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Police are breaking up “coronavirus parties” in New Jersey, authorities are hunting down a Florida pastor for violating a ‘health order’ to not hold services, state troopers are enforcing quarantine orders along the Louisiana-Texas border, and yet it’s business as usual for US military recruiting even as calls grow to close boot camps across the United States, especially at hard-hit coronavirus hot spots on the East and West coasts.

“Marine recruiters in the state hit hardest by the novel coronavirus have grave warnings about the military’s decision to continue sending young men and women off to boot camp in the middle of a global pandemic,” reports Military.com. “Marines at New York recruiting stations say it’s only a matter of time before COVID-19, the serious illness caused by the coronavirus, sweeps through one of the service’s two entry-level training depots.”

Efforts have been implemented at Army and Marine recruiting offices to do remote virtual initial recruiting interviews; however, boot camp training grounds which see thousands of young future Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen conduct drills and exercises in close quarters – also sleeping in close quarter barracks – have taken no initiative to halt or alter training. Crowded chow halls and dining facilities are also potential places of rapid outbreak.

Top Pentagon brass has said keeping entry-level recruit training operational is essential to national security, as Military.com notes based on a DoD policy ruling:

The Pentagon has decided that keeping all the services’ entry-level training camps up and running is critical to national security. The decision was reportedly at odds with what some service leaders recommended: a temporary pause on recruit shipping until the threat of the coronavirus lessened.

Defense Department officials overrode the recommendations from senior military leaders to halt training for 30 days, The Washington Post reported March 16.

As of late in the day Monday, the Marine Corps announced it would delay sending new recruits to Parris Island, South Carolina. Yet basic training for the thousands of recruits already there will continue, the statement said.

The Marine Corps are putting a halt on sending recruits to Parris Island, but training for recruits already there will continue, “with continued emphasis on personal and environmental cleanliness and social distancing,” USMC announces.

— paul mcleary (@paulmcleary) March 30, 2020

It may be too-little-too-late, as one Marine interviewed by Military.com said, “Decision-makers are absolutely in denial if they believe high rates of infection and hospitalization will not happen on the depot under close proximity and enclosed spaces.”

The Marine and others interviewed are worried that due to the Pentagon policy it’s only a matter of time before the virus rips through lower enlisted ranks, itself a huge potential  risk to national security and defense readiness.

“How will we … explain to the families that put their trust in the Marine Corps if something does — and it will — happen to the recruit?” the Marine asked. “Why do we always wait until it’s too late before we take action?”

And another said: “We are putting lives in danger en route to [boot camp], and we are taking even a bigger risk by mixing the new recruits with the recruits and permanent personnel on the depot.”

On Monday the Pentagon also announced it currently has 1,087 confirmed coronavirus cases DoD-wide, which includes civilian contractors, up from 600 on Friday.

Authored by Guido Taietti via GreatGameIndia.com,

Five years ago, Italian state owned media Company, Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana, exposed dark efforts by China on viruses. The video, which was broadcast in November, 2015, showed how Chinese scientists were doing biological experiments on a SARS connected virus believed to be Coronavirus, derived from bats and mice, asking whether it was worth the risk in order to be able to modify the virus for compatibility with human organisms.

Below is a transcription of the Italian broadcast translated in English…

Chinese Biological Experiments

Chinese scientists have created a pulmonary supervirus from bats and mice only for study reasons but there are many questionable aspects to this. Is it worth the risk? It’s an experiment, of course, but it is worrisome. It worries many scientists: It is a group of Chinese researchers attaching a protein taken from bats to the SARS virus, Acute Pneumonia, derived from mice. The output is a super coronavirus that could affect man. It remains closed in laboratories and it is only for study purposes, but is it worth the risk – creating such a great threat only for examination purposes?

The debate about the risks of research is as old as science itself. Like the myth of Icarus, who plunged from the Sky and perished in the sea, having gone too close to the Sun with the wings of wax designed by his father!

Chinese scientists experiment on SARS virus to infect humans. Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana

Here is an experiment in China, in which a group of scientists has managed to develop a chimera – an organism modified by attaching the surface protein of a coronavirus found in bats of the common species called the Great Horseshoe Bat, to a virus that causes SARS in mice, although in a non-fatal form. It was suspected that the protein could make the chimeric hybrid organism suitable for affecting humans, and the experiment confirmed it.

It is precisely this molecule, called SHCO14, that allows the coronavirus to attach itself to our respiratory cells and to trigger the syndrome. According to researchers, the two organisms, the original and even more so the engineered one, can infect humans directly from bats, without going through an intermediate species like the mouse, and it is this eventuality that raises many controversies.

