jbluhm86

And how do you get steam? By boiling water. No water = no cooling = fuel rods melt. Fukushima: station blackout, coupled with backup generators being damaged, caused the coolant water in the core to boil off and exposed the core, causing it to melt down. Three Mile Island: Operator error and sensor malfunctions left a pressure relief valve open while sensors gave a false reading of overpressure, so operators stopped the flow of coolant into the core. The coolant began to boil off, and the core partially melted before operators realized what was going on and restored water flow.

Forbes: How Much CO2 Does A Single Volcano Emit? A tremendous synthesis of information took place in 2013, revealing our best value yet for the total amount of CO2 emitted from natural release events within Earth. They found: 33 measured degassing volcanoes emit a total of 60 million tons of CO2 per year. There are a total of ~150 known degassing volcanoes, implying (based on the measured ones) that a total of 271 million tons of CO2 are released annually. 30 historically active volcanoes are measured to emit a total of 6.4 million tons of CO2 per year. With ~550 historically active volcanoes total, they extrapolate this class of object contributes 117 million tons per year. The global total from volcanic lakes is 94 million tons of CO2 per year. Additional emissions from tectonic, hydrothermal and inactive volcanic areas contribute an estimated 66 million tons of CO2 per year, although the total number of emitting, tectonic areas are unknown. And finally, emissions from mid-ocean ridges are estimated to be 97 million tons of CO2 annually. Add all of these up, and you get an estimate of around 645 million tons of CO2 per year. Yes, there are uncertainties; yes, there's annual variation; yes, it's easy to get led astray if you think that Mt. Etna is typical, rather than the unusually large emitter of CO2 that it is. When you realize that volcanism contributes 645 million tons of CO2 per year – and it becomes clearer if you write it as 0.645 billion tons of CO2 per year – compared to humanity's 29 billion tons per year, it's overwhelmingly clear what's caused the carbon dioxide increase in Earth's atmosphere since 1750. In fact, even if we include the rare, very large volcanic eruptions, like 1980's Mount St. Helens or 1991's Mount Pinatubo eruption, they only emitted 10 and 50 million tons of CO2 each, respectively. It would take three Mount St. Helens and one Mount Pinatubo eruption every day to equal the amount that humanity is presently emitting. The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere can be determined from both ice core measurements, which easily go back hundreds of thousands of years, and by atmospheric monitoring stations, like those atop Mauna Loa. The increase in atmospheric CO2 since the mid-1700s is staggering. CIRES & NOAA They work great in the middle of the desert where there's no water around for hundreds of miles. Depends on the particular element and isotope. Some radioactive isotopes have half-lives of a few decades, some are tens of thousands of years, others are millions. Good news is that there's plenty of scientific advances being made to address this issue. One solution being researched is taking liquid nuclear waste and combining it with blast furnace slag to create solid nuclear glass - it reduces the total volume of nuclear waste and converts it into a smaller, more stable form that is safer and more easier to store. Another advancement is in the research of molten salt reactors. Traditional nuclear reactors use water to cool the reactor core down, but will melt down without continuous flows of water through the core - thats what happened at Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island. MSRs work by combining nuclear fuel with molten salt as a coolant/moderator - they have a much higher safety profile, use less nuclear fuel, and can even run off of nuclear waste generated by other LWC reactors. Sad thing is, is that molten salt reactors were known to be safer and more efficient than LWC reactors all the way back in the 1960's but the government chose to fund LWCs because their waste byproducts could be enriched to form fuel for the US's nuclear weapons stockpile. Molten salt reactor's can't produce precursors for weapon's grade nuclear fuel, so it was abandoned.

Yes, ketchup is separate from catsup, but they're equal, so it's all good...

You know, I completely agree with you, for a change. Thankfully, so did the Supreme Court in 2013 when they legalized gay marriage. Both parties are well on their way to having equal rights when it comes to marriage benefits and protections, yet for some reason, calling it "marriage" infuriates you and other religious nutbags - even though their marriage doesn't affect you in the slightest. Except that, for many years, it was. And, unsurprisingly, religious zealots justified slavery and then racial segregation by use of biblical principles, so you're off on that account.

At the end of the day, "marriage" and "civil union" are the exact same concept with the only exception being that the religious have to have it called "civil union" in order to rationalize it and square it away with their religious beliefs. You're just arguing semantics at this point. You can spell it as "catsup" or "ketchup", but it's still the same shit at the end of the day.

Except when it comes to to individuals of the same sex getting married, apparently.

"Freedom of religion for me, but not for thee"... And that's another prime example of why government is/should remain a secular institution. BTW, there's not a single secular government on the planet that allows for marriage to animals either, and they presumably didn't need the religious to sign off on that either. "Hate the sin but love the sinner" is valid as long as they continue to support your positions, I suppose.

