overtone

They already picked one, and funneled big money into his campaign - Jeb. Getting the other candidates out of the way is what the money was supposed to do. They only started looking at Rubio in the first place because of that failure. The fact that they have to wait until five or six other candidates get out of Jeb's way for him to even win a primary, is a measure of their role in managing the monster they've created.

The objection I have to naming corporate attempts at influence as a big problem is that they are intrinsic and inevitable - they're a feature of having capitalist corporations in the first place. It's like naming gravity, or greed, or lust, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as the biggest problem. The existence of aspects of reality don't belong in this list, however troublesome they may be. Organized crime does the same thing, and if one's government succumbs that is a problem - but the problem one has as a citizen of that polity is with that government. The organized criminals are merely behaving by nature. It's the corrupted government that has to be "solved". The means we have for dealing with those corporations, organized criminals, foreign enemies, inconveniently flooding rivers, tendency of fires to spread and destroy, etc, is government. There's nothing intrinsic or inevitable about a fascist takeover of a major political Party. It's not inherent in the nature of political Parties to inevitably become as the current Republican Party has become.

No. What was actually shown was a 5-7% wage gap right off the mark, first year out, initial hire for the same job. What happens after that - raises, promotions, differential access to horizontal transfers for building skill sets, mentorship and influences, rate of failure influenced by hostile work environments, etc etc etc, - is not constrained by that initial situation. The comparison of men and women side by side within the same occupation remains to be made. You have presented no evidence that this "filtering" is the cause of all of that difference, and you have presented no evidence that this "filtering" is itself independent of gender discrimination. It's even possible that those occupations are higher paying because men filter into them, and there is a gender bias in society to pay men more money for whatever they do. That would be the handiest explanation for the common practice of paying high school basketball coaches more than second grade teachers, for example. There is at least one study out there that pegs the long term economic value added by a very good, as opposed to average, second grade teacher at around $300k @ yr. So if second grade teachers were hired the way corporate CEOs are allegedly hired, that's what you would have to pay for the best.

"The GOP" created a core voter base immune to reason and coordinated by paranoia, bigotry, and an incoherent sense of grievance. It has two major (and partially overlapping) factions: the white Christian fundies, and the neo-Confederate racial bigots. It's not going to "jump" under the direction of "the GOP". And as far as South Carolina is concerned, "the GOP" can love them some Bush and Rubio all they want - this is what's playing in SC: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2005/04/little-red-state-fundy-sez.html

I'm not clear about how being "less aggressive about getting pay raises" explains a 7% wage gap in one's first year on the job.

This is the kind of thing already addressed in, for example, Medicare. As far as splitting from the thread, the health care system in the US is a possible contender for "biggest problem" - anyone want to make the argument? That would make two contenders: 1) the current Republican Party 2) the current health care system.

Depends on what you mean by "subsidize". The oil companies get a lot of support - the US Army enforcing their contract terms, for example - but the "free market" (externalized cost) price of oil is pretty low.

We've seen that, with W&Cheney. They re-elected them - with a bigger vote. It's hard for outsiders to realize just how insulated from reality - what happened six months ago in the real world, let alone six years - the Republican voter in the US actually is. Two thirds of them think Obama was probably born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim. That's not a joke, it's an example.

I postpone stuff that's going to be a hassle as long as possible - who needs the tension and frustration, when there's a chance it will go away on its own?

So? That's one issue, not a political faction or the organizing issue of a political faction. That issue happens to be polarized exactly as the Republican media operatives have attempted to describe all issues. It's all but unique, in that respect. (And no, the truth does not lie "in the middle". It lies to one side of the entire clusterfuck.) One issue does not a political faction make. "There is no "liberal" analogue of the American taliban that the Republican Party represents" Demonization does not "encapsulate" very many issues in the US, since it applies only to the Republican Party's approach to them. In that respect, demonization is an aspect of why the Republican Party is America's biggest problem. Or to repeat:

The invention of the keel, allowing a sailing ship to tack upwind, was long delayed. Likewise the discovery of hydrogen and its uses as a lifting gas (or ballooning in general). As far as discoveries awaiting us: the domestication, or at least husbandry, of some major ocean dwelling animal is long overdue. It would be kind of a tragedy if, like the reds in North America with the horses etc, we killed them off before we learned to ride them or herd them.

