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flauntpage · 6 years ago

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Maybe It’s Not Better To Be Lucky Than Good: Lightning 6, Flyers 5

Shayne Gostisbehere was the only Flyer who was publicly honest about Saturday’s 6-5 overtime loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning:

“I mean we got a point out of it, but I don’t know if we had any business getting a point today.”

It’s always refreshing to hear blunt honesty. But the more disturbing thing is to hear the rest of his teammates – and his coach – wax poetically after this stinkburger of a hockey game about how well the team played and how there was solid effort and there are a lot of good things to build on.

Let’s break it down this way:

The Flyers have now lost three-straight games after a 5-0-1 stretch got them back to respectability.

All three games, mind you, have occurred on home ice, where the team has been dreadful this season.

In the game itself, the Flyers penalty kill allowed three more goals in four shorthanded situations, and one was an abject mess of systemic hockey.

There was a 22-minute stretch in the game where the Flyers were outscored 5-1. Most of that time was in the second period, and the coach, displaying great delusion, said, “Our first two periods were good periods. We came out of it on the wrong end of it. We have to do a little bit more. But our first two periods were pretty darn good periods.”

For the record, it was 3-1 Tampa after two periods.

The team is playing with two goalies who are no better than AHL level. With Brian Elliott out for at least two weeks and Michael Neuvirth occupying his customary place on injured reserve, the Flyers goaltending duo at the moment is Calvin Pickard and Alex Lyon. Lyon hasn’t been given a shot yet, but Pickard allowed six goals on 26 shots against Tampa and made no big saves when the team needed him.

His goals against average is now 4.60 and his save percentage is .852. Both are the worst in the NHL among goalies who have played in at least five games this season.

After allowing six more goals, the Flyers have the second-worst goals against average in the NHL (3.56) and have allowed the third-most goals in the league.

Yeah, really solid effort, boys.

Now, there were positives in the game. It’s not lost on me in this analysis that the power play – the much beleaguered and criticized power play – finally had a good game. The Flyers scored three power play goals. They hadn’t done that since last Jan. 4 against the Islanders – a span of 62 games.

They did badly outshoot one of the best teams in hockey significantly (45-26) and they did stage an epic comeback, scoring four goals in a span of 6:04 in the final 10 minutes of the third period, becoming only the ninth team in the history of the NHL to do so.

(It should be noted here that the NHL originally sent out a note saying it was the first time in league history that this happened. It was written everywhere in initial stories, so you might have seen it, but the league was wrong and later corrected that error).

And although Hakstol is off his rocker about the second period, and the players are fooling themselves with all the talk about playing a mostly good game and showing a never-say-die attitude in coming back the way they did, they did have an excellent first period. Despite not scoring, they showed they are a team that can feed off emotion, albeit sometimes that emotion takes them the wrong way – more on that in a minute.

Still, the mistakes continue to mount. The same deficiencies rear their ugly heads repeatedly and at the most inopportune times. And although there is talent here, and, at times the Flyers make you think they are turning the corner, they remain nothing more than inconsistent and mediocre. They are 9-9-2 at the quarter pole of the season. In the three previous seasons under Hakstol they were:

2015-16: 6-9-5 (17 points)

2016-17: 9-8-3 (21 points)

2017-18: 8-8-4 (20 points)

Notice a trend?

And here is an example of the worst trend about the Flyers:

That's a cool five goals in his last two games for Brayden Point, in case you were wondering.#TBLvsPHI | #GoBolts pic.twitter.com/3pjFWzFvgz

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) November 17, 2018

Not one player on the ice does anything right for the Flyers.

Yes, this is the penalty kill, so the Flyers are down a man. And yes, the Lightning power play is pretty damn good (they have seven goals in their last 11 opportunities over the past two games).

But that doesn’t excuse the complete lack of cohesion for the Flyers.

One by one:

Why would Scott Laughton chase a hit there?

Why is Dale Weise challenging the puck so high in the zone? If he can’t get there he creates way too much space for the Lightning to operate behind him.

Why is Robert Hagg abandoning his position and getting himself caught in no-man’s-land? This puts undue pressure on his defensive partner…

… Andrew MacDonald, who, when faced with pressure makes the absolute wrong choice and flops like a fish in a feeble attempt to block a pass.

Pickard is just damn slow.

Why does this happen? Is this structural? Is this something you can blame on coaching? Maybe. Especially since the penalty kill has been a flaming pile of dung all season.

