your patient will die. Either screaming, or from the inevitable infection from trying to do 21st century surgery under 17th century conditions. Just...don't.
We're not trying to get you through medical school here, just get you up to speed on fundamentals of primary care, both in the field, and in an off-grid (short-term or longer) situation.
Get all the knowledge and experience you can now, while it's both cheap, and easily available.
When you're 5000 miles from help up Schitt's Creek, or in a Turd World/Civil War era medical situation, it's too late to crack a friggin' book, or take a class.
