Recent posts by Redem on Kongregate

Topic: Serious Discussion / Eye Color Puzzle

But there are 200, so that’s doesn’t seem a relevent question.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Eye Color Puzzle

That there is at least one person with blue eyes would seem to be already evident from simple observations of the other people.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Eye Color Puzzle

I do not think that the announcement adds any new information, so I conclude that no one would leave the island as a result of it.

Topic: Serious Discussion / My Opinion About Evolution

Meh, the genetic evidence alone is sufficient to prove evolution beyond any reasonable doubt. That the genetic evidence is so consistent with the fossil evidence is merely icing on the cake.

The young earth model that includes Noah’s flood is laughable. You’re rejecting evolution on the scale of billions of years and substituting it with evolution on the scale of a few thousand years… the mutation rate necessary to generate all modern diversity from a stock of 2 of each animal is literally lethal. Not to mention the effect of predator-prey dynamics on a population size of 2 for both is… well. Clearly impossible. Not to mention the fossil and genetic evidence directly contradicts this both in terms of timeline and geographical distribution. If your model was correct we would expect to find the remains of all animal species around whereever the Ark landed, and radiating out from there towards their current positions. Why don’t we? Not only that, but why did the predators not eat all the prey animals as soon as they landed before their population could grow enough to sustain predation? How do you account for the current diversity of life when there is only a few thousand years to accumulate mutations?
The answer is of course that you cannot,but I do wonder what sort of mental gymnastics you will come up with for it all.

By any reasonable standard of evidence you are wrong. But your religious faith requires you to reject that idea, so you’re stuck in a bad place trying to argue in favour of the nonsensical. I do not envy you your position.

Topic: Serious Discussion / What does trascendance consist of?

Getting high, I suspect.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

I may be missing something here. I am talking about income taxes, the main infusion to our treasury, albeit not the only one.

Fine, but then say precisely that. What you’ve been saying all along is much different, that half of people pay no taxes, which is simply untrue. It would also help if you keep in mind that that half of people paying no income taxes includes a great many people who have simply retired.

You’ve been using this line to pretend that these half of the country are leeches, which is simply not the case.

I can see where you are coming from on your thinking. However, I’m not advocating just cutting social programs to put people more in a lurch. Our government sends billions upon billions to other countries for one thing. We blow billions on scientist studying the sex life of the African Swamp Rat. We spend millions on people who make pictures of Jesus with feces through all over the picture. We have many, many areas we could cut if the government wanted to. I also think we should cut back on the politicians compensation. Do you know they have gotten two cost of living raises during this recession?

You really don’t. The billions spent overseas is in aid, and is not really all that much in the grand scheme of things. Nor does the US spend billions on studying obscure mammals. The entire budget of the National Science Foundation is only 7 billion. The concept that this money is being wasted on frivolous studies is a myth, one perpetuated by GOP fairly often, especially the anti-science section of it. The US budget spending on the arts is even less, and I doubt any of it was spent on images of Jesus made from feces.

Even if you cut all of this, however, you would not make a significant cut in the deficit. You can’t without either growing the economy or massively reducing spending.

The recession is not a cause, it is a symptom. It is a symptom of an inadequate budgeting of our government and the allowing of corruption in the decision making of our government.

No, it really is the cause of the current drop in tax revenues.
You could make an argument that the recession was caused by the government policies, but that’s a discussion for another time.

If you are working at a $10 an hour job, live in a $200,000 house, drive a Mercedes, you are going to have problems budgeting your money. You will need to borrow money. This will allow you to temporarily stem the inevitable bankruptcy you will experience. Now after the temporary influx of money you will be back to your shortage of money, but now you have another payment going out. Now you have to borrow money again. This becomes a loop that eventually you will not be able to maintain and will get to a point that you cannot make all of the payments you have accumulated. But! If you realize at the outset that you are spending more than you are earning, you sell your house and buy a cheaper one and trade your car for a Ford Focus, you can level your spending from the debt producing loop to a manageable level and balance your budget.

The problem is that a household budget is not a good analogy for a national government. They’re too different for this reasoning to translate from one to another. Governments have fixed outgoings and highly variable incomes, the polar opposite of a household.

