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queencityac.bsky.social
annec
@queencityac.bsky.social
850 followers 2K following 2.1K posts
Teacher, writer, Vermonter, ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 ally 🐈
she/her
website: https://coldereye.beehiiv.com
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queencityac.bsky.social
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A screenshot of me muting the word "Nuzzi" on bluesky, forever.
November 14, 2025 at 7:33 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
This is so true.
Well, as Amy Odell points out in her book about Gwyneth, she is a key player in the rise of wellness, and/or the commodification of wellness, to the detriment of actual wellness. As the lifestyle stream has exploded, wellness has become a privilege, not a human right, and the rest have become more unwell. So if Gwyneth is really to live on in name a hundred years from now, it will be in infamy. Is that what she’s looking for?
October 17, 2025 at 2:36 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
The simple, elegant cover of *She Was Nice To Mice*, a children's book by Ally Sheedy, written when she was twelve.
October 13, 2025 at 10:19 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
I think there is textual evidence that #Taylor Swift understood "Sympathy is a Knife" and did not necessarily hear it as a diss track. In the New York magazine cover story about #Charli XCX, which comes out two months after the release of Brat, Taylor Swift is quoted:
In Charli's profile for Vulture, Swift herself put any beef rumors to bed: "I've been blown away by Charli's melodic sensibilities since I first heard Stay Away' in 2011. Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. "She just takes a song to places you wouldn't expect it to go, and she's been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off."
October 5, 2025 at 1:12 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
The explanation for our media landscape:
The main reason that it is hard to reduce inequality is that rich people do not want to give up their money. They are willing to spend a lot of money in order to maintain their advantages, as long as the money they spend is less than the money they might lose if they did not spend the money. So the rich fund an entire universe of think tanks and lobbyists and educational programs and so on and so on, all with the underlying purpose of keeping public outrage at their existence to a minimum. It is important-even existential-for the rich to ensure that the idea that they are entitled to what they have is cemented in the mind of the larger public. Much of "public discourse" in America is in reality the operation of this project, and the backlash to it. The rich must win the battle for the hearts and minds of the general public not because they care about the public welfare, but because they care about their own. Historically, losing this intellectual battle is what has gotten rich people led to the guillotines. And those that were guillotined were not nearly as rich as our rich people today.
September 24, 2025 at 3:08 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Yeah these are the udm14.com results:
Google results for "train station blandings" that show Market Blandings
September 24, 2025 at 3:09 AM
queencityac.bsky.social
Michael Gross' 2016 piece on Trump partying and apparently having sex with underage girls, based on the reporting he did for a book on the modeling industry:
The girls were as young as 15, he says, and "over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations. There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It's based on power and dominating girls who can't push back and can be discarded. There's always someone to pick them back up. Nobody wants to call home and say 'Help me.' " Trump would "go from room to room," said the photographer, who added that "I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor" but no smoking. Trump didn't approve of cigarettes. Those men at these parties often knew each other. "It's a small community," the photographer says. "They exchanged information, facilitated each other. Trump was in and out. He'd wander off with a couple girls. I saw him. He was getting laid like crazy. Trump was at the heart of it. He loved the attention and in private, he was a total fucking beast."
September 10, 2025 at 1:08 AM
queencityac.bsky.social
She goes on to say:
"I still believe that there were models and then there was the girls that did that. Like I thought there was a separation."
September 9, 2025 at 4:31 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
It's notable that by the late 80s Casablancas was known for making models get down to their underwear in his office, undergoing an inspection of sorts. And as I've pointed out before, Epstein was being sent girls by Casablancas/Elite. So this part struck me:
"Jeffrey Epstein knew that I was 13 years old. When he interviewed me, he asked me to get down to my bra and just my panties and I thought that was weird but, I mean, modeling."
September 9, 2025 at 4:25 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
By coincidence, this was my favorite story as a child:
Illustration of two families in striped outfits, with text: "She had a mama who was named Mrs. Jacqueline. Her papa was named Mr. Jacqueline. The little Jacqueline had two sisters who were both named Jacqueline, and two boy cousins who were named Jacqueline, and two girl cousins who were named Jacqueline, and an aunt and an aunt who were named Jacqueline."
September 1, 2025 at 7:26 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Garrett Graff on what's missing from press accounts at the moment:
"...this morning, there's not a single story on the homepage of the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN about Trump's health - but there is a story on the New York Post about how robust the president's health surely is!" [...] "One of my running themes of media criticism in the Trump era has been that the national media knows all-too-well how to provide wall-to-wall coverage and elevate something from a 'news story' to a 'news event'.... It's very clear - at least so far - that Trump's health is not a news 'event', but what's even more puzzling is the extent to which the national media doesn't even treat it as a news 'story.'"
September 1, 2025 at 4:03 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
In the Guardian piece on Brunel, a scout who works for him threatened a U.S. modeling agent representing one of the abused girls to keep his mouth shut or face reprisal from the Russian mafia:
[A female modeling scout for the Karin agency] "made it very clear that Brunel had a relationship with the Russian mob." "I remember her saying 'If you don't let this go, you will just disappear. That will be the end of it... you'll just be gone.' "
August 3, 2025 at 10:37 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
There is another example in different Guardian piece, on Jean-Luc Brunel, where Epstein posed as a movie agent:
"From her home in Livermore, California, Soerensen tells me that not only was she repeatedly sexually assaulted by Brunel in the spring of 1988, but she was also 'pimped out' to his friends in an orchestrated system of abuse. She tells me this culminated in a meeting with a man Brunel referred to simply as 'Jeffy', supposedly a top movie agent looking for a new young actress. Soerensen, now 53, says it was only recently, after recognising him in TV footage, that she realised this was Jeffrey Epstein."
