Frank The Bunny At Last

I finally watched Donnie Darko after several years of reading the DVD cover, feeling intrigued, yet putting it back on the shelf.

First off, it's a gorgeous looking movie. It has a lush cinematic, flowing quality to it. The characters are all interesting in their own way, and I love that they each don't fill their role in the movie perfectly - each is just a bit off. All this gives the film an eerie atmospheric quality. And the six-foot demonic bunny helps, too.

Then there's the plot. I followed along the best I could and barely grasped the time travel, alternate universe thing that was happening. It was fascinating and just confusing enough to make the movie good for more viewings in the future. I doubt its existential mish-mash will ever become clear, or if it's even able to, but it is fun.

I watched a bit of the DVD extras (on the director's cut edition). The fan/obsession thing is pretty annoying, but some of the film's symbols were illuminated a bit more in the piece where Frank the bunny goes around "asking" people what they thought it all means.

I love films like this. As Ebert points out, "...I grow weary of films...which follow their formulas with relentless fidelity to cliche and stereotype, I feel gratitude to directors who make something new."

Darko is a film that suffered from being released during the 9/11 shock, and that's too bad because the thing is pretty cool. I'm glad I finally watched it.








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Blue Velvet

Fiddler On The Mount

How many rites and rituals do we celebrate without question, even if they may have been corrupted long ago and incorrect? To put it another way, when we find out that a long-honored ritual has been changed a thousand or more years ago and is not authentic to its origins, do we seek to change that tradition and correct it?

This is the question raised by the discovery of the Gospel of Judas.

In it Judas tells how Jesus fought against organized religion and priests who plant "trees without fruit." Jesus tries to teach his disciples that they are in danger of becoming fruitless gardeners themselves, but they do not listen. Judas seems to 'get it' and Jesus makes him his right-hand man. "You will sacrifice the man that clothes me, " Jesus says, telling Judas to give him up to the authorities. He warns him, "You will be cursed," but that "the star that lead the way is your star."

These teachings are in line with Gnosticism which teaches of the divinity within the individual, the light within the cloud of flesh.

Jesus was a rebel against the priestly caste. They taught that divinity is objective, that it is "out there" and the only way to receive its blessing was to follow the church and be rewarded in the afterlife. Jesus taught that divinity was subjective with a link to the objective - that one did not need to follow any organized religion to obtain enlightenment. It is here and now and eternal.

Obviously the esoteric corruption of the church won that battle and filtered Jesus's teachings into the rites and rituals that dominate Christianity today. Gnosticism was shelved as heresy.

Gnosticism, by the way, isn't perfect nor innocent of esoteric hoopla itself, but it's a hell of a lot closer to what Jesus probably meant.

So now in this wondrous age of information which allows history an easier time in surfacing, we find the Gospel of Judas which paints quite a different picture of things.
Does this mean the Catholic Church will rewrite their Passion Play? Can the evil Judas Iscariot be redefined as Jesus's greatest desciple?

I wouldn't hold my breath, but it does highlight something that religion must do in order to survive. It must re-valuate and re-symbolize its teachings to match modern times. It must make its rites and rituals mean something to people by correcting its empty symbols and errant objective focus. Right now religion is a dog chasing a shadow, and that dog is so far gone that it's not even funny.

Another interesting question raised by the Gospel of Judas is how things got corrupted. Was it that dastardly priestly caste or was it ages of transcription errors and misconstruction of meanings?
Probably a grand mix of both.

Even so, the suspiciousness of the New Testament's take on Judas was recognized by Tim Callahan in his book Secret Origins of the Bible where he notes that:

The Greek word rendered as the English verb "betray" is paradidomi, which while it can mean "betray" can also mean "surrender," "entrust" or "transmit."

and writes:

I suspect that there is a story beneath a story here and that in the original, Jesus told the disciples as a directive that one of them was to deliver him over to the authorities that night. Making the arrest at night might have been to avoid the possibility of starting a riot. Thus, Judas was not so much a betrayer as the one designated to hand Jesus over in order that he might demonstrate his divinity by rising from the dead.

