Welcome back my brother! Glad you had a great time, but I really missed you.
Made me a good Zinger of a post about the fiddler's today. Check it out.
Hi Ian:
I now give a presentation entitled: Superbugs, bacteriophages: Getting beyond bullshit und ueberbullshit.
I am too old to die young any more and only recently discovered that there is a peer-reviewed scholarly literature on "bullshit". It is, in my opinion, the most important subject I did not study as a student and in my working life! (see my blog http://bullshitcitynorth.blogspot.com and look for The academics of bullshit)
Here is a comment I posted recently that was kept to 2000 words:
(G.W. (Bill) Riedel, from Ottawa, Canada) wrote: Dear fellow potential victim of a superbug infection: Above someone noted that there were 4000 superbug infections while the libs. were in power - there are still 8000 to 12000 of these antibiotic-resistant infections annually - the superbugs don't care who is in power! But the joke is on us as some countries still practice technology discovered by the Canadian, Felix d'Herelle in 1917. Phage therapy uses highly specific viruses, bacteriophages, which are harmless for humans, to treat bacterial infections. Phage therapy is not currently approved or practised in Canada. According to a letter signed by a former federal health minister it can be made available legally to Canadians under the Special Access Program of our Food & Drugs Act! There are moral and ethical reasons for making it available in countries that are members of The World Medical Association. A discussion of phage therapy is currently very timely because of the recent release of the Canadian film: Killer Cure: The Amazing Adventures of Bacteriophage and the book by Thomas Haeusler entitled, Viruses vs. Superbugs, a solution to the antibiotics crisis? ( see http://www.bacteriophagetherapy.info ). This file has dramatically changed because the US Food and Drug Administration has amended the US food additive regulations to provide for the safe use of a bacteriophages on ready-to-eat meat against Listeria monocytogenes (see http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS...316-
nfr0001.pdf ). Also http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/op...s/
opabacqa.html . The idea that ready-to-eat meat can be treated if contaminated with Listeria bacteria while a doctor could not get a pharmaceutical grade phage therapy product when faced with a patient suffering listeriosis strikes this author as absurd. Info. on treatment in Georgia , Europe ( http://www.phagetherapycenter.com ), or Poland - http://www.aite.wroclaw.pl/phage...ges/
phages.html or more recently at the Wound Care Center, Lubbock, Texas ( http://www.woundcarecenter.net/ ) .
Hi Ian:
As I said above - "How to detect bullshit" (google that string for an excellent paper) and how to deal with it is the most important thing we can teach students. Here is a short list of references which was published in the student paper of my alma mater as a service to students:
Most recent book on the subject:
Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work by Samuel A. Culbert, 2008. Stanford University Press
On the field of bullshit
GW “Bill” Riedel, Alumnus Tuesday, 30 October 2007
From The Gateway - U. of Alberta campus student paper
Following an all-
candidates
’ meeting during the recent Ontario provincial election I had the privilege to briefly discuss with some journalism students the fact that “bullshit” has now become a respectable academic field of study.
If one uses google scholar with the search string “on bullshit” one is rewarded 5,590 hits (this is almost double in April 200
of what should be mainly the academic, scholarly, peer reviewed literature on the subject.
While the revival of studies on bullshit is generally credited to the phenomenal success of Princeton University emeritus philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt
’s 2005 book simply entitled “On Bullshit”, this author is of the opinion that Neil Postman’s paper delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English on November 28, 1969 in Washington, D.C. entitled “Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection” should be the first reference any student should read. Postman made the following point: “As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit.”
A little later he continues: “every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure”. It was left to Frankfurt to proclaim that “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit”; however, the purpose of this short submission is to draw to the attention of students that the rapidly expanding academic literature on bullshit has something of interest to most students. Let me close by simply providing three examples:
1. Students of journalism and political science should be interested in – Brandenburg, Heinz, Short of Lying – The prevalence of bullshit in political communication, presented at the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association, Reading, 4-6 April, 2006.
2. Accounting, business and science students might enjoy Queen
’s University Norman B. Macintosh’s Accounting – Truth, Lies, or bullshit. A Philosophical Investigation.
3. For anyone wanting to go deeper into bullshit the book by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch, 2006, Bullshit and Philosophy – guaranteed to get perfect results every time, Open Court, Chicago is a must library addition.
While the entire book is worth reading, although some chapters are heavy slugging, the following chapters are highly recom
Dr. Riedel, thank you for your lengthy comments. I checked out your blog; it was pretty entertaining. I'll read the book as I have time; thank you.
-M-, all is well. I got something we need to sit down and watch. ^_^
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