And maybe Hakstol should have used his timeout before this. The Flyers had just allowed a 5-on-3 power play goal to get behind 4-1, and it was the result of real frustration with the officials after two calls the Flyers didn’t like (one was definitely a penalty, the other probably wasn’t). It might have been a good time to just give his team an extra few seconds to breathe. Relax. Forget about the frustration. (Hey, maybe make a goalie change). All that is certainly true.

But that doesn’t excuse the Flyers from letting negative emotion impact them.

Maybe, instead of tanking this shift out of frustration, they play hard enough to allow that great comeback, and instead of just tying the game, maybe they pull one out with their comeback and steal two points instead of just one.

This is emblematic of a fragile hockey team. These are the things that happen to a team that lets itself get spooked into thinking the worst too often. This is completely on the players.

As for the comeback – was it really as good as it seems? I say no.

I mean, this was pretty cool:

Then Simmonds tied it all up at 5. pic.twitter.com/sO6sWyUvNE

— Broad Street Hockey (@BroadStHockey) November 17, 2018

This was the final goal in the comeback. It tied it at 5-5. Like I mentioned earlier, only eight teams have ever done this before – erase a four-goal deficit in the final 10 minutes. That’s quite awesome to see, no matter who the teams are that are involved.

And Simmonds was not going to be denied on this play. The Flyers were riding a big old wave of momentum and you could feel it in the Wells Fargo Center. It was nice to see the old barn rocking again, even for only a few minutes.

But how good really was the comeback? How much of it can really be attributed to the Flyers finding the intestinal fortitude to make an epic comeback? How much of it was really never-say-die?

Or was it just fortuitous?

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it wasn’t impressive to score four goals so quickly. But I will also tell you that the Flyers really weren’t chasing this thing until it was 5-3. Then the level of play and the emotion and the energy ramped up.

Before that, I think the Flyers were accepting their fate of another home loss, and maybe they would score a goal or two and make it seem more respectable.

But Tampa really let the Flyers back into the game. They took two dumb penalties at a time in the game when they could have simply coasted to victory, and then their penalty kill seemed less than enthused to be on the ice in a four-goal game with less than 10 minutes to go.

They also didn’t get the same effort in goal from Louis Domingue that he gave through the game’s first 50 minutes.

And after Travis Konecny scored the first of his two goals, the Flyers didn’t seem that enthused. Even after Sean Couturier cut it to two, it was like, OK… that’s nice.

But it wasn’t until this moment…

First, Konecny made it a one goal game. pic.twitter.com/nvCsSxO4t5

— Broad Street Hockey (@BroadStHockey) November 17, 2018

…that the Flyers really turned on the juice.

So you see, it was only a really dominant effort by the Flyers once they got within two. Before that, they were resigned to the fact that they were going to lose. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There was no notion they could pull this out until they were back within two.

It was a wild game for Konecny as well. Two goals is great, but he let his emotions get the better of him that lead to the first penalty in the third period sequence that saw Tampa stretch their lead to 5-1, and he was absolutely terrible on the second goal of the game by Tampa with his defensive effort in the second period:

Erne making moves, Ceddy cashing in.

#TBLvsPHI | #GoBolts pic.twitter.com/BwrZ4Xj3mo

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) November 17, 2018

You just can’t be that lazy in your own end. Sorry. Nice finish for Konecny, but a disjointed effort all around.

As for Simmonds, It was great that he tied the game, but this play in overtime was brutal, and it’s why Tampa scored the game-winner:

Your @sonnysbbq goal of the game: A no-brainer. Cirelli’s unreal OT winner! #TBLvsPHI pic.twitter.com/Hxd50UniHw

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) November 17, 2018

He shattered his stick on the post after the goal in frustration. And his frustration was so great that he was “unavailable” (cough: refused to speak to the media) after the game.

So we don’t know publicly how he felt about the effort, but I’m betting he felt a lot like I described Gostisbehere at the beginning of this post.

The Flyers were lucky to get a point. And all this other poppycock about good play and grit is just that.

Simmonds and Jake Voracek (who also was “unavailable” after the game) used to be great guys to talk to after games, win or lose. Now, they don’t want to talk, ever.

Likely because they are as tired of the same-old Flyers story as the rest of us. Can you blame them?

The post Maybe It’s Not Better To Be Lucky Than Good: Lightning 6, Flyers 5 appeared first on Crossing Broad.

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birdfriender · 8 years ago

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What's so bad about D&D 3.5?