Well, rangerx listed a slew of situations and pieces of evidence I could just add in to the list behind my as yet unopposed contention that America's biggest problem is the current Republican Party. But they did not draw the obvious conclusion. Instead, at the end of it they posted this: Which is nonsense. There is no "liberal" analogue of the American taliban that the Republican Party represents. The quranic wielding of the Bible or the Constitution is by the one political "side", not each of two. In the US, we have seen the rise of fascism as a major political force, and its cooption of one of the two major political Parties - there is nothing comparable among even the authoritarians of the left. The other Party has not been coopted by any such faction. It's not the division, or factionalism, or partisanship, or sectarian fighting, in itself, that is the problem. It's the nature of one of the combatants. Fascism must be fought, opposed, by everybody else - that's a good thing to do. Thing is, the Republican Party does not need to "win" to achieve the major goals of its co-opters. It just needs to prevent the government of the US from functioning as the government of a liberal democratic republic - that is: functioning. So vandalism - e.g. the Citizens United ruling, or 200 filibusters - works as well as achievement. And that's where the threat lies.

There's another and more sympathetic factor: denial of guilt. Politics is a central responsibility of adults in a democracy. These guys have an entire adult life of having been wrong, badly and inexcusably and fundamentally wrong, about the central and most significant sociopolitical issues of their time. In being wrong they betrayed their country, their neighbors, their families, and their proclaimed principles. And then it all blew up in their faces. Even worse, a large number of people they have despised and treated with contempt have been revealed to have been right - all along, repeatedly, consistently, for years. So now what? Like the Confederate veterans after the Civil War, they are surrounded by wreckage and judgment. Denial, revision, diminution of event, this is my story and I'm stickin' to it, kill the messenger, are all human responses. One can sympathize.

It makes you a dupe. Your contention that being a dupe is what makes you a "republican" is one of most plausible postings you've made. This is what makes you a bigot: And this is what makes you dupe and bigot both: Meanwhile, none of that has anything to do with my contention that the Republican Party is America's biggest problem right now. You continue to avoid that issue, even when pretending to respond to my posting in this thread. And in avoiding the central issue of my posting while responding to it, you continue to post falsehoods about it, and me - really very silly, odd, inexplicable "errors" that serve no purpose on this thread. Like this: The obsession with "hatred" that you can't seem to shake off, the sheer stupidity of complaining that I am basing anything on "decisions made in the past", the almost comical inability to say anything accurate - anything at all - about me or my posting here, is all in the service of irrelevancy. The threat to America now posed by the current Republican Party appears to be something you cannot address, even in refutation. Why is that?

No one has ever claimed that the racial bigots and religious fundies and reactionary assholes that make up the voting base of the current Republican Party do not or should not have a vote. We all agree that those people are citizens and have the right to vote. Nobody ever said any different. Got it? Is that clear enough for you? We all agree that these people have all the rights of citizens in good standing. Nobody has argued any different. Nobody. Ever. Except, as always with your claims and assertions, there is a reality involved. We can check on whether black people are all dependent wards of the State, for example. The answer is no. And we never thought they were. And there is no particular reason the subject should have come up - nobody else is talking about anything like that. It's a bit odd, don't you think? We can also check on where the white people's money is going, and verify that most of it is going to other white people. Just as we thought. We can also, although with less certainty, check on whether your claims are based in bigotry and/or being duped. And here your many, many errors of historical fact and frequent racial focus in anecdotes are evidence. They are not conclusive, but they are evidence. If you are not being duped, where are you getting your false claims and assertions? Why does race play so large a role? Are you making them up yourself, and their consistent agreement with the barrage of propaganda and falsehoods from the centers of rightwing authoritarian bullshit currently marketing the Republican Party to the gullible is a coincidence? That's hard to believe. Agreement with what agrees with physical reality can easily be coincidence, because that reality is the same for all - a common source is visible. But agreement in error and delusion is evidence of a different kind of common source - not reality. Once again, as so many times before: your obsession with hatred of persons is a symptom, and an indication. You have repeated it so often, and in the face of so much careful explanation, that we are fully justified in taking it as evidence of your political stance and ideology and sources of opinion. I don't know what argument you think you've won, but by the evidence you have no idea what's wrong with the current Republican Party, or why it is a problem for America. You don't even know what it's been doing, or what it did in years past. If you can't think of any reason to regard the Republican Party as a threat to America except hatred for the people who call themselves "republicans", you're a dupe. So with that in mind: my assertion, that you are ostensibly responding to, is that the current Republican Party is America's biggest problem. Reasons have been posted, the argument made.