Cool. I am trying to stay up on this stuff.

I looked it up for ya, it is as I thought.

I not only paid for medical insurance, I owed quite a bit after my heart surgery. Medicaid is fully financed. The only difference is with Medicaid we use our normal doctors. With socialized medicine, we will begin to lose our doctors because they won’t make a profit.

That’s simply not true. I know of no country that implemented a universal healthcare plan, whether primarily public or private in nature, that drove their doctors away. Why would it be different in the US?

They do have school loans to pay back you know. All of this goes far deeper than just a government run program that will only allow medical for certain things. You do know, many of your doctors are trained in the United States, right?

Define “many”. :p
Some are, no doubt, trained in the US. Just as some of ours go to work in the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. Educated people are a fairly mobile bunch and can go where they please. Those that come to the UK do so because it is in fact a place they want to work. Completely countering your claim that the NHS would somehow chase doctors away with their policies.

The NHS works, it really does. Heart surgery? If I ever need it, I won’t see a bill for the procedure. I suspect part of the reason the US has poor healthcare outcomes in many areas is the added burden of having to deal with the bill no doubt impedes recovery.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

Those who don’t pay taxes amount to 47%. However, this includes the senior citizens who are retired. This is a misnomer since I have had to pay taxes on my SS.

Again you’re not paying attention. This is only referring to a single specific kind of tax, it does not refer to those who don’t pay any taxes or to those who get more than they pay.

Redem, this is exactly what is hurting the US. We are spending more money than we are taking in. If you did this with your budget, you would be going bankrupt in no time. The money Obama is spending is coming from loads because they don’t have the cash to spend. With so many people out of work, their revenues are down by about $320 billion. Businesses are not selling their products because people don’t have any money and so their tax payments are down too. We cannot survive on just debt for too long or we will not even have enough money to pay the base payments on that debt. We are almost there now.

No, what is hurting the US is the recession. It is causing the drop in income which is the main source of the deficit right now (Along with tax breaks, the wars in the middle easy and other irresponsible republican spending programs like Bush’s medicare part D).
The idea that the US should slash welfare, SS, medicare and the like to reduce costs to meet the reduced revenues would indeed balance the budget in the short term, but it would also cause another massive drop in the economy, plunging tens of millions in abject poverty and causing a further drop in revenues. No doubt you would then advocate for further reductions in these programs to re-balance the budget, causing a further drop. The social economic and political fallout of this would be enormous. This policy would literally destroy the US as a country if it were followed to the end.

Meanwhile, in mainstream economics, the recommendation is to keep up with spending on these important social programs so that the economy is stable enough for growth to occur. Sure, it increases debt in the short term, but it improves the outcome in the long term.

No, I don’t have it wrong. I live here, remember? I grew up learning these things in school…when they still taught them.

If that is the case then you either remember this one wrong or you were taught wrong.

Where did you get your information on this refinance program. It hasn’t passed yet. I am the one in the trenches here, so to speak.

From you, as it happens. I am taking it for granted that the information and links you have posted about it are more or less accurate. I may very well be wrong in that assumption.

You are talking to someone who knows about expensive healthcare. I know all about it and I took the responsibility of paying my share. The way I see it is some people will do what they have to to afford health insurance and some ignore the need. These are the ones who get into trouble and these are the ones who you think I should pay for…the irresponsible ones. Everyone can already get medical help if they need it. There are many programs already out there to help those who need it. Medicaid is just one example.

You may know about paying for medical insurance in the simple sense that you’ve done so before, but that in no way translates to knowledge about the broad subject of funding healthcare systems. There are ways people can get help, like Medicaid, but those programs are exactly the sort of thing that you oppose… and worse. Thanks to the opposition of people with a similar ideal as you, these systems are invariable poorly funded and structured so that they’re both expensive and ineffective. Bravo, America.

Topic: Serious Discussion / African-American Studies in the USA

including plenty of Irish, Redem, surprised you didn’t mention that

I don’t see it is all that relevant to the overall point, in brief. It does nothing to diminish the central point, that white people enslaved human beings on an industrial scale to fuel our economies, the effects of which linger to this day. The US, for all its sins, at the least acknowledges this in school history classes. The UK does not.