This was before the translation of the Gospel of Judas had been revealed.








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Garden of Earthly Delights

The Decider Is The Worst President In History

When you're a second-term president (or even a first!) you've got to be at least a tad bit mindful about your place in history.

Then there's Bush...

Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

That's from the cover article The Worst President in History by historian Sean Wilentz in the latest Rolling Stone.

Wilentz compares Bush to the other bad presidents we've had, like James Buchanan who divided the country by being a pussy and picked his nose as it went to war with itself, or Andrew Johnson who was our first vice-president to succeed (after the assassination of Lincoln, hmmm....) and our first impeached president for his defiance of Congress for his ex-Confederate pimping, and Herbert Hoover who promised "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage" as the Depression began and then practically told the growing poor to buck-up and weave some blankets or something.

All great men make a few mistakes, but Wilentz takes a measured look at the whole of Bush's presidency, and it looks dreadful.

For me, the litmus test of Bush's presidency is found in a single thing: his nomination of Harriet Miers for Supreme Court Justice. No other act was so absurdly asinine, so full of crony hubris, so revealing of a dark, selfish, small-minded philosophy.

That, plus his atrocious speaking abilities, makes "The Decider" the worst president in history.








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Fuddy Duddy Skeptics

The latest eSkeptic newsletter contains the following article which I applaud:


A Skeptic’s Defense of Supernatural Television
by Jason Colavito


The supernatural took over U.S. television this year in the wake of the success of ABC’s Lost. Programs about psychic detectives, alien invaders, monster hunters, and mysterious creatures proliferated on American airwaves, and a wary public braced for a science fiction renaissance rivaling only crime-based television in the number of prime time hours devoted to it.

This invasion of paranormal programming prompted immediate cries from television critics that the shows’ monsters were television’s way to explore the aftermath of the War on Terror. Skeptics countered that the success of otherworldly shows indicated that broadcasting had slipped back into a quagmire of irrationalism, posing a danger to America and civilization as we know it.

Purdue University communications professor Glenn Sparks sent out a press release warning that this fall’s television shows “could encourage people who can least afford it to start spending money on psychics.” Sparks also warned that teenagers were susceptible to the shows’ pernicious influence, and he said “networks should consider posting disclaimers about the reality of the shows.”1

Many skeptics who issue such dire warnings and oppose televised supernatural fiction often engage in uncritical and fallacious thinking that undercuts their rationalist message. Attacking these television shows, or even the idea of supernatural fiction in general, risks insulting the audience skeptics wish to reach, and it suggests an elitist, condescending attitude that continues to give skeptics a bad name.

British television critic Ian Bell was particularly scathing in his review of NBC’s Medium, a drama about a psychic consultant, based in part on alleged real-life psychic Allison DuBois, calling the show “hogwash”: “In my world,” Bell wrote, “there is a real and growing problem caused by the bizarre things ordinary Americans are, apparently, prepared to believe.” He did, concede, though, that “it’s only TV.”2 Skeptical Inquirer’s Joe Nickell also blasted the show because it “shamelessly touted” DuBois as though she were actually able to psychically solve crimes.3

Let us begin by dispensing with the caveats. First, Medium, along with Ghost Whisperer on CBS, are both based on supposedly true stories. Skeptics are right to attack these programs for falsely claiming some kind of truth. Second, many of these shows are not very good — based on their merits as drama, not as science. Others are excellent, like Lost and the WB’s Supernatural — probably the purest and best-made horror series on network television. But too many skeptical critics question the very right of fictional programs to include supernatural elements, as though their existence were an affront to science and reason.

