I have time and again mentioned that investment banks' analysts don't understand the true value of Xiaomi which is the reason why they have given me ample time to pick up xiaomi shares cheap over the last few years.. true enough, I do not know when Xiaomi share price will rally fiercely on the upside.
But for me, Goldman's price target of 22.6 hkd for Xiaomi (#01810hk) is a serious misunderstanding of true value of a great business.
Compared that against apple, which had spent 10 billion on its electric vehicle business, and yet has not delivered a single product on ev. They had since withdrawn from the EV sector and dissolved it's team.
For Xiaomi, it's ecosystem of Xiaomi investees as well as it's decade plus investment in the entire manufacturing ecosystem allows it to scale it's production and research and development fast.
Coupled with its understanding of users' needs, Xiaomi's products are not only of high specifications but are reasonably priced.
This is having users at the heart of its ecosystem. Users now understand this and are willing to jump onto new products launched by Xiaomi.
As always, this should not be construed as any investment or trading advice.

F4F 34 UK - North east based.
Hi
I'll try to keep it brief.
About me: I work in the building services industry as a junior electrician. In my spare time I like to listen to audiobooks about sci -fi , Roadside Picnic is my favourite or politics & history. I mostly enjoy left wing womens writers. My favourite author is Emma Goldman. Also I enjoy PC gaming, mostly open world survival games like The Long Dark. I can also be found watching documentaries or learning to build diorama models.
I'm mostly socially introverted but enjoy going for cultural trips with the womens club I run. I'm a great cook and i'm good with building & fixing things. So far as the rest of my life I want to travel the whole world. I want to cycle the Eurovelo routes, I want to build an off road van and take it the whole world over. Professionally I want to start my own business in commercial property maintenance. I'm planning to buy a house before 40 (with a workshop for all my hobbies) and settle down some day. I'm completely child-free for myself but wouldn't rule out a step parent role if you've already got a kid. I'm honestly looking forward to my mid life. I want a quiet comfy life with lots of books, good food, volunteering in my community, learning to garden, a couple of pets and a wife to spend my life with.
I'm looking for a forever partner to settle down with, i'm strictly monogamous and not interested in poly. Someone preferably based in the North East. I'm near Newcastle for now but would open to moving somewhere else in the long term for the right partner. If this sounds like we could be a good match then be brave and let me know.
Edit : if you've sent a chat request for this in the last 24 hours and I didn't respond, i've accepted it and it's disappeared after being accepted. Please resend.