Bullshit. Have some self respect. Own up to what you voted for, and what they did. The Tea Party is the Republican Party, they are one and the same, and it started playing dress up in three-cornered hats and parading around yakking about the Constitution and renaming itself in 2009 as soon as Obama put a black hand on the Bible and became President - long before Obama "asked for laws" (whatever that is supposed to mean), long before Obamacare - for two reasons: 1) because the alternative would have been facing what the last eight years of their ruinous behavior had done to the country. 2) because they were racial bigots and the thought of a black President drove them right around the bend. As far as 1): The Republican Party is simply in denial. They got everything they wanted, with W, and it blew up in their faces exactly the way the lefties had been telling them, for years, that it would. It was a disaster, eight years of the worst government this country has ever seen as a Union, and it was completely their fault. We have been digging out of this sewage pit they drove us into ever since. It's going to take decades more. It might not even be possible. Meanwhile: the guys who got rich? They're trying to do it again. There was no Crash for them, the Iraq War was a gravy train of profits, Katrina was just black people, they think W&Co just got a bad press. And 2): the Confederacy rose again. Racial bigotry lives, in the US, and it's organized itself in the Republican Party. A secret Muslim? Born in Kenya? "You lie!" at the State of the Union? Gun sales tripling after the election results were announced? C'mon - nobody's fooled. This is a psychiatric disorder we are all familiar with in this country. We didn't need the monkey dolls and the posters of Obama with a bone through his nose at the "Tea Party" rallies, to know what we're looking at. But that isn't what happened, is it. That's a comforting little fairy tale you tell yourself to avoid looking in the mirror. Obama almost never used executive orders early on, far less than most Presidents, and he spent all his time for years trying to compromise with a Party that had no goal but obstruction of anything - even their own bills - that he supported. Meanwhile, the Republicans in the Senate set a record for filibusters. Hundreds of filibusters, hundreds of bills bottled up in committee, dozens of judicial and agency appointments held up for months and years, and thousands of hours of public rhetoric and media attacks that were just foul. Ugly. Eight years of this crap. The fact that Obama got anything done at all is one of the strongest tributes to his ability one can imagine. And then you pull this amnesiac bs, like you've been sleeping under a rock for a decade, and post nonsense like that.