I’ve had this ask sitting in my inbox for ages bc I want to give a proper answer and that might take a little while.

Fucken long post under the cut

So the first an most obvious criticism is the balance issue, a lot of words have been said by a lot of people on this but basically there are some classes that are so weak as to be useless unless carefully optimized by someone who knows what they are doing (eg monk) and other classes that are so overpowered as to trivially break the game unless carefully reigned in by someone who knows what they are doing (eg druid).

To expand on both those points: monk has a core issue with the design of the class, firstly it is strongly dependent on multiple different attributes. The monk cant wear armour. this is theoretically offset by them adding their wisdom bonus to AC however in order to keep up with other melee combatants this means the monk needs to have high stats in both dex and wis. Additionally, the monk needs strength in order to deal damage as their unarmed attack bonuses do not scale well enough to make up for their lack of magic weapons. Additionally, as a melee combatant with d8 hit dice the monk really cant afford to dump constitution or risk being extremely vulnerable to a couple of lucky attacks. Finally the monk has the second lowest skill points per level of any class, meaning that in order to have any out of combat utility they need to have a little bit of int. This leaves only charisma as a viable dump stat (this is the dump stat for almost every class in the game by the way, another flaw of D&D). As if all this wasn’t enough, the monk doesn’t even have full BAB scaling for gd knows what reason? Additionally the monk has several abilities that benefit them for moving or encourage them to move around, suggesting that the monk should be a fast and mobile fighter, however their key damage dealing ability, flurry of blows, requires a full action and therefore cant be used in the same turn as movement. Flurry of blows ALSO imposes an attack penalty which couples with the monks low BAB means the monk struggles to ever hit enemies, let alone deal meaningful damage.

On the other end of the spectrum, the druid only really ever needs Wisdom. Freeing them up to put their second highest stat in constitution or intelligence for general utility. The druid gets an animal companion which being entirely honestly is usually a more useful combat unit than a monk, and takes its own entire turn every combat in addition the druids fairly powerful array of spells. At level 6 though the druid gets the option to take the Natural Spell feat which, taken on its own with no optimization or further thought put into it, completely breaks the game, letting the druid shapeshift into animals with extremely strong physical stat lines while keeping the druids mental stats AND spellcasting. A casual player with no effort and without meaning to can pick this feat because it sounds cool and suddenly have a character that is basically as powerful as the rest of the party combined.

These sorts of issues pervade all of D&D 3.5 and all its sourcebooks. These examples are just from the core rules but it gets honestly worse the more content you add. Balance isn’t the only issue though, there is a general lack of cohesion with the design across different sourcebooks and different designers. There are often multiple different implementations of the same concept or idea but done in subtly different ways. For instance the alternate class feature system is used very inconsistently and infrequently. There are many sourcebooks that implement “new” classes that could very obviously just have been sets of alternate class features for existing classes, I have a bad memory for the specifics of these but classes such as the Ninja and Swashbuckler jump to mind. Another example of this issue is in bonus typing. There is supposedly a system in 3.5 where every bonus has a type such as enhancement and that multiple bonuses of the same type dont stack, however this is once again applied inconsistently and there are many places in sourcebooks with “untyped” bonuses where neither the designer nor editor cared to correctly implement the rules. These may have eventually been fixed in errata but as far as I know they were not.

Related to the issue of incoherent design vision there are frequently mechanics or ideas where there is no indication as to how the designer intended these things to be used. The most obvious example of this is Beholder Mage which is a prestige class that is clearly ludicrously overpowered as it was supposedly designed for DMs to use for enemies, however nowhere does anything indicate that this is the intention. On its own this may not seem like a huge issue but when there are lots of these cases scattered across different books and articles it adds a huge overhead on the GM to make sure everything is being used as intended (i.e. that they dont let players play Beholder Mage even when nothing mechanically prevents them from doing so).

One thing that is more of a personal gripe is the issue of “simulationist” games in general. D&D aims to simulate a world by tying everything down with mechanics. Every NPC is built on the same stats and skill system as the player characters when there is absolutely no need for this to be the case. The effect of this is that the DM has to put in a lot of work maintaining the simulation; generating entire stat blocks for every monster and NPC, maintaining all their status effects and spells/day etc. and while many people would argue that DMs dont have to do this and can just handwave it all, that is not what the rulebook tells you to do! When you spend money on the rulebook for a roleplaying game you are placing your faith in the designers of that game to have made a good game with a coherent ruleset that is fun to play, as soon as you start ignoring chunks of the rules to make the game fun or playable THEN THATS A BAD GAME! If the solution to having fun with a game is to just handwave and ignore the actual rules then those are bad rules! its a bad game!

