France’s Far Right Turn A rising nationalist faction has grown its coalition by appealing to Catholic identity and anti-immigrant sentiment — and reshaped the country’s race for president......... With only one month to go until France’s presidential election in April ..... Emmanuel Macron’s presidential victory as an independent five years ago shook up France’s multiparty system. ...... Now Zemmour and Maréchal’s alliance, with its “anti-wokisme” and its appeals to anti-immigrant sentiments, has forged a revanchist politics that captures a notable shift in the public mood. ...... As the far right enjoys its greatest cultural primacy in France in 75 years, it is Zemmour and his followers, not the National Rally, who are defining the future of the French right wing ....... In 1992, Maréchal appeared in a campaign poster as a startled blond toddler held aloft in her grandfather’s arms. Twenty years later, Maréchal was elected to the National Assembly as a representative of the party. At 22, she was the youngest member of Parliament in the history of the modern French Republic. “The Le Pen name is a brand,” Maréchal, now 32, told me last fall. “It has been both my handicap and my advantage. I wouldn’t have been elected without it.” ......... Maréchal’s impending betrayal of her aunt, with its tantalizing mix of political ambition and familial wounds, had been a subject of media speculation for weeks. ...... the family’s treacheries have for decades delighted the French media ....... In 2015, Marine kicked her father out of the National Front for the same reason. They didn’t speak for months. (Eventually, they reconciled.) ....... Maréchal told me. “In people’s minds, it’s the nation, authority, family, heritage, preservation. Broadly speaking, that’s our identity.” ....... and, on the right in particular, around the father of modern France, Charles de Gaulle ...... Maréchal, who has continued to dodge precise questions about her political future as she campaigns full-time for Zemmour, is sometimes called the “fantasy” of the right, a double entendre that captures her political currency and symbolic importance. ....... the word “photogenic.” If it’s taboo to remark on the sex appeal of a female politician in 2022, it would also be disingenuous to pretend that it isn’t a strategic element of Maréchal’s public persona. ........ “So young! So pretty!” ...... she was 22 when she was elected to the National Assembly in 2012, and photos of her from that time, long blond hair swept to one side or, better yet, blowing in the wind against a backdrop of pastoral France, her face fixed in an expression of concern or confident command, are still used frequently by right-wing groups. ...... I’d attended several events where she was on the program, and I never saw her ill at ease. “Distance creates prestige,” Maréchal said, echoing de Gaulle, when I remarked that she had been out of politics for five years but everyone was still talking about her. “They’re projecting their fantasies onto me.” ...... Early on, Maréchal established a reputation not only as a nationalist but also as a Catholic. ...... introduced Maréchal into networks where Zemmour was also a frequent V.I.P. “Paris is the center of everything,” Maréchal told me. “It’s not that way in every European country, but Paris is the economic, cultural and political center of the country. And when you’re politically nonexistent in Paris, it’s very complicated to succeed.” ........ Maréchal also “had a hunger for intellectual questions,” says Eugénie Bastié, another young conservative journalist who worked with Zemmour. “She cultivated that dimension of herself, a depth that her aunt doesn’t have.” Le Pen famously floundered in a debate against Emmanuel Macron in 2017, an embarrassment from which she struggled to recover. “We have this need for our political figures to be intellectuals,” Bastié said. “Someone who doesn’t make us ashamed.” ........... Yet Maréchal still possesses the Le Pen hardness. She can rally the masses with the kind of primal emotion that can only be credibly acquired from a sense of grievance ...... She observed that, of the three traits of the French Republican trinity, “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” only the last couldn’t be imposed by law. “Fraternité is a sentiment of attachment,” she said, and concluded, “it is fragile.” ........ Like their American counterparts, Zemmour and Maréchal like to denounce the liberalism of cultural institutions, namely the media and academia. ...... Renaud Camus, the source of the “grand remplacement,” or “great replacement,” conspiracy theory (which has been picked up across the Atlantic by commentators like Tucker Carlson) ........ Camus’s argument holds that the white French population is being replaced by a nonwhite, non-French population. ........ the Overton window,” Tegnér said, referring to a shift in what’s considered acceptable discourse. D’Ornellas, of Valeurs Actuelles, agreed, pointing out that 15 years ago, the term “ ‘identity’ was absolutely a dirty word. Now it’s pretty much normal to talk about it.” ........ Some of this shift in French public life can be traced to the Islamist terror attacks that have devastated France, beginning in 2015. ........ Prominent left-leaning intellectuals formed a collective to battle Islamist extremism. ....... since the 1980s, as French Muslims became a more visible public presence, has been interpreted to mean that public life should be free from overt religious expression. ...... Last fall, Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, founded the Laboratory of the Republic, a government-organized think tank meant to further the ideals of laïcité, proclaiming that “The veil itself is not desirable in French society” and decrying “le wokisme” as an American import. In 2013, Manuel Valls, interior minister to the Socialist president François Hollande, called for systematically deporting Roma, who are European Union citizens, from the country. ....... Conservatives like Zemmour openly use the doctrine as a tool to delegitimize Islam. He tells his audiences that under his presidency, he would “not want to hear the voice of the muezzin,” the person who issues the Islamic call to prayer, while simultaneously extolling France’s “Christian heritage.” ........... Michel Barnier, the former Brexit negotiator for the E.U., said, but he allowed that the French sometimes had a feeling of no longer being “at home.” ....... an environment in which “reasonable people decided that to be reasonable, you had to agree with unreasonable people,” Fassin said. They were made to feel that if they weren’t against the so-called Islamo-leftists, a way of branding those on the left as Islamophilic for cautioning against anti-Muslim bigotry, then they were “complicit with terrorism,” Fassin said. “And, of course, that has consequences. Intimidation, basically.” .......... “The ideas of humanism and solidarity have weakened in the public debate” ....... “They have refused to get into any questions of security, immigration or Islam. Every time those topics come up, they say, ‘Those are right-wing topics.’ So people say to themselves, ‘OK, then I’m on the right.’” ........ the far right has been able to set the terms of debate ...... “We are still far from dominant,” d’Ornellas told me. “But you could say at least that for the first time, we are in a position to contest the liberal cultural hegemony.” ........ Maréchal and Zemmour have long proselytized for what they call the union des droites, the joining of disparate right-wing factions behind a single leader. This could happen either by fusing the center-right party and far-right parties, though that is considered highly unlikely, or, more probably, by joining the most right-wing voters of the center to those on the far right. ....... It is hard to say what is electoral strategy and what is Zemmour being Zemmour. .......... He has asked whether “young French people will accept to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors,” a concern Maréchal shares. ......... “in 2060 the historic native people could be minorities on French territory.”
........ Maréchal told me that the identity question is central to the election, that “for the French it is a vital question, they feel it in their flesh, a vital threat that gives them anxiety.” She explained that it was “because they have the feeling that in several years France will no longer be France, because the population will have largely changed, it will be majority-Muslim, it will no longer be France as we’ve known it.” She went on: “Often, Muslim women who wear the full-body veil or burqa are reproached: ‘If you want so much to live like in Afghanistan or in Iraq, then go live in Afghanistan or Iraq.’ ........... Officially, France promotes an “assimilationist” model. This means that anyone can be French, so long as they adopt French cultural norms. The origins of this code date to the 19th century, when the French government, in order to form a cohesive nation-state, imposed unifying measures on different regional identities. “French culture,” in other words, was created. ........... But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the emerging French right is interested in neutral statism; on the contrary, it wants to assert the primacy of a particular notion of Frenchness — part historical, part phantasmagorical. “I think people on the right are exasperated by the idea that we put all the religions on the same level,” Bastié said. “The right has turned the page on this kind of relativism. We have a specific Judeo-Christian heritage that we must assume. Only Europe and the West refuse to assume their own heritage. A Muslim country would never say that its heritage isn’t Muslim.” .......... The French far right, like its American counterparts, has taken an interest in the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban’s calls for a Europe that rejects multiculturalism and asserts its “Christian heritage” were always meant to attract the attention of Western European conservatives. Zemmour and Maréchal visited Budapest together last fall, and Marine Le Pen made a showy campaign stop there. ......... Marquardt had invited a young philosopher and historian named Mohamed Amer Meziane to give a presentation on his recently published book, in which he argued that Europe, and France specifically, give themselves credit for having modernized during the 19th century. But this was the period of France’s imperial adventures in the Muslim world, which — not coincidentally, he argued — racialized the concept of “religiosity,” rendering it “uncivilized.” After Meziane finished, Marquardt opened up the discussion. Yassine Belattar, a well-known Paris comedian, observed that he thought the upcoming election would break relations among the French. “It’s a referendum for or against Muslims,” he said. .............. In response to Meziane and Belattar, one such guest stated that there was only one question to be answered, with a simple yes or no: Was being Muslim more important to them than being French? ........... a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic. ........ a standard that would never be applied to Catholics. “If you were a believer, would it be Jesus or Macron, the decisive influence in your life?” he shouted. “Answer that!”
