THAT ’70S SHOW: Federal Reserve Delivers Bad News About Expectations For Inflation, Raising Interest Rates. “The Fed is now signaling that rates will need to rise sooner and faster, with their forecast suggesting two hikes in 2023. This change in stance jars a little with the Fed’s recent claims that the recent spike in inflation is temporary.”
How is it that Washington and Wall Street are the only people shocked by this?
TODAY AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ Live Chat with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.
Cold drinks, hot takes.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Victoria’s Secret Replaces ‘Angels’ with Megan Rapinoe, Other ‘Gender Equity Campaigners.’
The Victoria’s Secret empire was built, in part, on the wings of Heidi Klum, Gisele Bundchen, and Tyra Banks. But following a year in marketing purgatory, the famed Angels are officially no more.
After more than two decades, the New York Times reports the company is doing away with its heavenly super-model parade. In its place will be a new promotional campaign called the “VS Collective” that will feature “women famous for their achievements and not their proportions,” like the soccer star and gender equality advocate Megan Rapinoe.
The Angel’s demise has been some time coming. In 2019, CEO Leslie Wexner announced the end of the Angels fashion show broadcast, saying, “Fashion is a business of change. We must evolve and change to grow. With that in mind, we have decided to rethink the traditional Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”
Perhaps Victoria’s Secret might want to also rethink their relationship with Rapinoe? ‘U Look Asian With Those Closed Eyes:’ Woke Megan Rapinoe Mocked Asians In Unearthed Tweets.
Flashback: Feminists and conservatives agree: Good riddance to the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.
Victoria’s Secret was founded in 1977 as a place for men to buy lingerie for women. From the beginning, women’s interests were a corporate afterthought. While the company has tried to brand itself as helping women feel good about themselves, its advertising has always been about fulfilling male fantasies.
It’s not good for customers, and Victoria’s Secret doesn’t have such a great reputation with its employees, either. This summer, more than 100 models signed a petition demanding that the company protect its models from sexual misconduct. Did you know Victoria’s Secret was also closely associated with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein?
Now, after last year’s fashion show had the lowest ratings ever, the sordid event appears to be gone for good. “Oh, Thank God,” ran a headline in New York magazine’s website for women, the Cut. “It’s Over Now.”
That was from 2019’s moral panic, when it temporarily seemed like the Sexual Revolution had morphed into the French Revolution. Before the Bad Orange Man was ousted for Bad Touch Biden.
Because last year, voters evidently decided that voting out #OrangeManBad was more important than #metoo:
SHE CAN COMFORT HERSELF WITH ‘NO MEAN TWEETS’: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Walloped By Ratings Nosedive. “According to analytics provided by Nielsen Media Research, Wallace’s 4 p.m. show Deadline: White House has seen a nearly 80 percent drop in viewership since January 2021 in the critical 25-54 demographic. At the end of May, just 147,000 non-geriatrics above the age of 25 tuned into her two-hour MSNBC program per day.”
FAUCI LIED, PEOPLE DIED:
● Shot: Fauci denies scientists ‘deliberately suppressed’ Wuhan lab leak theory.
—The New York Post, today.
—Hot Air, yesterday.
Related: As Trump Banned China Travel, Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Studies Calling For ‘Collaboration.’
I HAVE A PIECE ON VOTING REFORM IN REALCLEARPOLITICS: Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Fossils suggest woodlice ancestors crawled across Ireland 360M years ago.
SPACE: SpaceX launches new GPS satellite for Space Force. “The Falcon 9 rocket rose into a mostly sunny sky as planned at 12:09 p.m. EDT from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX recovered the booster on a barge, Just Read the Instructions, in the Atlantic Ocean. A little over an hour after launch, the second stage of the rocket carried the U.S. Space Force’s GPS satellite into the intended orbit. At 1:41 p.m., SpaceX announced the satellite had separated from the upper stage successfully.”
It’s the first time a national security asset has been launched on a reused booster.
RADICAL CHIC: Biden Land Management nominee ‘collaborated with eco-terrorists,’ traded testimony for immunity.
The letter told the Forest Service that 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” had been jammed into the trees of an Idaho forest.
“The sales were marked so that no workers would be injured and so that you a–holes know that they are spiked,” read the letter obtained by Fox News. “The majority of the trees were spiked within the first ten feet, but many, many others were spiked as high as a hundred and fifty feet.”
“P.S., You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt,” the note concluded.
Tree spiking is a dangerous and violent eco-terrorism tactic where metal rods are inserted into trees to prevent them from being cut down. The metal rods damage saws that, in turn, have severely injured people, such as a mill worker whose jaw was split in two from an exploding saw.
Being adjacent to terrorists always seems to be in the Ayers when there’s a Biden or Obama administration.
MEANWHILE, CHINA CONTINUES WORK ON ITS SECOND SPACE STATION: Biden’s ‘Mission Equity’ Threatens to Destroy NASA. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that this hyper-focus on characteristics like race–not actual employment qualifications–could lead to unqualified individuals being employed at NASA simply based on their human characteristics or membership in an ‘underserved’ or ‘underrepresented’ community.”
IN CASE YOU WERE COMING TO TRUST THE FBI: Trial reveals federal agents falsely accused a UT professor born in China of spying.
And this was an ordinary case, not a politically charged one. And it gets worse.
PROF. JACOBSON: Mitch McConnell Did The Nation A Great Favor By Keeping Merrick Garland Off The Supreme Court. “If there were a scintilla of doubt that McConnell did the nation a great favor, that doubt should have been put to rest during Garland’s June 15, 2021, speech on ‘Violent Extremism and Domestic Terrorism.’ The ideological purge will make Lois Lerner blush.”