Finally the reason I hate D&D so much and why i cant just ignore it and let people have their “fun” (i remain unconvinced) is the way the design attitudes and sensibilities behind D&D dragged down roleplaying games for so long. I dont think it’s unfair to call D&D the World of Warcraft of tabletop games. For decades, every new RPG copied the fundamental ideas behind D&D, that enemies and players all work on the same system, that the GM should just be expected to do all the work and spend all the hours sorting everything out and that the GM should be the ultimate arbitrator of everything and therefore responsible for everything. Even games that I think are broadly pretty good still suffer from this core conceit, Savage Worlds, Dark Heresy, World of Darkness, etc all would likely be better if they hadn’t approached their design from a D&D dominated perspective.

Honestly I probably forgot some stuff? But thats in broad terms why I think D&D and especially 3.5 are so bad.

#extremelyfowl

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thrashermaxey · 7 years ago

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Weekend wrap: The Jets make history

Yeah, I’d say that felt like it was worth waiting three decades or so for.

The Jets took care of business on Friday night, eliminating the Wild in five games to advance to the second round. While the magnitude of the moment made for a dramatic finish, the game itself didn’t provide much in the way of suspense. The Jets rolled over the Wild, scoring 31 seconds in and leading 4–0 before the game was 12 minutes old. That was more than enough, as Connor Hellebuyck recorded his second straight shutout to pad his all-time Jets lead.

It was the first time Winnipeg fans had seen their team win a playoff series since 1987, when the old Jets beat the Flames in the opening round. That iteration of the team didn’t win another series in its remaining nine years before heading to Phoenix, and 15 years without a team and seven more after luring the Thrashers north had added up to a grand total of zero playoff games won until this year. They took care of the first win in Game 1; now they’ve checked off a series to go with it.

Next up, the team takes aim at another first: The two versions of the Winnipeg Jets have never won a game in the second round of the NHL playoffs. Both previous trips to round two ended in four-game sweeps at the hands of the Wayne Gretzky-era Oilers dynasty.

This year’s matchup won’t be quite as foreboding, although it’s not all that far off. The Predators are the Presidents’ Trophy champions, and will have home ice. Their lineup features the likely Vezina winner, a Norris finalist, and a forward in Filip Forsberg who’s doing something ridiculous in just about every game. But while the Jets were dominating the Wild, the Predators looked at least a little bit vulnerable against the underdog Avalanche and took on an extra game’s worth of wear and tear in the process, so this is a series that Winnipeg can win.

Either way, it should be a must-see matchup, quite possibly the very best of the entire post-season. There’s a strong case to be made that these are the two top teams in the league, and their regular-season meetings were fantastic. It might even be tempting to suggest that this series will be for the Stanley Cup, although that implies that the winner will emerge with anything left for the Sharks or Knights in the conference final. As for who we’re picking, well, we’ll get to that in the power rankings.

But first, one other thing a Winnipeg Jets team has never accomplished: Being the last Canadian team standing in the NHL playoffs. They’ll have to wait at least a few more hours to claim that honour, after the Maple Leafs went into Boston and escaped with a Game 5 win to keep their series alive.

That one saw the Leafs build a 4–1 lead midway through the second period, then hang on as a desperate Bruins team dominated the second half. Boston rained 45 shots on Frederik Andersen, including 20 in the third period, and the Leafs spent much of the game in the penalty box. By late in the third, the Bruins had cut the lead to 4–3, and, yes, everyone was thinking it. But this time Toronto held on, if only barely.

Game 6 goes tonight in Toronto, with a potential Game 7 looming back in Boston on Wednesday. It still feels like the Maple Leafs haven’t put a full game together in the series, with inconsistent play from Andersen and the top forwards. But Saturday at least offered some signs of encouragement, with Auston Matthews looking dangerous in the early going and the return of Nazem Kadri giving the top six a boost.

The end result wasn’t pretty, and probably had more than a few Toronto fans suffering through some traumatic memories of 2013. The Leafs still have a long way to go if they’re going to join the Jets in round two. But for now at least, the country still has two teams to root for, and we can save the annual “Canada’s Team” debate for at least one more day.

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they’re headed towards a Stanley Cup.

