Arizona’s gym owners want big brother off their lats.
Some of the state’s fitness centers have announced that they will remain open in defiance of an order Gov. Doug Ducey (R) issued on Monday mandating they close, along with bars, movie theaters, and water parks. That order has come amidst a rising number of coronavirus cases in the state.
“We were asked to close in five hours,” Tom Hatten, CEO of the Mountainside Fitness chain, said at a press conference, according to the Washington Examiner. Hatten has since filed a lawsuit against Ducey over his closure order, which his complaint calls “arbitrary and irrational.”
On Tuesday, police charged a Mountainside manager at one of their Scottsdale locations with a misdemeanor for keeping that gym open. Hatten has said he’d pay any fines his employees received.
Other gyms are turning up the resistance as well.
Lifetime Fitness gyms closed in response to the governor’s order. But on Tuesday the gym chain’s CEO Jeff Zwiefel said that they’d be reopening the next day, according to AZ Central.
Fit Body Bootcamp, which describes itself as a “boutique personal training studio” has also said it will stay open.
“When I think of a gym, I think of a place you walk into and you’ve got the bench presses, and the squat machines, and the curl, and all that stuff, and rows of bikes and rows of equipment,” said the franchise owner of one Phoenix-area Fit Body Bootcamp to Arizona’s Family. “That’s just not what we are.”
Arizona’s Family reports that at least two other gyms are open in the Phoenix area in spite of Ducey’s order.
The unwillingness of large segments of the fitness industry to close down again illustrates just how tired Americans are of seemingly endless lockdowns that have kept them inside and endangered their businesses. Many of these gym owners complained to the media that they’re adopting the same cleaning and social distancing protocols as businesses that are allowed to remain open.
It’s a sign that state officials are going to be increasingly hardpressed to force people back into their homes, regardless of the public health merits.
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The Outpost is a ripping combat film that demonstrates one more time how soldiers confronting death in some godforsaken outback can be fatally hobbled by the micro-management of top brass who are in turn taking orders from bumbling politicians half a world away. Why do some things never change?
Based on a true-life book by CNN journalist Jake Tapper, the movie is set at a remote U.S. Army outpost in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in 2009, the eighth year of the Afghan war. The base has no particular strategic value and is in fact situated in a valley ringed by three mountains (a violation of a fundamental law of combat: “Aren’t we supposed to be on top of the mountain to win this thing?” one soldier asks). The mountains are crawling with Taliban fighters, whose sudden bursts of gunfire crackle through the hours of every day. It’s a rocky and inhospitable land, populated by villagers that American officers are naively eager to aid, but whom none of the grunts trust. When a group of new soldiers arrives by helicopter, the commanding officer (Orlando Bloom in a nicely modulated performance) greets them with, “welcome to the dark side of the moon, gentlemen.” (Welcome to Bulgaria, actually, where the movie was in fact shot.)
The director, Rod Lurie, is a West Point graduate who served four years as a U.S. Army officer. He conveys the profane male camaraderie of outpost life and the headlong chaos of combat with a close-up familiarity uncommon in these sorts of films. He is aided immeasurably by cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore, whose long tracking shots through dark rooms and then right out again into blazing sunlight to twirl with the actors through gunfire and explosions, is a rare achievement in war-movie camerawork.
The cast includes a number of showbiz offspring: Scott Eastwood, Milo Gibson, James Jagger, Will Attenborough. They’re all fine, but it’s Eastwood who gravitates quickly to the center of the movie. As we know by now, while he may lack only a dead cigarillo stuck in his mug to fully recall the scowling sang-froid of his father Clint, he has his own reserves of charisma. As commanding officers come and go at the outpost, Eastwood’s character—Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha—convincingly evolves into a leader himself. In one portentous scene, in which Romesha has led some of his men out on a daytime patrol into the mountains and stands with them looking down at the outpost as the Taliban might do, he says, “Every time they take a potshot at us, they’re figuring us out.” Then he points out the damage that enemy fighters could easily inflict in an attack, taking out the Americans’ armored vehicles, ammo depot, the base generators—and finally the Americans themselves, who’d be left exposed and helpless.