Subreddit Patreon
First Prev
Anglestan
Augustus 2, 1923 A.V
Hospital, Mancheston
Mark Jacobs
Darkness. It had been dark for a while. He could hear people walking around. Talking. It was difficult to make any of it out, but he just knew they were talking about him. Days went on like this. Hearing sounds, muffled noises, like his head had been submerged underwater. He couldn’t move his body. He couldn’t move anything. He could feel people move around him. Move him. Insert things inside him. Tools. Metals. Tubes. Still, he couldn’t do anything. It all felt like a dream. Sleep paralysis. He knew things were happening, but he just didn’t know what.
This time, however, it was different. He felt his finger. A small soft twitch of movement. It took some effort, but he was able to concentrate and move it one more time. Then another. Two fingers. Three. Thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky, until he could flex them all and clench into a fist. From there he felt the sensation extend to his arm. The movement. From his arm to his shoulders, to his neck.
Slowly, the feeling in his body returned to him like the sun returning behind the hills as it set. The sounds became more clear. A ceiling fan. The soft whirr of machines monitoring his health. His tongue. He could move his tongue. His jaw.
He experimented with what else he could move. Eventually, his whole arm could be raised. More. Higher. His eyelids fluttered open. Images flooded into his brain as his surroundings slowly formed from a blur. Finally, light. Except, it was only on one eye. His other eye saw nothing but darkness, an incomplete picture. He waited for something to appear. Yet, nothing came from the other. He sat up, looking around. His back cracked, and some of his joints popped. He could recognize where he was now. White walls, a curtain, a white bed with machines all around him. A hospital.
The darkness in his other eye bothered him. He was certain his eyelids were open. At least he thought it was. He reached over to the side of his head, touching his right eye only to find that it wasn’t there. There were bandages wrapped all around it, with gauze and tape covering it. He gasped.
“N-Nurse? Nurse!” he called out.
A nurse quickly came into the room. “O-Oh! You’re awake sir!” she said. “Please stay there, don’t move around much. You’ve been out for a week. I-I’ll inform the others. They’re here to see you.”
“W-wait! What happened to my—”
The nurse quickly left the room, calling for someone outside. Mark sighed and waited for her to return. She came back not so long after. Behind her were familiar faces. Olivia, Phineas, Charles, Zach, Emma, Louis. His whole squad was there. Olivia gasped and immediately rushed over to him, taking his hand and giving him a smile. “Hey,” she said, kissing him on the forehead. “I’m here, Mark. I’m here.”
“Liv…”
“Lookin’ good, boss,” Louis quipped, trying to lighten the mood.
“What happened?”
“You got shot,” Olivia replied. “You got shot in the eye. The bullet went straight through your eye socket and destroyed your eye completely, but it didn’t get deep enough to reach your brain. The doctors had to remove your entire eyeball. There’s… nothing there, honey.”
“Oh,” Mark said, reaching over to the gauze patch and bandages where his right eye would have been.
“B-but you’re alive! You’re awake. That’s all that matters,” Olivia said softly. Her lips quivered almost as if she was about to cry. “You had me so worried. I thought that you wouldn’t wake up again. I missed you so much.”
“I’m okay,” he replied, holding her close. “What else happened?” Mark asked, feeling the patch of gauze again, tapping on it lightly as if it were something to be curious about.
“Six is secure. The army responded quickly and took down the aquillas and skyship. We lost fifty people in the attack at Liverlake, but hundreds more were rescued due to our efforts and continued search and road clearing.”
“My mother?”
Olivia looked down. “We… couldn’t leave her in the open like that. We cleared out the debris of the house, salvaged what things we could, and buried her there. Right Where you placed her,” she said, shaking her head. “I-I hope that was okay. We did it out of utmost respect, and we were as gentle as possible.”
“It’s okay.”
He looked down, the grief returning to him for a split second. He clasped his hands together looking dejected. “Thank you. I guess I’ll go visit her later. Like I promised,” Mark gave a pained smile.
“Mark there are some things you should kno—”
“Colonel Jacobs.” A man entered the room. “Glad to see you’re up.”
Mark looked up at the new visitor. His one eye could see the man in a formal military uniform. He looked dignified, sporting medals and patches all over his coat and garments. “We have much to discuss, Colonel.”
“Colonel? W-who are you?”
“I’m General Henderson. The new general of the army. We have much to talk about,” he said. Mark squinted his eye, looking from his squad to the man in front of him. New general? What is he talking about? Isn’t Jorgenson the general? What’s… going on?
“Sir, if I may,” he started. The general nodded at him, prompting him to continue. “Why did you call me, colonel? What happened to Thatcher? Why are you the general? Did something happen to Jorgenson?” he asked.
“That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about,” Henderson said. “On the same night of the attack on Liverlake and Mancheston, a bomb was set off in New Amsterdam, UNA. Right in the UHT headquarters. It killed numerous world leaders, military personnel, and officers. The president, Jorgenson, Thatcher, and ten other high-ranking military officers of Anglestan were killed. We’re understaffed at the moment, and many positions had to be filled in as quickly as possible in order to ensure chain of command. You were supposed to be promoted to a military captain, but according to Thatcher, should anything happen to her, she had you appointed as her possible successor.”
“W-what..? But I’ve barely started my military career. I’ve been serving for only a few months."
“In situations like this, we can make these kinds of decisions. We are in dire need of officers. You were supposedly the next highest position, and in these circumstances, we could advance you several ranks higher if need be,” the general said. “We also reviewed your file. Top of your class in basic training. Highest-rated Hemolites squad. Highly praised by both your team members and officers who’ve seen you perform. You have exceptional leadership qualities, and you have the highest number of successful missions, executing the most difficult deployments with relative ease. If you’re not qualified, I don’t know who is.”
“I-I see, sir.”
“We also reviewed the Liverlake and Mancheston attack last week. You were there supposedly on leave. Yet, when the attack happened, you rose to the occasion. You orchestrated an organized civilian group to perform search and rescue missions, as well as clearing out the road for emergency services to pass more easily. Interviews with those civilians who were helping under your orders described you as inspiring and strong.”
“Sir, I just rallied the people to do what was ri—”
The general stopped him, raising his hand. “And let’s not forget your heroic defense of Facility 9 with no one else but yourself and only three of your squad members. You successfully thwarted the Crescent and stopped their attempts at securing an important military asset. You killed multiple strigoi soldiers and almost gave your life for the mission. Taking all that into account with Thatcher’s personal wishes. We decided you were the perfect replacement as colonel. Of course, the hemolites branch was Thatcher’s passion project. We believed the best one to run and lead it, is someone from the program itself and has substantial inside knowledge of how it worked, and how it operated.”
Mark looked down, unsure of what to think. Colonel. I was just supposed to be a captain, now I’m a colonel. Thatcher’s shoes are big. Can I even fit them? I don’t even know the first thing to do. Am I even still fit for duty? I lost an eye, my mother died, and this war has been stressful on all accounts. But… Do I even have a choice?
“We have high expectations for you Colonel Jacobs. We hope that you don’t disappoint.”
Mark swallowed hard, pausing for a bit. He took a deep breath and answered. “I’ll answer the call, General.”
“Good. We have copies of the files on all of Thatcher’s projects and classified information. You have clearance to access them either for viewing or execution of whatever they are. We are putting this much trust and responsibility in your hands, but I know you can handle it. You’re a rare exceptional leader that some can only wish to have.”
“I appreciate the compliments, general. I’m honored. However, I still have things to do before I report again for active duty. Will you please give me a few days to fully recover?”
Henderson nodded. “You got two days, colonel. I heard your mother had recently passed. My respects.”
“Much appreciated, sir. Thank you.”
The general gave a quick nod and left the room. Mark looked at his squad, giving them a pained smile. “I guess I’m not your squad leader anymore, huh?” he said.
Olivia smiled back at him, cupping his face. “You’re the colonel. It’s up to you to decide who we end up with, but in our hearts and minds, you’re still the best we’ve ever had. You can ask anyone here, they’ll all give the same answer.”
“Yeah, boss! Fuck, if you want it, we can even be your elite strike team,” Louis snickered. “Or better yet! Your bodyguards! That way you won’t ever be far from your buddies, right? Whatcha’ think? Erm… colonel. Sir.”
“You don’t need to be so formal with me, Louis. Thank you for guarding my mother’s body.”
“Aye. Nobody could even get close. They had to do a lot of convincing before I even stepped away from my post.”
Mark nodded. He looked at Zach and Charles. “We helped save dozens. You’ll always be our squad leader.”
He then turned to Phineas and Emma. “We’ll be loyal to you, as always,” Phineas said. Emma simply gave a thumb.
He finally looked in Olivia’s direction. She looked back at him, holding him closer. “I’ll follow you,” she said softly. “Till the ends of the Earth. Till death. Anywhere you ask me to go, I’ll jump in without question. I’m yours. Forever and always.”
Mark closed his eye and took a deep breath. He paused for a second before opening again, grabbing hold of the sides of the bed. He pushed himself up and shakily got off. Olivia came in to support him, but he held his hand up. She understood and slowly backed away, allowing him to stand on his own two feet again. He planted his feet firmly on the ground, forcing them to stop shaking.
Carefully, he took a step. His body; learning how to support him once again. He shifted his weight from side to side, reaching his hand out to Olivia. “Help me to the bathroom. I want to see what I look like.”
Olivia slowly grabbed his arm and helped him walk over to the bathroom. He reached over to the sink and looked in front of the mirror.
“I’ll get you your clothes,” the duskwalker said. “We had them washed, and the general also left something for your eye.” Mark nodded in response before Olivia left to get his belongings. He looked into the mirror, letting out a sigh. He slowly grabbed the bandages around his face and carefully unwound them, leaving only the gauze taped over his eye socket. He swallowed hard and slowly reached over to it. His hands shook as he carefully began peeling the tape and gauze away. Dried blood had still stuck to it as he pulled it off, revealing nothing but a hole where his eye should be. Tears formed in his left eye. A hitch in his voice. He resisted the urge to break down, clutching his chest as he nearly fell over the sink.
You’ve got this. Keep going. You have to keep going. You have to be strong. For everyone. Olivia, Zach, Phineas, Louis, Emma, Charles, Henry, August, James, Tommy, Jason, Camilla, Jeremy, Vance, Latevia, Mom… everyone. All those names, and all those who depend on me.
He gripped the edges of the sink. The whole country depended on him. The whole world even. He had to perform. There was no surrendering. No giving up. No throwing in the towel. He can’t. He has no choice. I have no choice.
“Mark,” Olivia said as she returned. He turned to her, and instantly hugged her tight, taking deep breaths and slowly exhaling. “A-are you, okay?” she asked. The colonel slowly pulled away, clearing his throat. He nodded at her, giving her a pained smile.
“I’ll be okay,” he said.
She smiled back and handed him his clothes. This time, however, there was a little addition on top. It was an eye patch. The colonel let out a soft chuckle before grabbing it and looking back at the mirror. He reached over his head and slowly placed it over his right eye socket, covering the horrible carnage behind it.
He took off his hospital gown, revealing his scars and musculature. He had developed his body a lot over several months, training it as much as he could. He was no longer the scrawny pipe-wielding tram driver Olivia met, nor was he the man that he once was. He was a leader. Not because he wanted to be, but because he was called to be. It was his burden to bear, and it had cost him plenty. He still had plenty of himself to give. So let them come. So be it.
Mark slipped on his clothes. Putting on his pants, his boots, his uniform, vest, and coat. A new patch on his shoulders signifying his new rank.
He definitely looked like someone worthy of taking the lead at the front. He could keep up with even the strigoi members of his team. This was his new start. His new chapter. I need to be what they need me to be. He sighed.
I am Colonel Mark Jacobs. I am Colonel Mark Jacobs. “I am Colonel Mark Jacobs.” He turned to Olivia and nodded at her, pulling on the sides of his coat, and touching his eye patch one last time, just to make sure it was placed properly. He cleared his throat and stepped out of the bathroom, facing the rest of his former squad.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Introduction
In 1909, Sigmund Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. On the way there from Vienna his cabin steward was reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, an event Freud claimed was the first indication he ever had that he was going to be famous. In the United States, the philosopher and psychologist William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear Freud talk, giving psychoanalysis official recognition, as Freud saw it, for the first time. He later wrote about what the Clark lectures meant to him: “In Europe I felt as though I was despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream: psychoanalysis was no longer a production of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”
Little did Freud know how his intellectual discoveries would transform America, which he dismissed as an “anti-paradise” or a “gigantic mistake.” Though he feared that Americans would enthusiastically “embrace and ruin psychoanalysis” by popularizing it and watering it down, he already suspected that his theories would in some way shake the country to the core. While watching the waving crowds from the deck of his ship as it docked in New York, turned to his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung and said, “Don’t they know we’re bringing them the plague?”
Well before the hedonism of the 1920s, a Freud-inspired revolution in sexual morals had begun. Greenwich Village bohemians, such as the writers Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had been “deeply impressed by the lucidity” of Freud’s 1909 lectures, and Mabel Dodge, who ran an avant-garde salon in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, adapted psychoanalysis to create their own free-love philosophy. In the radical journal The Masses, Floyd Dell warned that “sexual emotions would not be repressed without morbid consequences.” Eastman, one of America’s first analysands, wrote a book comparing Freud and Marx: “Weren’t all forms of repression evil?” he asked rhetorically. Dell’s left-leaning analyst, a Shakespeare scholar called Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum who treated many of Greenwich Village artists, argued that it was healthier for young men to frequent prostitutes than to practice abstinence or masturbation.
Together they fashioned a cult of the orgasm - Mabel Dodge even went so far as to call her dog Climax. However, as Dell later admitted, their experiment was an isolated one, like that of the Oneida Community in the nineteenth century and a handful of other “obscure but pervasive sexual cults.” It was only after the Second World War that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large.
When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud’s pupils, arrived in New York in late August 1939, exactly thirty years after his mentor and only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas about fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of Puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex - as Alfred Kinsey’s renowned investigations, which he began that same year, were to show. Reich could be said to have instigated “the sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks. “A sexual revolution is already in progress,” he declared, “and no power on earth will stop it.”
Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. “There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients,” he concluded in The Function of the Orgasm (1927): “the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction” (the italics are his). The orgasm was the panacea to cure all ills, he thought, including the fascism that had forced him to leave Europe. Reich sought to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, thereby giving Freudianism an optimistic gloss, arguing that repression, which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition, could be shed. This would lead to what his critics dismissed as a “genital utopia” (they mocked him as “the prophet of bigger and better orgasms”). His ideas became influential in Europe, which Henry Miller, finding a new sense of purpose through sex, characterized as “the Land of Fuck.” Reich was a figurehead of the vocal sex reform movement in Vienna and Berlin before the Anschluss, after which the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the continent, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud.
Soon after he arrived in the United States, Reich invented the orgone energy accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool - a box in which, it might be said, his ideas came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone energy accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere (a force which he christened “orgone energy”) - mysterious currents that in concentrated form could not only help dissolve repressions but also treat cancer, radiation sickness, and a host of minor ailments. As he saw it, the box’s organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, so the box acted as a greenhouse; and, supposedly, there was a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.
Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics, but after two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich’s claims. Nevertheless, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 1950s, when Reich rose to fame as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. Orgone boxes were used by such countercultural figures as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs - who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in the movie Sleeper, giving it the immortal nickname “Orgasmatron.” Bohemians celebrated the orgone box as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora’s Box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague - the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex.
Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in the United States (his FBI file is 789 pages long). In 1947, after Harper’s Magazine introduced Reich to Americans as the leader of “a new cult of sex and anarchy,” the Food and Drug Administration began investigating him for making fraudulent claims about the orgone accumulator, and in 1954 a court ruled that he must stop leasing and selling his machine. When he broke the injunction he was sentenced to two years in prison. The remaining accumulators, along with thousands of copies of the journals and eleven books Rich self-published in America (including copies of The Sexual Revolution), which were thought to constitute “false advertising” for them, were incinerated.
In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to get its head around what came to be called the Holocaust and intellectuals disillusioned with communism were abandoning the security of their earlier political positions, Reich’s ideas landed on fertile ground. With his tantalizing suggestion that sexual emancipation would lead to positive social change, Reich seemed to capture the mood of this convulsive moment. People sat in the orgone box hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. The literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his journal, “Everybody of my generation had his orgone box…his search for fulfillment. There was, God knows, no break with convention, there was just a freeing of oneself from all those parental attachments and thou shalt nots.”
In his essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin described how that generation crystallized around Reich’s thinking in the later 1940s and early 1950s:
It was a time of the most terrifying personal anarchy. If one gave a party, it was virtually certain that someone, quite possibly oneself, would have a crying jag or have to be restrained from murder or suicide. It was a time of experimentation, with sex, with marijuana, with minor infringements of the law. It seems to me that life was beginning to tell us who we were, and what life was - news no one has ever wanted to hear: and we fought back by clinging to our vision of ourselves as innocent, of love perhaps imperfect but reciprocal and enduring. And we did not know that the price of this was experience. We had been raised to believe in formulas.
In retrospect, the discovery of the orgasm - or, rather, of the orgone box - seems the least mad of the formulas that came to hand. It seemed to me….that people turned from the idea of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting. And I doubted that their conversion was any more to be trusted than that. The converts, indeed, moved in a certain euphoric aura of well-being. Which would not last…There are no formulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life - certainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights.
“There was, God knows, no break with convention”; “the least mad of the formulas that came to hand” - both Kazin and Baldwin saw their bewildered peers breaking out of one ideological prison only to find themselves in another. Theirs was a generation teetering on a new kind of brink - full of optimism about the possibility of change, they were unsuspecting accomplices in the authorship of more insidious forms of control.
I first learned about Reich’s orgone energy accumulator in 1993 when I visited Summerhill, the “free” school in Suffolk, England, founded in 1921 by A. S. Neill. I was an anthropology student at Cambridge University and, when I asked whether I could stay for a while as a participant-observer, I was offered a large tepee as a place to sleep. I like the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist. However, everything at Summerhill - where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws - is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for that summer I lived in a bed-and-breakfast in Leiston. All the other guests worked for the nuclear power station Sizewell B: every piece of crockery and all the towels and cutlery were stamped with the nuclear power station’s logo. The owner of the B&B had been given a free pullover after a random Geiger counter inspection had determined that his own, hung out on the clothesline, harbored dangerously elevated levels of radiation.
A.S. Neill met Reich in Oslo in 1936 and soon afterward became his analysand, fitting in a dozen sessions with him one a return trip. Reich had by that time been expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (he had once been considered Freud’s heir apparent, but his attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism ended up alienating practitioners of both), and pioneered a new form of analysis called “vegetotherapy,” a repudiation of the talking cure. Reich’s third wife, Ilse, described it as “doing away with the psychoanalytic taboo of never touching a patient,” and replacing it with “a physical attack by the therapist.” Reich would relax the patient’s taut muscles with deep breathing exercises and painful massage, until he or she broke down in involuntary convulsions, which Reich called the “orgasm reflex.”
Though his school had already been running for fifteen years, Neill found in Reich’s work its ideological justification, and he once referred to himself as Reich’s “John the Baptist.” His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of “character-armor” and “self-regulation.” For his part Reich saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son, Peter, to Summerhill for a while. He once threatened to give up his research and come and teach at the school, but Neill laughed and declined his offer, saying that Reich would frighten the children. Neill did, however, ask him to be the legal guardian of his daughter, Zoe. Reich invited Neill to start an orgonomic infant research center at his research institute in Maine and encouraged him to replace his Summerhill staff with people schooled in Reichian practice. Neill rejected both suggestions, but continued to read aloud from Reich’s books at staff meetings.
Reich and Neill shared a belief in the redemptive power of unconstricted development in children. For Reich this had an urgent political significance: he thought that only when children were raised free would it be possible to lay the foundations of a utopia. Neill thought that a radical reform of the education system was an essential preliminary to the creation of a better world. Both men believed that children were inherently good: it was an authoritarian, sexually repressive upbringing that corrupted them. Summerhill was designed to offer children a sanctuary from the moral contamination of the world, where they could live out their desires without the fear of punishment and play without the pressure of indoctrination: “We set out to make a school in which we would allow children freedom to be themselves,” Neill wrote. “In order to do this we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.” The school’s motto continues to be “Giving children back their childhood.”
By the summer of 1944, Neill had begun to practice Reich’s analytic technique on his pupils at Summerhill. “I have given up teaching and am doing only veg.-ther. analysis,” he wrote to Reich. “The more I see the results with adolescents the more I consider that bloody man Reich a great man…Marvelous how patients weep so easily when lying on their backs. Some do so in the first hour. Why?” One former student remembers being instructed to lie down and “breathe deeply, as though you’re having sexual intercourse,” while Neill prodded her stomach (she was too young to know what sex was, so she just panted). “The repressed ones have stomachs like wooden boards,” Neill wrote to Reich of his pupils’ resistance, “but children begin to loosen up very quickly, and at once begin to be hateful and savage.”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell, like Neill, preached the benefits of an unconstrained childhood and campaign for new sexual mores. Neill said that Russell’s On Education (1926) was the only book on the topic he’d read without uttering an expletive. Russell spent a week at Summerhill in 1927 before opening a school of his own, Beacon Hill, based on similar principles. He was soon disillusioned, however, and left the school after five years. The children in his care, Russell wrote, were “sinister,” “cruel,” “destructive.” The effect of giving them their freedom “was to establish a reign of terror, in which the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable.” Russell’s own children, for whom Beacon Hill was partly created (it had only twelve pupils), were, like their father, traumatized by their time at the school. “I learned to get along inside a shell,” Kate Russell said, “fending off physical and emotional assaults from others and trusting nobody.” But for Neill, the monstrous behavior of children was a stage long the path to liberation: if they were “hateful and savage” it was only because they were sloughing off the final carapace of their repressions.
The accumulator that Reich gave Neill arrived in England on the Queen Elizabeth in April 1947, along with a smaller “shooter” box with a protruding funnel for directing orgone energy rays at infections and wounds. “I sit in the Accumulator every night reading,” Neill wrote appreciatively, “re-reading the Function of the O. while I sit in the box.” Neill soon became convinced of the machine’s effectiveness: “We used the small Accu on a girl of 15 with a boil on her leg,” he said. “It cleared up in three days, and we are to have her in the big box next term.” The effects apparently defied scientific explanation: “When Lucy had a new lump on her face under the operation scar, she applied the small Accu and it went in a fortnight,” Neill marveled. He bombarded Reich with questions: Was it safe to keep an accumulator in one’s bedroom? Did you have to be naked inside it? Would it be effective in the damp English climate? How long could his daughter safely sit in the box?
Neill’s daughter, Zoe Readhead, has run Summerhill since 1985. Neill was sixty-four when his only child was born; when she was two, Picture Post ran a story saying that of all the children in Britain, she had the best chance of being free. “I remember the orgone accumulator vividly,” she told me. “It was quite chilly in there because of the zinc.” As a child Readhead was prescribed half an hour a day in the device; she recalls the red plastic cushion she sat on and the funnel or “shooter” she was encouraged to position over her ear to try to cure a recurrent earache. She also remembers that as she grew up Neill lost interest in the machine (he thought he’d been mistaken in putting an extra layer of asbestos around it), and moved it to a corner of the garage.
By the time Reich died, in 1957, he and Neill were no longer communicating. In December 1954 Neill wrote, “It gave me a great shock to find you believing in visits from other planets. No, I said, it can’t be true; Reich is a scientist and unless he sees a flying saucer he won’t accept it as reality. I can’t understand it.” Reich, whose sanity had long been an open question (Sandor Rado, who analyzed Reich for a few months in 1931, said that he was “schizophrenic in the most serious way”), had started to suffer from paranoid delusions about the world being under attack by UFOs. The armor-clad orgone box was always something of a protective shield, illustrative of Reich’s sense of being besieged, but he now built a “cloudbuster,” an orgone gun that was designed not only to influence the weather - diverting hurricanes and making it rain in the desert - but to be the first line of defense against an alien invasion. It was a kind of orgone box turned inside out, so that it could work its therapeutic magic on the cosmos.
Reich initiated the break with Neill; his young son, Peter, who was spending the summer at Summerhill, told Neill that the American planes passing over the school had been sent to protect him, or so his father said. Neill replied that this was nonsense (there was a large U.S. air base nearby), and when Reich heard of Neill’s response he wrote to his remaining supporters that Neill was no longer to be trusted. In the American edition of Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childhood, published in 1960, all references to Reich were deleted because the publisher considered him too controversial. (The book sold two million copies in the United States.) But Neill never turned his back entirely on his friend’s philosophy, and long after Rich’s death he persuaded Zoe to go to Norway to have vegetotherapy with another of Reich’s disciples, Ola Raknes.
Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957, eight months after being sentenced. If Reich’s claims were no more than ridiculous quackery, as the FDA doctors who refuted them suggested, and if he was just a paranoid schizophrenic, as one court psychiatrist concluded, then why did the U.S. government consider him such a danger? What was happening in America that led Reich to become an emblem of such a deep fear?
The critic Louis Menand described Arthur Koestler, with whom Reich shared a Communist cell in Berlin, as “a slightly mad dreidel that spun out of Central Europe and across the history of a bloody century.” Reich’s story traces a similarly erratic path, and looking back at his era can help to shed new light on it. Through the history of Reich’s box it’s possible to unpack the story of how sex became political in the twentieth century, and how it encountered Hitler, Stalin, and McCarthy along the way . Reich created the modern cult of the orgasm and, influentially, held that ecstasy was a point of resistance, immune to political control. Of course, the birth control pill - licensed by the FDA in 1957 (the year Reich died) for treating women with menstrual disorders - ultimately provided the technological breakthrough that facilitated the sexual liberation of the following decade. But Reich, perhaps more than any other sexual philosopher, had already given the erotic enthusiasm of the 1960s an intellectual justification, and laid the theoretical foundations for that era.
His ideas rallied a new generation of dissenters, and his orgone box, however unlikely an idea it may now seem, became a symbol of the sexual revolution. In January 1964, Time magazine declared that “Dr. Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box”:

• With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes the larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books which a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotic. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

Time called this new “sex-affirming culture” the “second sexual revolution” - the first having occurred in the 1920s, “when flaming youth buried the Victorian era and anointed itself as the Jazz Age.” In contrast, the children of the 1960s had little to rebel against and found themselves, Time commented, “adrift in a sea of permissiveness,” which they attributed to Reich’s philosophy: “Gradually, the belief spread that repression, not license, was the great evil, and that sexual matters belonged in the realm of science, not morals.”
In 1968 student revolutionaries graffitied Reichian slogans on the walls of the Sorbonne, and in Berlin they hurled copies of Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. At the University of Frankfurt 68er (as they were called in German) were advised, “Read Reich and act accordingly!” According to the historian Dagmar Herzog, “No other intellectual so inspired the student movement in its early days, and to a degree unmatched either in the United States or other Western European nation.” In the 1970s, feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Juliet Mitchell continued to promote Reich’s work with enthusiasm.
However, even in his lifetime, Reich came to believe that the sexual revolution had gone awry. Indeed, his ideals seemed to run aground in the decade of free love, which saw erotic liberation co-opted and absorbed into what the historian of psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky calls a “sexualised dreamworld of mass consumption.” Herbert Marcuse, another emigre who became the hero of a younger generation, provided the most rigorous critique of the darker side of liberation. After his initial enthusiasm for a world characterized by “polymorphous perversity,” Marcuse became cynical about it, and he ended his career with a series of brilliant analyses of ways in which the establishment adapted all these liberated ideas (the “intellectual Muzak” of the time) into an existing system of production and consumption. Reich had propagated an expressive vision of the self, but his sexualized politics of the body soon dissolved into mere narcissism as consumers sought to express themselves through their possessions. In the process, as Marcuse was early in detecting, sex and radical politics became unstuck.
It is a testament to the popularity Reich once had that his name is still remembered at all - so many of his colleagues have been forgotten. But he is now known more for his mad invention rather than for the sexual radicalism that box contained. Reich’s eccentric device might be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of that era. Why did a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that the symbol of liberation was a box?