August 2, 2025 at 7:59 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
This is a summary of some of scholarly work on Glasnost/post-Glasnost beauty contests in Russia:
Scholar Elizabeth Waters discusses how Soviet readers of such articles were shock both by the way girls navigated the gray areas between promiscuity and prostitution, and by the way they seemed unrepentant and nonchalant about their behavior. The "gray areas" of prostitution were also traversed in the rapidly expanding beauty contest industry, which had been imported from the West in the mid-1980s. Young women were keen to enter this world of apparently glamorous opportunities with hopes of winning money, fame, and often a foreign modeling contract, particularly after the first Miss USSR was crowned in 1989. The contestants were usually from modest families and had higher education, but were employed in low-paid jobs. Soviet psychologists supported beauty pageants because "feeling beautiful improved a woman's sense of well being and her work performance." In actuality, however, many contestants soon realized the contests held hidden agendas, requiring them to provide sexual favors to photographers, agents, and even pageant organizers. In this manner, the sexualization of the culture and the departure from Soviet protocol had created a great deal of confusion about the boundaries between erotic art, glamour modeling, and commercial sex. Bridger, Kay, and Pinnick note: "Reports on several of these competitions imply that the women involved are expected at the very least to sleep with the organizers, and, if they really hope to win, probably with everyone from the judges to the lighting technicians as well."
July 29, 2025 at 10:40 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Epstein was obviously engaged in his own massive operation, separate from these modeling agencies. But he comes up at the periphery of the world described - some of the models were sent to "casting calls" at his house:
It also appears that Epstein had a Casablancas connection during the 1990s. According to a lawsuit filed in the US three months ago, in 1990 Casablancas sent a teenage model for her first "casting call" at a residential address on New York's Upper East Side, to meet a "photographer" who, it turned out, was Epstein. The lawsuit states that Epstein ordered the 15-year-old girl to undress before taking photographs of her, pushing her against a wall and sexually assaulting her.
July 29, 2025 at 9:18 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Is it fair to say that Robert Maxwell basically admitted he worked for Israeli intelligence? He settled a libel suit on the point.
A bitter, protracted dispute between a British newspaper group and prominent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh came to a quiet finish in a London courtroom yesterday when the Mirror Group apologized to Hersh for its "attempts to impugn" his integrity and agreed to pay "substantial damages." Hersh sued the company for libel after one of its newspapers, the London Daily Mirror, published a series of articles three years ago harshly attacking him and his book, "The Samson Option." In it Hersh reporter that the paper's owner, publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and its foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, had links to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The paper's lawyers seemed to be saying yesterday Hersh was right. The Mirror Group's attorneys did not return a telephone message left last night.
July 28, 2025 at 12:45 AM
queencityac.bsky.social
God, getting into this stuff is so weird. But apparently Mogilevich and Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine's dad) were business partners:
There were also other names, dangerously embarrassing names, that had links to Maxwell and Israel... One was Semion Mogilevich...
July 27, 2025 at 8:20 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Another of Mogilevich's lieutenants, his "enforcer" Vyachelsav Ivankov was eluding authorities and then found to be living in Trump Tower:
"The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. 'We were looking around, looking around, looking around,' James Moody, chief of the bureau's organized crime section, told Friedman. 'We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower' "
July 27, 2025 at 8:00 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
More about Mogilevich, from the same source:
"
"Mogilevich wasn't feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. Tjhe FBI has credited the 'brainy don', who holds an ecomics degree in economics from Lviv University. with a staggering range of crimes." "'He uses his wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,' the FBI says, 'but to influence governments and their economies.'"
July 27, 2025 at 7:47 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Just to follow one link, Russian mobster David Bogatin, who owned five apartments in Trump Tower, had a connection to Mogilevich:
"[Bogatin's] family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the 'boss of bosses' of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich - feared even by his fellow gangsters as 'the most powerful mobster in the world' - was expanding his multibilion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America."
July 27, 2025 at 7:36 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Like, dude.
First paragraph of the review: "Dr. Finer... announces in his introduction that his book 'is intended to be a work of impartial recognition and explanation.' It is possible that Dr. Finer has a different conception of impartiality than that usually held, but the method of his book is not likely to impress the average reader as judicial."
July 26, 2025 at 3:52 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Yes, imagine writing about Mussolini's Italy from a hostile perspective.
Title of a Book Review: "A Hostile But Searching Study of Mussolini's Italy"
July 26, 2025 at 3:46 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Description of the philosophy of Ralph Wigram, the British official constantly warning of the danger of Hitler, in a nutshell: "you cannot conciliate an enemy who is out to destroy you - except, naturally, by destroying yourself to save him the trouble."
...it was precisely this same quality that he himself cherished in the great Edwardian State Paper, at the heart of whose message, stripped of its outer husks of time and place, will be found nothing more nor less than the wholesome but unpalatable old chestnut that you cannot conciliate an enemy who is out to destroy you--except, naturally, by destroying yourself to save him the trouble.
July 7, 2025 at 5:06 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
Noticed this helpful explainer from Vox on how someone else's Medicaid cuts are going to affect you, even if you have private insurance:
...somebody currently on Medicaid loses their benefits with the work requirement. They go to the doctor less and maybe they end up with a serious medical situation that they only seek help for when it's an emergency. They go to the ER.... Well, the hospital is not just going to eat the costs of that person's care. The next time they negotiate with private insurers, like yours and mine... they will charge the health insurer a higer rate.
July 3, 2025 at 9:02 PM
queencityac.bsky.social
"I will consider your proposal"
A gray cat with yellow eyes looks up at the viewer from the sidewalk.
May 30, 2025 at 1:37 AM