Topic: Serious Discussion / African-American Studies in the USA

It’s not an overgeneralisation at all, we can talk about a group without having to caveat every sentence with the obvious fact that what a group does may not be endorsed by or done by individuals within said group. It is simply a fact that white people as a group have screwed with a lot of other peoples. You as an individual are guilty of whatever, I don’t much care, it’s not relevant. You are not the collective “white people”, but simply an individual within the set.

Topic: Serious Discussion / World without Religion: Better or Worse?

Religious people bring it up a lot. Seems like it’s an important topic to them or something.

Topic: Serious Discussion / World without Religion: Better or Worse?

Take your example above, of the land animal to water animal transition. In order for that to happen, you have to get worse at walking, and get better at swimming. There has to come a point where you are pretty bad at walking and pretty bad at swimming. At which point survival of the fittest comes into play and you get eaten.

And if you were living in deep water then being a poor swimmer might be a problem. Or if you were living entirely on land being a poor walker might be a problem. However, if you’re living in shallow water, it isn’t a disadvantage at all. Such creatures were well adapted to the environment in which they actually lived.

Topic: Serious Discussion / African-American Studies in the USA

I happen to be one of them…?

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

Redem, Yes I think it was TARP. I don’t know the value of money to you, but $300 billion ( I rralize I didn’t use enough zero’s above so I corrected it) is a tidy sum in my book. Obama has borrowed twice as much as all of the presidents combined. This is what is hurting us.

No, this is not what is hurting the US, the recession is. The borrowing money to fix the recession is the effect, not the cause.
$300b is a lot, but it’s in the form of a loan and not a prize fund. Very little of that money contributed to the debt.

I heard on the news that tax revenue for the feds has dropped by $320 billion just since last year. This tells me the economy is still falling.

If true it’s the result of the tax breaks, not the economy failing. It isn’t, it’s recovering.

If we are putting so many people back to work, why are so many companies (like Hostess) going bankrupt and why are so many people still not working?

Companies go bankrupt all the time, I doubt you can substantiate the insinuation that the recession is directly to blame, although no doubt a company that makes its money selling luxury items would suffer through a recession.

However, in the Constitution, Section 8, it states:all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. I take that to mean you can’t pick a certain section of the citizenry to pay an unfair amount to the government. But of course, he doesn’t pay attention to that document anywa

You take it wrong, it just means that you can’t tax, say, Iowa more than Delaware.

I then there is the latest “program” by Obama. Now he is “helping” those homeowners who are underwater by allowing them to refinance. What isn’t well know is his little addition of a fee that will add billions to a slush fund. It is supposed to pay for further unemployment benefits, but being a slush fund can be used for anything.

No, it can’t. Or rather, it can only be used for the purpose to which the law creating it has said it can be used for. Moreover, he’s helping them out by letting them refinance because the alternative would be homelessness for many.

The free market system is our economy, not the worlds. That is a common mistake I guess. Yes, we do export, or used to, and we import. This is fine and I have no problem with this. What you and others misunderstand is thinking we must give up our sovereignty to the world. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t see your country giving up their sovereignty, why do you think we have to?

That really doesn’t make any sense. The free market is not your economy, it is an ideal regarding the lack of barriers to trade. One that means that the US trades with other countries. Ideally, to the mutual benefit of both. Sovereignty have basically nothing to do with this.

Whose personal debts, yours? You think I should pay your personal debts, or just your medical? why is it up to me to pay for your medical care? I don’t believe you have offered to pay for my by-pass surgery. If you want to I won’t turn you down.

The personal debts of those who are ruined by healthcare costs due to the way your healthcare system works. It is not a matter of you paying for me, but of increasing the risk pool of the health insurance we use to the maximum possible, everyone. Practically, it amounts to the government collecting your healthcare insurance premiums instead of private companies.

Ok, this is where you are completely wrong, there are many who not only don’t pay income taxes, they get back money they never paid in. This is fact.