Here’s the problem:

First, such complaints fuel the image that skeptics are priests in the temple of reason condescending to average Americans (and to fellow skeptics who enjoy supernatural fiction). It gives the appearance that skeptics believe viewers of these programs are ignorant, stupid, or too enthralled by the flashing pictures on the idiot box to differentiate between news and drama. It is one thing to point out that such things are not “real;” another to appear to tell viewers they are less worthy than the austere rationalists who would never indulge in irrational entertainment.

Second, the reasoning behind these criticisms is flawed. Supernatural dramas, the argument goes, shouldn’t exist because the supernatural is unreal. But, then, what is the purpose of fiction? All fiction is inherently unreal, as it is stories of things that did not happen. If the only appropriate topics for fiction are things that are possible, then why does fiction exist at all? If we condemn storytelling to the realm of the real, then storytelling is robbed of the very elements that make it more than simply history — the ability to manipulate time and space and the possible and impossible to create compelling stories that reach toward higher truth. If
Lost does this and Medium does not, this is where critical discernment — not scientific condemnation — come into play.

Lastly — and my personal pet peeve — is that the skeptical criticism only extends to shows that trend toward horror and not pure science fiction. Obviously this is because many skeptics are scientists and have an affinity for sci-fi, but in the realm of what is real and what is science fact, extraterrestrials, warp drives, and galaxies far far away are every bit as unproven as Gothic horrors. ET may be slightly more scientifically probable than ghosts, but neither is currently known to exist. And before critics complain that Star Trek never led anyone down the garden path, let’s not forget the Heaven’s Gate cult watched Star Trek religiously and hoped to beam up to the waiting aliens after their 1997 mass suicide. This proves only that disturbed people will fixate on whatever pop culture throws at them, supernatural or not.

It is possible for skeptics to watch and enjoy supernatural horror because since the dawn of time stories have always been about more than just the plausibility of their plots. The great horror author H.P. Lovecraft, himself an ardent materialist, atheist, and skeptic, loved supernatural horror and wrote the book on it — Supernatural Horror in Literature. He recognized the “genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale” against those who call for a “didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.”4

If a materialist like him could love a good ghost story, why can’t we love Supernatural? After all, there is nothing inherently “better” about non-supernatural stories. Who among us can say that as preposterous as ghost whisperers are that they are any more preposterous than the plot of The OC? That’s why they call it “fiction.”

References
1. “Professor: TV Shows May Tune Our Belief in the Supernatural.” 2005. AScribe Newswire, September 6.
2. Bell, I. 2005. “The Psychic Who Prompted a Mass Superstition.” The Herald, September 14.
3. Nickell, J. 2005. “The Case of the ‘Psychic Detectives.’” Skeptical Inquirer, July–August, 16–19.
4. Lovecraft, H.P. 2000. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Ed. S.T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 21.



Hear, hear! I actually enjoy Medium. It's a great fictional show which portrays how a psychic's day-to-day life and her family are influenced by her 'ability'.
I also like Smallville, which hopefully doesn't suggest to the public that Superman really exists.

I'm a skeptic through and through, but those who get upset about fiction really do undercut "their rationalist message."

What The Hell Did Buddha Know About It?

What do foreign affairs writer Thomas Friedman and celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters have in common? Their superficiality is so enchanting that I find I can't look away until I realize I've wasted the past 10 minutes listening to them, and then I angrily change the channel. At any rate, they've made me think.

Barbara interviewed Jane Fonda the other day on the Charlie Rose show. Jane's autobiography just came out in paperback and she's plugging it. They talked about Jane's life and how she's been able to cope with all that's gone on. Barbara threw her Larry King brand softball questions which bounced off Jane's I'm-a-victim-listen-to-my-plight, noodle-limp racquet. Barbara, as with everyone, hung Jane's 'suffering' in the most dramatic and gaudy frame she could find.

Ok, I don't mean to belittle Jane Fonda's problems. She's just part of the bigger picture in America of people who think they've suffered in life and who've created and entire socio-economic movement of faux suffering. In fact, it's a movement with so much momentum that people can't trip over a rock while hiking in the Grand Canyon without later demanding the entire place be covered with warning signs, bubble wrap, and guard rails.
Nobody is allowed to suffer in America. It's a crime here. Real life be damned.