VIII: The Flight from Feeling: Sociopsychology of the Sex War
The Trivialization of Personal Relations
Bertrand Russell once predicted that the socialization of reproduction - the supersession of the family by the state - would “make sex love itself more trivial,” encourage “a certain triviality in all personal relations,” and “make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death.” At first glance, recent developments appear to have refuted the first part of this prediction. Americans today invest personal relations, particularly the relations between men and women, with undiminished emotional importance. The decline of childrearing as a major preoccupation has freed sex from its bondage to procreation and made it possible for people to value erotic life for its own sake. As the family shrinks to the marital unit, it can be argued that men and women respond more readily to each other’s emotional needs, instead of living vicariously through their offspring. The marriage contract having lost its binding character, couples now find it possible, according to many observers, to ground sexual relations in something more solid than legal compulsion. In short, the growing determination to live for the moment, whatever it may have done to the relations between parents and children, appears to have established the preconditions of a new intimacy between men and women.
This appearance is an illusion. The cult of intimacy conceals a growing despair of finding it. Personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened. The inability “to take an interest in anything after one’s own death,” which gives such urgency to the pursuit of close personal encounters in the present, makes intimacy more elusive than ever. The same developments that have weakened the tie between parents and children have also undermined relations between men and women. Indeed the deterioration of marriage contributes in its own right to the deterioration of care for the young.
This last point is so obvious that only a strenuous propaganda on behalf of “open marriage” and “creative divorce” prevents us from grasping it. It is clear, for example, that the growing incidence of divorce, together with the ever present possibility that any given marriage will end in collapse, adds to the instability of family life and deprives the child of a measure of emotional security. Enlightened opinion diverts attention from this general fact by insisting that in specific cases, parents may do more harm to their children by holding a marriage together than by dissolving it. It is true that many couples preserve their marriage, in one form or another, at the expense of the child. Sometimes they embark on a life full of distractions that shield them against daily emotional involvements with their offspring. Sometimes one parent acquiesces in the neurosis of the other (as in the family configuration that produces so many schizophrenic patients) for fear of disturbing the precarious peace of the household. More often the husband abandons his children to the wife whose company he finds unbearable, and the wife smothers the children with incessant yet perfunctory attentions. This particular solution to the problem of marital strain has become so common that the absence of the father impresses many observers as the most striking fact about the contemporary family. Under these conditions, a divorce in which the mother retains custody of her children merely ratifies the existing state of affairs - the effective emotional desertion of his family by the father. But the reflection that divorce often does no more damage to children than marriage itself hardly inspires rejoicing.
Battle of the Sexes: Its Social History
While the escalating war between men and women have psychological roots in the disintegration of the marital relation, and more broadly in the changing patterns of socialization outlined in the preceding chapter, much of this tension can be explained without reference to psychology. The battle of the sexes also constitutes a social phenomena with a history of its own. The reasons for the recent intensification of sexual combat lie in the transformation of capitalism from its paternalistic and familial form to a managerial, corporate, bureaucratic system of almost total control: more specifically, in the collapse of “chivalry”; the liberation of sex from many of its former constraints; the pursuit of sexual pleasure as an end in itself; the emotional overloading of personal relations; and most important of all, the irrational male response to the emergence of the liberated woman.
It has been clear for some time that “chivalry is dead.” The tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and politesse. They set themselves up as protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. The counterconvention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of the privileged classes against women socially inferior to themselves, nevertheless showed that the male sex at no time ceased to regard most women as fair game. The long history of rape and seduction, moreover, served as a reminder that animal strength remained the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested here in its most direct and brutal form. Yet polite conventions, even when they were no more than a façade, provided women with ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. They surrounded essentially exploitive relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else made exploitation easier to bear.
The symbiotic interdependence of exploiters and exploited, so characteristic of paternalism in all ages, survived in male-female relations long after the collapse of patriarchal authority in other areas. Because the convention of deference to the fair sex was so closely bound up with paternalism, however, it lived on borrowed time once the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had destroyed the last foundations of feudalism. The decline of paternalism, and of the rich public ceremonial formerly associated with it, spelled the end of gallantry. Women themselves began to perceive the connection between their debasement and their sentimental exaltation, rejected their confining position on the pedestal of masculine adoration, and demanded the demystification of female sexuality.
Democracy and feminism have now stripped the veil of courtly convention from the subordination of women, revealing the sexual antagonisms formerly concealed by the “feminine mystique.” Denied illusions of comity, men and women find it more difficult than before to confront each other as friends and lovers, let alone as equals. As male supremacy becomes ideologically untenable, incapable of justifying itself as protection, men assert their domination more directly, in fantasies and occasionally in acts of raw violence. Thus the treatment of women in movies, according to one study, has shifted “from reverence to rape.”
Women who abandon the security of well-defined though restrictive social roles have always exposed themselves to sexual exploitation, having surrendered the usual claims of respectability. Mary Wollstonecraft, attempting to live as a free woman, found herself brutally deserted by Gilbert Imlay. Later feminists forfeited the privileges of sex and middle-class origin when they campaigned for women’s rights. Men reviled them publicly as sexless “she-men” and approached them privately as loose women. A Cincinnati brewer, expecting to be admitted to Emma Goldman’s hotel room when he found her alone, became alarmed when she threatened to wake the whole establishment. He protested, “I thought you believed in free love.” Ingrid Bengis reports that when she hitchhiked across the country, men expected her to pay for rides with sexual favors. Her refusal elicited the predictable reply: “Well, girls shouldn’t hitchhike in the first place.”
What distinguishes the present time from the past is that defiance of sexual conventions less and less presents itself as a matter of individual choice, as it was for the pioneers of feminism. Since most of those conventions have already collapsed, even a woman who lays no claim to her rights nevertheless finds it difficult to claim the traditional privileges of her sex. All women find themselves identified with “women’s lib” merely by virtue of their sex, unless by strenuous disavowals they identify themselves with its enemies. All women share in the burdens as well as the benefits of “liberation,” both of which can be summarized by saying that men no longer treat women as ladies.
The Sexual “Revolution”
The demystification of womanhood goes hand in hand with the desublimation of sexuality. The “repeal of reticence” has dispelled the aura of mystery surrounding sex and removed most of the obstacles to its public display. Institutionalized sexual segregation has given way to arrangements that promote the intermingling of the sexes at every stage of life. Efficient contraceptives, legalized abortion, and a “realistic” and “healthy” acceptance of the body have weakened the links that once tied sex to love, marriage, and procreation. Men and women now pursue sexual pleasure as an end in itself, unmediated even by the conventional trappings of romance.
Sex valued purely for its own sake loses all reference to the future and brings no hope of permanent relationships. Sexual liaisons, including marriage, can be terminated at pleasure. This means, as Willard Waller demonstrated a long time ago, that lovers forfeit the right to be jealous or to insist on fidelity as a condition of erotic union. In his sociological satire of the recently divorced, Waller pointed out that the bohemians of the 1920s attempted to avoid emotional commitments while eliciting them from others.
Since the bohemian was “not ready to answer with his whole personality for the consequences of the affair, nor to give any assurance of its continuance,” he lost the right to demand such an assurance from others. “To show jealousy,” under these conditions, became “nothing short of a crime…. So if one falls in love in Bohemia, he conceals it from his friends as best he can.” In similar studies of the “rating and dating complex” on college campuses, Waller found that students who fell in love invited the ridicule of their peers. Exclusive attachments have way to an easygoing promiscuity as the normal pattern of sexual relations. Popularity replaced purity as the measure of a woman’s social value; the sentimental cult of virginity gave way to “playful woman-sharing,” which had “no negative effect,” as Wolfenstein and Leites pointed out in their study of movies, “on the friendly relations between the men.”(*) In the thirties and forties, the cinematic fantasy in which a beautiful girl dances with a chorus of men, favoring one no more than the others, expressed an ideal to which reality more and more closely conformed. In Elmtown’s Youth, August Hollingshead described a freshman girl who violated conventional taboos against drinking, smoking, and “fast” behavior and still retained her standing in the school’s most prominent clique, partly carefully calibrated promiscuity. “To be seen with her adds to a boy’s prestige in the elite peer group…. she pets with her dates discreetly never goes too far, just far enough to make them come back again.” In high school as in college, the peer group attempts through conventional ridicule and vituperation to prevent its members from falling in love with the wrong people, indeed from falling in love at all; for as Hollingshead noted, lovers “are lost to the adolescent world with its quixotic enthusiasms and varied group activities.”
These studies show that the main features of the contemporary sexual scene had already established themselves well before the celebrated “sexual revolution” of the sixties and seventies: casual promiscuity, a wary avoidance of emotional commitments, an attack on jealousy and possessiveness. Recent developments, however, have introduced a new source of tension: the modern woman’s increasingly insistent demand for sexual fulfillment. In the 1920s and 1930s, many women still approached sexual encounters with a hesitance that combined prudery and a realistic fear of consequences. Superficially seductive, they took little pleasure in sex even when they spoke the jargon of sexual liberation and professed to live for pleasure and thrills. Doctors worried about female frigidity, and psychiatrists had no trouble in recognizing among their female patients the classic patterns of hysteria described by Freud, in which a coquettish display of sexuality often coexists with powerful repression and a rigid, puritanical morality.
Today women have dropped much of their sexual reserve. In the eyes of men, this makes them more accessible as sexual partners but also more threatening. Formerly men complained about women’s lack of sexual response; now they find this response intimidating and agonize about their capacity to satisfy it. “I’m sorry they ever found out they could have orgasms too,” Heller’s Bob Slocum says. The famous Masters-Johnson report on female sexuality added to these anxieties by depicting women as sexually insatiable, inexhaustible in their capacity to experience orgasm after orgasm. Some feminists have used the Masters report to attack the “myth of vaginal orgasm,” to assert women’s independence of men, or to taunt men with their sexual inferiority. “Theoretically, a woman could go on having orgasms indefinitely if physical exhaustion did not intervene,” writes Mary Jane Sherfey. According to Kate Millett, “While the male’s sexual potential is limited, the female’s appears to be biologically nearly inexhaustible.” Sexual “performance” thus becomes another weapon in the war between men and women; social inhibitions no longer prevent women from exploiting the tactical advantage which the current obsession with sexual measurement has given them. Whereas the hysterical woman, even when she fell in love and longed to let herself go, seldom conquered her underlying aversion to sex, the pseudoliberated woman of Cosmopolitan exploits her sexuality in a more deliberate and calculating way, not only because she has fewer reservations about sex but because she manages more successfully to avoid emotional entanglements. “Women with narcissistic personalities,” writes Otto Kernberg, “may appear quite ‘hysterical’ on the surface, with their extreme coquettishness and exhibitionism but the cold, shrewdly calculating quality of their seductiveness is in marked contrast to the much warmer, emotionally involved quality of hysterical pseudo-hypersexuality.”
[*. The transition in American movies from the vamp to the “good-bad girl,” according to Wolfenstein and Leites, illustrates the decline of jealousy and the displacement of sexual passion by sexiness. “The dangerousness of the vamp was associated with the man’s intolerance for sharing her with other men. Her seductive appearance and readiness for love carried a strong suggestion that there has been and might be other men in her life…. The good-bad girl is associated with a greater tolerance for sharing the woman…. In effect, the woman’s attraction is enhanced by her association with other men. All that is needed to eliminate unpleasantness is the assurance that those relations were not serious.”]
Togetherness
Both men and women have come to approach personal relations with a heightened appreciation of their emotional risks. Determined to manipulate the emotions of others while protecting themselves against emotional injury, both sexes cultivate a protective shallowness, a cynical detachment they do not altogether feel but which soon becomes habitual and in any case embitters personal relations merely through its repeated profession. At the same time, people demand from personal relations the richness and intensity of a religious experience. Although in some ways men and women have had to modify their demands on each other, especially in their inability to exact commitments of lifelong sexual fidelity, in other ways they demand more than ever. In the American middle class, moreover, men and women see too much of each other and find it hard to put their relations in proper perspective. The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. Formerly sexual antagonism was tempered not only by chivalric, paternalistic, conventions but by a more relaxed acceptance of the limitations of the other sex. Men and women acknowledged each other’s shortcomings without making them the basis of a comprehensive indictment. Partly because they found more satisfaction than is currently available in casual relations with their own sex, they did not have to raise friendship itself into a political program, an ideological alternative to love. An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession.
Feminism and the ideology of intimacy have discredited the sexual stereotypes which kept women in their place but which also made it possible to acknowledge sexual antagonism without raising it to the level of all-out warfare. Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. “These women are less angry at their men because they don’t spend that much time with them,” according to one observer. “Middle-class women are the ones who were told men had to be their companions.”
…
Strategies of Accommodation
Because the contradiction exposed (and exacerbated) by feminism are so painful, the feminist movement has always found it tempting to renounce its own insights and program and to retreat into some kind of accommodation with the existing order, often disguised as embattled militancy. In the nineteenth century, American feminists edged away from their original programs, which envisioned not only economic equality but a sweeping reform of marriage and sexual relations, into a protracted campaign for woman suffrage. Today many feminists argue, once again in the name of political realism, that women need to establish their influence within the two-party system, as a kind of loyal opposition, before they can raise broader issues. Such tactics merely serve to postpone the discussion of broader issues indefinitely. Just as the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century drew back from discussions of love and marriage when they met with public hostility, so strong forces in the National Organization for Women today propose to improve woman’s image, to show that feminism in no way threatens men, and to blame “social conditions” or bad attitudes, not male supremacy, for the subordination of the female sex.
More subtle forms of accommodation pose as radical challenges to mainstream feminism and the status quo. Some militants have revived discredited theories of matriarchal origins or myths of the moral superiority of women, thereby consoling themselves for this lack of power. They appear to the illusory solidarity of sisterhood in order to avoid arguments about the proper goals of the feminist movement. By institutionalizing women’s activities as “alternatives to the male death-culture,” they avoid challenging that culture and protect women from the need to compete with men for jobs, political power, and public attention. What began as a tactical realization that women have to win their rights without waiting for men to grant them has degenerated into the fantasy of a world without men. As one critic has noted, the movement’s “apparent vigor turns out to be mere busyness with self-perpetuating make-work: much of it serving in the short run to provide its more worldly experts with prestige, book contracts, and grants, its dreamers with an illusory matriarchal utopia.”
“Radical lesbians” carry the logic of separation to its ultimate futility, withdrawing at every level from the struggle against male domination while directing a steady stream of abuse against men and against women who refuse to acknowledge their homosexual proclivities. Proclaiming their independence from men, militant lesbians in fact envision a protected enclave for themselves within a male-dominated society. Yet this form of surrender - the dream of an island secure against male intrusion - remains attractive to women who repeatedly fail to find a union of sexuality and tenderness in their relations with men. As such disappointments become more and more common, sexual separatism commends itself as the most plausible substitute for liberation.
All these strategies of accommodation derive their emotional energy from an impulse much more prevalent than feminism: the flight from feeling. For many reasons, personal relations have become increasingly risky - most obviously, because they no longer carry any assurance of permanence. Men and women make extravagant demands on each other and experience irrational rage and hatred when their demands are not met. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that more and more people long for emotional detachment or “enjoy sex,” as Hendin writes, “only in situations where they can define and limit the intensity of the relationship.” A lesbian confesses: “The only men I’ve ever been able to enjoy sex with were men I didn’t give a shit about. Then I could let go, because I didn’t feel vulnerable.”
Sexual separatism is only one of many strategies for controlling or escaping from strong feeling. Many prefer the escape of drugs, which dissolve anger and desire in a glow of good feeling and create the illusion of intense experience without emotion. Others simply undertake to live alone, repudiating connections with either sex. The reported increase in single-member households undoubtedly reflects a new taste for personal independence, but it also expresses a revulsion against close emotional attachments of any kind. The rising rate of suicide among young people can be attributed, in part, to the same flight from emotional entanglements. Suicide, in Hendin’s words, represents the “ultimate numbness.”
The most prevalent form of escape from emotional complexity is promiscuity: the attempt to achieve a strict separation between sex and feeling. Here again, escape masquerades as liberation, regression as progress. The progressive ideology of “nonbiding commitments” and “cool sex” makes a virtue of disengagement, while purporting to criticize the depersonalization of sex. Enlightened authorities like Alex Comfort, Nena and George O’Neill, Robert and Anna Francoeur insist on the need to humanize sex by making it into a “total experience” instead of a mechanical performance; yet in the same breath they condemn the human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness and decry “romantic illusions.” “Radical” therapeutic wisdom urges men and women to express their needs and wishes without reserve - since all needs and wishes have equal legitimacy - but warns them not to expect a single mate to satisfy them. This program seeks to allay emotional tensions, in effect, by reducing the demands men and women make on each other, instead of making men and women better able to meet them. The promotion of sex as a “healthy,” “normal” part of life masks a desire to divest it of the emotional intensity that unavoidably clings to it: the reminders of earlier entanglements with parents, the “unhealthy” inclination to re-create those relations in relation with lovers. The enlightened insistence that sex is not “dirty” expresses a wish to sanitize it by washing away its unconscious associations.
The humanistic critique of sexual “depersonalization” thus sticks to the surface of the problem. Even while preaching the need to combine sex with feeling, it gives ideological legitimacy to the protective withdrawal from strong emotions. It condemns the overemphasis on technique while extolling sexual relations that are hermetically free of affect. It exhorts men and women to “get in touch with their feelings” but encourages them to make “resolutions about freedom and ‘non-possessiveness,’” as Ingrid Bengis writes, which “tear the very heart out of intimacy.” It satirizes the crude pornographic fantasies sold by the mass media, which idealize hairless women with inflated mammaries, but it does so out of an aversion to fantasy itself, which so rarely conforms to social definition of what is healthy minded. The critics of dehumanized sex, like the critics of sport, hope to abolish spectatorship and to turn everyone into a participant, hoping that vigorous exercise will drive away unwholesome thoughts. They attack pornography, not because they wish to promote more complicated and satisfying fantasies about sex, but because, on the contrary, they wish to win acceptance for a realistic view of womanhood and of the reduced demands that men and women have a right to make of each other.
The Castrating Woman of Male Fantasy
The flight from feeling, whether or not it tries to justify itself under an ideology of nonbinding commitments, takes the form above all of a flight from fantasy. This shows that it represents more than defensive reaction to external disappointments. Today men and women seek escape from emotion not only because they have suffered too many wounds in the wars of love but because they experience their own inner impulses as intolerably urgent and menacing. The flight from feeling originates not only in the sociology of the sex war but in the psychology that accompanies it. If “many of us,” as Ingrid Bengis observes of women and as others have observed of men as well, “have had to anesthetize ourselves to [our] needs,” it is the very character of those needs (and of the defenses erected against them) which gives rise to the belief that they cannot be satisfied in heterosexual relations - perhaps should not be satisfied in any form - and which therefore prompts people to withdraw from intense emotional encounters.
Instinctual desires always threaten psychic equilibrium and for this reason can never be given direct expression. In our society, however, they present themselves as intolerably menacing, in part because the collapse of authority has removed so many of the external prohibitions against the expression of dangerous impulses. The superego can no longer ally itself, in its battle against impulse, with outside authorities. It has to rely almost entirely on its own resources, and these too have diminished in their effectiveness. Not only have the social agents of repression lost much of their force, but their internal representations in the superego have suffered a similar decline. The ego ideal, which cooperates in the work of repression by making socially acceptable behavior itself an object of libidinal cathexis, has become increasingly pallid and ineffective in the absence of compelling moral models outside the self. This means, as we have seen, that the superego has to rely more and more on harsh, punitive dictation, drawing on the aggressive impulses in the id and directing them against the ego.
The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites. The intensity of his oral hunger leads him to make inordinate demands on his friends and sexual partners; yet in the same breath he repudiates those demands asks only a causal connection without promise of permanence on either side. He longs to free himself from his own hunger and rage, to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion, and to outgrow his dependence on others. He longs for the indifference to human relationships and to life itself that would enable him to acknowledge its passing in Kurt Vonnegut’s laconic phrase, “So it goes,” which so aptly expresses the ultimate aspiration of the psychiatric seeker. <“Western” Buddhism>
But although the psychological man of our times frightens himself with the intensity of his inner needs, the needs of others appall him no less than his own. One reason the demands he inadvertently imposes on others make him uneasy is that they may justify other in making demands on himself. Men especially fear the demands of women, not only because women no longer hesitate to press them but because men find it so difficult to imagine an emotional need that does not wish to consume whatever it seizes on.
Women today ask for two things in their relations with men: sexual satisfaction and tenderness. Whether separately or in combination, both demands seem to convey to many males the same message - that women are voracious, insatiable. Why should men respond in this fashion to demands that reason tells them have obvious legitimacy? Rational arguments notoriously falter in the face of unconscious anxieties; women’s sexual demands terrify men because they reverberate at such deep layers of the masculine mind, calling up early fantasies of a possessive, suffocating, devouring, and castrating mother. The persistence of such fantasies in later life intensifies and brings into the open the secret terror that has always been an important part of the male image of womanhood. The strength of these pre-Oedipal fantasies, in the narcissistic type of personality, makes it likely that men will approach women with hopelessly divided feelings, dependent and demanding in their fixation on the breast but terrified of the vagina which threatens to eat them alive; of the legs with which popular imagination endows the American heroine, legs which can presumably strangle or scissor victims to death; of the dangerous, phallic breast itself, encased in unyielding armor, which in unconscious terror more nearly resembles an implement of destruction that a source of nourishment. The sexually voracious female, long a stock figure of masculine pornography, in the twentieth century has emerged into the daylight of literary respectability. Similarly the cruel, destructive, domineering woman, la belle dame sans merci, has moved from the periphery of literature and the other arts to a position close to the center. Formerly a source of delicious titillation, of sadomasochistic gratification tinged with horrified fascination, she now inspires unambiguous loathing and dread. Heartless, domineering, burning (as Leslie Fiedler has said) with “a lust of the nerves rather than of the flesh,” she unmans every man who falls under her spell. In American fiction, she assumes a variety of guides, all of them variations on the same theme: the bitchy heroine of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzegerald; Nathanael West’s Faye Greener, whose “invitation wasn’t to pleasure but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love”; Tennessee Williams’s Maggie Tolliver, edgy as a cat on a hot tin roof; the domineering wife whose mastery of her husband, as in the joyless humor of James Thurber, recalls the mastery of the castrating mother over her son; the man-eating Mom denounced in the shrill falsetto of Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, Wright Morris’s Man and Boy, Edward Albee’s The American Dream; the suffocating Jewish mother, Mrs. Portnoy; the Hollywood vampire (Theda Bara), scheming seductress (Marlene Dietrich), or bad blonde (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield); the precocious female killer of William March’s The Bad Seed.
Child or woman, wife or mother, this female cuts men to ribbons or swallows them whole. She travels accompanied by eunuchs, by damaged men suffering from nameless wounds, or by a few strong men brought low by their misguided attempts to turn her into a real woman. Whether or not the actual incidence of impotence has increased in American males - and there is no reason to doubt reports that it has - the specter of impotence haunts the contemporary imagination, not least because it focuses the fear that a played-out Anglo-Saxon culture is about to fall before the advance of hardier races. The nature of impotence, moreover, has undergone an important historical shift. In the nineteenth century, respectable men sometimes experienced embarrassing sexual failures with women of their own class, or else suffered from what Freud called “psychic impotence” - the characteristic Victorian split between sensuality and affection. Although most of these men dutifully had intercourse with their wives, they derived sexual satisfaction only from intercourse with prostitutes or with women otherwise degraded. As Freud explained, this psychic syndrome - “the most prevalent form of degradation” in the erotic life of his time - originated in the Oedipus complex. After the painful renunciation of the mother, sensuality seeks only those objects that evoke no reminder of her, while the mother herself, together with other “pure” (socially respectable) women, is idealized beyond reach of the sensual.
Today, impotence typically seems to originate not in renunciation of the mother but in earlier experiences, often reactivated by the apparently aggressive overtures of sexually liberated women. Fear of the devouring mother of pre-Oedipal fantasy gives rise to a generalized fear of women that has little resemblance to the sentimental adoration men once granted to women who made them sexually uncomfortable. The fear of women, closely associated with a fear of the consuming desires within, reveals itself not only as impotence but as a boundless rage against the female sex. This blind and impotent rage, which seems so prevalent at the present time, only superficially represents a defensive male reaction against feminism. It is only because the recent revival of feminism stirs up such deeply rooted memories that it gives rise to such primitive emotions. Men’s fear of women, moreover, exceeds the actual threat to their sexual privileges. Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and sexual danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand - intimidated, emasculated - appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one. When even Mom is a menace, there is not much that feminists can say to soften the sex war or to assure their adversaries that men and women will live happily together when it is over.