That’s not half of people, though, which is what you were claiming. And yes, there are those who get more from the state than they pay for, this is not a problem.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

1) I could be wrong. But so could you. Think about that. And you may want to recheck your numbers.

I’ve checked them fairly recently, I’m going to go with my memory of it, and say no. I should also add that the bailouts were predominately loans, i.e. they don’t increase the national debt by that number.

2) Asinine? Are you shitting me? Jesus. Hang on. Let me find this here link. Ah! There it is:
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/the-us-budget-explained.jpg
14 trillion. That is our debt. You don’t get out of debt by spending or tagging “spending” under the name “stimulus”. We’re nowhere near out of the woods yet. The unemployment rate is still markedly high and the participation rate is still at a record low. We’re going downhill fast.

Actually, you do. That’s precisely how you recover a nation from a recession, and recovery from a recession is the first step to paying off the debts. The alternative is… what? Slash spending so that you plunge the economy into a deeper hole, dropping revenues even more than they are now?
That’s insane.

The size of the debt is not particularly relevant to this, either, regardless of how large the debt is the first step is to end the recession.

I will note, the largest factor in the recent increase in the debt was simply that the recession happened and dropped tax revenues massively. The solution is the reverse of this.

3) I don’t think we understand each other very well here. What I’m saying is that we should try to be as self-sufficient as possible by making our own goods, mining, drilling, etc. etc. After establishing a certain degree of independency over a period time, we would then have more leverage and trading power than we do now as we would be exporting more and importing less. I don’t want complete economic isolation. I realize that’s not good. What I’m saying we do though is use the vast amount of resources present within the United State’s borders in order to generate more goods to trade with and be more self-sufficient.

Where it’s profitable the US already does. What you call independence would manifest itself as creating unprofitable industries, which would take protectionist policies to manage. For every job you create this way you lose another to the effect of these policies on your exports. This is how globalisation works, you can’t roll back that tide.

4) I actually have a fairly large and mapped out argument against socialized medicine, but I’m not going to discuss such a broad topic on a thread about the messiah (Obama…I know, I know…the joke’s getting old…but I’m still laughing lol…sorry.) So unless you feel like making a topic regarding socialized medicine (God, I hope you’ve seen this movie):

Amusing that you use an image from a movie made in the UK, a nation with a public universal healthcare system providing among the best healthcare in the world for among the lowest costs among industrialised nations.I’m somewhat curious what your argument is, but I won’t make a whole thread just as a prompt for you to make a single post on the subject.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

Redeem, there were two bailouts. The first one was $780,000,000 to start but more was added. That is only 220,000,000 shy of a trillion.

If you mean TARP, it was about 300 billion or so and most of that is either repaid already or is in the process of being repaid. That did not add a signfiicant amount to the debt. This other thing about the Fed is simply nonsense, that’s what the Fed does, loans money to banks. Nothing shadowy about it at all.

Stimulating the economy was tried during the depression and didn’t work. It would have been better if government stayed out of the picture and let the economy recover on it’s own.

You’re welcome to that opinion but you must realise that you’re arguing against the experts on that one, you’re going to need something more than your opinion to be convincing.

And think about what you said on the jobs…we slowed the rate of job losses? Are you sure that was a plus in Obama’s column? You do know they quit counting those who run out of unemployment, right?

Untrue, I am referring to employment figures, not unemployment figures. BLS data, to be specific.

We had imports and exports long before we had Nafta and Gatt. We can be an independent country and still maintain our sovereignty.

You can’t be a free market country while maintaining massive trade barriers of the sort that would be needed to prevent globalisation.

Debt is not eliminated with universal healthcare. Someone has to pay for those programs and it ends up being the productive citizens, those who actually work.

Still eliminates personal debts (and the overall cost of healthcare would drop if the experience of every other country in the world is anything to go by).

Do you know that half of Americans don’t pay any taxes? That means they are sponging of those who do.

That’s not true at all, this is ONLY referring to federal income tax. I don’t think there is anyone that doesn’t pay any taxes at all. However, this is unimportant, the country already pays for the healthcare and the bill is huge. The practical difference between paying insurance premiums to a company and paying them to the government is nil.