5. Boston Bruins: This is a bit risky, as they’re the only team in our top five that hasn’t already punched a ticket to round two. The safer play would be to swap in the Knights here, but we’re sticking with Boston. Gutsy call, or transparent attempt at the reverse-jinx? You decide.

4. Tampa Bay Lightning: You have to figure they’ll be hoping that the Leafs and Bruins go the full seven and inflict as much damage on each other as possible before the winner crawls their way to Tampa.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

from All About Sports http://www.downgoesbrown.com/2018/04/weekend-wrap-jets-make-history.html

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vitalmindandbody · 7 years ago

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Two American Dreamings: how a dumbed-down nation lost slew of a great idea

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , royal principles are overwhelmed in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal opportunity is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old man got

But something happened on the best way of that place

They shed an American flag in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest inventions of all time, and just like it says on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it caused a totally new guild in human liaisons. After millennia of pharaohs, emperors, emperors, princess, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their helper elites and locked-down social structures, countries around the world was founded where delivery and ancestry didnt affair so much better, where by application of your expertises, energy, labour and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your substance mint in life and achieve a measure of economic defence for yourself and their own families. Peasants and proles could aspire to more than merely survival. Radical!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the word in his volume The Epic of America, defining the American fantasy as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each girl shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous all cases of delivery or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the fantasy was there from the start, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, pleasure residing in its 18 th-century sense of boom, thriving, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation compensations. Batch of that offered in the old country, and thats precisely why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, tenancy, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged system, to throw it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our proletariat upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to assure for ourselves the liberation that financial defence draws, and for millions principally white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the lane it used to work , nothing less than a revolution in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the idea that people are able to rise from implemented in order to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the modeling of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across classes peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the gains of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much better a phenomenon of great numbers of people rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all first-class. You didnt “ve got to be” extraordinary to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with implicit buy-in to the social contract, devotion to the system proceeding on the assumption that the system was basically fair.

The biggest gains happened in the post-second world war era of the GI Bill, affordable higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive taxation system. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US doubled. Income inequality reached historic lows. The median CEO salary was approximately 30 meters that of the lowest-paid employee, compared against todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top tax bracket strayed in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Granted, there used to be far fewer billionaires in those dates. Somehow the society survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and the possibilities for the average “mens and”, if we can not find it, all our other accomplishments amount to good-for-nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address subsequently that day in which he listed the four impunities essential to American democracy, among other issues freedom from want. In his Commonwealth of the Union address three years later, FDR expanded on this notion of freedom from want with its own proposal for a Second Bill of Right, an economic bill of rights to antagonize what he viewed as the growing totalitarianism of the modern economic ordering TAGEND

This Republic had at its embarking, and ripened to its present forte, under the protection of certain inalienable political claims among them the right of free speech, free press, free sacred As our commonwealth has grown in sizing and prominence, however as our industrial economy has expanded these political claims have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clearly defined realization of the fact that true-life personal freedoms cannot prevail without economic security and independence.

Political rights notwithstanding, discretion reverberates dreadfully hollow when youre going nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that compensation peonage, or any system that inclines toward subsistence level, is plainly inconsistent with self-determination. Survival is, by definition, a held, frantic nation; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present era, to getting enough of what the body needs to make it to the next. These daylights a minimum wage laborer in New York City clocking 40 hours a week( at$ 9 per hour) gives $18,720 a year, well for the purposes of the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, anxious existence, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, clothe, and shelter yourself on a compensation like that, much less a family; much less buy health insurance, or save for your teenagers college, or participate in any of those other good American circumstances. Down at peon grade, the pursuit of gaiety sounds like a bad gag. Its “ve called the” American fantasy, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous gentlemen are not free people, said FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. Parties who are hungry and out of a responsibility are the stuff of which totalitarianisms are acquire. A dreadful explanation, demonstrably genuine, and especially unsettling in 2016, a point in time when the American Dream seems most viable as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, abundance dispensation, mortality rates: by all the necessary measures, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is sinking. Remarkable people continue to rise, but overall mobility is sluggish at best. If youre born poor in Ferguson or Appalachia, chances are youre going to stay that lane. Ditto if your early recalls include the swimming pool at the Houston Country Club or ski readings at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your roost at the upper part of the heap.