And just who do I think I am judging the suffering of others? Well, I've not suffered the daily hunger and hard work of living on the edge of survival in some poor fishing village in the South Seas, nor have I grown up in an alcoholic household in the Bible Belt with a father who used to beat me for any reason under the sun. However, I do know that these are genuine examples of suffering that the majority of we Americans have very little experience with and they highlight the healthy perspective that what we mass-market as suffering doesn't even come close to the real thing.
Also, I'm a blogger and that automatically gives me mucho authority to judge stuff.

Suffering may be relative but marketing the simple and common struggles of life as traumatic is a luxury only a fat and lazy nation can enjoy (and Big Pharm can joyously reap with their Zoloft scythe).

Enter Tom Friedman. If you can withstand his frequently simplistic and annoyingly gooey analogies, he makes a good point about America. He suggests the only way out of our oil-economy and foreign relation woes is to go ahead and raise the price of oil to 100 dollars a barrel. This, he reasons, will encourage Americans to seek alternative-energy technologies and loosen the grip of foreign oil dependency. It'd be a struggle and we would suffer for awhile.

But would we really suffer?

The past few years of rising gas prices has made little dent in spending. This summer's high gas prices will also be nothing more than a minor annoyance. In fact, I heard on the radio today that Americans are buying more gas than ever, despite the high prices!
And we pay it without so much as a whimper. Big Oil is cashing in on that sweet apathy ($5 a gallon, here we come!).

Could America deal with oil suddenly raised to 100 dollars a barrel? Could we truly 'suffer' to walk our kids to school, take public transportation, wait in line, lay off fast-food, budget and save, eat left-overs, recycle, grow gardens, lose a few pounds, let it mellow if it's yellow and only flush it down if it's brown?

Is that even close to what real suffering is? I'll bet every celebrity, all of the MTV generation, and my 15 year old kid thinks so.

Ok, I do too. Listen, I'm a victim of inappropriate suffering demarcation (ISD) and it has traumatized me. Look at this blog! It's the work of pain and suffering!

I can only hope Big Pharm is making a pill to help cure ISD. And with all of the rest of the 'trauma' headed our way, Big Pharm really doesn't sound like a bad place to invest.










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Linkage Sundries

How to shower, for men and women. Very funny.

Always interesting stuff over at Floble.

Things I Learned From My Patients, student doctor thread.

Nice post on Balloon sinuplasty.

Scientists against Disease Mongering.

There are more bacteria than you think!

Central Park West architectural tour.

Museums of Unworkable Devices, or Torture Devices, or Craftmanship.

Photoshop clones.

Biology of B-Movie Monsters.

3-D Pong.

Art of James Porto.

The Lost Gospel of Judas.

Damn Interesting and Neatorama. Simply cool.

How to deal with spam.

Gonick's mathematical cartoons.

LiveScience.





Some sources:
BoingBoing
3quarksdaily
grow-a-brain

Refreshing Work Atmosphere

For the past ten years of my nursing career I've worked primarily with 'middle-aged' women, whatever that means these days (40 to 60?). I've probably worked with only 5 or 6 women under the age of 30. Most of them have been over the age of 40.

Along with that is a bit of a generational gap. The older nurses were generally trained in more traditional nursing curricula, and even thought they've evolved along with the times and have priceless experience to teach, there's still that bit of Florence Nightingale-ishness that they carry. What is Nightingale-ishness? It's a bland burrito of prudishness and stoicism.

However, over the past couple of years I have worked with several younger nurses (20's to 30's). In fact, the majority of nurses on the crews I work with now are young, instead of the other way around.

It's been a striking switch of atmosphere for me which is most apparent in the humor on the floor. The jokes are more frequent, the humor more sarcastic and crude. We find ourselves using popular idioms and catch phrases quite often. South Park and Dave Chappelle sayings crop up quite a bit.

