annec

@queencityac.bsky.social

988 Followers 2113 Following

Teacher, writer, Vermonter, ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 ally 🐈 she/her website: https://coldereye.beehiiv.com

A small rabbit on a front lawn.
"More Pride, Less Prejudice" written in chalk, with the "Pride" in rainbow colors.
More rainbow over Williston
Rainbow spilling from the clouds in Williston, VT.
Reddish photo of the Academy of Music in Northampton
Rainbow over building in S. Burlington, Vermont.
White Adirondack chairs facing Lake Champlain, with the Green Mountains in the distance.
A movie poster for *The Lair of the White Worm* featuring Amanda Donohoe and Hugh Grant.
"Most Similar Historical Figures to You: Salvador Allende"
A sign in sidewalk chalk that reads, "Power Is Not In Supremacy It's In Respect."
A picture in sidewalk chalk of a bird, which is labeled "Peent."
The words "A Better World Is Possible" written in sidewalk chalk.
A pink bush in full bloom, in front of a brick façade.
Cover for Jane Pek's *The Verifiers* with a drawing of an Asian woman in black stepping onto the Brooklyn Bridge.
A protest sign that reads, "We're all the couch now."
A protest sign with a heart-shaped bubble that reads, "Listen to HCR."
A protest sign in kid handwriting that reads, "PEACE pa-lees WE NEED IT NOW" and "LOVE," "EVERYONE IS AWESOME," "THIS QUEEN SLAY," and "AWESOME." The word "HATE" appears crossed out.
A protest sign that read, "Sorry, World. We're working on it."
A protest sign that reads, "I MISS THE TRUTH."
A recent internal assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that was circulating inside the Pentagon in recent weeks determined that Iran could potentially keep the passage shut for anywhere from one to six months, four sources familiar with the document told CNN. But White House and Pentagon officials insisted that the assessment - particularly the longer end timeframe, which some consider a worst case scenario - was not being seriously considered. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had not seen it, and Trump has not been briefed on it, nor was he using it to inform his policy decisions, one seniorWhite House official said.
A fluffy, scampering skunk in a UVM parking lot.
A sugar cookie dipped in chocolate with green sprinkles and a sugar cookie in the shape of lips with green frosting. The latter reads "Kiss me."
The last call that [redacted] characterized as threatening occurred in approximately December or January [redacted], while [redacted] was working at [redacted]. A co-worker received a message on their work landline that was intended for [redacted]. The man on the message stated that he was.... [trails off]
At one point, her mother became aware that Epstein had nude photos of the teen from their sexual encounters and was demanding money to keep them hidden, the woman told the FBI. The victim said she had seen the photographs in his bedstand, leading to a violent encounter when he discovered her snooping. She said his extortion demand caused her mother to steal funds from her real estate company. Epstein had departed investment and trading company Bear Stearns in 1981 after an internal investigation of his trading practices. Around the time of the allegations, he was operating a company he founded in New York. Epstein worked as a troubleshooter for wealthy clients, advising them on issues like corporate embezzlement and offering investment strategies. The alleged victim said her mother’s boss — the Epstein associate from Ohio — and his company accountant helped the mother fix the books so she could pay off Epstein. The alleged victim told agents that the episode was so stressful her mother began drinking again. Her mother later went to prison near Columbia, the woman told agents. Records confirm that her mother was implicated in such a crime around this time.
The last call that [redacted] characterized as threatening occurred in approximately December or January [year redacted], while [redacted] was working at [redacted]. A co-worker received a message on their work landline that was intended for [redacted]. The man on the message stated he was...
French text: "Kristi Noem, la ministre de la sécurité intérieure, limogée par Donald Trump"
"Particulars as to Marriage": part of 1911 Ireland census, showing a marriage that has lasted 29 years, producing 14 children, 12 still living.
Book cover for Katie Siegel's *Out of the Loop*, with a swirl of calendar pages and a magnifying glass.
Gold-domed State House in Montpelier, VT.
Gorgeous wooden rafters and decorated windows in the Mount Holyoke library.
Last point, but in a way the one I most want to share with you. This story has now been picked up in Times, NPR and, after yesterday, a bunch of other publications. But the guy who found it was Roger Sollenberger, who used to work at Daily Beast but has been an independent for a while. I don’t know Sollenberger personally and I don’t follow his work that closely. But again and again, though not that frequently, he comes up with pretty big stories. He’s also the guy who came up with the various scandals tied to Rep. Corey Mills and the crazy accommodations he had in DC. It’s an example of how really, really big stories can be unearthed by solo operators without the heft and legions of reporters they have at places like the Times.
Now, what the NPR story also indicates is this individual made a similar allegation in lawsuits against Epstein in 2019; that this information was in the information that was relevant to Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial and is indeed with the Maxwell trial team; that, again, the FBI interviewed this individual multiple times and the Epstein estate settled with them. So those are all indications that what this individual said was credible enough that it became incorporated into a criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell—that the DOJ deemed it credible enough that law enforcement, the FBI, deemed it credible enough to interview them multiple times, and that the Epstein estate settled with them. So those are all indications that this is a serious allegation, and the allegation itself is, of course, appalling.
Now, of course, these files contain reports that aren’t credible. Law enforcement officials receive tips that aren’t credible all the time. What makes this latest revelation, I think, so significant is this is an individual who the FBI opted to interview not once, not twice, not three times—four times. This was a serious, credible enough lead that there were multiple interviews and multiple indications that this individual was telling the truth. And that’s what they chose to cover up.