I'm not a patreon member. Is there a patreon episode about Emma Goldman?
Dave has mentioned Emma in a few episodes, and every time he does, I say, "do an episode about her!" I know people have criticized the show for not having many episodes about women, and I feel like Emma would be a very great topic for her own episode.
If there is a patreon episode about her, I will definitely start subscribing!
If not, as a pro-abortion woman from the Midwest, I want to know how to meaningfully reach out to Dave to request him to cover a topic.
Thank you all!

China’s central bank topped up its gold reserves for an 18th straight month in April, although the pace of buying slowed in the face of record prices.
The People’s Bank of China has long been one of the market’s largest buyers, steadily growing its bullion holdings since 2022. However, the precious metal’s record-breaking rally since mid-February — with successive all-time-highs reached last month — seems to have dented demand.
In April, the PBOC bought 60,000 troy ounces, according to official data released Tuesday. That’s down from 160,000 ounces in March, and 390,000 ounces in February.
First-quarter purchases by the world’s central banks, led by China, were the strongest on record, according to the World Gold Council. Some market watchers have suggested that gold’s 12% rally this year has been partly driven by mystery buyers among those institutions.
Central banks tend to be longer-term strategic buyers, and bullion-buying by institutions in emerging markets has much further to run, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“Emerging market central banks drive the gold rush,” Goldman researchers wrote in a note. Bullion holdings are still only 6% of reserves at emerging central banks, half the levels in developed markets.
Gold has also been supported by increased demand from Asian investors, especially in China, where appetite has been sharpened by an underperforming economy and lackluster markets. Heightened geopolitical risk amid conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East has also bolstered haven buying.
Spot gold fell 0.2% to $2,319.79 an ounce at 10:41 a.m. in New York. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was up slightly. Silver and palladium were little changed, while platinum rose.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-07/china-s-gold-buying-spree-extends-to-18th-straight-month

From what I've heard:
Gold prices have jumped 20% in just the past 2 months, causing gold to increase to nearly 60% of its pre-pandemic price of $1500, closing above $2400 recently. It's almost matching the performance of the S&P 500 throughout the pandemic and is outperforming the US dollar, which has lost about 20% of its buying power since the pandemic.
Main Drivers: Inflation, Central Bank Buying, and geopolitical instability are causing a move away from the US Dollar and into gold as a safe-haven asset.
Wall Street banks are making very bullish price predictions for gold, with Goldman Sachs forecasting $2700, Bank of America $3000 by next year, and UBS $4000 in the next 2-3 years.
This would probably be the biggest rally in gold prices since the 2008 financial crisis, and before that, you'd have to go back decades to see a comparable surge.