........... In the postcolonial era, when ideas about social hierarchy have been overturned, a generation whose ancestors were born under colonialism but who are themselves French-born and highly educated are not keen to be instructed on how to be “French.” .......... In 2018, he said that he dreams of a French Vladimir Putin, a man who “takes a country that was an empire, that could have been a great power, and tries to restore it.” ........ Putin’s Russia has always been the model for the kind of conservative Christian civilizational state that Zemmour and Maréchal espouse, one ruled by a strong leader who patronizes the church, enforces traditional values and unapologetically rebuffs any kind of rights-based progressivism. ........ Le Pen’s party has taken loans from a Russian bank; in 2017, in an attempt to bolster her standing, she met with Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Le Pen’s campaign moved quickly to trash a trove of campaign leaflets that featured a picture of Le Pen and Putin shaking hands at the Kremlin. ......... The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the monarchy and the aristocratic order that preceded it; but there is a deep-rooted reactionary right that never fully accepted the new republic. It is a sentiment that still resonates in the bourgeois Parisian circles that Maréchal and Zemmour frequent. Maréchal has remarked that France and the Republic are not necessarily the same thing, that the Republic is just one regime, and “France preceded the Republic.” ........ At the rally in Toulon, the speakers who introduced Zemmour and Maréchal, some of them former National Rally members, spoke of France’s past “imperial grandeur” and the war in Algeria. ........ I stayed to talk to the young man, Salahedin Hamzi, who is 17. He showed me his ID, marked “République Française.” “I have to prove 10 times a day that I’m French,” he said, gesturing to his face. “When I was little, everyone was the same, but as I got older I was made to understand that I wasn’t French.” ....... when France was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944, many of the soldiers that freed Toulon were from the French colonies. .
Javelin missiles: Thank DARPA for Ukraine’s success against Russian tanks Javelin missiles have been an effective force multiplier, the latter-day equivalent of the slingshot that David used against Goliath. .......... Javelin missiles have helped Ukraine repel the numerically superior Russian military. These missiles are the result of a competition between DARPA and the U.S. Army. They are capable of penetrating tanks and circumventing various countermeasures, such as reactive armor. ......... It is a relatively large, shoulder-fired guided missile with a range of about two miles, and it has transformed the war in Ukraine. Its explosive warhead is capable of penetrating heavy armor (like tanks) and is highly lethal against other targets, like low-flying helicopters. ......... it is a fire-and-forget guided missile, which means that the operator locks the missile on to a target before it is launched and then the missile guides itself to the target ....... the ability to follow either a straight trajectory like most missiles, or a lofted (arch-like) trajectory that enables the Javelin to hit the larger, less protected top of a target such as a tank. ....... The weapon is so critical that Ukraine has requested deliveries of 500 of them — daily. .......... Army personnel were skeptical about a “fire-and-forget” missile, which they dismissed as, “You fire, and the missile forgets.” ........ The Army later renamed the weapon Javelin, and it entered full-scale production in 1997 — the world’s first medium-range, one-man-portable, fire-and-forget, anti-tank weapon. ......... hundreds of tanks and other vehicles (as well as some helicopters) reportedly have been destroyed in Ukraine by Javelins. Used against the overwhelming numbers of Russian forces, the Javelin has been an effective force multiplier, the latter-day equivalent of the slingshot that David used against Goliath. .
Inside Sanjay Mehta's ambition to build India's Y Combinator at 100X.VC Entrepreneur-turned-investor Mehta is making life easier for early-stage startups, helping them to focus on their ideas, while handholding them to raise money ....... “Many times, startups can build something that no one wants, which are recipes for failures,” he says. ....... When Kumar met 100X.VC she had finished three pilots to test her idea but had not opened for business, “so a lot of what we were talking about was still only on paper”. But the VC firm took the time and made the effort to validate what she was telling them. ........ While 100X’s first cheque of Rs 2.5 million is a small one, it’s really the downstream impact of the firm’s backing that founders value. “To be honest, the capital infusion per se is the least helpful thing they did for us, compared to many other areas where they added value,” says Omkar Pandharkame, co-founder and CEO of BHyve. “I’m not sure if it’s fair or right to call them this, but they are pretty much the Indian version of Y Combinator.” ........ “There were two meetings, one negotiation, one term sheet, and money in the bank in less than a week.”