We did not try to do the same things with the Iraqis we did with the Germans and Japanese and Italians. That was because our government did not have the same wisdom and ability and sound comprehension in 2003 that we had in 1948. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan Notice that the US did not attempt to help the Iranians as it did the Soviet Union, for example. Notice also the difference between the US attempts to restore the artistic treasures of Europe and Japan (there's a movie out, portraying the efforts as heroic - there will be no such movie about our Iraq occupation) vs the cavalier dismissal of the museums and other cultural treasures of Iraq. And we flat out betrayed the Kurds - as usual, but the usual failure was the anticipated and delivered consequence. No. There is no "good" Party. There is one major source of partisan intransigence, and it is not an inevitable product of "our system" but rather a corrupter of it. Only one Party is responsible for that - the Republican, also known as "Tea", Party. They may not be the mainstream, whatever that is, but the teaparty controls both houses of Congress as we speak, and has provided every viable Presidential candidate other than Sanders or Clinton. That's my nomination for America's biggest single problem. This guy liveblogs some of them - this is a casual driveby compared to his others, but you may enjoy: http://driftglass.blogspot.com His signoff: "Tonight, the part of Private Deadmeat who stands up at the end of the movie "'cause there ain't no sniper Sarge!" and takes one right to the melon was played by Marco Rubio." The last one: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2016/01/at-gopdebate-phase-one.html The intro: " Phase One: Rand Paul: I predict we'll get a lot of the puberty vote. Oh. "Liberty vote"? Yeah, we'll get them too. John Kasich: There are nine lanes. The conservative lane. The crazy lane. The biker lane. The Diane Lane. The Insane Clown Lane. The "getting laid" lane. The Kasich lane. What was the question? Ben Carson: Sometimes they let me out of the box so I can think there. The country is abnormal. I get calls late at night. Ted Cruz: I will kill anyone with an "I" or an "S" in their name. Unlike Obama who wants to sell your children off to devious furriners. I will saturation bomb those areas where the bad guys will gather conveniently under my falling bombs. Marco Rubio: ISIS is more dangerous than Ming the Merciless times Hitler times Vlad the Impaler. We will need to send over 100 million zillion soldiers over there to take down the Ottoman Empire Ted Cruz: Jimmmmmmy Carrrrrter. Bwahaha. Yes I have a huge boner right now. Yes I call it "Reagan". Over on every other channel, Donald Trump is still answering the first "question". "

The sound heard is not only very complex from each instrument, but modified by the room. Any cancellations and nodes are overwhelmed by the larger volume of these resonances, as well as by fluctuations in the exact position and direction of the instruments (the sounding surface of each instrument is not a point source, either). In some rooms you can hear such cancellation etc - they have "dead spots". In a carefully designed anechoic chamber, the instruments sound much different - I would not be surprised to discover such interference patterns to be audible in an anechoic chamber, the effect being a noticeable change in timbre on certain notes in certain places in the room. You'd have to fix the position of the instruments and extend the duration of the tone unrealistically.

More promisingly, it might be possible to genetically engineer certain plants (maize, most alluringly) for symbiosis with nitrogen fixing bacteria, and this is currently being investigated. The GM would be in the plants, probably, rather than the bacterium. It's not going to be easy. http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/08/aob.mct048.full

In addition to developing the drug, the drug company involved spent millions - far more than it spent developing the drug - on lobbying Congress to get favorable and long term monopoly control over its manufacture (to have US patent and ownership laws written in its favor). It also obtained, by much effort and expensive "lobbying", very favorable legislation regarding its tax liabilities (deductions for "research" and "marketing" and other expenses (including the lobbying itself), the depreciation of its legal monopoly, the description of retained earnings, international earnings and profits, the corporate and capital gains tax rates on income derived from the sale of the drug, etc etc etc). It also received, in return for its investment in lobbying Congress, special industry treatment of its legal liabilities for side effects etc, protection from the market leverage of big purchasers such as Medicare, the right to advertise its drugs to ordinary people unable to evaluate their needs or risks, and other benefits. So with all this added value, the drug company was able to sell the drug for a very high price - much higher than it would have obtained otherwise - to an "investor" with no political vulnerabilities, no brand name to sully, and an interest in gouging sick people for big bucks with their lives on the line. And it and its executives and investors enjoyed favorable taxation policy on the profits made thereby. So our problem here is not just the creep. There's always a creep around. It's the corruption of Congress by the drug company. And that corruption is almost total in the federal level Republican Party - essentially the entire Republican Congress and all Presidential candidates are on board defending most or all of those price boosting privileges. They call it "free market" and "business friendly" and "job creation" and "small government".

Comes under this heading, in my categories: Huntsman was one of them. A Republican of integrity and sound judgment in governance would have to come from the ranks of the unknown, local. The sound judgment part is where the questions lie - he's a flat taxer, gave the nominating speech for Palin, etc. But for him to be on the sidelines while the likes of Cruz and Rubio strut center stage is revealing of the Party involved.