Just one year ago (this broadcast is of 2015), the U.S. government suspended research funding, which aimed to make viruses more contagious. The moratorium did not stop the work of the Chinese on SARS, which was already in advanced stages and looked relatively harmless.

According to a section of the scientific community, it is in fact not dangerous. The probability that the virus may pass to our species was insignificant compared to the benefits of the virus – an argument that many other experts rejected. First, because the relationship between risk and benefit is difficult to evaluate and second, because especially in these times, it is more prudent to not put into circulation an organism that can escape or be removed from the control of laboratories.

As soon that this broadcast went viral on the Italian social media, journalists and experts began explaining it away saying, that the virus in the video was not COVID-19. Even the British journal Nature, which wrote the very publication this Italian show was based on, clarified that the virus the broadcast talked about was not related to the “Natural” COVID-19.

However, that is beside the point. This is not to say that the viruses are literally the same. This is to say that the information presented in the video is consistent with the information that China is doing a lot of research on bioweapons, and that the impact of the virus in the broadcast has a lot in common with mainstream information about the symptoms of COVID-19.

The central monitor room at China’s National Bio-safety Laboratory. Nature

Moreover, Nature itself had done a piece in February, 2017, on the BSL-4 laboratory in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raising valid concerns and theories, and wondering out loud whether experimentation with deadly viruses was a good idea.

“BSL-4 is the highest level of bio-containment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial….

Future plans include studying the pathogen that causes SARS, which also doesn’t require a BSL-4 lab, before moving on to Ebola and the West African Lassa virus, which do… Worries surround the Chinese lab… The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times… The plan to expand into a network heightens such concerns. One BSL-4 lab in Harbin is already awaiting accreditation; the next two are expected to be in Beijing and Kunming.”

In January, 2020, Nature then sheepishly added an editor’s note to the top of the article, saying that there is in fact “no evidence” of this lab playing a role in the outbreak of coronavirus and that scientists believe that the source is likely “an animal market.”

Meanwhile, the Italian scientists at Milan University are investigating whether the coronavirus outbreak actually began in Italy in the last quarter of 2019. Milan and Lodi cities of Lombardy administrative region reported a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in October and December of 2019. Meanwhile, amidst worldwide criticism, a $20 trillion lawsuit has been filed against China for waging Biological war using Coronavirus.

Signs of social unrest in major Western cities could be developing over the next few weeks, and as we previously warned last Friday, a global depression with high unemployment could unleash a “social bomb” in European countries and or North America. 

At the moment, Italy is the most high-risk country in the West to experience a potential breakdown in society. The country is suffering from an explosion in COVID-19 cases and deaths, a collapsed hospital system, an economic depression, and high unemployment. Sounds a lot like Venezuela… 

Italy has called up the military in recent weeks to enforce lockdowns across the country. There have also been reports of organized gangs operating in the Southern part of the country that are using social media to plot raids on businesses, reported Bloomberg.

It’s a race against time for Italian officials to prevent social unrest: 

“We need to act fast, more than fast,” Mayor Leoluca Orlando of Palermo, a city of Southern Italy, told daily La Stampa. “Distress could turn into violence.”

Lockdowns in the country have entered the fourth week, Health Minister Roberto Speranza said in a statement on Monday recommending that the government must extend the countrywide lockdown through Easter. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has been injecting stimulus into the economy to prevent a complete economic crash, and the next round could hit as early as mid-April, worth $33 billion.

Italy is the epicenter of COVID-19 in Europe. As of Monday afternoon, 101,739 confirmed cases had been reported, with 11,591 deaths. The growth rates in deaths in Northern Italy is still on an exponential curve. 

“Discomfort and malaise are growing, and we are recording worrying reports of protest and anger that is being exploited by criminals who want to destabilize the system,” said Orlando.

“The more time passes, the more resources are exhausted. The few savings people are running out. This tells us socio-economic issues will erupt.”

The most southern part of the country has the highest unemployment. Stories are already starting to surface of social unrest. People, with no money, are now starting to raid supermarkets.  

#Bread and food riots in South Italy! In #Naples and #Palermo, where countless unemployed people live, supermarkets are being protected by police. The shelves are swept empty, customers carry home heavy shopping bags… that are snatched openly in the street.#coronavirus #Italy pic.twitter.com/MXA7dsPvwc

— peter patti (@peterpatti) March 28, 2020

According to La Repubblica daily, locals in Palermo have been raiding stores – telling cashiers they have no money to eat.