Income inequality, gross the gaps in wealth: were to say daily, continuously, that these are the necessary consequences of a free market, as if world markets was a action of quality on the order of weather or tides, and not the wholly manmade create that it is. In light-footed of recent history, blind following of those kinds of financials would seem to require a firm commitment to folly, but makes acquire for the moment that its genuine, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the laws of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad regulation that requires inequality of opportunity? Ive yet to hear the action for that, though doubtless some enterprising thinktanker could construct one out of this same free-market financials, together with stenches of genetic determinism as it pertains to characters of penalty and persona. And “it wouldve been” bogus, that case. And more than that, dishonest. That we should allow for wildly divergent opportunities due to accidents of birth ought to impres us as a crime equal in violence to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is ensure equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal rights in markets. The overture goes deeper than feeling, deeper than programme, deeper even than adherence to equality and the endeavours of happiness that are set out in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of democracy, and to the prospects for its very existence in America. We may have democracy in its own country, wrote supreme court justice Louis Brandeis, or we may have enormous affluence concentrated in the handwritings of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would inevitably use their supremacy to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class plainly couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly played out in the present age of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the case for financial equality goes beyond even equations of strength politics. Democracys premise remains on the idea that the collective gumption of the majority will testify right more frequently than its incorrect. That given sufficient possibility in the endeavours of merriment, your population will develop its flairs, its intellect, its best judgement; that over season the national capacity for discernment and self-correction will be broadened. Life will improve. The species of your league will be more perfect, to acquire a word. But if a critical mass of your population is kept in peonage? All its verve spent in the furrows of day-to-day survival, with scant opportunity to develop the full range of its modules? Then how much poorer future prospects for your republic will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the smooth functioning of republic than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all distinguished this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived actuality of the two countries, not just a pretty tale we tell ourselves.

I have always gotten much more publicity than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American reverie, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe nature where much of “the member states national” consciousness resides, the sum product of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, Tv, internet, texts, tweets, ad saturation, luminary preoccupation, plays preoccupation, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire invasion of media and messaging that strives to separate us from our brains. September 11, 2001 exploded us out of that nightmare for about two minutes, but the dreaming is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was speedily absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex affair horribly direct in research results, but a swamp when it is necessary to reasons was stripped down and binaried into a dependable fantasy narrative of us against them, good versus misery, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was virtually executed for pointing out that a few shreds of historic awareness might help us understand how we came to this moment. For this modest proposal , no small number of her fellow Americans bid her dead. But if united followed her guide if wed done the hard work of excavating down to the roots of the whole nasty circumstance perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at a campaign affair for the Republican campaigner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Image: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but leaved our recent record it begs research: the majority of cases most Americans dont just knowing that real any more. How else to clarify Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for chairman? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the presidency in the 1990 s and went out in flames, but he made the mistake of running as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the ultimate creature, and irrefutable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his job until 2004, to be exact he deemed status in our lives as a more or less normal personality. Larger than life, to be sure, cartoonishly grandiose, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably objectionable, but Trump didnt become Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first episode gleaned 20.7 million viewers. By likenes, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 polls in the 1992 presidential election yes, Im equating referendum totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump kept describing that robust 20 million week after week. The season finale that time reached 28 million viewers, and over the coming decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate direction TV has of extraditing fame into the very core of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom action flesh who demonstrated every hope of shredding the pols. One ponders if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking Tv swindler could be to our natures. Trumps performance on that night did not dishearten , nor through all the debates in the long advance that followed, and if his consider for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional legislators, we should expect just as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, world happens on a sliding scale. The reality is just another possibility.

I is talking about password primeval.

I would give the signed of republic ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine dates Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face dispute. There is likely to be blood. The bayonets are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both pulpits, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And yet for the past 30 years the Democratic nominee has worked comfortably within a party constitution thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The new Democrats of the Clinton era are always strong for political privileges, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for racial and gender equality, strong for LGBT privileges( though that took hour ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment assembled with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven economic order that fertilizes the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real indignation Trump to talk to , no fantasy there. Bernie as well; tiny meditate their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps claimed devotion to the common man stumbles over even the most basic proofs. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has spun from an suggested no( wages are already too high ), to suggest yes( wages are too low ), to weasel word( left open up to the states ), to yes and no in the same sigh( I would leave it and cause it reasonably ), and, lastly, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( cause it to $10, but its still best left to the states ). All this from the candidate whos securely in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and nothing at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine such elections season, thank you. Addressing at a Morgan Stanley investors discussion in March, one of the leaders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a boy whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The moneys rolling in and this is fun this[ is] going to be a very good time for us. Sorry. Its a horrid concept to say. But creating it on, Donald. Keep going.