With the difference being: Cruz actually said that and it's an obviously horrible idea; Trump actually said that and it's an obviously bad idea; Hillary said something not quite like that and it's not clear whether what she did say is a bad idea; Sanders did not say that and what he did say is probably a good idea. And neither Hillary or Sanders has said anything else as stupid and horrible as Cruz, or as poorly considered and bad as Trump, there - but both Cruz and Trump have matched those quotes with others just as bad. Many others. See, it's not just two sides and politics: reality is involved. Nothing there is true of my posting. Nowhere, anywhere, have I claimed that everything wrong with America is the fault of the dumpster fire that the Republican Party has become since Nixon. I don't even think all the bad stuff is the fault of the fascists and fundies that the Republican strategists lured from the Democratic Party and other places, and gathered into that one dumpster under the Republican tent. The direction of implication is this: Republican Party -> bad. The other direction, bad -> Republican Party , is not mine. That's a thing opposed by the current Republican Party in almost every respect, from acknowledging the dominant human role in climate change and threats, to EPA programs and "environmental" interferences with corporate profitmaking, to international agreements governing environmental issues of energy consumption. There are Republican candidates for President - with standing, not rejected by the Party - who not only want to cut EPA funding (those bills passed the House recently), but have officially attempted to get rid of the EPA altogether.

Hillary's plan was not single payer. Hillary rejected single payer. Her plan was like Romney's, or Obama's later. And it never made it to Congress - it never had enough votes to clear a Republican filibuster in the Senate, or Democratic opposition to it in the House. Imaginary stuff that you fear for no reason is not Bernie's fault. You invent stuff to be frightened about with Bernie, and then you vote for the people who will actually to that bad stuff - Republicans. What are you talking about? That was before Reaganomics took hold. Rich people can still get good rates of return, of course. We installed them after the Great Depression, and they worked well for fifty years. We began repealing them (and cutting way back on enforcement) in bits and pieces starting in 1982 (which crashed the Savings and Loans, and began the ballooning of the Federal debt ) and especially 1998-2002, with consequences we will be living with for the rest of our lives. One of the major political Parties in the US has made it their special business to give corporations large tax breaks for offshoring jobs. Now this same Party includes in its platforms the demand that we allow the profits earned by offshoring jobs for tax breaks be repatriated into the executives's and investor's pockets in the US without paying US taxes. Any idea which Party that is? He says the criterion is going to be speed of turnover. That is a standard criterion already used in the US to separate speculation on stock price from investment in the company - there used to be (maybe still is) a higher capital gains tax on profits made by selling a purchased stock within just a few months, rather than keeping it for a few years. The free market survived. Although Clinton was a rightwing conservative, that is unfair: he just signed a couple of bad bills while under threat of, and after being weakened by, impeachment. The guys who arranged that snuck the provisions into other bills he had to sign, that kind of thing. Those were all Republican written and Republican promoted efforts.

I made no such assertion. My only claim was that bias against age in women, more than men, is a standard trope of the standard feminist approach. I merely pointed out that the standard, stereotypical feminist theory in the matter has no problem handling the circumstance described - contrary to the claim of the post I argued against. (There are of course many factors that could be mentioned, if one were to address the study itself, including but not limited to : the data was from the UK, which has a different set of cultural factors from the US; employed women in that age bracket are likely on average to come from higher social strata, and have longer history at a given job; the exclusion of overtime biases the data regarding categories of employment that include gender disparities - there are kinds of male-dominated jobs (such as heavy seasonal work the trades) in which overtime is built in to the yearly compensation, and specifically compensates for the lower hourly base rate. And so forth. )

So? What's your point? What "female victimhood conspiratory theory" does that contradict? The explanations for that sound like an interesting inquiry, but plenty of them fit the normal descriptions of a society that - say - rewards youth in women and punishes age, regardless of other attributes, while rewarding ability and experience and hard work in men. Just to point to one stereotype often incorporated into standard feminist theory.