Does this affect the professionalism on the floor? So far everyone keeps the bathroom humor at the desk and out of the ears of patients, doctors, or other staff. The younger nurses are quite adept at speaking to an elderly patient with the proper respect and grace one moment, and then speaking in ghetto-language at the desk in the next.

In Emergency Departments you often see crude humor rise parallel with the acuity of stress. To outsiders this humor can seem extremely inappropriate and disgusting, but it's a basic human response to things.

Is this a dumbing down of nursing culture, or is it just a refreshing breath of fun? I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I really like it.









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A Caring, Compassionate Atheist And Skeptic

atheist n. One who disbelieves in the existence of a God. SYN.--an atheist rejects all religious belief and denies the existence of God; infidel is applied to a person not believing in a certain religion or the prevailing religion.


In the confines of the definition of the word atheist I would certainly call myself one, but that doesn't mean I like it.

I do not think of religious people as delusional and adversarial, but rather misguided and/or stagnant. I recognize that religious beliefs are instilled into most people by family, tradition, culture, and with all the emotional ties and habitual bows that come with them. One cannot just come along and refute or negate all that.

Much of religion, any religion, is like a workers' union - it probably had a very good purpose at one time in history - but the further it moves away from that one time the less meaning it has, the more empty its rites and rituals become, the more bloated and burdensome it grows.
If a religion doesn't re-define, re-valuate, and re-symbolize itself then it becomes a useless thing and oftentimes a very corrupt and dangerous thing.

So, here we sit in a world full of empty, broken religions. Many people walk on by, indifferent. Some pick up the shards and lash out at or try to coerce others, some just cry and wail, some forever try to piece things back together, some cut or kill themselves, and some stand at a distance and shake their heads or laugh. Atheists, deservedly or not, get lumped into the last group.

That whole scene is very tragic and chaotic, but we're all in it together.
The most compassionate of hopes is that we'd all just stand up, laugh, pick up a broken piece or two for sentimental reasons, hold hands and slowly walk forward.

"Atheist" has a negative connotation to it. It seems to lack compassion for the metaphorically challenged and their broken vessels. It even seems to sneer and mock them at times.
Perhaps "atheist" is a drill-sergeant of a word - it has a duty to perform and doesn't have time for cries of pain - but how effective can it be and to what end?

The word "skeptic" bears this same quandary. It's a word that exudes pessimism or cynicism. It may mean well, but it lacks compassion (com-"with" + passion-"suffering"). It doesn't seem to suffer with the struggles of others.

A few years ago, several skeptics got together to find a better word to describe themselves and came up with "bright". This was a terrible error, for all it did was go to the other side of the 'meaning' spectrum to become perhaps optimistic but at the same time very pompous.

A more measured and middle-ground word like "rationalist" would've been more appropriate. One wonders, though, how 'rational' all these skeptics were when they came up with "bright".

These examples of semantics may seem trivial, but in a world where meanings are loosely bound and where symbols are too broken to hold them, they are important.

The Age Of Meaning has dawned already and it's almost midday.*









*I have no idea what that means either.

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Devil's Dictionary

Will The Farmhouse And Barnyard Ever Be One Again?

Here's a nice angry article by Howard Zinn (via) which points out that the adage 'Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,' has come true for America - that we are too easily fooled by the leaders and power-brokers of this nation, again and again.

As I read it, I kept thinking of Animal Farm and how simple it was for the pigs to fool the rest of the barnyard animals. The corruption allowed the rich to wallow and the poor to decay.

Zinn's article points out the sobering statistic that America's healthcare, despite spending more per capita than any other nation, ranks 37th in the world in overall performance.

That's difficult to wrap my head around, especially with working in a hospital. In my ignorant and insulated world on a med/surg floor I see everyone being given adequate and above care.