Many victims of Epstein received money from a compensation program created after his death. The program operated independently of the estate, and its administrator evaluated claims based on a series of factors including, credibility, degree of harm and age of the survivor. The fund reported making payments to 135 women. Jane Doe 4 who sued over Epstein’s alleged abuse in Hilton Head was deemed ineligible by the program, according to court documents, though the reason is unclear. “I have my reservations about how the funding committee handled most of those,” Fudali said, referring to the victim’s compensation fund. “We were able to get money directly from the estate without having to go further into litigation.” Jane Doe 4 voluntarily dismissed her claims with prejudice, relinquishing her ability to bring the legal action again. Fudali would not disclose the amount she received from the estate and rebuffed a request from The Post and Courier to speak with her. “Most of them are staying quiet,” he said, referring to the victims. “Even though Epstein has been dead for almost a decade, most of them continue to live in fear.”
Two people standing on a frozen Lake Champlain.
From Michael Wolff to Jeffrey Epstein: "And they won't be the last. My buddy, Lorin Stein, who runs the Paris Review--the Paris Review for god's sake--just went down. The 80-year-old-father of my friend Rachel Horovitz--the playwright Horovitz--whacked. Big names on the horizon: Michael Douglas, Larry Gagosian, and still my favorite, Arthur Sulzberger."
Email to Epstein says: Sulzberger. Zuckerman. Rose. Mitchell prob busy but good catch. Any NY establishment people you need to win back. But must be people you can trust not to gossip. Ghislaine fluff everyone up. Epstein replies: Rose?
Jeffrey Epstein: if bannon outted charlie and pinch sulzberger, then what? Michael Wolff: the end of the establishment as we know it (edited for clarity)
Academic paper title: "Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know in Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly" by Melissa Farley
Speaking with Mark Thompson on SiriusXM, Luke recounts being alarmed by what he saw, drug use, explicit sex, and girls he believed to be underage. He compared the atmosphere to the film *Eyes Wide Shut*, saying it felt more like an underground scene than a typical celebrity gathering. Luke says he arrived expecting a high profile social event but quickly realized it was turning into something far more unsettling. Seeing sexually charged behavior and people he suspected to be minors was a red flag. Uncle Luke decided to leave rather than stay and party, admitting he was concerned with the environment. Still, he remained tight-lipped on the intimate details.
The author of more than a dozen books, Mr. DeMott was best known for a trilogy that examined cultural beliefs in three sensitive areas: "The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class" (William Morrow & Company, 1990); "The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Race" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995); and "Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Gender and Power" (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
Still of Renate Reinsve from *Sentimental Value*
Introduction to Trans Literature Iflater on you want to read a good novel it may describe how a young boy and girl sit together and watch the rain falling. They talk abour themselves and the pages of the book describe what their innermost little thoughes are. This is what is called literature. But you will never be able to appreci- ate that if in comic-book fashion you expect that at any minute someone will appear and pitch them out of the window. Comics is a form about visual presence, a succession of forms, that is stippled with absence, in the frame-gutter sequence. —Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent —Hillary Chute, Why Comics? A young boy falling and a young girl in the rain are together in a fashion. Their little thoughts pitch through them like the rain, and at any minute they expect someone you will never appreciate. This is what is called young. The rain keeps pitching down the gutters, against the selves the boy rubs between inner windows, talking about the presence in their little wants, and the innermost rain you will never be able to describe: you may never be a girl, but you can be good if a novel in fashion describes you. Later, you appear. The boy and the girl want to describe themselves. Instead they expect that some literature will appear to rain them out of the window. Their pages describe. You can't pitch the rain. They can only want to appear in the book of themselves, and if they sit together they may call a window. Rain talks to the gutters. The falling boy, who may be a girl, may never be out till later, but the girl's book will be good, it will be a comic book, it may be a boy and a boy and a girl together,
When Joseph Duveen, the most spectacular art dealer of all time, travelled from one to another of his three galleries, in Paris, New York, and London, his business, including a certain amount of his stock in trade, travelled with him. His business was highly personal, and during his absence his establishments dozed. They jumped to attention only upon the kinetic arrival of the Master. Early in life, Duveen-who became Lord Duveen of Millbank before he died in 1939, at the age of sixty-nine-noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation. Beginning in 1886, when he was seventeen, he was perpetually journeying between Europe, where he stocked up, and America, where he sold. In later years, his annual itinerary was relatively fixed: At the end of May, he would leave New York for London, where he spent June and July; then he would go to Paris for a week or two; from there he would go to Vittel, a health resort in the Vosges Mountains, where he took a three-week cure; from Vittel he would return to Paris for another fortnight; after that, he would go back to London; sometime in September, he would set sail for New York, where he stayed through the winter and early spring.
A screenshot of me muting the word "Nuzzi" on bluesky, forever.
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?
The simple, elegant cover of *She Was Nice To Mice*, a children's book by Ally Sheedy, written when she was twelve.
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."
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.
Google results for "train station blandings" that show Market Blandings
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."
"I still believe that there were models and then there was the girls that did that. Like I thought there was a separation."
"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."
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."
"...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.'"
[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.' "
"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."
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."
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.
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.