🇮🇹 Ayer se produjo un incidente en Palermo que ha hecho saltar las alarmas en el país. Una veintena de personas trató de sacar varios carros llenos de productos de un supermercado Lidl negándose a pagar. “Basta de estar en casa, no tenemos dinero para pagar, tenemos que comer”. pic.twitter.com/bS2f0I1Fv3

— Descifrando la Guerra (@descifraguerra) March 28, 2020

In other Sicilian towns, locals have intimidated shop owners for free food. The region is home to millions of people that could be weeks away from major social unrest. 

“I am afraid that concerns shared by much of the population — about health, income, the future — will turn into anger and hatred if this crisis continues,” Giuseppe Provenzano, Italy’s minister overseeing southern regions, told La Repubblica.

Italy is further down the line in the outbreak than most other countries and threatens to unleash the next chapter of the crisis, that is, social unrest.

What’s happening in Italy could be coming to America. 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A top drug dealer in the UK has revealed that people are “panic buying” cocaine and marijuana to help them get through the coronavirus lockdown.

The drug dealer, who has 20 dealers out on the street and 200 regular customers, told the Guardian, “People are panicking – the amounts of cannabis they’re buying is ridiculous – so we are just dealing to regulars now.”

He says that the price of cocaine is set to surge because there are no new shipments coming in from abroad for at least 6 weeks.

“I’m maintaining the same prices I’ve always charged but I’m concerned that, when stock begins to run low, people higher up the chain will charge more or cut the cocaine and decrease its quality,” said the dealer.

He added that people running out of money due to becoming unemployed as a result of the quarantine remains a primary concern, “but we’ll always have the regular cokeheads who buy most days.”

Dealers are also offering to take bank transfers from regular customers and post drugs through the letterbox to cut down on potentially spreading the coronavirus infection.

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Sweden has taken a slightly different approach to coronavirus than the rest of the world, allowing life to go on as ‘normal’ with a few exceptions.

Unlike neighboring Denmark – which has restricted meetings to 10 people or less, Swedes are still going out to nightclubs, hanging out with friends, and even ‘enjoying ice creams beneath a giant Thor statue in Mariatorget square,’ according to the BBC.

“We who are adults need to be exactly that: adults. Not spread panic or rumors,” said Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in a televised address to the country last weekend.

“No one is alone in this crisis, but each person has a heavy responsibility.“

And while the country has limited gatherings to 50 people as of Sunday, the government is largely leaving decisions over self-isolation and social distancing up to the citizens. BBC notes that almost half of Stockholm residents are working remotely, and that traffic is quieter than usual. Stockholm’s public transport company SL reports 50% fewer riders on subway and commuter trains last week.

Stockholm Business Region, a state-funded company that supports the city’s global business community, estimates that rises to at least 90% in the capital’s largest firms, thanks to a tech-savvy workforce and a business culture that has long promoted flexible and remote working practices.

“Every company that has the possibility to do this, they are doing it, and it works,” says its CEO Staffan Ingvarsson.

His words cut to the heart of the government’s strategy here: self-responsibility. Public health authorities and politicians are still hoping to slow down the spread of the virus without the need for draconian measures. –BBC

According to the report, there are ‘guidelines’ but not strict rules. People are advised to stay home if they’re sick or elderly, wash hands, and avoid non-essential travel whenever possible.

So far the country has had roughly 3,500 cases and 105 deaths.

Demography may also be a relevant factor in the country’s approach. In contrast to the multi-generational homes in Mediterranean countries, more than half of Swedish households are made up of one person, which cuts the risk of the virus spreading within families. –BBC

The BBC also notes that swedes love the outdoors – and officials have said that forcing people to stay inside would be physically and mentally unhealthy.

“We have to combine looking at minimising the health effects of the virus outbreak and the economic impacts of this health crisis,” said Stockholm Chamber of Commerce CEO Andreas Hatzigeorgiou.

“The business community here really thinks that the Swedish government and the Swedish approach is more sensible than in many other countries.“

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

We’ve reached the next stage of the EU’s evolution, whether it will adopt a common bond market or not. It’s been clear for a long time that something had to change if the European Union was to survive its political transformation.

And that issue is the formation of a shared debt structure underpinning the euro, commonly referred to as Eurobonds.

But in light of the current crisis they’ve been given the euphemism, “Coronabonds” and sold that way ad nauseum in the financial press, especially by Bloomberg.

Why? Because that’s the next step that’s been on the docket for a long time; pushing the EU to its breaking point and waiting for just the right moment to bulldozer what’s left of national sovereignty in Europe in the name of saving lives.

It’s truly stunning how inhuman political leaders are in this world. This is not to say I’m surprised but it’s still stunning.