The poor ranking of American healthcare obviously refers more to that of the preventive and maintenance kind. It is in these areas that the poor are forgotten and the rich are not.

It is in these areas that the power-brokers see 'taking a loss' as minimal and acceptable damage to their interests. This is especially so when the farmhouse has moved so far from the barnyard.
Orwellian, indeed.






(links on the rich via grow-a-brain)


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Narnia On The Cartoon Scale

I finally watched Chronicles of Narnia last night.

Here's my one sentence review:

It's gorgeous and great for kids, but on the cartoon scale it's very Disney whereas Lord of the Rings was very Warner Bros., and everyone knows Warner Bros. cartoons are darker and more interesting.









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A Talking Head On The Subject

Moderninsm, for the most part, has passed. Science and intellectual rigor - its handmaidens - are revealed to be as slanted and biased as religions ever were. The great industrial revolutions did not deliver utopia. What will take their place?

David Byrne on religion and science.

More.

You Must Be This Tall To Ride This Ride

The evolution of spiritual patterns used to explain things, AKA God, is interesting to think about.

Mankind started out with basic cause/effect thinking which helped in food, fight, and flight responses. This type of thinking lasted tens of thousands of years. It was animalistic and it helped humans survive and grow in population. As evolution slowly progressed and populations grew and interacted, attempts were made to communicate and understand the world. Magical thinking seemed to explain things quite nicely, and along with that grew a thing called culture with its rites and rituals. When agriculture came on the scene, culture exploded and the spiritual patterns of many a magical thinker started to congeal better. To superspeed things up, city-states and merchant-mentality arrived. Spiritual patterns were numerous, gods were everywhere, and city-states meat-grinded it all into more organized packages called religions. Religions are a very recent invention in terms of evolutionary time. The more popular religions took hold and grew in dominance, and now things seemed set in stone.

Then, not long ago along came science which explains things better than spiritual patterns do, and also with thanks to city-states, the rapid concilience of all science’s disciplines came together in the past few centuries to explain things with even greater power.

It even declared God to be dead last century, meaning that spiritual patterns had their purpose once but are now pragmatically useless. This was/is perhaps arrogant , but it is not false.

So, we have thinking evolving from animalistic to magical to religious to scientific, with the concept of God evolving from a wide plurality to a few singulars to a almost a one, and now to an empty, lingering habit of thinking. All those patterns and rituals set in stone are quaint, outmoded.

The problem is most of mankind is still clings to its adolescence. The young adulthood in our thinking evolution is frightening to all of us. It means we must find new cultural rites, rituals, and laws that can keep things organized. It means the concept of supernatural guidance has been absorbed and we are each given the enormous responsibility of it, i.e. we are now God. The thing we used to pray to is now empty and broken.

Some react to this realization with violent clinging (fundamentalism) and others wander around looking for another (new ageism, cults).

The interesting questions now are: How long will it take to finally leave God patterns and step out on our own? Can we put old symbols and rituals in a museum to appreciate their beautiful lessons, and can that even be done without wide-spread violence, destruction, and panic? What symbols and rituals will be used in the next phase of our evolution of thought (science fiction, space travel, globalization, Gaia, viruses, asteroids…)?

Are we tall enough to ride this ride?











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Back Class Circus

I went to Back Class today, which is an annual requirement to help teach/remind you of proper body mechanics and thus prevent back injuries which in turn prevents disabled workers on workman's comp.

This year the hospital has decided that the usual 15 to 30 minute class isn't good enough and has extended it to an hour and a half.

So I arrived at 1pm and the following ensued:

The instructor was Mrs. Back Nazi and she was all business. But the business at hand seemed to be all about her. Up front she announced it would be an all practicum course with no lecture needed. She promptly went into a 15 minute lecture.

Then came the demonstration of the techniques we would need to pass. This lasted another 15 to 20 minutes because of several people in the class who wanted to 'share' their experiences.

These 'sharing' individuals were the same people who stood back and endlessly complained about how useless the class was and how much time it was taking.

