[Fortune] For more than a decade, China’s aspirational shoppers, spurred by a fast-growing economy and rising wages, snapped up products from cosmetics giants like L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, and Shiseido. Before the COVID pandemic hit, China appeared set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest makeup market.
Those boom times are over, as more Chinese consumers now turn to up-and-coming local brands, like Mao Geping and Florasis.
L’Oreal’s sales in Mainland China dropped last year, shrinking its overall North Asia sales by around 3%. The Chinese market, the bulk of the firm’s North Asia revenue, now accounts for 17% of group sales, down from 23% in 2022. The French firm continues to call China an important market, but has reportedly started cutting its retail workforce due to slower Chinese demand.
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[Jpost] The flames in Paris are not just physical. They are the burning embers of decades of self-delusion.
Another night, another fire. Paris – once the city of light, love, and liberal pretensions – found itself engulfed again in the dark flames of violence. The occasion? Not some tragic provocation or political upheaval, but victory – a national triumph in the form of Paris Saint-Germain’s long-sought Champions League win.
A moment that ought to have united the nation, that ought to have been met with pride and patriotic celebration, instead saw the streets of the French capital descend into chaos.
Two dead, nearly 200 injured, and over 500 arrests as hundreds of vehicles and shops were vandalized or torched. This is what celebration now looks like in Western Europe’s major cities. This is what civic pride has become: a pretext for carnage, a football trophy transformed into a funeral procession for the remnants of order.
We know the pattern by now. The predictable ritual: The media quickly reaches for its euphemisms: “unrest,” “youths,” and “tensions.” No identities offered. No ideologies examined. Just a vague fog of explanation, as though cars spontaneously combusted in joy, and riot police were provoked by the sheer exuberance of street dancing.
LONG WAR FROM WITHIN
But beneath the smoke lies a truth we dare not name: This was not an accident of exuberance, nor the mischief of marginalized boys letting off steam. It was the latest outburst in a long war on Western civilization from within – waged not only with bricks and fire but with ideology. An ideology that sanctifies destruction, that frames grievance as virtue, and that labels any effort to restore order as “oppression.”
At the heart of this ideology is the unrelenting cult of jihadism – not just in its armed form, but in its cultural and psychological manifestations. The belief that violence is holy when directed at the West. That rage is righteous when wrapped in the banners of identity or injustice. That civilization must apologize before it can defend itself.
What was visible on the boulevards of Paris was not merely hooliganism. It was a theater of menace and a message, again and again: we do not love your country, we do not respect your traditions, and we will desecrate your symbols – even your victories – to remind you of your weakness.
The flames in Paris are not just physical. They are the burning embers of decades of self-delusion. Of leaders who refuse to admit that mass immigration without integration comes at a cost. Of intellectuals who insisted that all cultures are equal, even when some glorify martyrdom over mercy. Of a press that will bend over backwards to avoid saying what every citizen knows in their gut: that a portion of Europe’s imported population does not want to coexist but to conquer.
We are told to believe – to chant like catechisms – that Islam is peace, that jihad means struggle (as if all struggles are noble), and that the only problem lies in our own misunderstanding. We are instructed to believe this even when chants of “Allahu akbar” accompany the destruction of Jewish shops in Sarcelles or when synagogues require police protection every Shabbat in cities that once prided themselves on tolerance.
And so here we are again. A celebration turned siege. A football win drowned out by sirens. France will, no doubt, convene its usual roundtables. The interior minister will issue the perfunctory condemnations. President Emmanuel Macron may light a candle. And within a week, the names of the dead will fade – until the next “spontaneous” outburst rears its head.
But a deeper reckoning is needed. It is time to stop pretending that the threat is abstract and that extremism floats in the air like a virus. The ideology behind this violence is coherent, even if it is depraved. It is taught, shared, and incubated – in certain mosques, in certain online forums, and in homes where children are taught to hate the country that feeds them.
It is spread in lyrics, in sermons, and in whispers that Europe is weak, that the infidel will fall, and that the future belongs to those willing to burn for it. And it is enabled by our cowardice.