Cal, I understand that you having one foot in the grave and the other on a banana-peel keeps you preoccupied most of the time, but do try to keep up. This has already been addressed: Feel free to point out to me where I stifled, censored, or silenced OBF or any other religious poster on here from expressing their views on religion. If you cant, then go suck an angry red cock. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion =/= freedom from critique. I didn't "batter" OBF on anything like he's some abused wife who burned her husband's meatloaf: he stated his religious viewpoint, I offered counterarguments to those viewpoints. Perhaps YOU are the one who's offended by what i've responded with, so, by all means, notify the mods if you think i've crossed some imaginary redline. Hell, Hoorta is a mod and he's been actively participating in this thread all along; I haven't been notified that anything i've said on here has been out of line per the board's rules, so I don't know what you're even crying about. I generally believe that it's an acceptable practice to use mockery and humor to point out inconsistencies and logical plot holes in bad ideas, yes. Religious beliefs fall into the category of bad ideas. Just look at Scientology.

I'm sorry, but nothing in your response addressed my original point. As a follower of the Judeo-Christian faith, I would say that you agree that God/Jesus/Holy Spirit/Trinity - or some variant of the like - is: Omnipotent: God has unlimited power: able to do anything at anytime with no limitations. Omniscient: God knows everything, past and future. Infallible: incapable of making mistakes or being wrong I think the above is a fair assessment of how most practitioners of Christianity views God. So, now that we have these principles established, lets go back to my original argument. It's a pretty well established scientific fact at this point that there are two major factors that come into play when talking about human behavior: the biological and the sociological. We know from observation that damage to the human brain - by stroke, for one example - can cause markedly different behavioral patterns in someone that wasn't there before the damage occurred. Extensive drug abuse by a woman while she's pregnant can have severely negative, irreversible consequences to a developing fetus' brain. I could go on. You also have social stressors that can shape a person's behavior. Childhood trauma/abuse has been linked to a high frequency of serial killers, for example. So, how does all of this apply, in the religious sense? It goes back to what I stated earlier about God "creating people sick and ordering them to be well on the pain of eternal damnation". If God truly is omnipotent, its is reasonably within his power to create an individual without a biological (genetic) predisposition towards homosexual tendencies, or to cause them to experience events in their lives that would push them towards a homosexual lifestyle, yet he seemingly refuses to do so. If God truly is omniscient, that means that he knew beforehand that he would create individuals with genetic predispositions towards homosexuality or that he would place them in sociological stressors that would inexorably lead them to be homosexuals in the future, yet he does nothing to prevent that from happening. Finally, and perhaps the most morally dark example, we come to the idea of God being infallible - the idea that nothing God does is wrong or a mistake. So, if we follow this logic, God intentionally created someone knowing that they would become a homosexual later in their lives. He also knew beforehand that this person would hypothetically choose to continue to unrepentantly lead a homosexual lifestyle. God also knows beforehand that he will damn this personally eternally for his lifestyle. And none of this will be wrong for God to do, because God is supposedly infallible. To use an analogy, it's like a poker game where God knowingly deals an individual 7-2 offsuit for their hole cards, and expects to to make to make an Ace high straight flush with them by the river or he'll shoot them in the head. You say that homosexuality is a choice, but if God truly is omnipotent, omniscient and infallible, then choice becomes an illusion at that point. God literally and intentinally stacks the deck against a homosexual individual before they're even born, and has already made the decision to damn them to an eternity of pain and torment before they're even born. There is no morality in any of that.

Jesus did one hell of a job keeping the door to the Presidential Box inside Ford's Theatre locked tight. So there's that, I guess.

Keep chugging your A&W there, Popeye. You'll get there eventually.

By the same token, you're essentially saying that the Judeo-Christian God (and, by extension, all of the moral and societal implications that go along with that) exists without any definitive proof He exists outside of quoting the Bible, which any other religion could do with their own religious texts. Personally, i'm not willing to go so far as to say that homosexuals are who they are SOLELY based on genetic or other biological predispositions toward it; but I think that there's been enough scientific research established to support the idea that biological mechanisms do play some role in a person's sexual orientation. As for your pedophile/voyeur example, I do believe that there has been sufficient research in the area of neuroanatomy and cognitive neuroscience to show that biological factors like brain structure and neurochemical imbalances do play a large role in predicting the predisposition an individual has towards certain negative behavioral traits, such as pedophilia, sadomasochism, homicidal tendencies, etc. Its pretty firmly established that structural changes to the brain, whether anatomically or neurochemically, can have profound and demonstrable effects on one's behavior, so it isn't out of the realm of possibility for me to imagine that there are some not yet well understood biological factors underpinning homosexual predilections. Finally, here's a thought for you to chew on for a minute: say that there are biological mechanisms which predispose individuals to be homosexuals, i.e. "they didn't choose to be this way". If you take into account that it's said that we're made in God's image, and that an all seeing and all knowing God made an individual to be in such a state, then by what right would said God have the moral justification to condemn that individual to an eternity of everlasting torment based on that individual following the "faulty design" that a perfect God gave them? As I stated it to OBF earlier, it would be as if God created that individual sick, and ordered him to be well, on pain of eternal damnation otherwise. How could you consider such a God to be a moral and just one?