Topic: Serious Discussion / My Opinion About Evolution

Your writing style is a complete mess, yanno, it would be easy to respond if you made your points clearer.

1. Too many actual missing links.
1a. And NO examples of “partial use” of ANY “advantages”.
Even Archeopteryx (though I seem to remember it being a hoax, right or not?) is already a fully winged bird, though not too flying.
But no “semi-winged raptors” ever found.
Yeah, FEATHERS (maybe!), but what about WINGS.
Explanation:
There is a HUGE difference in the chest muscle system of birds and non-flying raptors.
But I’ve never heard of any “in-between” raptor-bird with a semi-bird type chest.
Did you?

Archeopteryx was not a hoax, no. It was a transitional form between modern birds and ancient dinosaurs, showing anatomical signs unique to birds and some that are not present in birds but were present in their ancestors. There are earlier ancestors such as the Unenlagia with wings too small to fly.

The very definition of a transitional fossil. The sort that is oft claimed to be missing. The very concept of a missing link is flawed. If you mean transitional fossils then please use that term, and I can show you thousands of them. If you mean something else, then please let us know.

There are earlier ancestors such as the Unenlagia with wings too small to fly, but good enough

2. Behavior.
Like, whales.
What in the world made their ancestor to move to LIVE in the water?
Quite a few species live NEAR the water and constantly HUNT there, yet this doesn’t make them actually relocate there.

Food and shelter most likely. They evolved in swamps, those that were able to venture into deeper water to escape predators or hunt for food would have an advantage. This is a pretty obvious one.

Evolution is based on “better wins”, but all these “missing link” forms were WORSE than both the ancestor and the descendant!

No, it’s based on statistical advantages from genetics favouring some individuals over others in the effort to reproduce.

Amusing that you state that these “missing link forms” were worse than ancestor and descendants… if we know what they look like, seems to me that they’re not missing any more. :)

Regardless, you’re mistaken. You’re assuming there is no advantage to having a wing that is less well developed than modern birds, and this is clearly false. Even if incapable of sustained flight as modern birds sometimes are, flying short distances is an advantage, as is gliding, as is using your wings to run faster or climb steeper slopes, or maneuver better while running, or to keep yourself/offspring warm in winter. Numerous advantages that increase step by step towards a fully modern bird wing.

Whale-dogs had no reason to SHORTEN their legs, and their “medium” forms were quite useless both on land and in water.

But not in a swamp or a shore line. Short legs of the sort you refer to seem to work quite well for crocodiles, afterall, and many other creatures in similar environments.

2. “Others such as Niles Eldredge, Stephen J. Gould, Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman and Steven Rose argue that we are still missing something big, and that natural selection does not explain the full complexity of evolution.”
In other words, they finally agree that they DON’T KNOW “for sure”.

No, they’re proposing that there are additional mechanisms involved in evolution, other than natural selection. This is not a controversial position.

Also, there’s no clue as to how STEP 1 turned into this; the jump is (typically for “missing links”) from A to B without any clear AB.

This reminds me this funnily enough. Doesn’t matter how many transitional fossils we find, that just creates two new “gaps” for some creationist to demand a link for.

Again, for me such examples of “evolution”, DO remind of INTELLIGENT MODIFYING: you add a feature, the creature gets better “stats”.

Does it? What sort of lazy “intelligence” can’t get it right he first time and needs to make so many tiny incremental changes?

But to RANDOMLY grow such things, VERY unbelievably unlikely.

Mutations are random, evolution is not.

Why don’t polar bears or beavers live underwater the way whales do?
Or, rather, why do crocs or hippos still have legs?
The wiki page compares the early whales to both of these, so why ones decided to stay put, while others got fish-styled?

Because they do. In the future either might lose their limbs, but they might not. Evolution doesn’t direct any species to a specific end, it just works with whatever mutations happen to arise.

Besides, both Crocs and Polar bears live on land still, if they had evolved to live in deep water and their limbs had atrophied to evolved into fins, you would be demanding the same of them as you do for whales now. It would not change your questions at all.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

1) I beg to differ.