THE WEST'S MORAL CLARITY
The West is still home to immense strength, intelligence, and moral clarity – but it must choose to use it. It must stop apologizing for defending its own way of life. It must demand loyalty from its citizens and expel those who openly declare allegiance to enemies of the state. It must prioritize national security over ideological purity and begin to recognize that sometimes, peace comes only when evil is made to fear consequences again.
In the end, Paris is a mirror – not just for France, but for the whole of Europe – that reflects what happens when we swap vigilance for virtue signaling and borders for blind faith. It is a city that once resisted tyrants and revolutionaries, that gave the world the Enlightenment, and that stood tall against Nazi occupation.
Today, it battles a new threat: one that carries no uniform but plenty of flags, that uses smartphones instead of guns, and that wages jihad in the name of liberation while shackling the West with its own guilt.
The time for reckoning has come. If we do not confront this culture of destruction now, we will wake up one day to find there is no culture left to defend.
#2
In the end, Paris is a mirror – not just for France, but for the whole of Europe – that reflects what happens when we swap vigilance for virtue signaling and borders for blind faith.
One of the hallmarks of the world-wide globalist movement has been the intentional looting of 'Republican' coffers to prevent election of grassroots candidates, all by those screaming they are 'Republicans' and we need to 'unite'!
The Georgia Record reported in-depth last year on the Fulton County GOP 'Trust' issue, where millions of dollars that should have gone to Fulton County Republican candidates over almost two decades instead were 'mismanaged', in an admission by those involved in the management of those funds for years.
The above Fulton developments are a perfect example of the looting of funds I am referencing that is going on nationwide.
Now word comes out this morning that the GA GOP Accounting Director Karen Hentschel may have been involved in felony crimes in the past, including 'theft by misappropriation' and 'cocaine'.
As we pointed out in our reporting, Henschel has been accused of filing reports in the name of GA GOP Treasurer Laurie McClain without McClain's approval or knowledge. Henschel has been in the same position for 16 years.
This comes on top of reports showing personal expenses charged to GA GOP accounts.
GA GOP Chair Josh McKoon could quiet all these questions by allowing McClain access to GA GOP finances as her job would require, but he refuses to do so.
It has been reported that approximately $100 million has flowed through the GA GOP accounts over the last decade and a half. Was it all without transparency?
All of this is transpiring under the cloud of a corporate structure being laid over the GA GOP political party, preventing disclosure, and which has not filed required documents to the GA Secretary of State in years. Does the GA Republican Party still exist?
In a bizarre development, documents of the corporate transition were sealed in the settlement of a lawsuit with former GA GOP Chair John Padgett. Current GA GOP leadership expended resources and time to ensure the records of the settlement would stay sealed...forever....that's forever, longer than the records of the assassination of JFK.
Why would they do that?
All of this begs the question - was the Georgia GOP infiltrated with those who say they are 'Republicans', but have no intention of following Republican values of freedom and the democratic process?
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[USAWatchdog] Journalist Alex Newman, author of the popular book "Deep State" and the recent best-selling book called "Indoctrinating Our Children to Death," is warning people to pay attention to the genocide of white farmers in South Africa. What is happening there is something the Deep State wants to take global in their tyrannical takeover of all life and property on Earth. Newman, who once lived in South Africa, warns, "What’s happening down there to them is a microcosm, and that’s what they have planned for you, your country, your family and what’s left of the Christian West. . . . What I have documented (in 2012) very clearly and very unambiguously is this racist, murderous, communist program taking place in South Africa was backed by the highest levels of Deep State power. This includes the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the US State Department, including their allies and partners in Great Britian, and they all knew the Soviet Union was behind this and other communist governments were behind this. This is a monstrosity piled on a monstrosity and, again, what they are doing to the Afrikaners (white farmers) now, they plan to do to you as soon as they get the opportunity. Instead of amalgamating all these nations under a South African government, they want to amalgamate all these nations under a one world system. Barack Obama has said over and over again that he was inspired to get into politics because of what they were doing in South Africa. This all comes together here—and you are next. That’s why it’s important to watch what is happening in South Africa."