.......... Today, a growing share of the startup founders in India comprises those under 25 ...... We are on the cusp of a significant change in India’s startup ecosystem and the 100 unicorns dream by 2025 will be realised before that ........ unicorns are being created the world over at least in a significant part because of cheap money from the US. What will really change India’s startup landscape is if more local investors and domestic capital gets involved. ........ Even today, the valuations and outcomes are being driven by companies like SoftBank and Tiger Global, he says. “What we need is more of Tata acquiring BigBasket rather than Walmart acquiring Flipkart. That’s the truth of it. Walmart really gave a jolt to a lot of Indian corporates when Flipkart got acquired. It was like a jewel going away.” .......... If the top 200 established corporate businesses in India allocate Rs 500 million a year to startups at the seed stage, they will change the landscape ....... “And they have enough cash on their balance sheets to easily do this,” and they will see the benefits to their own businesses too. ....... while there are many Indian unicorns today, none comes even remotely close to dominating its particular market segment even locally, let alone becoming a global story.
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No One Wants to Go Back to the Office As Much As White Men
What is the Lightning Network in Bitcoin, and how does it work? The Lightning Network is a second layer added to Bitcoin’s (BTC) blockchain that allows off-chain transactions, i.e. transactions between parties not on the blockchain network. Multiple payment channels between parties or Bitcoin users make up the second layer. A Lightning Network channel is a two-party transaction method in which parties can make or receive payments from each other. Layer two enhances the scalability of blockchain applications by managing transactions outside the blockchain mainnet (layer one), while still benefiting from the mainnet’s powerful decentralized security paradigm.
I tried Experian Boost three times – here’s how it’s helped my credit The concept sounded pretty amazing: Your utility and telecom data gets added to your credit file and raises your score. Essentially, you’d get rewarded for paying your bills. ....... Then, to boost my score, I connected my bank account, which was also easy ....... Experian found my utility bill, and my FICO score went from 640 to 654. I was ecstatic. ...... And one credit limit increase, one credit card upgrade and one new credit card later (thanks, CardMatch!), I got to 667 this January. ...... I was paying for the Internet with a card I hadn’t connected yet. Plus Experian now lets you report your Netflix payments. ...... This time, I’ve added all of my credit card accounts, just to be sure every eligible payment will count toward my score. ....... My score has increased by 13 points, taking my score to the next credit tier—from “fair” to “good”. ...... Now my FICO score is at 680, and in total, Experian Boost has raised my score by 22 points. ...... Now that years of fair credit are officially behind me, I may qualify for some of the most exciting credit cards (I’m looking at you, Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card), and I’m considering refinancing my car loan. ..... 90 percent of top lenders use FICO scores, and while you likely won’t know which credit bureau’s data your lender will pull, it doesn’t hurt to improve your chances by boosting your score with Experian. ...... Experian Boost is an easy way to increase your FICO Score with Experian. It may benefit some users more than others, but it never hurts to try—the service is free and won’t use any negative payment information.
Experian Boost Review On-time payment history is the most important factor in your credit score accounting for 35% of your total credit score, followed by credit utilization which makes up 30% of your credit score.
How To Get Rent Payments Added To Your Credit Report Credit is king in America. A credit score determines eligibility for even the most basic necessities of life, including housing. Having a healthy credit score requires years of credit, combined with factors like positive payment history and low credit utilization. ....... about 26 million Americans are credit invisible
, meaning they have no credit score at all. There are multiple factors contributing to this trend, including insufficient credit history. ........ Experian, for example, receives rent payment data through Experian RentBureau, and updates its database every 24 hours from property management companies and electronic rent payment services across the country. ...... Some cost as low as $6.95 per month; others charge annual fees upwards of $95-plus. The services are usually rent payment platforms with the additional option to report your payments to your credit report. ....... people who have little to no credit, or a rock-bottom score, will benefit the most from reporting their payment history to credit bureaus...... TransUnion states that out of a sample of 300,000 residents, 8% of the population with no credit score achieved an average score of 635 after reporting their rental payments on time.