Copper briefly traded through $10,000 a ton as investors raised bets on Federal Reserve rate cuts, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warned of intensifying supply stress.
Metals joined a wider rally in risk assets after soft US jobs data triggered renewed speculation that the Fed will move to lower rates this year. Copper initially rose as much as 2.1% — returning to five digits again after a brief period in late April — before paring gains as trading got underway in Europe.
The prospect of Fed easing is adding to tailwinds for copper as bulls predict further gains, with the world’s mines struggling to match growing demand. Goldman raised its year-end price target to $12,000 a ton, from $10,000 previously.
“We continue to forecast a shift into open-ended and mounting metal deficits from 2024 onwards,” the bank’s analysts, including Nicholas Snowdon, wrote in a note. There’s potential for a “stockout episode” — in which inventories run extremely low — by the fourth quarter, they said.
In the US, swaps markets now point to a 54% chance of a Fed rate cut by year-end, up from about 40% at the end of April. And in China, financial markets have returned from an early-May public holiday in a bullish mood on government pledges to boost growth.
Supply Stress
Copper is up almost 17% in 2024 amid signs of recovery in global factory activity, as well as flashes of supply tightness — especially for raw materials shipped to smelters. Still, skeptics have pointed to soft indicators in China, from falling import premiums to buyers holding off purchases.
The metal’s gains have been primarily driven by speculation, and may fade as high prices discourage consumption and spur aluminum substitution, Duan Shaopu, a director at China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association, said at a recent press conference, according to a script posted on the group’s WeChat account.
Copper was 0.9% higher at $9,992.00 a ton on the London Metal Exchange as of 3:13 p.m. local time, as all metals except nickel gained ground.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/copper-breaches-10-000-again-055332614.html

Copper briefly traded through $10,000 a ton as investors raised bets on Federal Reserve rate cuts, and Goldman Sachs Groups Inc. warned of intensifying supply stress.
Metals joined a wider rally in risk assets after soft US jobs data triggered renewed speculation that the Fed will move to lower rates this year. Copper initially rose as much as 2.1% — returning to five digits again after a brief period in late April — before paring gains as trading got underway in Europe.
The prospect of Fed easing is adding to tailwinds for copper as bulls predict further gains, with the world’s mines struggling to match growing demand. Goldman raised its year-end price target to $12,000 a ton, from $10,000 previously.
“We continue to forecast a shift into open-ended and mounting metal deficits from 2024 onwards,” the bank’s analysts, including Nicholas Snowdon, wrote in a note. There’s potential for a “stockout episode” — in which inventories run extremely low — by the fourth quarter, they said.
In the US, swaps markets now point to a 54% chance of a Fed rate cut by year-end, up from about 40% at the end of April. And in China, financial markets have returned from an early-May public holiday in a bullish mood on government pledges to boost growth.
Supply Stress
Copper is up almost 17% in 2024 amid signs of recovery in global factory activity, as well as flashes of supply tightness — especially for raw materials shipped to smelters. Still, skeptics have pointed to soft indicators in China, from falling import premiums to buyers holding off purchases.
China’s Struggling Copper Smelters Poised to Get Export Lift
The metal’s gains have been primarily driven by speculation, and may fade as high prices discourage consumption and spur aluminum substitution, Duan Shaopu, a director at China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association, said at a recent press conference, according to a script posted on the group’s WeChat account.
Copper was 0.9% higher at $9,992.00 a ton on the London Metal Exchange as of 3:13 p.m. local time, as all metals except nickel gained ground.
Full article:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-07/copper-advances-on-goldman-forecast-and-fed-rate-cut-optimism

This post was motivated by how there was retaliation against USAC candidates who have vocally spoken in support of Palestine (reported by UCLA Radio 5/6/2024 - 1:32 pm update)
USAC (the undergrad student government) has a lot of useless petty politics, but those 15 student officers also determine how millions of dollars of our student fees are spent. A lot of our fees are restricted for specific purposes, but a big chunk are spent solely based on what USAC officers want to do with them, usually for clubs' requests or their office's programs. As a whole, they also can pass resolutions like the BDS resolution earlier this year. Certain offices have specific initiatives like the UPass transit card. USAC also has admin duties that clubs have to deal with and appoint some members to things like the boards of ASUCLA, Wooden, and SAC. And the top offices represent the student body in talks with admin.
For a USAC beginner's guide, look at this helpful old Reddit post.
According to this Instagram post, the election period will start this Friday 5/10-5/17. Candidate debates will be on 5/8 and 5/9.
Here's a list of 2024's candidates (copy and pasted from a Daily Bruin article):
President (6)

• Joshua Bances, a third-year political science and public affairs transfer student
• Chloe Garton, a second-year economics and public affairs student
• Katie Pool, a third-year business economics student (incumbent general representative)
• Tajvir Singh, a third-year political science student
• Adam Tfayli, a second-year human biology and society student (incumbent international student representative)
• Elena Yu, a third-year cognitive science student

Internal vice president (3)

• Josh Garland, a third-year history and political science student
• Joe Lin, a second-year computer science student
• Ishan Misro, a first-year computational biology student

External vice president (3)

• Faith Choi, a first-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student
• Javier Nuñez-Verdugo, a third-year cognitive science student
• Emma Zhou, a third-year public affairs student

General representatives (9) Note: Three general representatives will be elected.

• Diego Bollo, a second-year labor studies and political science student
• Tommy Contreras, a second-year political science and public affairs student
• Maayan Goldman, a first-year psychology student
• Harvind Grewal, a third-year political science transfer student
• Colin Ignazio Geisen, a first-year student
• Chris Ramsey, a second-year mathematics/economics student
• Evie Sijl, a third-year history transfer student
• Vikas Sundar, a second-year statistics and data science student
• Eli Tsives, a first-year theater student

Academic Affairs commissioner (1)

• Cristopher Espino, a second-year education and social transformation and political science student

Campus Events commissioner (1)

• Robbie Hall, a third-year history and political science student

Community Service commissioner (1)

• Carolyn Wang, a third-year public affairs and statistics student

Cultural Affairs commissioner (2)

• Lekhna Kumaraswamy, a first-year mathematics/economics student
• Alicia Verdugo, a third-year education and social transformation and sociology student (incumbent)

Facilities commissioner (1)

• Alexandra Paul, a third-year public affairs student

Financial Supports commissioner (3)

• Jean Pierre Etcheverry, a second-year student
• Nico Morrone, a second-year financial actuarial mathematics student
• Jonah Nazarian, a first-year business economics student

Student Wellness commissioner (4)

• Reuben Broudy, a first-year political science student
• Chiara Frank, a third-year neuroscience student
• Evangelina Ocampo, a psychology student
• Paige Zwerner, a first-year student

Transfer student representative (4)

• Michael Green II, a gender studies transfer student
• Carlos Rodriguez, an economics transfer student
• Mona Tavassoli, a third-year political science transfer student
• Benjamin Tsimmuaj Lee, a third-year political science transfer student

International student representative (2)

• Reagan Scorpio Lee, a business economics student
• Syed Tamim Ahmad, a second-year physiological science student

Full candidate statements and headshots are here: https://www.uclaelectionboard.org/candidates
There's usually a list of endorsements from clubs, but I haven't been able to find it.
It's been hard to find USAC election information this year. I think they lost their old Instagram account (with over 1000 followers) because @uclaelectionboard has the 2024 election info links but only has 60-ish followers.

The second installment of my "Yes, No, Maybe So" slate of predictions, where I lay out my wide pool of contenders and weigh each of their pros and cons. My first entry for the Best Picture field was received well enough, so I figured I'd keep going. I hope these are fun to parse through and prove useful when you make your own predictions.
I'm sure I'm leaving out some viable contenders, but these are the 20 names that stood out to me the most while surveying the field:

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

ANORA (Neon) Mikey Madison (No previous nominations; 25-years-old) Role: Anora, a Brooklyn sex worker who seizes her shot at marrying into royalty. Yes: She's carved out a nice reputation as a fearless actor. Baker is on a steady roll of mounting acclaim, and this project could really uncork her as a force of nature. No: Mikey goes for it in every role, but she's not everybody's cup of tea. Her style might be too eccentric for the median voter. Simon Rex can attest that knocking a Sean Baker leading role out of park is more useful for indie cred than Academy gold. Maybe So: If the movie nabs a big honor at Cannes -- Best Actress, perhaps? -- she'll definitely be in the conversation.
BLITZ (Apple Original Films) Saoirse Ronan (Four previous nominations; 30-years-old) Role: Unspecified, but presumably a young woman trying to survive the London Blitz. Yes: She's broken records by racking up nominations before even turning 30; a win feels more life a matter of "when" than "if." And what could be a more prime opportunity than starring in a Steve McQueen film that looks like a frontrunner on paper? No: The parameters of her role are still unclear. She might be more of a supporting player than everyone is presuming, and it's possible she doesn't even have the standout part among the cast. Maybe So: It doesn't look like The Outrun is going far in any awards conversation, but it was a very recent reminder of how much she can elevate a movie that otherwise wouldn't drum up hullabaloo. And if Blitz is strong enough, she could ride the wave on the strength of her reputation even if the role isn't a standout.
CHALLENGERS (Amazon MGM Studios) Zendaya (No previous nominations; 27-years-old) Role: Tashi Donaldson, a prodigy tennis player who becomes embroiled in a throuple with two other hot shots. Yes: She's having a helluva 2024, dominating springtime with Dune: Part Two and Challengers. She gets to be complicated, driven and highly physical in a star vehicle that worships the ground she walks on. Glowing reviews and an adult film that makes great use of her star power. No: Early release, and credit to her is heavily balanced with Faist and O'Connor (much to the movie's artistic benefit). Can she weather months of competition and short memories? Maybe So: When you've reached the level of superstardom that Zendaya has, sometimes the Academy wants to welcome you to the club at the first opportunity. When your vehicle is this good, admiration and affection can grow instead of recede over the year.
EMMANUELLE (Neon) Noémie Merlant (No previous nominations; 35-years-old) Role: Emmanuelle, a young woman following her muse through a series of erotic adventures. Yes: Merlant is a star in France and is recognizable to Hollywood thanks to her performance in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She's pairing up with the promising Audrey Diwan. She could have a similar trajectory as Sandra Hüller last year as a respected European actor getting their crossover moment. No: A "series of erotic adventures" isn't as dramatically potent as "did this mercurial author murder her husband?", you know what I mean? The movie might be a tough sell to Hollywood, even if it's critically respected. Maybe So: The film isn't playing at Cannes, but if it makes a splash during the fall festivals then she could be in play with an increasingly international Academy.
THE FIRE INSIDE (Amazon MGM Studios) Ryan Destiny (No previous nominations; 29-years-old) Role: Claressa 'T-Rex' Shields, a boxer from Flint, Michigan who trained to become the first woman in her country's history to win an Olympic gold medal in the sport. Yes: Best known as one of the stars of the Fox series Star, Destiny could be one of the big breakouts of the year. A physically demanding portrayal of a real-life sports star in an inspirational true story could slingshot her into stardom, capped off with an Oscar nomination. No: She's not particularly well-known. Directorial debuts by cinematographers have a cursed history. The rumored release date is in August -- it might be a pure commercial play. Maybe So: Even if the movie isn't in the awards conversation, it could go a long way in elevating her for future consideration.
HARD TRUTHS (Bleecker Street Media) Marianne Jean-Baptiste (One previous nominations; 57-years-old) Role: Unspecified, but presumably the focus of the movie's exploration of the contemporary world. Yes: Reuniting with Leigh since their fruitful collaboration on Secrets & Lies, which nabbed her an Oscar nomination. It'd be great if they make magic again and are rewarded for it. No: Bleecker Street is a minor league campaigner. It's been nearly 30 years since she was nominated and her profile has quieted considerably. Mike Leigh hasn't directed anyone to an Oscar nomination since Vera Drake two decades ago. Maybe So: The BAFTA constituency could make a huge difference if they throw their weight behind her and the film.
HEDDA (No Distributor) Tessa Thompson (No previous nominations; 40-years-old) Role: Hedda Gabler, newly married and bored with both her marriage and life, seeks to influence a human fate for the first time. Yes: One of the more exciting actors of her generation, she's spent the past decade doing a mix of commercial projects and small indies. Passing was a promising step towards the awards conversation, but she hasn't been playing in that arena up until now. How about a Henrik Ibsen adaptation, reuniting with her Little Woods director Nia DaCosta? That could do the trick. No: Will the movie even come out this year? Even if it plays in the fall festivals, it might get pocketed for 2025. Play adaptations are often stagey; could this be written off as a neat creative exercise rather than the real deal? Maybe So: The material is indisputably dramatic and weighty. DaCosta could be approaching this with fire in her belly after the reportedly frustrating experience on The Marvels. If the movie is arresting, she may have crafted a great awards vehicle for her star.
HERE (Sony Pictures) Robin Wright (No previous nominations; 58-years-old) Role: Unspecified, but presumably the matriarch in a family story "capturing the human experience in its purest form." Yes: Wright is one of the most prominent actors of her generation without an Oscar nod to her name. She became an Emmy mainstay with House of Cards. Maybe reuniting with her Forrest Gump director and co-star could finally get her into the Academy club? No: Zemeckis' output has skewed more towards "disaster" than "hit" for a while now. The pretentious log line doesn't bode well for this being a well-considered return to form. Maybe So: If this actually is a return to form for Zemeckis and a great spotlight for Wright, the narrative of her being the odd one out on Gump's success can only help her case.
HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (Netflix) Natasha Lyonne (No previous nominations; 45-years-old) Role: Rachel, a dutiful daughter who reunites with her fractious sisters when their father becomes terminally ill. Yes: Lyonne's graduated to the status of national treasure over the past decade and she's gotten career-best notices for this critical hit from last year's fall festivals. Netflix is a great backer for nabbing an acting nomination. The film's overall strong acclaim only helps her. No: She shares the limelight with Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen. Will they even campaign her lead, or try their luck with the supporting category instead? Industry insiders saw this performance months ago; will the appeal endure when new and shinier contenders materialize? Maybe So: The Netflix effect cannot be underestimated. Even if the film doesn't become a package contender, her performance will be seen by many and that can make all the difference.
JANET PLANET (A24) Julianne Nicholson (No previous nominations; 52-years-old) Role: Janet, a spirited mother who we see through the adoring eyes of her codependent daughter. Yes: Rapturous reviews from last year's fall festivals with career-best notices for Nicholson. A24 is a savvy distributor and Nicholson's Emmy win for her turn in Mare of Easttown has upped her profile. No: Summer release date. It's a small film, and Nicholson is one of those hard-working actors who can be easily taken for granted amid a field of showy turns. Maybe So: If critics rally around Nicholson and keep her in the conversation through awards season, this could be the indie-performance-that-could.
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX (Warner Bros.) Lady Gaga (One previous nominations; 38-years-old) Role: Harley Quinn, an institutionalized rebel who takes a shine to Arthur 'Joker' Fleck, embarking on a bad romance together. Yes: Her casting perked up the ears of people who didn't even like the first installment. Gaga starring in anything is an event, and this sequel is a musical -- playing exactly to her strengths. Going toe to toe with Phoenix in his Oscar-winning role will leverage her star power in spades. If she steals the movie from him, watch out. No: Gaga was accepted by the Academy with a grounded performance in A Star is Born -- less so with high camp like House of Gucci. She was pointedly ignored for the latter even though her precursor run pointed towards her being a frontrunner. Does the Academy plan on being rude to her going forward, rejecting her theatrical turns and really making her work for it? Maybe So: The movie's going to be a huge hit, and you just know she'll be recording an original song. If she's a viable nominee, she feels like a threat for the win.
KINDS OF KINDNESS (Searchlight Pictures) Emma Stone (Two previous wins and two nominations; 35-years-old) Role: Multiple roles across three different stories, but the most prominent appears to be a woman searching for the messiah of a new religious movement. Yes: Stone has graduated into a rarefied league that few stars ever get to touch. She's fresh off a second Oscar and reuniting with Lanthimos, striking while the iron is hot. No: Anthology films don't lend themselves to roles that voters can glom onto. Even if she brings the house down, this might be viewed more as an exercise than an achievement, Maybe So: Stone is arguably growing into the Meryl Streep of her generation. We may have entered a new era where the Academy makes room for her no matter how unconventional the project.
THE LAST SHOWGIRL (No distributor) Pamela Anderson (No previous nominations; 56-years-old) Role: A fifty-something showgirl who must reassess her life after her Vegas gig closes up shop. Yes: Anderson has always had higher artistic aspirations than her career has afforded her. Gia Coppola has exhibited talent before, and this metatextual indie vehicle could be an ideal showcase for the 90s sex symbol's chops. No: Anderson has never been taken seriously as an actor before, and she comes with a lot of baggage. Even in an optimistic scenario, the movie might be received as a solid showcase but nothing revelatory. Maybe So: If the film makes a splash at the festivals, Anderson's narrative could be irresistible on the campaign trail. It would certainly make for one of the more triumphant stories of the season.
MARIA (No Distributor) Angelina Jolie (One previous win and one nomination; 48-years-old) Role: Maria Callas, a legendary opera singer facing the end of her life as her chronic condition worsens. Yes: Jolie is one of those movie stars where you feel she'd have a lot more nominations under her belt if she just tackled awards-friendly projects more often. She's playing a famous icon and working with Pablo Larraín, who's been on a hot streak with getting leading ladies nominated in biopic roles. No: Larraín's frosty star biopics have been received more and more coldly with each new installment. Kristen Stewart's nod for Spencer was a squeaker. Streaks are made to be broken, and this one's been on an increasingly strained thread. Maybe So: Jolie hasn't put herself out there in this arena for a while now; the sheer novelty of her starring in something this ambitious again will draw a lot of attention.
MOTHER MARY (A24) Anne Hathaway (One previous win and one nomination; 41-years-old) Role: Not entirely clear, but either the fashion designer or pop star in the film's central relationship. Yes: Hathaway's been generating some admiring press for sizzling up the (small) screen with her return to romantic comedy in The Idea of You. She's pairing up with David Lowery, who's quietly been one of the best American filmmakers out there. Could this glitzy vehicle be her return to the awards conversation? No: Is she even the lead role, or will the film tilt more towards Michaela Coel? Lowery's got an admirable body of work, but he hasn't broken through with the Oscars yet. Maybe So: Hathaway inexplicably became a punching bag for the internet after her 2013 win for Les Miz, but she's reemerged with no fucks to give towards the haters. She may be entering a resilient new era of being taken seriously again.
NIGHTBITCH (Searchlight Pictures) Amy Adams (Six previous nominations; 49-years-old) Role: A dissatisfied stay-at-home mom who begins to worry she might be turning into a canine beast. Yes: Adams is right alongside Bradley Cooper as the most recognized actor of her generation without ever taking home an Oscar trophy. She is glaringly overdue, and who better than the massively talented Marielle Heller to give her the star vehicle to finally propel her to long-awaited victory? No: The premise is aggressively strange. Adams is beloved, but her profile's been severely degraded after a series of disastrous choices. Is a whacko body horror movie going to pull her out of her career rut? Maybe So: This project was initially slated to go directly to Hulu, but Searchlight Pictures has since had an about-face and announced it will have a theatrical run. That indicates confidence, and you couldn't ask for a better distributor in the awards race.
PARTHENOPE (A24) Celeste Dalla Porta (No previous nominations; 26-years-old) Role: Parthenope, a woman born of the sea who looks for love in 1950s Naples. Yes: You could do a lot worse than making your theatrical debut starring in a Paolo Sorrentino picture. Dalla Porta is brand new, acting in some Italian TV before being cast in the titular role of the auteur's new feature. If the film is a Cannes sensation and Oscar breakout for Sorrentino, you'd imagine that the Parthenope of Parthenope would partake in the spoils. No: She's completely unknown, and Sorrentino has yet to hit with the Academy outside of the International Feature category. Will this be an actual acting showcase, or will she be relegated to being just the sensual muse of this odyssey? Maybe So: If Parthenope hits with the increasingly international Academy, she could be swept up along with the ride. Every year has a couple unknowns who are catapulted to the Oscar spotlight.
THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Sony Pictures Classics) Tilda Swinton (One previous win; 63-years-old) Role: Martha, a long-suffering daughter who hits an unbridgeable impasse with her mother after a misunderstanding. Yes: The great Tilda Swinton teaming up with the legendary Pedro Almodóvar for his feature-length English debut. It has the potential to be dramatically rich and a spotlight of her talents. No: Will the movie even be out this year? Swinton is a legend, but she hasn't been recognized by the Academy since her win for Michael Clayton despite a string of great performances. Was it just a passing fancy that can't be replicated? Maybe So: The pedigree alone will be catnip for a savvy campaigner like Sony Pictures Classics.
THE SUMMER BOOK (No Distributor) Glenn Close (Eight previous nominations; 77-years-old) Role: A grandmother vacationing with her granddaughter on a Finland isle, where they bond over life and death. Yes: Close probably has the strongest "overdue" narrative out of any living actor, and this is a ripe role from a well-received book. The existentialism of her role only compounds how little time the Academy has left to finally recognize her. No: Will the film be out this year? Director Charlie McDowell's track record hasn't been strong enough to give a high degree of confidence for this adaptation. Maybe So: Admit it: Close made a lot of new fans by being a great sport and twerking to "Da Butt" at the 2021 Oscars. She will always be someone to root for.
THELMA (Magnolia Pictures) June Squibb (One previous nominations; 94-years-old) Role: A nonagenarian who seeks vengeance when she's robbed by a phone scammer. Yes: Squibb is probably the most beloved actor in their 90s working today, and this Sundance hit is a great showcase for her charms. No: The movie is a broad comedy and a summer release. Magnolia Pictures is a minor league campaigner. This is plainly a commercial play. Maybe So: There's something beautiful about Squibb starring in a gonzo action movie at her age. She'd be the oldest nominee ever by a considerable margin if she were recognized -- that's a juicy narrative.

CDSL: Net profit at Rs 129 cr vs Rs 63 cr, Revenue at Rs 245 cr vs Rs 125 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Birla Corp: Net profit at Rs 193 cr vs Rs 83.9 cr, Revenue at Rs 2656 cr vs Rs 2463 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Kansai Nerolac: Net profit at Rs 101 cr vs Rs 94 cr, Revenue at Rs 1662 cr vs Rs 1605 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Asian Energy: Net profit at Rs 16.9 cr vs loss Rs 3.7 cr, Revenue at Rs 119 cr vs Rs 28.6 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Inox Wind: Net profit at Rs 37.9 cr vs loss Rs 112.9 cr, Revenue at Rs 528.5 cr vs Rs 186.2 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Aptus Value Housing: Net profit at Rs 164 cr vs Rs 135 cr, NII at Rs 251 cr vs Rs 213 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Anup Engineering: Net profit Rs 43.0 crore vs Rs 19.5 crore, Q4 EBITDA Rs 37.3 crore vs Rs 30.2 crore (YOY) (Positive)
IDBI Bank: Net profit up 43.7% at Rs 1,628.5 cr vs Rs 1,133.4 cr (YoY), NII up 12.4% at Rs 3,687.9 cr vs Rs 3,279.6 cr (YoY) (Positive)
ENIL: Revenue at Rs 149.3 cr, up 42.4% YoY, Radio segment revenue up 26.4%, Non-FCT revenue surged up 48.1% (Positive)
J&K Bank: Net profit up 34.1% at Rs 638.7 cr vs Rs 476.3 cr, NII up 4.5% at Rs 1,306.1 cr vs Rs 1,249.5 cr (YoY) (Positive)
Dr Reddy's Lab: Company announces launch of Doxycycline capsules in U.S. (Positive)
Tata Power: Co. signs PPA with SJVN Limited to set up 460 MW firm and dispatchable Renewable Energy Project (Positive)
Vatech Wabag: Company launches blue seed a pioneering initiative to empower promising start-ups in water sector. (Positive)
Ujjivan SFB: RBI approves appointment of Sanjeev Nautiyal as Ujjivan SFB MD & CEO for 3 years with effect from July 1. (Positive)
Yes Bank: Company Goldman Sachs (SINGAPORE) PTE bought 36.92 cr shares at 24.26/sh (Positive)
Rallis India: Company has commissioned a new Water- Soluble Fertilizer (WSF) Plant in Akola, Maharashtra (Positive)
Zen Technologies: Won orders worth ₹1,358 crore during the financial year (Positive)
Force Motors: Company’s Domestic plus Export sales were 2624 unit’s vs 1828 units, up 43.5% YoY (Positive)
Zydus Life: Company’s US arm acquires worldwide proprietary rights to Zokinvy at net base price of $45 million from US-based Eiger Biopharmaceuticals. (Positive)
Bharti Airtel: Company added 17.5 lakh users in March vs 15.3 lakh added in February (Positive)
Reliance Ind: Jio added 21.4 lakh users in March vs 36 lakh added in February (Positive)
Craftsman: Company acquires 24% stake in PV component maker, DR Axion India, for Rs 250 crore (Positive)
Carborundum: Net profit down 4.2% at ₹142.6 cr vs ₹148.8 cr, Revenue up 0.1% at ₹1,201.2 cr vs ₹1,199.8 cr (YoY) (Neutral)
DMart: Reveneus Rs 12727 cr vs Rs 10594 cr YoY, Net profit Rs 563 cr vs Rs 460 cr YoY (Neutral)
Britannia: Net profit at Rs 538 cr vs Rs 537 cr, Revenue at Rs 4069 cr vs Rs 4130 cr (YoY). (Neutral)
M&M FIN: Net Profit at ₹619 cr Vs Poll of ₹710.4 cr, Revenues at ₹1918 cr Vs Poll of ₹1786 cr (Neutral)
Titan: Net Profit at ₹786 cr vs poll of ₹830 cr, Q4 Ebitda Margin 9.72% Vs 10.64% (YoY) 11.1% Est (Neutral)
Kotak Mahindra Bank: Profit at Rs 4,133.3 cr vs poll of Rs 3,376.9 cr, NII at Rs 6,910.0 cr vs poll of Rs 6,673.0 cr (Neutral)
Tata Tech: Net profit at Rs 157 crore, down 7.6% QoQ. Revenue up 0.9% QoQ (Neutral)
Goa Carbon: Company temporarily shuts down operations at Odisha plant for maintenance purposes (Neutral)
HDFC Bank: Company re-appoints Atanu Chakraborty as the part time Chairman of the bank for 3 yrs w.e.f. May 5, 2024 (Neutral)
Vodafone Idea: Company lose 6.84 lakh users in March vs 10.2 lakh lost in February (Neutral)
Colgate Palmolive: Company gets penalty of Rs 13.5 crore for FY21 from I-T Department. (Neutral)
Paras Defence: Company wins order worth 20 cr rupees from IFFCO. (Neutral)
Sun Pharma: Company to acquire valstar s.a., including its unit kemipharm s.a., for up to USD 31M (Neutral)
BSE: Company’s Girish Joshi resigns as Chief – Listing & Trading Development of the company w.e.f. August 2, 2024 (Neutral)
Zydus Lifesciences: Company to sell about 25% stake in JV Bayer Zydus Pharma for ₹282 cr (Neutral)
One 97 Communications: Bhavesh Gupta has resigned as President and Chief Operating Officer of the company to move to advisory position (Neutral)
Tata Technologies: Constant currency revenue growth of 0.3% sequentially. Services revenue down 1% sequentially (Negative)
Auro Pharma: U.S. FDA inspection at Unit II in Rajasthan facility closed with 7 observations. (Negative)
MRPL: Net profit at Rs 1138 cr vs Rs 1913 cr, Revenue at Rs 29190 cr vs Rs 29401 cr (YoY) (Negative)

Update 1.0.2032 Gameplay
6 Additional Licensed Players Adrenaline Skills Stamina Nitto Finals Online Scheduled Tournaments
Detailed Descriptions:
1 - Additional Players:
TIEBREAK Early Access 4 sees the addition of three new ATP and three new WTA players.
Carlos Alcaraz Grigor Dimitrov Francis Tiafoe Emma Raducanu Karolina Pliskova Madison Keys
2 - Adrenaline Skills: TIEBREAK Early Access 4 sees the addition of Adrenaline Skills, a completely new gameplay feature. Adrenaline Skills allow you to modify your strokes and movement during matches. Adrenaline accumulates during matches, Applying power to a shot, winning contested points such as clutch points, long rallies, and breakpoints will all add to the Adrenaline Bar. Used for both offensive or defensive purposes, Adrenaline allows for greater, deeper strategy during points, to help you recover or play that winner at just the right time.
To execute Adrenaline Skills, hold down RB, and press one of the stroke buttons (Y, X, A). The amount of adrenaline required and consumed whenever executing shots is displayed on corresponding icons.
Note: This feature will be expanded to allow further customisation in TIEBREAK Early Access 5.
3 - Stamina: TIEBREAK Early Access 4 implements a stamina bar to display your fatigue levels throughout a match. Your Stamina will be directly affected by the amount of power applied to your strokes, on-court movement, and lunges.
Stamina can be regained while stationary during points, resting after games and at the end of each set. You will notice that as the Stamina bar is depleted your movement around the court will be impacted.
4 - Nitto Finals: Experience the end-of-Year ATP Tournament, the Nitto Finals. Take on the current best in the world in round-robin and knockout tournaments to determine who is truly the champion!
5 - Online Scheduled Tournaments: TIEBREAK Early Access 4 sees the addition of all remaining ATP/WTA 1000 tournaments to online. Fight to the top of the leaderboard for each tournament, add ranking points to your overall season tally and make World Number 1!
Note: Each scheduled tournament will last two days for those who want to take their online gameplay to the next level.