The Taliban actually are planning a major assault, an inevitability that further agitates the already jumpy Staff Sergeant Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones in yet another fascinating performance). The good news for Carter and the outpost’s other 53 soldiers is that there’s a squad of combat helicopters that’s ready to fly to the rescue when the Taliban—some 400 of them—launch their assault. The bad news is that those choppers are two hours away. Can the Americans hold out? That, of course, is what makes this a story worth retelling—somehow they do; and in the end they prevail.
Lurie devotes the second half of the movie to giving this ferocious battle its due, with breathtaking stretches of wonderfully well-choreographed action – some of it unflinchingly bloody—and an accumulation of telling detail: a body bag being zipped up over a dead man’s face; the nonstop sound inside an armored Humvee of bullets slapping the vehicle’s outer skin; and the drained faces of men watching their comrades going down, or already dead on the ground.
The movie is an instant classic, and it’s a shame it can’t be shown on a big theatrical screen at the moment. But it can still reach out and excite you from a smaller one. And also make you wonder why, after 19 years, we are still in Afghanistan.
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Ukraine Central Bank Chief Cites “Systematic Political Pressure” In Shock Protest Resignation Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/03/2020 – 06:55
Ukraine’s business community and investors are reeling — not to mention a presidential office eager to present itself as driving a longtime clean-up of the corrupt banking sector — over the Wednesday shock resignation of Ukraine’s highly respected central bank chief Yakiv Smolii. His tenure was supposed to go until 2025, but President Zelensky accepted the resignation Thursday.
The timing couldn’t be more suspect: the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) governor announced he resigned due to “systematic political pressure” which many believe came directly from Zelensky and his lawmakers, but also oligarchs said to be close to the young ‘reformer’ president.
It was only last month that Kiev secured a crucial $5 billion eighteen-month loan to help weather the economic slump due to the COVID-19 crisis, $2.9 billion of which has already been distributed.
Ukraine’s now former National Bank Governor Yakiv Smolii, via Reuters.
Smolii’s letter of resignation submitted to President Volodymyr Zelensky said as follows: “For a long time, the National Bank of Ukraine has been under systematic political pressure,” the surprise statement catching the entire nation off guard began.
“This makes it impossible for me, as the Governor, to effectively carry out my duties as the head of the National Bank of Ukraine and interact with other government agencies,” according to the statement posted prominently on the NBU’s official site.
I’ve submitted my resignation appeal to the President. This decision has been taken as an answer to systematic political pressure that denied fulfillment of my duties as the Governor. Let it be a warning for attempts to undermine institutional independence of the central bank. pic.twitter.com/cFQuAlakrM
No doubt this line Smollii posted in a social media statement has raised eyebrows at the IMF:
“Let it be a warning for attempts to undermine institutional independence of the central bank.”
It also comes at a deeply vulnerable moment for Ukraine’s economy, already expected to contract 5% this year due to the pandemic.
“Under his leadership, Ukraine has made important strides in achieving price stability, amply demonstrating that an independent central bank is a key element of modern macroeconomic policymaking,” an IMF spokesman said in a statement on Thursday.
“That is why the independence of the NBU is at the centre of Ukraine’s Fund-supported programme, and why it must be maintained under his successor.”
Zelensky’s office sought to reassure markets amid the rolling fallout: “Ensuring the central bank’s independence remains our priority,” a brief statement said. And further the finance ministry was forced to cancel $1.75 billion Eurobond sale, Bloomberg reports, and noted: “The hryvnia weakened 1.3% to its lowest level against the dollar since April and the yield on the government’s dollar bonds due 2028 jumped 33 basis points to 7.42%.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3goeLIG Tyler Durden
Action Park was the Somalia of theme parks, a New Jersey thunderdome for people who preferred risk to rules. It was founded in the mid-1970s by Gene Mulvihill, an eccentric businessman who dreamed of a participatory place that offered more than just the illusion of danger.
“My father seized upon the idea that we were all tired of being coddled, of society dictating our behaviors and lecturing us on our vices,” Gene’s son and onetime employee Andy Mulvihill writes in Action Park, an extremely entertaining memoir co-authored by the journalist Jake Rossen. So the park erected attractions that ceded high levels of control to the patrons. “Guests riding down an asbestos chute on a plastic cart,” for example, “could choose whether to adopt a leisurely pace or tear down at thirty miles per hour and risk hitting a sharp turn that would eject them into the woods.”
Those riders just might be drunk too. Action Park sold a lot of beer, eventually building its own brewery.