You can do so if you wish, but you would be wrong. The combined cost of the bailouts is nowhere near a trillion, let alone trillions.

2) Maybe instead of thinking in terms of two “dimensions”, you should try thinking more dynamically and radically. You act as if there are only two options here: spend money, or not spend money. There are definitely other options that would be much more beneficial to this country. Throwing money at the problem has obviously not worked, and not spending money has obviously not worked. Maybe it’s time for some type of new economic policy altogether.

Those are the two broad categories of response to a recession, yes. Stimulating the economy is what was recommended by the experts, and it very clearly did work as evidenced by the change in the rate of job losses after it was passed. The passage of the stimulus bill marks the turn around point in the recession. To deny that is simply asinine.

3) I realize that we don’t have much independency, but that’s my point. I want to have as much independency as physically possible. I don’t like the fact that we have to rely on other countries for things we could easily produce ourselves.

Sorry, you can’t have that and still expect a free market. As much as you may have to import goods to meet consumer demand you also export goods for overseas trade. If you raise trade barriers against your trading partners they will do the same right back. You do not gain anything from economic isolation, and you lose a lot in terms of the price of goods increasing.

4) False.

I really don’t think you have any basis for that claim. At a minimum, that specific problem of debt from healthcare costs is eliminated by universal healthcare programs.

You also seem to gain better, cheaper and more effective healthcare overall. But, if someone isn’t ripping everyone else of then that’s “socialism”, apparently.

Topic: Serious Discussion / African-American Studies in the USA

Blacks, most of the time, kidnapped themselves and then sold the people they kidnapped to white slavers. It was not a one-way street. Seriously, ditch the whole “White Man’s Guilt” thing.

And it happened because we were buying slaves on an industrial scale and shipping them en masse half way around the world. Ditch the attempts to downplay our guilt.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

1) That’s debatable. Suppose had we not blown away several trillion dollars trying to keep these floundering companies afloat and “create jobs” (yeah, that’s worked really well).

The US did not “blow” away any trillions on that.

Passing stimulus packages may keep the country’s economy alive in the short term, but in the long term, the country’s economy sinks from where it was previously and its currency loses power. Japan has already experienced this.

Untrue, the alternative is to allow the economy to crash harder, faster and deeper in the short term, which would take a lot longer to climb out of and recover from.

2) I think what we have here is failure to communicate (God, I hope you’ve seen Cool Hand Luke. It’s a classic.). I personally don’t like the fact that America exports a lot of the oil it drills/refines (I’d much rather us keep it all), but what I was trying to point out to you was the fact that at least we’re selling SOMETHING to other countries. In case you haven’t noticed, the US doesn’t exactly make anything anymore. We import way more than we export. We have no independency.

The US is one of the world’s major exporters and importers. That more or less the mark of being the strongest economy per capita. You have no independancy, but neither do any other major nations. Welcome to globalism.

3) Dry your tears, my son. Socialized medicine is not the answer.

Actually, to that specific problem, it would be.

Topic: Serious Discussion / My Opinion About Evolution

You claim these are things about evolution that make no sense to you, yet most points have nothing to do with evolution at all. I think, rather, than you are objecting to the entire scientifically determined natural history of the universe. Evolution is not short hand for this concept.

1. I heard the sun is slowly shrinking, which makes sense. But supposedly, if it has been shrinking at the same rate for one million years or so, it would have been big enough to incinerate the earth.

You seem to have realised the major flaw in this argument already. If it has been shrinking at the established rate for a long time it would have been much bigger in the past. IF. No such long term trend has been established. Moreover, the short term trend identified by one paper in the late 70s is not widely regarded as being sufficient proof in itself that there is even a short term trend in the sun’s size. Major flaws have been found in the paper and others have come to wildly different answers as to the rate of change of the sun’s diameter. Which suggests to me at least that they’re measuring noise for the most part.

Unless you’re referring to the Holtzman contraction hypothesis, in which case that one is completely discredited. That model shows the Sun as a giant ball of burning hydrogen rather than a ball of hydrogen plasma undergoing nuclear fusion.

2. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (from order to disorder), on the big bang in particular. So every time all matter condenses, all atoms are wedged together, all the pressure builds up (with help from a special form of radiation, correct?) and explodes. How are split atoms fixed? This may be happening infinite times, or else we couldn’t exist. But then, even those explosions would have to weaken, even the slightest bit when the dark matter and energy wears itself out from all the explosions. So eventually these “big bangs” would stop. How large was the biggest one?

This has nothing to do with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which does not state “from order to disorder”, but rather the transition of a closed system from low to high entropy states, entropy being defined as the ability of a system to do work.

What you are describing is not the big bang, at all. The model you’re describing is too different from the actual model for your highlighted problem to have a scientific answer, it just doesn’t apply.
There is a cyclical big bang model, however in that model there are no atoms as such, at the point where the “bang” happens. Rather, there is just space and energy.

3. I’m curious how DNA came into the picture. This technique of making little RNA strands involves setting all base components in the near perfect position to create a single piece. Whether it works okay, we don’t know, but we can still call it RNA. Theories that RNA worked a bit different back then have appeared in recent years, but do you know anything about the argument against it, based on limited info (duh), and the fact that proteins can’t copy themselves?

This would be abiogenesis, not evolution. The leading hypothesis for this is the RNA world hypothesis. The nucleotides from which RNA and DNA are made form spontaneously within an abiotic world similar to the earth. Thus, random DNA molecules form spontaneously as the nucleotides join up and split apart due to chemical and thermodynamic pressures. Most of these are basically random gibberish, but some are not. Similarly, lipids spontaneously form into “bubbles” through which individual nucleotides can pass by which block larger molecules like RNA. Combine the two and you get protocells, which form spontaneously and in which RNA molecules are able to grow in a more stable environment, and which “grow” by absorbing lipids and nucleotides from the surrounding water, and “reproduce” by splitting up as they get too large. At this point evolution of a sort favours the more stable protocells and those which can promote the growth of more protocells like themselves.

This is not “life” as such, but it is a start.

DNA is more stable than RNA for long term storage of genetic patterns and thus when some protocell develops an RNA strande that catalyses DNA, things really get stable and evolution can begin more strongly.

4. How reliable do you think carbon dating actually is? What do you think about scientists, archeologists, and Biblical historians agreeing that humans in evolution and creation originated from the same area? What about the many missing links?

This is three in one.

1. Very reliable, it’s quite simple to calibrate against artifacts of known age.
2. They don’t agree on anything of the sort. Well, the scientists and archeologists do, but biblical historians have no basis for pointing to an origin point in Africa. Those that claim to are lying.
3. The concept of a “missing link” is a lie. If you mean transitional fossils, then we have them by the thousand, including hundreds of large samples for the last few million years of human evolution alone.

5. What do you think about the peculiar symmetry of animals?

Well, they’re not actually perfectly symmetrical at all. They’re vaguely symmetrical, but what of it? I fail to see why that’s an objection to evolution at all.

I hear that people have discovered fragments of cut wood on Mount Sinai, and skeletons of people and horses, along with chariots.

So?

I also hear stories of modern day miracles, or situations that defy nature, about passed on stories, miracles experienced by friends of the story-tellers, and miracles experienced by friends and myself.

I’ve heard people claiming they’ve met Elvis, alive and well, that they’ve been kidnapped by aliens, that crystals have the power to heal. I’ve heard people make a lot of claims. Remarkable how few even attempt to substantiate their claims, and of those that do, how spectacularly they’ve failed in the attempts.

What if I told you I’ve actually heard God talk to me, and not in a dream?

I’d tell you to seek mental help.

I’ve been on abortion debate on Kongregate in the past, and I realized it all boils down to one question: What gives the ball of cells the right to life?