BRIGHAM YOUNG AND JOHN D. LEE, THE EXECUTOR OF THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE, WERE JOINED AT THE HIP
THEY WERE “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”
Part II
Polygamy:
Emmeline and Louisa Free, two young and attractive sisters, were both under promise to be sealed to John D. Lee, who was preparing to plurally marry them both. Brigham Young saw Emmeline Free, fell in love with her, and asked John D. Lee (his trusted subordinate) to surrender his claim to her to him. Although privately reluctant, because he loved her as well, Lee deferred to his leader. (Lee, Confessions, 166-67). According to Brigham Young’s biographer, Lee’s “Paternal and ecclesiastical loyalty” to Brigham “trumped his interest in Emmeline.” (Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, 135-36). Emmeline Free “became a favorite with Brigham, and remained so until he met Miss Folsom, who captivated him to a degree that he neglected Emeline [sic], and she died broken-hearted.” (Lee, Confessions, 167). While Lee had but one child with Louisa (from whom he was later separated), Brigham Young had ten children with Emmeline. John D. Lee told George D. Grant in 1849 “that Brigham told him if he would give up Emmeline,” allowing her to marry him, that he “would uphold him in time and eternity & he never should fall, but that he [John D. Lee] would sit at his right hand [Brigham Young’s right hand] in his [Brigham Young’s] Kingdom.” (Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, 135-36). John D. Lee, because of his devotion, would be Brigham Young’s right-hand man in the Kingdom yet to come. Lee gave Young his then most favorite wife and, ultimately, ten children.
Brigham Young rewarded John D. Lee and Isaac C. Haight, Mountain Meadows men, with dashing young brides to renew their vitality (Lee, Confessions, 239), just after the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Lee: Emma Batchelor, January 7, 1858; Haight: Elizabeth Summers, January 1858). The Mormon prophet married both couples, at different times, but in each case, in January 1858 – months after the September 1857 Massacre – in his private sealing room. Brigham granted Emma a reprieve from an earlier marriage, making her available to a just then highly favored Lee. Brigham Young, the leader who decided who got whom, gave Emma to Lee, who described his “dashing” new bride in these terms: “Emma is the 1st English girl that [has been] Given me in the covenant of the P.H. [priesthood], & a more kindhearted, industrious & affectionate wife I never had.” (Cleland and Brooks, Lee Diaries, Vol. 1, 147). She was Lee’s seventeenth wife, and a mother to six of his children. Lee married nineteen wives with whom he had fifty-nine children, which was more children with fewer wives than his patron, Brigham Young. Like Brigham Young, Lee married ten teenagers. Those young wives included four sixteen-year-olds – one with whom he had seven children – a fourteen-year-old – with whom he had eleven children – and a twelve-year-old who resisted connection and was later consigned to one of his sons. With his teenage brides, Lee had 45 of his 59 children. (George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy, 604-5, 635-37). Six of Lee’s wives, the first six of nine, received their second anointings in the Nauvoo Temple. (Lee, Confessions, 171). Eleven of his nineteen wives left him, over the years, after and because of his role in the notorious Massacre. If the Indians were charged with the massacre, as Vengeance Is Mine reports, because Lee was supposed to have lied to Brigham, if Lee was nothing more than an after-the-fact observer to an Indian atrocity, what did Lee do to cause Brigham Young to give him that “dashing young bride” – four months after the Massacre – to renew his “vitality”? In a ceremony, conducted by Young, in the President’s private sealing room.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre:
“Young’s edict, declaring martial law in the early fall of 1857, closed the borders of Utah Territory, virtually bringing travel to a halt across the Great Basin, isolating California, and cutting the nation in half.” (John Gary Maxwell, Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah, 25).
John D. Lee, like Apostle George Albert Smith (Joseph Smith’s cousin), was a member “of the ultra-secret Council of Fifty, the ruling body of the earthly Kingdom of God [led by Brigham Young].” (Bigler and Bagley, Mormon Rebellion, 160). That Council, a shadow government (“functioning as a secret provisional legislature,” John G. Turner), intended to take control when Jesus came and Mormons ruled the world before the end of the nineteenth century. George Albert Smith was not local, at least not then, in the truest sense, and neither was John D. Lee, Brigham’s right-hand man. Those two men had credentials above and beyond (different than) the southern Utah crowd. Apostle Smith had been the First Colonel in the Iron County Brigade, and Lee was a Major. The proximity of these two partisans, prior to the Massacre, was up close and personal. “Lee conducted much of Smith’s ‘pleasant but somewhat arduous journey of 185 miles’ through Santa Clara Canyon to Mountain Meadows.” (Bigler and Bagley, Mormon Rebellion, 160). There was ample opportunity in those times, and on that journey, for Brigham’s son and Joseph Smith’s cousin to discuss anything of consequence. Smith predicted dire consequences for the emigrants in the presence of Jacob Hamblin, when those Mormons, Indians and emigrants “from Arkansas ‘on thare way to Calafornia’” camped in close proximity at Corn Creek. Hamblin: “Thare was a Strang[e] atmosphere Serounded them.” “The apostle spoke of it, Hamblin said, unable to resist the temptation to prophesy what he may have known was coming, Smith said he believed ‘Some evle [evil] would befall them before they got through.’” (Bigler and Bagley, Mormon Rebellion, 167).
Since Mormons “intercepted, read, even copied or destroyed” letters deposited by non-Mormons at the post office, and since no letters “ever left the valley” without their contents being known, “Indian agent Jacob Holeman hand-carried his 1852 letter to the non-Mormon mail post at Fort Bridger.” Holeman’s letter (written years before the Mountain Meadows Massacre) had a message for those who would later dutifully study the details of that southern Utah atrocity. “Its contents [Indian Agent Holeman’s letter] told of white men’s participation in Indian attacks on emigrant trains. Caution was employed, for he expected that white men in the attacks were Mormons who would read his mail.” (Maxwell, Baskin, 74). Holeman’s conclusion in 1852 was repeated by historian Juanita Brooks one hundred years after he first addressed that terrible fact. Juanita Brooks “resolutely placed the blame where it belonged,” concluding that “white men, not Indians, were chiefly responsible” for the ambush of the Arkansas emigrants and that “she had come to feel that Brigham Young was directly responsible for this tragedy. John D. Lee, she believed, would make it to heaven before Brigham Young.” (Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 363).
George Albert Smith traveled south with but one traveling companion. But he returned to the Great Salt Lake with an Indian entourage, by that to say with as many as twelve to fourteen southern Utah Indian leaders and chiefs. On September 1, 1857, Brigham Young said this in his daily journal: “Kanosh the Pavaunt chief with several of his band visited me.” The Journal History of the Church for the same day “tells of the visit of Jacob Hamblin and twelve Indian chiefs from the south.” (Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, Author Statement II, Preface). “President Young talked with them all, but it seems that Kanosh was given private audience. He was the chief who had killed Captain John Gunnison and several of his men as they were camped on the Sevier River on October 28, 1853.” Juanita Brooks didn’t know if Kanosh, a chief close to Brigham Young and a future temple-endowed Mormon elder, was at Mountain Meadows some few days later. Some of Brigham’s September 1 visitors would seem to have been present days later at the scene of the crime.
George Albert Smith, with Lee, was a powerful presence in Mormonism’s southern Utah precincts. (Mormon Rebellion, 160-61). Smith, a regional founder, outranked both Isaac Haight and William Dame because of his position as Colonel, Apostle and Brigham Young’s spokesman. But Lee, the Prophet’s right-hand man in a kingdom yet to come, had his own particular place in the supreme leaders’ hierarchical equation. “Apostle Smith who had been the Iron County Brigade’s first Colonel, met with local leaders and gave them instructions, both written and verbal.” Following that, “He stayed overnight in the home of the man who would play the key role in the coming atrocity.” (Bigler and Bagley, Mormon Rebellion, 160). George Albert Smith asked John D. Lee a hypothetical question: “Brother Lee, what do you think the brethren would do if a company of emigrants should come down through here making threats? Don’t you think they would pitch into them?” “‘They certainly would,’ Lee [reported having] said.” (“Lee’s Last Confession,” cited at Mormon Rebellion, 160). “Southern Utah leaders, who met with Colonel Smith knew what was expected of them.” (Ibid.).
January 11, 1857: First Presidency First Counselor Heber C. Kimball preaches “against wild enthusiasm.” This is, according to Michael Quinn, the first official reference that the “religious zeal of [the] Utah Reformation is getting out of control.” (Quinn, Extensions of Power, 754). February 8, 1857: President Brigham Young asks a congregation, “Will you love that man or woman [who has committed a sin beyond redemption] well enough to shed their blood?” Quinn notes that “Blood Atonement sermons are the most publicized feature of the Reformation,” a movement that started in 1855. In April, Brigham Young restores the passage of the sacrament “after withholding it from all church members for [the] past six months of Reformation which ends with Utah War.” (Ibid.).
John D. Lee, Diary entry, Monday, March 7, 1859. “About 2 P.M. an Expressed came to me by H. & T. Woolsey from a Friend in the North Stating that all hell was about to brake loose. A Detatchment of Johnson’s Troops were expected within a few days & to take care of myself. The bearer of the express was instructed not to sleep night or day untill the Letter reachd me, . . . .” (Brooks, Lee Diaries, Vol. 1, 200). “This timely warning from ‘a Friend in the North’ followed a pattern that ran through all the remainder of Lee’s life. He was always told, well in advance, of any threatened danger; the messenger was usually one of his ‘adopted sons,’ and the ‘faithful Friend’ was his own foster father, Brigham Young.” (Cleland and Brooks, editors, Lee Diaries, Vol. 1, 326 n 54).
The September 1, 1857, arrival of the southern Utah chiefs placed men at Brigham’s disposal “whose bands had previously raided but never directly attacked Americans moving west.” (Bigler and Bagley, Mormon Rebellion, 143). Their chances of success, if left to themselves, were close to impossible, as even they perceived. And they hesitated to steal those well-guarded emigrants’ cattle, horses, carriages, wagons, belongings and possessions. By the time Mormon militiamen – some of them disguised as Indians –planned, organized and commenced this surprise attack, with the assistance of their Indian allies, no less than 250,000 Americans had made that great American trip. Brigham Young was playing with fire. His edict (martial law) requiring American citizens to have his permit, a passport to traverse American land, at the imperious dictate of a squatter sovereign, was an affront to everyone everywhere that didn’t belong to the one true church. When the Southern Utah leaders selected the person of all persons to relay the facts about the Mountain Meadows Massacre to their leader, Brigham Young, the choice was an obvious one. It was Lee (Young’s adopted son).
At Mountain Meadows, the throats of emigrant women and children were cut. Brigham Young could not but have known that throats were cut. And that while (the cutting of throats) was “not Indian practice,” it was “consistent with Mormon beliefs about blood atonement.” Decades later one participant acknowledges “that Mormon men slit [the] throats of women and children.” (Quinn, Extensions of Power, 756). The shedding of innocent blood had consequences for men like John D. Lee and Brigham Young, both of whom had been recipients of the vaunted second anointing. There were no military deaths in the Utah War, a conflict often cited as justification for the deaths of the one hundred and twenty emigrants. The “Reformation,” as it was called, was a period of extreme indoctrination and violent rhetoric, a low point in the checkered history of the Mormon Church. Much of the violent discourse (“sermons like pitch forks”) angering susceptible Saints passed the mouths of Jedediah Grant, Brigham Young and George Albert Smith.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre Cover Up:
John D. Lee helped Young craft an alibi by denying Young’s involvement, and keeping his counsel, after the crime. It was the Mormon way. Keeping secrets was a first principle of the new and demanding faith. Brigham Young denounced John Pack, a member of the Council of Fifty, for “‘devulging the secrets of this council’ and for warning a man to leave the valley by ‘intimating that his life was in danger.’” Young to Pack: “‘[T]he things that belong to this Council should be as safe as though it was locked up in the silent vaults of Eternity.’” Pack begged for forgiveness, offering to “have his head cut off if he transgressed again.” “Pack ‘wept biterly like a child.’” (Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, 187-88). And for good reason. It was no empty threat. When Bishop Klingensmith blew the whistle on the Mountain Meadows atrocity, he predicted his death. Men like Jesse Hartley and John Gunnison, though not oath bound, may have died for telling the forbidden truth.
At Young’s request, John D. Lee didn’t tell others, like Heber C. Kimball, what he told Brigham when they met, and both he and Brigham agreed to charge the Indians, and not the Mormons, with the crime. This conversation was a secret of such magnitude that locking it up in “the silent vaults of Eternity” had high priority. Lee wrote a letter, as Farmer to the Indians, to Brigham Young, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, because Young said that he should. He charged the Indians with the crime because Brigham said that he should. The reason Mormons disguised themselves as Indians was always intended, if things went south, to shield Mormon culprits from culpability. At the expense of their Indian allies, the “Battle Ax” of the Lord. In their book Vengeance Is Mine, authors Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown maintain that John D. Lee lied to Brigham Young when he represented the Iron County Brigade in its report to the Utah Territorial Militia’s Supreme Commander, Lee’s surrogate father, Brigham Young. He lied, they say, when he said “the Indians did it” and absolved himself and a hundred others, Brigham Young’s closest southern allies, high authority elders and confidantes, from any participation in that great early American crime. One question surrounding those contentions may be easy to answer: “Can the authors of Vengeance Is Mine point to other times when John D. Lee might be said to have ever lied to the man he worshipped [and protected], Brigham Young?”
Brigham Young promulgated that outrageous lie (“the Indians did it”) publicly from 1857 until about 1870 or so. He had practiced deception for much of his adult life. Young took his first plural wife in 1842. The Church he ruled with an iron fist didn’t admit that it believed, preached or practiced polygamy until 1852. Joseph Smith, who plurally married something close to forty women during his lifetime, denied that he ever believed, taught or practiced polygamy to the date of his death. It was common in the early Church to speak one way in private to confidantes (let us say to the “Quorum of the Anointed”), and another way in public to less worthy not-so-highly esteemed sluggards and drones, members who didn’t know what their leaders did behind closed doors.
John D. Lee said this of that: “When I arrived in the city I went to the President’s house.” After the brutal affair, and on September 11, 1857, a council was held at the emigrant camp, at the scene of the crime on the day of the crime. (John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, 236). On that occasion the leaders, including Lee, made speeches. “Thanks to God for delivering our enemies into our hands . . . .” And thanks to “the brethren for their zeal in God’s cause . . . .” The leaders stressed “the necessity of always saying the Indians did it alone . . . .” “The most of the speeches, however, were in the shape of exhortations and commands to keep the whole matter secret from everyone but Brigham Young.” (Ibid., 237). “It was then agreed that Brigham Young should be informed of the whole matter, by some one to be selected by the Church Council, after the brethren had returned home.” (Ibid., 237). By that to say home to Cedar City, Parowan and other environs after the crime, from the scene of the crime. That “some one to be selected,” John D. Lee Young (a member of Young’s family) had been the point man and executor of the atrocity.
“When I arrived in the city I went to the President’s house and gave to Brigham Young a full, detailed statement of the whole affair, from first to last – . . . I told him everything. I told him that ‘Brother McMurdy, Brother Knight and myself killed the wounded men in the wagons, with the assistance of the Indians . . . . He asked me many questions, and I told him every particular, and everything I knew . . . I gave him the names of every man that had been present at the massacre . . . .’ When I finished . . . he said: ‘This is the most unfortunate affair that ever befel the Church.’” He said that he was “afraid of treachery among the brethren,” and “if any one tells this thing, so that it will become public, it will work us great injury.” (John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, 240-41). “I want you to understand now,” he then further said, “that you are never to tell this again, not even to Heber C. Kimball. It must be kept secret among ourselves. When you get home, I want you to sit down and write a long letter, and give me an account of the affair, charging it to the Indians. You sign the letter as Farmer to the Indians, and direct it to me as Indian Agent [Superintendent of Indian Affairs].” (John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, 241).
Deception and Betrayal:
Brigham Young, Brigham Young Jr., George Albert Smith, George Q. Cannon, and others, concoct a story about the Massacre.
After the Massacre (September 6-11, 1857), and until the Fall of 1870, a period of thirteen years, Brigham Young and John D. Lee were on good terms. They protected each other. Their last productive encounter occurred at Tocquerville in 1870, where they talked about John D. Lee’s future at a new location, then parted company “in a very friendly manner.” (Lee, Confessions, 251-52). About two weeks after that amicable parting, Lee, by now a fugitive on the run, was shocked to learn that he had been “suspended from the church.” The following spring, in 1871, Lee visited Young, in the depths of his despair, and asked President Young why he hadn’t cut him off earlier “if what I had done was evil.”
Brigham Young’s reply to Lee in 1871, fourteen years after the Massacre, was, simply said, “I never knew the facts until lately.” (Lee, Confessions, 265).
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in September 1857 was carried out by the Iron County Brigade, a division of the Utah Territorial Militia commanded by the Utah Territorial Governor, Brigham Young. Brigham Young’s militia was aided by the Indians. In the year or two that followed the crime, multiple witnesses provided damning evidence that “white men, not Indians, were chiefly responsible” for the ambush of the Arkansas emigrants. “Multiple raids on emigrant wagon trains in Utah Territory, both before and after September 11, 1857, demonstrate that the train massacred at Mountain Meadows was not the only one attacked.” (Turley and Brown, Vengeance Is Mine, xiv). It is a well-established fact that by 1857, just before the Massacre, Brigham Young gave his Indian allies permission to steal the cattle of American emigrants on the North and South routes to the Coast without a Territorial consequence. Brigham Young authorized and encouraged the armed robberies of the emigrants’ cattle.
By and just before 1871, which was fourteen years after the 1857 Massacre, and the year in which Brigham Young told John D. Lee, “I never knew the facts until lately,” only Mormons continued to proclaim the innocence of Brigham Young’s militia. The Massacre occurred in 1857. Apostle Brigham Young Jr. defended the militia in the Philadelphia Morning Post on November 1, 1869: “Some years ago a party of emigrants, in crossing the plains, lost a couple of horses, and at once suspected the Indians of having stolen them. As a piece of malice they sprinkled the meat of an ox that had died through the night with strychnine. After their departure, a band of Indians found the meat and ate of it; the result was that nearly all who did so died; the remainder of the tribe then took up the trail, and gaining fresh accessions by the way, came up with the emigrants at Mountain Meadow, where in three days they killed 130 of the party. Some of our people, noticing that something was wrong, followed after, and arrived in time to save the remainder of the train; some sixteen women and children. That is the history of the ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre,’ for which we have always received the blame.” (Uncle Dale, cite from Recovery from Mormonism, April 6, 2013). “When the junior Brigham spoke in public, for the record in the national press, he spoke for his father and the other elite members of the Mormon leadership.” Part of Brigham Young Jr.’s statement was reprinted, “without criticism,” in the Deseret Weekly News on November 24, 1969. (Ibid.). This was the official explanation of the early Church made by Brigham Young’s biological namesake son.
The Massacre occurred in 1857. George Q. Cannon, Apostle, Secretary to Brigham Young, Mission President, Prophet, Seer and Revelator, Editor, Deseret News Weekly, December 1869: “In December 1869, fully twelve years after the murders at Mountain Meadows, Cannon who ‘had known the truth for more than a decade,’ continued to blame the Mountain Meadows Massacre on the Indians [“he claimed the citizens from Cedar City heard rumors of a battle but arrived too late to help”].” (Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 270). “News editor [Deseret Weekly News] and Apostle George Q. Cannon repeated the old story that the Arkansas company was hostile to the Indians and poisoned an ox at Corn Creek and probably poisoned the spring. Ten Paiutes died, and the survivors rallied their neighbors to attack the emigrants at Cane Spring.” (Ibid.). Cannon, while the article’s author, derived his text from a letter written by Apostle George Albert Smith, Joseph Smith’s cousin, Brigham Young’s spokesman and the LDS Church Historian. “Cannon had learned in 1858 that Mormons ‘did the job.’” (Ibid., 430 n 10).
Let us ask again: “Can the authors of Vengeance Is Mine point to other times when John D. Lee is supposed to have ever lied to the man he worshipped, Brigham Young?” Brigham Young, Brigham Young Jr., George Albert Smith and George Q. Cannon lied about the Massacre to everyone everywhere all of the time for more than twelve years.
Part III of this series of three separate submissions will be posted on Sunday, May 13, 2024.

