The poem is originally by Mindy Nettifee.

Hat Tip Eloísa Valdes

‘In 1645, the twenty-seventh year of the Thirty Years War, Swedish armies inflicted a devastating blow to the Imperial forces in Bohemia and swept into Austria with the aim of capturing of Vienna. The Imperial capitol, was not prepared to give up easily. The Swedes soon found themselves digging in for a long seige, negotiating with allies for support, and building fortifications around the occupied countryside. Upriver from Vienna, in the Krems district, while digging trenches, a group of Swedish soldiers discovered the bones of a giant….

Discover the teeth of giants. And say Happy Blogoversary to John.

This just in from Jason at 350.org:

Friends,

The moment is here: about an hour ago, some of big oil’s best paid Senators filed an amendment supporting construction of Keystone XL to the Senate’s budget bill.

Our goal today is to keep the Senate from forcing Obama to approve the pipeline. The oil industry is using all their money and might to push Keystone, but we’ve stopped them before, and we can do it again.

Many of us called our Senators once already this week to stop the pipeline, and it made an impact on big oil’s vote count. One of the people that big oil needs to support this bill is Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota — and since this vote will come down to the wire, they’re doubling down with pressure.

The vote could come in a matter of hours — can you call Sen. Klobuchar before the vote to tell her to stop the pipeline?

Here’s the number to use:

Sen. Klobuchar – (202) 224-3244
Then, click here to report what you heard and share this news: act.350.org/call/kxl-march-22-2013/

And here’s a suggestion for what to say when you call today:

“Hi, I’m calling to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline amendment that was just introduced to the budget. The science is settled: this pipeline is a climate disaster, and I insist that the Senator oppose this or any other attempt to force construction of the pipeline.”

In a close fights like this, calls from passionate constituents play a key role in helping Senators decide which way they will vote. Calls now will stiffen the spines of Senators who may be weakening, and get others off the fence.

This pipeline is a climate disaster, which is the reason that hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken action to stop it. If you’re a part of that number, you already know the stakes. It’s time for our supposed leaders to get serious about climate change and stop the pipeline.

Thanks for calling — I’ll have an update after the vote,

Jason

Discussed here, this is the video:

I used to work across the hall from this guy, you may have heard of him:

I put together a page of resources, just a few items but with a plan to grow it, HERE. This is for teachers and their allies, focusing on life science, an organized list of selected posts on this blog that should be of interest. Let me know if there is anything you’d like to see here sooner rather than later.

An oldie but a goodie:

The video is now flawed in the premise that “both false and true” are possibilities. We know to much to think that with a straight face. But, this video may be useful for those who refuse to believe or who can’t understand that.

Fracking, or Hydraulic Fracturing, is a method of extracting hard-to-get oil and gas from shale. For the most part, fossil fuels originally formed in shale, which was in turn laid down by near surface life in anoxic seas. Sunlight powered a high turnover of near surface plankton, algae, and bacteria, but oxygen-poor conditions just a little deeper in the sea made it unlikely for much of that life to be recycled through other life forms. So, during periods of anoxic seas, which lasted for millions of years now and then in earth history, much of that organic material from near the surface of the ocean settled into the sea floor mud where it became buried and incorporated into the growing layers of sediment. This was eventually transformed into oil and gas rich shale. (For a detailed overview of that aspect of earth history, see this fascinating book.) Eventually, some of that oil and gas collected in deposits that could be easily removed through drilling. Once this oil and gas is removed, however, the remaining hydrocarbon fuels are much more thinly distributed in the shale. In order to access this fuel, modern day miners pump water mixed with sand and chemicals at high pressure into the shale, which causes it to fracture, allowing the gas and oil to accumulate and become more easily removed. It is a little like squeezing a few drops of the water out of a mostly dry sponge…

Read the rest here.

As you know, I write now and then for the Minnesota Progressive Project. I should do more there, I know, and I try. But anyway, the MPP has a new blog layout which preserves the Kos-esque diary thingie but loads faster and is easier to navigate, with a few cool “discoverability” features that link readers to writing about key issues and candidates. Please go check it out.

While you are there check out the right sidebar for a place to click to sign a petition to encourage our state legislature to support same sex marriage by passing a bill that is right now before them.

In response to a comment on my blog, I issued a snarky tweet (and repeated it on Facebook) to the effect that if your argument involves the phrase “World View” you might be wrong. This led to a number of light hearted but snarky, and often helpful, responses on Facebook and Twitter indicating that the term “World View” could mean a lot of different things, such as opinion, paradigm, or point of view. So I thought I’d expand on the concept a bit. In short, “World View” does not mean any of those things, and is in fact a term with a very weighty and rather specific meaning.

The term is an English translation of the German “Weltanschauung.” I’ll leave it to the philosophers reading this to discuss the meaning of that term and its history. When I refer to the term I am talking about the way it is used today in arguments about evolution, creationism, and possibly matters related to religion. In this area of discussion, World View (or Worldview, if you like) is a lot like Steven Gould’s “Magisteria” but mostly it is a simple dog whistle.

Paradigms are general ways of approaching a related set of problems, with a number of agreed upon assumptions, accepted facts, and widely accepted models for how things work. People with different paradigms recognize, or should recognize, that their differences are resolvable with more information. Or, everyone may have the same paradigm and then over time the ruling paradigm is challenged from various sources, and finally overturned in the famous Kuhnian Paradigm Shift. Which has probably happened very few times the way Kuhn described it, leading us to consider the possibility that the Kuhnian paradigm of paradigm shifting has … shifted. Anyway, that’s paradigm.

Point of view is a bit different. Multiple points of view may exist at the same time even with a commonly held set of assumptions and a common knowledge base. But people can have different points of view because of the way they prioritize various parts of the problem. For instance, we can all have and hold the same basic facts about nature and human-nature interactions, but some will see nature as a source of human usable resources while others will see humans as an invasive and damaging species that needs to be controlled for the benefit of nature. Different points of view.

I first grappled with the concept of World View while working with my friend Mischa Penn in developing courses on race and racism for high school teachers. Like Gould’s non-overlapping Magisteria, World Views are different sets of assumptions that are a) not resolvable and b) lack possible resolution because everyone agrees you can’t and don’t need to. This is an important distinction. Two different religions may have two different savior-messiah entities, each purported to be the messiah to the exclusion of others. But that can’t be true. The belief in each messiah excludes belief in the others. People living together in a single society with these two messiahs can not resolve this difference. I won’t go into the World View issue in relation to race and racism as that would involve too much work for a mere blog post, and a careful reading of a great deal of literature in Spanish. But in the area of evolution vs. creationism the meaning is obvious. Science is a world view. Evangelical fundamentalist Christianity is a different world view. Individuals can have both sets of beliefs mixed up in their brains, but really, the two are in fact utterly irreconcilable.

When an argument is advanced that “I’m OK, and You’re OK” but we have different world views, or even “I hate you” and we have different World Views, the interlocutor is saying that it is possible to describe the world around us in two different but irresolvable ways. When I hear that from creationists, what I really hear is “I’ve run out of way to argue that the science is wrong, please don’t hurt me.” When I hear this from scientists, what I really hear is “your religion is wrong, science rules, but I can’t say that out loud and also go to Thanksgiving Dinner with my family.”

There are no valid alternate World Views. If there are two World Views competing in a certain conversation, one is wrong. They could both be wrong, of course, but not if one of them is science.

“World View” … the dog whistle that says “I know you’re right, please don’t hurt me.”