Yes, it’s quite clear that the Democrats’ strategy involves treating their opposition as terrorists.
BRIAN BENNETT: Biden’s Summit Gave Putin the World Stage He Craves.
The stagecraft played to Putin’s long-standing desire for Russia to be taken seriously as a major rival to the U.S. Even the setting seemed designed to place the two leaders on equal footing and emphasize the global power they each hold. When Biden and Putin sat down to meet in a library filled with leather-bound books inside the Villa La Grange, an antique globe had been placed between the two leaders.
At the start of their meeting, Putin was quick to point out that the summit was Biden’s idea.
Well, it was somebody in the White House’s idea.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Former Dean of Students wonders, ‘How much damage have my colleagues and I done?’
WELL, IT’S NOT AS IF THEY CARE ABOUT WORKERS: The PRO Act Empowers Union Bosses, Not Workers. “Unions are playing hardball over the PRO Act because they see it as a vital lifeline—a way to extract more revenue from America’s workforce at a time when the overall number of unionized workers continues to decline. A high-profile defeat earlier this year in the first attempt to unionize an Amazon distribution center only makes it more clear: given the choice, workers mostly don’t want to be part of a union. So why not remove the choice?”
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Virus-Origin Investigation Blocked by U.S. Elites? Politicians, Experts, Media Back China Over U.S. Video with an appearance from Roger Simon who notes that U.S. elites seem more loyal to Beijing than to America. “A lot of them don’t want to upset Beijing… Because they don’t want to bite the hand that will potentially feed them.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gzPh9NKwr0
NEWSPEAK: Biden DOE Redefines ‘Sex’ to Force Transgenderism on Schools. “The Department of Education under Biden twisted Title IX to push transgender orthodoxy, undermining women’s sports and the rule of law.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is the Tide Turning Against Cancel Culture? “Kevin Hart, Charles Barkley and Rita Moreno slam woke scolds … will more follow?”
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
● Shot: Twitter Introduces New ‘Send Mob’ Feature.
—The Babylon Bee, June 22nd, 2020.
● Chaser: Ellie Kemper and Twitter’s Two Minutes Hate.
Every Twitter user who visits the website is greeted by a list of links, which appear in a sidebar under the headline, ‘What’s happening’. The items on the list are a mixed bag of paid promotions, viral fodder and hot-button politics or pop-culture topics — but what’s important is that they are curated by Twitter independently of what’s actually trending on the website. (For instance: as I’m writing this article, the most-discussed Twitter topics in the NYC Metro area, according to a third-party aggregator, are the LA Lakers, a bunch of banal motivational hashtags like #wednesdaywisdom and #humpday and the recent FOIA release of Anthony Fauci’s emails. Meanwhile, my ‘What’s happening’ sidebar is the Fauci emails, a link to an interview with Kate Winslet, and ‘Tucker’, because someone with a significant following on Media Twitter is mad at Tucker Carlson. Again.) ‘What’s happening’ in your sidebar is not, for the most part, what is actually happening on Twitter. It’s more like what Twitter wants to make happen, by making you curious enough to click.
Last month, the words ‘Fartlow’ or ‘Eve Fartlow’ appeared in the trending topics sidebar for a full 24 hours. The source was a bizarre, juvenile bullying campaign against journalist Eve Barlow, which had been percolating under the radar for several days but gained viral traction after actor Seth Rogen, who has 9.1 million followers on the platform, amplified it by tweeting a fart emoji at her. The trollng stemmed from an essay Barlow had written about the Israel-Palestine conflict that some people found offensive, but this wasn’t readily apparent if you clicked the ‘Fartlow’ link in the sidebar, which led to a bunch of mean-spirited tweets about Barlow but not to her profile or her work — because these things were, in fact, irrelevant. As with Ellie Kemper, the story wasn’t what Barlow did; the story was that someone was mad at her — and the site’s editorial team knew that amplifying those tweets would keep users clicking and scrolling.
Orwellian dystopian analogies come pretty cheap these days, but this one is too obvious not to point out — only instead of Two Minutes Hate, it’s a 24-hour buffet. Twitter’s sidebar points to people who have been declared fair game for punching and the mob gleefully piles on. It’s not just that these stories are born on the website; it’s that Twitter actively nurtures them, promotes them and throws their scapegoats to the wolves. For a platform that likes to style itself as a place that takes harassment and abuse seriously, it’s especially ironic: Twitter will protect certain high-profile users who complain about abuse, but it also foments drama on purpose and by design, like the high-school teacher who plays favorites with the cool kids and always happens to be looking the other way when some unpopular schlub is being tormented right under his nose.
—Kat Rosenfield, Spectator World, June 2nd, 2021.
In addition to its ability to call up a high-tech lynch mob, it’s a virus of the mind as well — somebody should write a book about the multifaceted elements of Twitter’s insidious nature.
JAMES LILEKS ON MINNEAPOLIS’ SLOW TRANSFORMATION INTO DETROIT:
This will pass, though. Uptown will recover. It might take a few years. It will take more if no one feels safe, if the intersections are commandeered by bands of hotrodders who perform their idiot rituals at 2 AM, if hoopleheads spill out of bars and settle a slight with a spatter of gunfire. This will require prevention, apprehension, conviction, and incarceration.
Alas, those are the Four Horsemen for some, and the sound of their hooves is akin the tromp of stormtrooper boots. It’s always depressing to hear people say “well this is how you get the repressive fascists who come in on a Law and Order ticket.”
Yes, that’s so. So perhaps you might want to forestall that by doing something about the Law. And perhaps some Order.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Minnesota Nasty.
Or to flowchart the progression:
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