The park survived into the ’90s. Mulvihill’s book covers virtually everything you’d want to know about it, including the inevitable legal and regulatory battles. Injuries were common, but somehow they became part of the draw. “The risk did not keep people away,” the proprietor’s son concludes. “The risk is what drew them to us.”
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Action Park was the Somalia of theme parks, a New Jersey thunderdome for people who preferred risk to rules. It was founded in the mid-1970s by Gene Mulvihill, an eccentric businessman who dreamed of a participatory place that offered more than just the illusion of danger.
“My father seized upon the idea that we were all tired of being coddled, of society dictating our behaviors and lecturing us on our vices,” Gene’s son and onetime employee Andy Mulvihill writes in Action Park, an extremely entertaining memoir co-authored by the journalist Jake Rossen. So the park erected attractions that ceded high levels of control to the patrons. “Guests riding down an asbestos chute on a plastic cart,” for example, “could choose whether to adopt a leisurely pace or tear down at thirty miles per hour and risk hitting a sharp turn that would eject them into the woods.”
Those riders just might be drunk too. Action Park sold a lot of beer, eventually building its own brewery.
The park survived into the ’90s. Mulvihill’s book covers virtually everything you’d want to know about it, including the inevitable legal and regulatory battles. Injuries were common, but somehow they became part of the draw. “The risk did not keep people away,” the proprietor’s son concludes. “The risk is what drew them to us.”
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So, that’s over 9 million COVID tests done in the UK up to June 27th a.m. Sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it?
As of today (July 1st), that count has moved on to 9,426,631 – fourth in the world in total tests! (The UK is also fourth in the world in COVID deaths per million population, and closing in on Andorra for third place; but that’s another story). Now… is that figure believable?
I recently wrote a paper about understanding the published statistics – deaths, cases, tests – on the effects of this virus around the world. It is very long, and a little bit technical – although it does include lots of pretty (and not so pretty) pictures! Those interested in the detail can find it here. I had a bit of a laugh when one commenter at “the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change” mentioned me (though, I must say, not totally approvingly) in the same breath as Judith Curry, who is a true climate-science expert!
I found some interesting discrepancies between the two. One was with the Swedish cases numbers – a political hot potato, because of the lack of lockdown in Sweden. With the help of a Swedish commenter at WattsUpWithThat, I found that the issue seems to arise because the Swedes allocate each positive test to the date the test was done, whereas Our World in Data (whose data, if I understand right, comes via the World Health Organization) allocates each positive test to the date the test was reported, which is often days or even weeks later.
More concerning, though, was the UK’s data on numbers of tests carried out. Now for the UK, new cases and deaths reported by Worldometers and Our World in Data are in sync, with Worldometers always one day ahead. That’s consistent with the idea that Our World in Data gets its feed via a third party. The UK does report tests on a daily basis, but there’s often a gap of three or four days before a particular day’s tests appear at Our World in Data.
So… the daily Twitter update, shown at the head, gives the numbers of new cases and deaths on the day in question as 890 and 100 respectively. I’d expect those two numbers to appear in Our World in Data against the following day, June 28th. And indeed, they do:
But what about those numbers of tests? 4,852,547 is the cumulative total recorded here, against the 9,067,577 stated in the Twitter feed. This means the total reported on the Twitter feed was 87% greater than – i.e. almost twice – the “official” figure which, if I understand right, must have been reported to the WHO. That’s an awful lot of missing test kits!
Is such a discrepancy normal? To answer that question, I compared the UK with other countries. I took the cumulative total numbers of tests per million population reported at Worldometers up to June 23rd, and compared these with the numbers reported at Our World in Data up to June 26th. I had no expectation that the numbers would match anywhere near exactly. Indeed, what I found is that the Worldometers numbers were consistently above the Our World in Data ones, in most cases by between 1% and 18%. This seems reasonable to me, given that testing is still ramping up in many countries, and the Worldometers count will probably include situations such as test kits sent out but not yet returned.
I then plotted the numbers of tests per million from the two data sources on a scatterplot:
The plot thickens! The UK shows by far the biggest discrepancy in absolute terms among all the countries, and as a ratio it is only surpassed by Peru and France (and the French are not providing any meaningful data on tests at all). Of the three other “bad boys,” two, Belgium and Spain, are also among the countries hardest hit by the virus. Exactly the places, where you would expect there to be most political pressure to make the numbers look good!