New Releases for May 2024

Data courtesy http://www.bookreporter.com
For more discussion, see the monthly New Releases post.

Title	Author	ReleaseDate
Adventure
Clive Cussler The Heist	Jack Du Brul	May 7, 2024
Clive Cussler Condor's Fury	Graham Brown	May 7, 2024
Empire	Conn Iggulden	May 14, 2024
Tom Clancy Act of Defiance	Brian Andrews	May 21, 2024
Biography
The Last of His Kind	Andy McCullough	May 7, 2024
Feherty	John Feinstein	May 14, 2024
The Call to Serve	Jon Meacham	May 28, 2024
Fantasy
When Among Crows	Veronica Roth	May 14, 2024
The House That Horror Built	Christina Henry	May 14, 2024
Fiction
Retrospective	written by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean	May 7, 2024
Sipsworth	Simon Van Booy	May 7, 2024
The Lover	Rebecca Sacks	May 14, 2024
The Stellar Debut of Galactica Macfee	Alexander McCall Smith	May 14, 2024
All Fours	Miranda July	May 14, 2024
April May June July	Alison B. Hart	May 14, 2024
Blue Ruin	Hari Kunzru	May 14, 2024
Liquid, Fragile, Perishable	Carolyn Kuebler	May 14, 2024
Long After We Are Gone	Terah Shelton Harris	May 14, 2024
Paper Names	Susie Luo	May 14, 2024
Lucky Dogs	Helen Schulman	May 21, 2024
I Want You More	Swan Huntley	May 21, 2024
Lies and Weddings	Kevin Kwan	May 21, 2024
Shae	Mesha Maren	May 21, 2024
The Enchanted Hacienda	J.C. Cervantes	May 21, 2024
The Guncle Abroad	Steven Rowley	May 21, 2024
The Second Coming	Garth Risk Hallberg	May 28, 2024
Historical Fiction
All the Glimmering Stars	Mark Sullivan	May 7, 2024
Daughters of Shandong	Eve J. Chung	May 7, 2024
Disturbing the Dead	Kelley Armstrong	May 7, 2024
Ella	Diane Richards	May 7, 2024
Long Island	Colm Tóibín	May 7, 2024
The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying ...	Helen Simonson	May 7, 2024
Fair Rosaline	Natasha Solomons	May 7, 2024
The Stolen Child	Ann Hood	May 7, 2024
Whale Fall	Elizabeth O'Connor	May 7, 2024
The Old Lion	Jeff Shaara	May 14, 2024
Every Time We Say Goodbye	Natalie Jenner	May 14, 2024
Last House	Jessica Shattuck	May 14, 2024
Rednecks	Taylor Brown	May 14, 2024
The Shadow of War	Jeff Shaara	May 14, 2024
This Strange Eventful History	Claire Messud	May 14, 2024
Butcher	Joyce Carol Oates	May 21, 2024
The Lost Letters from Martha's Vineyard	Michael Callahan	May 21, 2024
The Wealth of Shadows	Graham Moore	May 21, 2024
The Passionate Tudor	Alison Weir	May 28, 2024
The Safekeep	Yael van der Wouden	May 28, 2024
The Act of Disappearing	Nathan Gower	May 28, 2024
History
Left for Dead	Eric Jay Dolin	May 7, 2024
Throne of Grace	Bob Drury	May 7, 2024
The Situation Room	George Stephanopoulos	May 14, 2024
Horror
You Like It Darker	Stephen King	May 21, 2024
Humor
Love, Lies, and Cherry Pie	Jackie Lau	May 7, 2024
Swamp Story	Dave Barry	May 7, 2024
The Time Has Come	Will Leitch	May 14, 2024
The Paradise Problem	Christina Lauren	May 14, 2024
I Hope This Finds You Well	Natalie Sue	May 21, 2024
Look on the Bright Side	Kristan Higgins	May 28, 2024
Memoir
Love Is a Burning Thing	Nina St. Pierre	May 7, 2024
The Year of Living Constitutionally	A.J. Jacobs	May 7, 2024
You Never Know	Tom Selleck	May 7, 2024
Animals I Want to See	Tom Seeman	May 14, 2024
Breaking Glass	Patricia Walsh Chadwick	May 14, 2024
A Walk in the Park	Kevin Fedarko	May 28, 2024
Mystery
The Overnights	Ian K. Smith	May 7, 2024
Nonna Maria and the Case of the Lost Treasure	Lorenzo Carcaterra	May 7, 2024
The Return of Ellie Black	Emiko Jean	May 7, 2024
On Her Watch	Melinda Leigh	May 14, 2024
The Detective Up Late	Adrian McKinty	May 14, 2024
Bad, Bad Seymour Brown	Susan Isaacs	May 21, 2024
Long Time Gone	Charlie Donlea	May 21, 2024
The Last Murder at the End of the World	Stuart Turton	May 21, 2024
First Frost	Craig Johnson	May 28, 2024
Knife River	Justine Champine	May 28, 2024
Romance
The Ministry of Time	Kaliane Bradley	May 7, 2024
Malibu Summer	LibGill	May 21, 2024
You Are Here	David Nicholls	May 28, 2024
Summer Fridays	Suzanne Rindell	May 28, 2024
Sports
The 1998 Yankees	Jack Curry	May 7, 2024
The Yankee Way	Andy Martino	May 21, 2024
Suspense
The 24th Hour	James Patterson	May 6, 2024
The Man on the Train	Debbie Babitt	May 7, 2024
A Lethal Question	Mark Rubinstein	May 7, 2024
I Will Ruin You	Linwood Barclay	May 7, 2024
Phantom Orbit	David Ignatius	May 7, 2024
The Deepest Lake	Andromeda Romano-Lax	May 7, 2024
The Instruments of Darkness	John Connolly	May 7, 2024
When She Was Me	Marlee Bush	May 7, 2024
The Last Time She Saw Him	Kate White	May 14, 2024
Think Twice	Harlan Coben	May 14, 2024
Very Bad Company	Emma Rosenblum	May 14, 2024
Under the Palms	Kaira Rouda	May 21, 2024
One Perfect Couple	Ruth Ware	May 21, 2024
Still Waters	Matt Goldman	May 21, 2024
Southern Man	Greg Iles	May 28, 2024
The Winner	Teddy Wayne	May 28, 2024
Camino Ghosts	John Grisham	May 28, 2024
If Something Happens to Me	Alex Finlay	May 28, 2024
Women's Fiction
How to Read a Book	Monica Wood	May 7, 2024
skin & bones	Renée Watson	May 7, 2024
Summers at the Saint	Mary Kay Andrews	May 7, 2024
The Mother of All Things	Alexis Landau	May 7, 2024
Their Divine Fires	Wendy Chen	May 7, 2024
Women and Children First	Alina Grabowski	May 7, 2024
The Summer Swap	Sarah Morgan	May 7, 2024
Lovers and Liars	Amanda Eyre Ward	May 14, 2024
Wives Like Us	Plum Sykes	May 14, 2024
Life, Loss, and Puffins	Catherine Ryan Hyde	May 14, 2024
All the Days of Summer	Nancy Thayer	May 21, 2024
Exhibit	R.O. Kwon	May 21, 2024
Mind Games	Nora Roberts	May 21, 2024
Summer on Highland Beach	Sunny Hostin	May 28, 2024
Allow Me to Introduce Myself	Onyi Nwabineli	May 28, 2024