This has zero to do with actually fighting the disease at this point. Just printing money and backing it with shared responsibility bonds is fundamentally no different than printing money locally to do the same thing.

It’s still not addressing the real problem… Europe is broke. Its bond market is non-functional under a negative interest rate regime.

The only way to bring legitimacy to pricing these ‘coronabonds’ is to have the ECB be an unlimited buyer of them.

And how it that supposed to build confidence in them exactly? I guess the EU actually agreeing about anything I suppose is good news?

A teleconference among EU leaders last week ended in apparent white-hot fury as the bloc remains completely split on the issue as it has been for decades.

The map from Bloomberg below hasn’t shifted with the COVID-19 crisis despite the hopes and strong-arm tactics in recent months by ECB President Christine Lagarde and French President Emmanuel Macron.

And with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s political capital nearly spent the only position she can take so as to not be thrown out of power is to accede to the domestic fiscal conservatives.

No surprise there. If you are looking for anything resembling leadership from Merkel you need a trip to the eye doctor. Merkel represents stasis and little else. She is committed to that because she can’t do much more.

What’s worse is that she has done everything imaginable to remain in power at a time when decisive action from Germany is needed one way or the other.

Merkel’s classic dithering in the face of difficult choices is just one more source of instability across the EU political and financial landscape giving investors the heebie-jeebies.

She cannot be seen as siding with France, Italy and Spain in bailing them out of their bad choices. But she really wants to. That’s why she pulled so many strings to help the globalist government in Italy led by Giuseppe Conte block Lega’s Matteo Salvini from taking over.

But those countries’ bad choices were born of the structural inequities built into the structure of the euro in the first place. And those structural problems were always leading us to this moment.

Had Salvini forced new elections and took over, by now, he would have made an uncomfortable choice for the EU, which would have been introduce a domestic parallel currency, the mini-BOT, while Italy faced this crisis mostly alone.

The crowd in Europe screaming “moral hazard” over bailouts are absolutely right. But, at the same time, they have to accept responsibility that the debts they are owed need to be written down substantially and the whole idea of a pan-European union chalked up to a bad idea and ended once and for all.

Now, given all of this, what’s fascinating is that even the immediate threat of COVID-19 and the draconian shut down of vast stretches of the European economy hasn’t budged either side from their position.

That doesn’t bode well for the future of the European Union in its current form. The northern bloc has hardened its stance. The U.K. is gone. And with its independence it is showing many countries in the EU what that independence gains them in terms of flexibility and nimbleness in dealing with the virus.

It’s not that the U.K. has made nothing but good choices but it’s far freer to adjust its response to the crisis than any of the EU member states who are trapped in an ossified and unresponsive bureaucracy more interested in virtue signaling about core European values than they are about saving the lives of the people whose values they are supposed to represent.

They keep trying to put a brave face on their disagreements. Read the Bloomberg article I linked to above, there is nothing but downplaying of the contempt these leaders have for each other at this time in there. They are facing real human crises and Emmanuel Macron is worried about the future of the Schengen Treaty and eurobonds.

Well, of course he is. I’m sure he’s also hoping COVID-19 wipes out members of the Gilet Jaunes in greater numbers than those loyal to the French state. But all deaths will be a bailout to the French state pension system, so, it’s all good there too.

The contempt Macron has for humanity is palpable. Honestly, he should really spend more time with Mike Pompeo to compare notes on how to wrap that contempt in a thin veneer of unctuous self-righteousness.

It’d be an improvement, frankly.

Macron is the one driving this virtue signaling, anti-human bus over the cliff. He was chosen for the job. And he chose Lagarde to force the evolution of the ECB.

The problem is the mask has slipped. No one is buying what they are selling in this crisis. To use a true humanitarian crisis for cynical political gain is depraved. And yet, that’s where we are and not just in Europe.

But its effects are most pronounced there because of how fundamentally unbalanced the playing field is between members.

Conte in Italy is in lockstep with Macron to politicize this as much as possible to pressure Merkel into caving in. But in the end he may face the reality that he’s failed. That will spell his end in Italy when the worst of the crisis is over.

For Merkel, I don’t think it will be up to her because the opposition to this stretches beyond her control. And she won’t be able to pull the same trick Helmut Kohl did to unilaterally pull Germany into the euro-zone without a vote.

But don’t think she won’t try.

In a crisis even incredibly unpopular leaders stay in power simply out of a perceived need for stability until it’s over.

That’s why there is this urgency to get this done now. Because Macron and his ilk know the window will close on them quickly if they don’t.

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