“The aim seems to be to show the largest possible number of tests, even at the expense of understanding.”
And one thing more. As I discovered while writing my article, the UK’s statistics collectors were recently required to move from their original basis of counting people tested to counting tests performed instead. This, obviously, resulted in increases in the headline numbers of tests right through the course of the epidemic. It also, unfortunately, meant that all the daily numbers of tests done in the UK prior to April 26th got wiped. And, while this move did bring the UK more into line with many other countries’ reporting procedures, countries such as Canada, Japan and the Netherlands are still reporting by people tested. So, my guess is that this move (likely both difficult and expensive), the over-reporting of test numbers, and the poor presentation of the data that Sir David criticizes, have all come about because of political pressure from those who want the numbers to look as good as possible. Sigh.
So, is the UK government misleading the public on COVID tests? Sir David Norgrove obviously thinks so; and I agree with him.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BZvOBO Tyler Durden
Guns, Drugs, & Murder: Over 700 Arrested In UK’s “Biggest Ever” Crackdown After “Secure” Network Hacked Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/03/2020 – 05:45
UK police have arrested over 700 suspects, seized US$67 Million and over two tons of drugs after an international team broke the encryption on a not-so-secure app used by gangsters to coordinate money laundering, black market trade, human trafficking and murder-for-hire, according to the Independent.
Known as EncroChat, it was used on bespoke mobile phones that were designed to be secure against police infiltration and examination.
But in April, an international team cracked its encryption, started spying on users and harvesting their data as they carried on unawares. –Independent
“There were 60,000 users worldwide and around 10,000 users in the UK,” said the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) of the ongoing raids. “The sole use was for coordinating and planning the distribution of illicit commodities, money laundering and plotting to kill rival criminals.”
The secretive communications network was cracked in April, after agencies in France and the Netherlands cracked into the EncroChatapp installed on mobile phones which was supposed to provide security against government infiltration and examination. Once the app was cracked, agencies began monitoring the gangsters’ “every move” according to the NCA.
“It is the biggest and most significant operation of its kind in the UK,” said a spokesperson.
Hundreds of staff worked to analyse the data and identify EncroChat users, working through millions of messages and hundreds of thousands of images.
It resulted in 746 arrests across the UK so far, including “high-value targets” and “iconic” fugitives who had previously escaped justice.
The operation has also revealed the identities of an unknown number of corrupt police officers and employees in different law enforcement agencies. –Independent
While EncroChat’s website is no longer functional, an archived copy from March 2019 reveals features which attracted criminals, including self-destructing messages, panic wipe, password wipe, tamper proofing and ‘guaranteed anonymity.’
The company described their ‘flagship product’ EncroChat as follows:
“It is a user-friendly secure instant messaging client designed for mobile environments. Security is guaranteed using our EncroChat Messaging Protocol. This is an end-to-end encryption messaging protocol which provides excellent forward and future secrecy properties for symmetric-key updating, along with improved deniability guarantees over the OTR protocol and its variants. We have also vastly simplified user verification to remove the complexities of encryption for end users.” -EncroChat
According to the report, EncroChat phones were used by the “middle tier upwards” when it came to gangsters who “get their hands dirty.”
According to Steve Jupp, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for serious organised crime, the operation is “an unparalleled victory against the kingpin criminals.”
“By dismantling these groups, we have saved countless lives and protected communities across the UK,” he added.
In addition to the cash and drugs, raids produced 77 firearms and grenades and 1,800 rounds of ammunition.
We imagine there’s a very nervous software engineer or two out there…
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Under the shadow of coronavirus, the French people people have elected their mayors and local councilors for the next six years. Well, some of them did, as a vast wave of apathy swept the nation, leading to a turnout of just 44.7% (19 points lower than in 2014). Perhaps the COVID innovation of mass house arrests has turned the whole nation into homebodies.
Results of second round of French municipal elections in selected cities. Image credit: Visactu.
Green candidates, often in alliance with the Pinks (Socialists), have seized control of twenty cities, including Bordeaux, Lyon, and Strasbourg. The media is trying to spin this as some kind of national mandate. Le Monde claims President Emmanuel Macron must “green” his policies as a result, but that seems like a great overstatement.
