REVIEW: ‘Sound of Freedom’ Shines a Light on the Issue of Human Trafficking.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Bud Light and Country Music: It’s Complicated.

Suffice it to say Bud Light sales losses aren’t alone. It’s losing the meme wars, too, both on Twitter and YouTube videos.

Pitch Meeting to Save Bud Light
What does this have to do with country music? Plenty, as it turns out.

Country crooners have lined up on the issue, either pouring salt on Bud Light’s wounds or insisting the initial ad campaign was a Nothingburger on Steroids.

Here’s how the battle lines shake out so far.

I’d rather enjoy my beer and my music without either having to take a stand on anything current but the Gleichschaltung doesn’t care what anyone prefers.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Gunman arrested for Philadelphia mass shooting which left 5 dead is BLM activist who wore women’s clothes.

(Bumped, by Glenn, because of course.)

GREG BYRNES: Independence Day Thoughts: What is America’s Vocation in The World? “The Revolution’s goal was not to change the old world or conquer it. The American system was to work out our destiny on our patch of earth. Rather than a warrior nation, we were to be an example of work and family responsibility capable of governing and supporting itself. It was to be an example that other countries could emulate as best they could. Leave the slaying of foreign dragons and the pipe dreams of ideological abstractions like those of the French Revolution elsewhere.”

SPACE: Scientists Find the Remains of a Catastrophe on Mars Scattered Across the Planet.

YOU WILL BE MADE TO CONFORM: Lefties Begin Denying Service to Trump Supporters.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Begin?”

CHANGE: Emerging economies are decoupling from China, helping them stay strong despite rising interest rates.

Due to the recent weakness in China this year, Wall Street largely expected most other emerging economies to follow, he noted. Meanwhile, rate-hiking cycles in the 1980s and 1990s triggered crises in emerging markets, and analysts expected the latest tightening campaign to produce a similar results. But except for a few instances, that didn’t happen.

“Among the 25 largest emerging economies, three-quarters of those reporting data have beaten growth forecasts this year — some, including India and Brazil, by a wide margin,” the chair of Rockefeller International wrote. “Forecasts for global growth in 2023 are rising and most of that uplift is coming from emerging economies.”

Many developing nations entered 2020 with improved fiscal discipline and stronger banking systems compared to prior decades, Sharma said.

So when the pandemic hit, they didn’t have to borrow as much money to pay for stimulus spending, with their deficits rising on average by 15% of GDP from 2020 to 2022, just half as much as the US’ did, he pointed out.

“The old notion that ’emerging’ is another word for reckless no longer applies,” he wrote.

And, compared with the Federal Reserve, emerging-market central banks did not delay in tightening their monetary policy. Such early intervention now allows many to start cutting interest rates, while the US looks to possibly hike two more times this year, he added.

In other words, our central bank isn’t as well run as, say, Kenya’s.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: CDC Altered Death Certificates to Remove ‘COVID Vaccine’ as Cause.

RESIST: Hong Kongers are mailing memes and support to jailed pro-democracy protesters.

More than 10,000 people have been arrested and at least 2,900 charged for their roles in the 2019 Hong Kong protests, which first erupted in June over a government extradition bill and later morphed into a broader movement fighting for democratic freedoms. In 2020, the Chinese government quashed the movement by imposing a national security law that gave authorities expansive new powers to crack down on political opposition. In 2021 alone, 985 people were put into custody for charges related to the protests, including unlawful assembly, rioting, and endangering national security. By the end of 2022, 522 of them remained behind bars.

While public expressions of dissent have dwindled in Hong Kong, some residents continue to support the city’s jailed protestors through small-scale online initiatives. Because inmates are prevented from using the internet, supporters like Ruby update them on news of the outside world through mailed printouts of news clips, memes, and YouTube video transcripts. They send essential items such as toothbrushes and underwear using online businesses, and share handwritten letters from the prisoners on social media to help relay their conditions to the public.

More than a little reminiscent of resistance to Soviet rule.

BEIJING BARBIE: Vietnamese Government Censors Hollywood Flick Over Disputed South China Sea Map.

CORPORAL KLINGER, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Army’s transgenders are exempt from physical fitness standards.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Judge Gives Free Speech Lovers a Big 4th of July Gift. “Doughty, by the way, is a Trump appointee, so thank you once again, Mr. President.”

HEH: Joy Reid Reveals She Got Into Harvard ‘Only Because of Affirmative Action,’ Surprises No One.

LIVING HISTORY: China is in default on a trillion dollars in debt to US bondholders. Will the US force repayment?

Before 1949, the government of the Republic of China (ROC) issued a large volume of long-term sovereign gold-denominated bonds, secured by Chinese tax revenues, to private investors and governments for the construction of infrastructure and financing of governmental activities. Put simply, the China we know today would not have been possible absent these bond offerings.

In 1938, during its conflict with Japan, the ROC defaulted on its sovereign debt. After the military victory of the communists, the ROC government fled to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China was eventually recognized internationally as the successor government of China. Under well-established international law, the “successor government” doctrine holds that the current government of China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, is responsible for repayment of the defaulted bonds.

A private group of American citizens holds a large quantity of these gold-denominated bonds. This citizen-led group, the American Bondholders Foundation (ABF), serves as trustee with power of attorney for some 20,000 bondholders, whose bonds are valued at well more than $1 trillion.