I can meet you here in agreement on this issue; small "L" liberal and liberalism is not the same as leftist ideology being espoused as liberalism today; that's why many (including myself) have been making the distinction by calling those individuals Regressive Leftists, etc. Same goes for the distinction between political conservatives and those of the far-right. I think we'd all benefit by recognizing the main political battle today isn't necessarily between left and right, liberal and conservative, etc, but rather, the battle is between classical liberalism and authoritarianism.

One of the problems with your argument is that you, presumably, have already set the Judeo-Christian god as your Supreme Being by which you model your spiritual morality off of. An atheist could say it's morally wrong to kill someone based on their sexual orientation, but someone reading the Bible couldn't necessarily say the same. It's the religious equivalent of the "fruit from the poisoned tree" doctrine. Once you set a flawed creator deity as the measurement by which to square your own morality by, it inherently flaws your own moral beliefs.

To be more specific, as an American, I actually believe you have every right to espouse your religious beliefs in the public forum if you so desire, that's the gist of freedom of speech, warts and all. However... To me, it seems that the religious want to have their proverbial cake and to eat it to, meaning that they want the right to talk about and practice their religious beliefs in the public arena, yet they don't seem as big on me joining them in the same public arena to exercise my right to freedom of speech to tell them what nonsense their beliefs are, and they want to be protected from my speech while in public. By all means, feel free to say and believe whatever fantastical ideas you want to in the privacy of your own home or house of worship, i'm not some jack-booted thug who'd kick the door down to your church to tell you how I think your religion is nonsense, and it would be abhorrent to me if someone else tried to do so. But once you step into the proverbial octagon of the public sphere, any and all ideas that you proclaim there are open to debate, critique, mockery, etc.

All one has to do is read any history book to know how utterly absurd this statement is, i'm sorry to say.

And some of us go that one extra step further and feel that all religions in general are myths.

Then perhaps it should remain that way - an individual faith - and not try to be imposed on others through government interference/legislation, no?

It does matter, and therein lies the crux of the argument of Christianity, or any religion for that matter. You get wildly different interpretations of religious doctrine -doctrine, by the way, that you must form your moral actions and life around at the risk of eternal damnation - all based on the same source material. Some of these interpretations are mild and peaceful as milquetoast, yet others are extremely ridged and dogmatic in their proscriptions, yet the common thread is that they all claim authority from the same sources: God, Jesus, the Bible, etc, and they all have some basis in what is actually written down in the Bible. To be frank, it's quite presumptive of you to claim that YOUR specific (presumably peaceful) practice of Christianity is the correct way to practice it, while all the more violent and Old Testament-heavy interpretations with all the joyful horrors that that entails is "not the correct interpretation" of your religion. It's no different than what the Muslims do with their religion as well. So it may not matter to you, but I bet it sure as shit that it's in the forefront of many homosexual's minds on which type of Christian beliefs is trying to be imposed on them, because they can't afford to hope that its the "hate the sin, love the sinner" variety and not the more violent interpretations.

Yes, and this is the same "merciful" Jesus who, according to you, will commit the souls of people to everlasting torment and damnation because they didn't believe in him on little to no tangible evidence that he or God actually exists, or because two people of the same sex love each other, presumably in some part due to biological and genetic predispositions that he created them with...I could go on. Humans created sick in God's eyes - in the image of God, the Bible says - and are ordered to be well by the very same God, on the pain of eternal torture and damnation. Some mercy, there.

You'r friend was quoting Pacal's wager. There are several problems to this. First and foremost, there's over 4200 extant religions/spiritual belief systems, etc. in the world today, with numerous more extinct ones practiced in the past, so just from a probabilistic standpoint, it would be absurd to throw-in with such a specific religion such as Christianity in the hopes that, out of all the existing and extinct religions humans have practiced throughout history, that that would be the single correct religion to practice. In layman's terms, its a form of spiritual Russian-roulette, in which the many various chambers in the barrel are religious beliefs and all but the one true religion are loaded, so you have to hope that when you spin the barrel and pull the trigger on Christianity, that you chose the right one. Secondly, acceptance of Pascal's wager is basically an admission of insincere belief in the first place, since one is presumably choosing Christianity to hedge their bets against implied eternal damnation instead of practicing Christianity because they sincerely believe in Christianity's tenets. One can assume that a hypothesized omnipotent and omniscient God would be able to tell the difference between sincere belief and belief as a means to hedge against damnation.

I legit laughed really fucking hard when I first read this. Kudos to you, good sir.