What are the tools the Deep State uses to gain total control? Look no further than the new global UN pandemic treaty and the huge push for climate change laws to give control to a few people at the top. Let’s start with the recently passed UN pandemic treaty, which President Trump cancelled for America. Newman says, "They have a clause about ’misinformation,’ which means you can’t speak out or ask questions about what injections they demand you and your children take. It’s got digital infrastructure . . . . So, they will track everything, which will pave the way for international vaccine passports. . . . It gives exemptions (to drug makers) and fast tracks the same outrageous process that we have seen before in emergency use authorization (EUA). That is whatever crazy concoction they come up with and then tell us all what we need. It is everything that was wrong with Covid on steroids enshrined into international law."
The Climate Change hoax is equally disturbing. Newman says, "It’s not just our wealth that they are taking. They are taking from us our ability to produce wealth. This dawned on me in Paris. I was at the climate summit there around 2015. You had Barack Obama pledging to slash American CO2 emissions by a third over the next decade. This is essentially chopping American economic activity down. Meanwhile, the Communist Chinese were pledging they were going to keep increasing their CO2 emissions. To their credit, they absolutely lived up to that. . .. So, what happened was as we were shutting down our power plants and stopping energy production in this country . . . this was making manufacturing and business uncompetitive if you were operating in a global market. You could not continue doing business in the United States with energy prices skyrocketing while energy prices in China were stable or going down. They hollowed out our productive capacity and moved it over to Communist China under the scam of ’Saving the Climate’. . .. That’s what is going on here, and Trump got us out of this whole thing. You cannot overstate the significance of this."
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[NS Lyons] Biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy stirred up a political firestorm not long ago when, in attempting to defend the importation of foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, he criticized America’s native culture as one of "mediocrity" and "normalcy." Calling for "more math tutoring" and "fewer sleepovers" for America’s youth in order to render them employable, he declared on X that "’Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent." Jumping into the ensuing debate, Elon Musk offered an alternative analogy, portraying America as a global sports franchise that ought to contract the best players no matter their origin. "Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct" for Americans to hold, he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. In the one view, "America" is merely a glorified economic zone, just one part of a "competitive global market" in which labor and capital flow freely. In the other, America is a professional franchise whose sole objective is to maximize winnings. In both cases America is viewed as analogous to a corporation. In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity.
The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus. There are thus few experiences employees find as irritating as that common workplace psyop in which management proclaims the corporate office to be a "family." Employees know implicitly that it is natural affections and iron-clad mutual loyalties, or at least strong relational bonds, that are precisely what distinguish a family. Their corporate employer, in contrast, won’t hesitate to dump them by the wayside the moment they fall into the wrong column of a spreadsheet. For their part, employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company — though perhaps plenty of resentment.
What angered people about the two CEOs’ comments was that — like so many of today’s elites — they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory between concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours — and the we of that "ours" is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.
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[American Thinker] Due to the bloody and cruel attacks of Hamas on the unsuspecting Israelis on October 7, 2003, the terrorists believe they will be rewarded with their own state. How is that possible?
In December 2024, the U.N. took action to re-visit the two-state "solution" between Israel and Hamas, the precursor to an upcoming international conference set to kick-off in New York in less than two weeks:
An international conference meant to resurrect the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will take place from June 17 to 20 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, a UN spokeswoman said Friday.
The conference stems from a resolution approved in December by the UN General Assembly, and it will be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. A diplomat in Paris close to preparations for the conference said it should pave the way for more countries to recognize a full-blown Palestinian state.
These plans to move toward a two-state solution are gaining steam, because the progressive international community believes the Arabs in Gaza have earned the right to their own Palestinian state. France and the U.K. have even begun to talk about the two-state outcome:
Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, David Lammy, confirmed last week that the UK is in talks with France to recognize a Palestinian state. Palestinian thought leaders, publications, and speakers throughout the Arab world see this as a reward for the horrific massacre of October 7, 2023, and an inducement to increase rather than decrease the level of violence and terrorism.
At this time, almost 150 countries have recognized the Palestinian Authority as governing a Palestinian state. And in May of last year, Norway, Ireland, and Spain took steps to recognize a Palestinian state.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