The victories of the bobo-green left are certainly a significant indicator. But really it only concerns a couple million urbanites. What is more striking for me is the complete fragmentation of the political landscape. The incumbent mayors who were reelected to office typically did so by distancing themselves from their national party.
This was the case of the mayoress of Paris, the archetypal wine-bar feminist Anne Hidalgo, who handily won reelection in the face two equally female rivals (Macron’s health minister Agnès Buzyn – the subject of many anti-Semitic criticisms – and former conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy’s former justice minister, Rachida Dati). Hidalgo is notionally affiliated with the Socialist Party, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from her campaign.
Rachida Dati votes in Paris.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) made one great gain: her partner Louis Aliot has been elected mayor of the southeastern city (120,000 inhabitants) of Perpigan. This is the first time the RN will be managing such a large city. His campaign rarely used Marine’s image or the RN’s famous flame-logo, preferring to cite the backing of non-RN hard-conservative politicians like Robert Ménard (who in some respects is more radical than Marine, as he supports collecting ethnic statistics for instance).
The new mayor of Perpignan: Louis Aliot.
Aliot proclaimed of his election: “It’s the proof that there is no longer a glass ceiling for the National Rally. This so-called ‘republican front’ has fallen tonight in Perpignan and could fall elsewhere in the future.”
The RN may have kept a half-dozen mayorships across the country, but it largely failed to make inroads otherwise. That’s out of 30,143 municipalities in France. Otherwise, the RN’s share of local councilors has collapsed from 1438 in 2014 to 840 today.
Significantly, women have made some progress in these elections. Women have gone from making up 16% of mayors in 2014 to 19.3% in 2020. The smalnness of this increase is essentially due to people reelecting their mayors in the countryside. By contrast, women now lead exactly half of France’s 10 largest cities. This is representative of real power dynamics and of the feminization of elite institutions in general. Already, any overrepresentation of men in any prestigious institutions is automatically assumed to be morally condemnable and needing of rectification. The pink fog continues to descend upon the West.
The biggest news is perhaps the collapse of Macron’s party at local level, failing to conquer or keep a single large city. Le Monde deemed this “a genuine Berezina” for the president.
All this suggests French citizens’ disconnect from politics in general. Elections are held with yawn-inducing frequency in France. Citizens are expected to be informed and care enough to regularly vote in municipal, county (départemental), regional, national (parliamentary and presidential), and European elections. What’s the point of voting for so many offices, especially when these lack visibility or discernible power?
The ruling political parties, which used to be quite well-organized and implanted across the country, are being reduced to personalistic and one-off phenomena, to brands. Macron jury-rigged a party in 2017, appointing many incompetents in the process, but has no local presence. Neither does Marine Le Pen.
National elections remain the most important, but there is a real challenge when the national elections do not actually correspond to a country’s underlying power dynamics (witness the failure of Trumpism in the United States, undermined by an erratic president, the systematic opposition of vast swathes of officialdom at all levels, and the failure to organize the Republican Party into a coherent populist machine).
Overt politics is being reduced to empty fad after empty fad. We have a plethora of talkative candidates with ever-more indistinguishable messages, with unclear responsibilities or mandates, most remarkable for their cosmetic differences.
French elites are quite aware of how alienated the French people are from “their” democracy. As a remedy, people are trying direct democracy. A “climate convention” of citizens was recently organized – theoretically chosen according to lot in true Athenian fashion. In fact, the convention was presided by politicians and think-tankers close to the Greens and the Socialist Party, and the “ordinary citizens” were vetted by the organizers, skewing the convention’s results to the left. Still, Macron is now being pressured to follow their lead.
Éric Zemmour (the Gargamal lookalike) making his modest proposal.
This initiative led the conservative pundit Éric Zemmour to make the following suggestion on live television: “I propose a citizens’ convention on immigration and demography. I am even prepared to preside it! With a referendum at the end!” A fine idea. As we know, are liberal-globalists oh so love democracy, but for some reason do not like the idea of citizens coming together to decide on this most fundamental question of national destiny.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZwLCnQ Tyler Durden
As pubs around the UK gear up for reopening after over 100 days of lockdown-based closure, you might expect that swathes of the population are raring to get back through the doors.
While 20 percent miss it a fair bit, almost half said they are either miss the pub not very much or not at all. A quarter said that they don’t go to the pub anyway.
It seems a lot has changed in old blighty since we left…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VJfI6l Tyler Durden