Then someone performing the techniques started to complain about them and that her "usual way" was what she was used to, and if the instructor wanted to insist on "this way" then "oh, well" she'd just go ahead an do it like that and end up with a "bulging disc."

At this point the Nazi Back instructor began yelling that "this way" was "the only way" and that she had orders to call security to remove anyone who "talked back."

The room, or actually hallway - yes, the class was held in a friggin' hallway! - fell silent after that shocking outburst and a long moment of awkwardness hovered.

The complainer resumed the techniques peppered with a few sarcastic jokes along the way.

Three people left in a huff because the class was now an hour into things and only 3 people had performed the techniques. They made sure their comments of "This is ridiculous!" were loud enough as they each stomped away.

A few minutes later, for some reason, a security guard came by to survey things. Everyone looked at the instructor with a "Oh, no you di'n't!" stare.

A gentleman playing the patient then refused to remove his cell phone from his belt so his demonstration partners could put on the gait belt properly. When they couldn't figure out how the gait belt clasp worked, he sat up and angrily put it on himself.

The Back Nazi then made a demonstrator re-do a technique because her feet weren't placed right. This led to probably the 6th argument about "right" foot placement. Then someone brought up the fact that the addage "nose follows toes" doesn't work out so well in a couple of moves. This led to several deep philosophical arguments about "nose follows toes" all at once which brought the class to a standstill.

It was now 2:30 and time for me to leave to pick up my kid. I didn't get my turn to pass the techniques, but I didn't care. It was the best reality show I've seen all week!

I can't wait till next time!

Things That Are Just Wrong

What's the deal with people selling stuff and referring to it as "the product"?

When you spend 5 or 10 years of your life developing or inventing something, you don't sell it to people using the cold, lifeless, annoying words "the product"!

It's just so wrong.



Sorry, I'm having a Seinfeld moment I guess.







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Rubik's Cube Solver

10 Problem Areas With Nursing And Science

10 Problem Areas of Nursing's Role in Science:

1. Nurses who refer to themselves as "heros" or wear "hero" shirts. ( Ok, this has little to do with science, but you can't call yourself a hero! That's only for others to decide, and even if they choose to do so it's very bad taste for a nurse to be wearing a t-shirt with it.)

2. Nursing diagnoses. They were useful once (like 60 years ago!) as a tool to help push the profession forward, but now they are useless and silly.

3. Quantum/Therapeutic Touch bullshit. 'nuff said.

4. The fragility of nursing integrity and the fact that one idiot nurse can degrade the entire profession's reputation in less than a second. (This is generally covers all annoying things about Nursing. It's probably more effect than cause.)

5. The current wave of "evidence-based practice" paradigm gobbledygook. Since when does "medical practice" have to be renamed "evidence-based practice"? (Actually, this isn't just a nursing problem, it's all through medicine. The prevalence of 'alternative medicine' and quackery has made the "evidence-based practice" paradigm almost a must. But think of the absurdity of it. It's science having to defend itself by renaming itself. Don't do it Science! Stand tall and let foolish waters flow by! Easier said than done, I know.)

6. The practicality disconnect: nurses who have little to do with direct patient care, but have much to say about it. (Management, Oy! This is where all the idiot nurses in #4 eventually end up. I challenge anyone to go to this site or this one and find anything of practical value.)

7. The fact that it's hard for smart nurses to speak out.

8. Two words: Pain scales. (Pain is NOT the "fifth vital sign" - vital signs are objective, not subjective. Now, that being said, pain is certainly important and it's something that needs attention and treatment, but the gonzo-focus that pain has gotten as of late has gone way past appropriate.)

9. Nurse practicioners aside, the higher one goes in nursing education, the farther one goes into vague "theory world". (It's almost the exact opposite of becoming a doctor: An advancing degree nurse pretty much does their internship first, and theory last!)

10. People who make lists of "10 Problem Areas" and can only come up with 9 are lame!








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