I think, rather, it boils down to “do you think you have the right to force a woman to go through pregnancy and childbirth against her will?”. If you have a way to remove the blastocyst/embryo/zygote/foetus without harming it I’d be happy to see it, but unless you do then the death of it is a side effect and not the point of abortion.

the whole idea that we evolved from a few chemicals in a bath of acids. I heard that one of our oldest ancestors was a sponge

That’s all life is. “A few chemicals” reacting together. Well, we’re both animals, but I am pretty sure we’re on different branches, i.e. that they’re not ancestral to us. Even if they were, what of it? The important question is whether it’s true, not whether you feel it’s personally uplifting or not.

It’s just, there’s a lack of direct evidence (like our beliefs), and there’s all the missing links, and the skeletons you call links, when they may be nothing more than an ancient ape or an old man with serious arthritis.

Nope, it’s easy to tell the difference between arthritic humans and ancestral hominids. For one, arthritis tends not to smoothly advance back in time through the fossil record, not develope a nice branching pattern of the sort that evolution generates. But more importantly, the genetic evidence is too strong to deny. We’re related to the other apes.

Topic: Serious Discussion / President Obama

I think Obama has cooked his goose for re-election. He is now going to make it mandatory that church owned hospitals perform abortions.

No, he isn’t. He’s demanding that they provide contraception coverage within their employees insurance policies.

To top this off he is pushing his new Harp program to get people to refinance their homes. What he has left out is the language that makes the new borrowers pay for his unemployment extensions.

Two separate issues. The first is that the GOP congress passed legislation that increases costs on Mortgages a little bit. The HARP thing is unrelated.

Did you read either link?

Topic: Serious Discussion / Communism

The ideas of total socialism as are embedded in the philosophies of communism do not work largely due to the law of rational choice. Why work effeciently when working less is easier and you can recieve equal pay for working less?

There are no “laws of rational choice”. Regardless, why work harder? Because you would lose your job if you don’t, to meet the goals you set yourself or which have been set for you, etc.
The idea that communism implies that people don’t need to work hard is just silly.

As is the idea that capitalism pushes people to work their hardest, it really doesn’t.

I disagree. I would agree that laissez-faire economics tend not to work successfully (i.e. precursor to the Great Depression) but capitalistic countries, taken proportionally, have not failed as much as socialistic (antecedent of communistic systems) countries have. Please correct me if I’m wrong, though.

Well, bluntly, the vast majority of countries have failed, or rather they’re not around any more. Many of them were capitalist to some degree, probably most.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Communism

I think it is an ideal, but VERY naive and impossible ideology, and as such no country should try to implement it.

The zeitgeist is grossly mistaken on this one. It is as workable as any of the other systems we’ve tried, the vast majority of attempted capitalist systems have failed too, afterall. This is mostly an excuse, I think, from people who agree with some of the ideas but can’t rationalise that with the USSR and the cold war propaganda against them.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Global Warming

When I was younger we were blamed for the brown cloud over a city. One morning early I was sitting on a mountain looking over that city. The sky was clear, but as the passenger planes started taking off I could see a haze develop over the airport and move across the city/ All of this time they were blaming the people and their cars. On top of that, they said it was scientifically proven to be caused by the drivers. I know better.

You mean smog? You may like to know what smog is before reaching conclusions like “I know better”. It’s a heady combination of smoke and fog. Fog is a natural phenomenon, it also happens to be an excellent way of capturing airborn particulate matter like the soot and ash and chemicals and stuff from unclean burning of fossil fuels. We didn’t make the fog, but we did make it into smog. Passing laws regarding how cleanly coal and other fossil fuels can be burned massively reduced the amount of particulate matter in the air, hence less smog today in many cities that used to be plagued by it, although there are some that still have problems due to the surrounding terrain.

As for the rest. The key question in all instances is “how”. How did some random frog go extinct? If it was due to shrinking environments due to our clear cutting of forests and polluting of water supplies… yes we can attribute that to us pretty certainly. We can also say that increased CO2 in the atmosphere causes it to absorb heat that would otherwise be released into space, thus “global warming”. This is not at all controversial, it’s basically high school science experiment to do that these days, with both CO2 and thermal detection equipment relatively cheap to obtain. Or you could look up the absorbtion spectrum of CO2.

Topic: Serious Discussion / Chemistry and Bioethics

Hardly shooting in the dark. We can test them for safety pretty damn easily.