Then-U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tough negotiation stance on the return of Hong Kong to China led to a British settlement agreement on these same Chinese bonds in 1987. Thatcher said that for China to have access to U.K. capital markets, it had to honor the defaulted Chinese sovereign debt held by British subjects. Faced with that stark choice, China agreed.

Unfortunately, the U.S. failed to take such a common-sense stance. To this day, China has had access to U.S. capital markets while openly rejecting its sovereign debt obligations to American bondholders.

Beijing always knows who to pay off in Washington.

NOW THAT’S A HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Court Hands Down A MASSIVE Victory for Freedom on the Fourth of July.

CATHERINE SALGADO: For Creator and Country: The Virtue of Patriotism.

THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: ‘Groundbreaking’ Sharp Images of Distant Planetary System Show 3 Planets Are Missing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Happy Independence Day—Hope We Have a Few More. “If the United States military spends much more time focusing on pronouns and wokeness we can forget about being overrun by China. We’re going to be conquered by a Guatemalan haberdasher named Reynard who just got bored one day and needed a new challenge.”

ANOTHER REASON NOT TO VISIT CALIFORNIA, IN CASE YOU NEEDED ONE: Thousands Of SoCal Hotel Workers Go On Strike.

LIVING HISTORY: Ukraine finds British WW2 Hurricane planes outside Kyiv.

The rusting remains of eight British Hurricane fighter planes dating back to World War Two have been found buried in a forest in Ukraine.

The aircraft were sent to the Soviet Union by Britain after Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941.

They were part of a package of allied military support for the USSR, paid for by the United States under the so-called Lend-Lease scheme.

So-called? Scheme? I’m not sure why decades after the fact the BBC is denigrating a material effort to keep anti-Nazi forces fighting, but, whatever.

Plus: “Some Hurricanes were deliberately broken up and buried after the war so the Soviets did not have to pay back the United States. Under the Lend-Lease legislation, the USSR was required to pay for any donated military equipment that remained intact after hostilities ended.”

CHANGE: Europe’s venerable Ariane 5 rocket faces a bittersweet ending on Tuesday.

The Ariane 5 rocket made its debut in June 1996 with a launch failure, and its second launch a year later was also a partial failure. But after that, the rocket has had a commendable record of success across 116 total launch attempts. For most of its history, the rocket was a true workhorse, launching dozens of commercial satellites into geostationary space and ensuring that the nations of Europe could get their national security payloads into orbit.

The rocket has also lifted a number of important space science missions, including the Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, BepiColombo, and JUICE spacecraft. Perhaps the rocket’s most notable launch came in December 2021, when it lofted the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA into a very precise orbit.

Because Webb did not need to expend any on-board fuel to correct its orbit, NASA was able to double its estimated lifetime for the mission. A NASA systems engineer, Mike Menzel, said an agency analysis found that Webb has enough propellant on board for 20 years of life, up from its original estimate of 10 years.

That was one helluva launch.

The replacement rocket, the Ariane 6, is years late and isn’t reusable, so it likely won’t find much of a market outside of homegrown missions for Europe’s militaries and intelligence agencies.

VENEZUELA IS ALWAYS THE ENDGAME: Biden bummer: Confidence in America dragged to ‘lowest’ point. “For perspective, Venezuelans have the same confidence in their government as Americans do in the Biden administration, Gallup said.”

CHANGE: The A-10 Warthog Making One Final Flight — to the Boneyard.

JOHN NOLTE: Add ‘Indiana Jones’ to This List of Kathleen Kennedy’s Stunning Failures.

The Disney Grooming Syndicate spent $400 million on Dial of Destiny, which is one of the most popular and beloved movie franchisse in Hollywood history, a franchise that delivered four previous blockbuster hits, a franchise with so much audience goodwill, a chapter that sucked as hard as Crystal Suck grossed $317 million domestic and $790 million worldwide. If you account for inflation, Crystal Suck made $417 million domestic and $1.15 billion worldwide.

If you account for inflation, Crystal Suck opened to $141 million over three days and $212 million over five days.

If you account for inflation, Crystal Suck grossed $385 million worldwide over its three-day opening weekend.

Compare that to Dial of Destiny’s $65 million domestic opening and $140 million worldwide opening.

So pardon me for not inventing an all-new box office category to excuse the potential box office catastrophe called Dial of Destiny. Excuse me for comparing apples to actual apples, but now that the Supreme Court has outlawed the obscene, un-American racism that is affirmative action, it feels safe to tell some truths about the most destructive affirmative action hire in entertainment history: Mz. Kathleen “Franchise Destroyer” Kennedy.

Let us list her now 100 percent failure rate.

Related:

And: Disney Stock On Track For Worst Year Since 1974.

That last headline is from the end of 2022, before Kennedy killed Indiana Jones.

Disney’s problem isn’t just Kennedy’s tortured tenure as the company’s Lucasfilm division chief. They’ve tarnished the Pixar brand, the Marvel properties are on life support, and the company’s endless reboots of classic animation films as live-action aren’t exactly wowing audiences.

Even the theme parks are struggling, with a billion-dollar Star Wars bet gone wrong and attendance still below pre-pandemic highs.

PRIORITIES: The Biden Regime Is Doling Out Your Tax Money to Promote Trans Madness Worldwide.