. . . the cttee members decide not to decide on the preliminaries of how to discuss the discussing of a Pacifica strategic plan (not least the need to pay $3.265m within the next six months to the Foundation for the Jewish Community, FJC); instead they decide to decide to defer the deciding to the next meeting . . .

It was even on the agenda – it’s just that in 1½hrs they never got to it coz they had agreed (without objection) to place it as the penultimate substantive matter, & having spent almost all their time on whether to run a pilot on advertising (underwriting), the grains of time had passed thru the egg-timer. Ah well, there’s always another one in two weeks’ time. (The meeting next Monday, called on 6Sep, was cancelled on 15Sep, without explanation or subsequent comment – but then it was denoted as “Purpose: Discuss Strategic Planning”. https://kpftx.org/pacalendar/cal_show1.php?eventdate=20200928)

[UPDATE . . . audiofile now posted, https://kpftx.org/archives/pnb/pnbstratcomm/200921/pnbstratcomm200921a.mp3 (1:18:48; the intended 90mins meeting started 21mins late; agree agenda, 2:44; advertising, 4:52-1:05:04; the last 13mins of the gathering spent lamenting the fact they never got to discuss “the strategic plan”).

[Highlight, from Our Grace, hallow’d be Thy name. Priceless:

I’ve been hearing, um, complaints & criticisms from a number of sources that Pacifica doesn’t have a strategic plan, & I would like to suggest that we, argh, at least start talking about it & – urgh – that we – I’d like to extend this meeting for 30 minutes to start a discussion about a strategic plan.

(1:07:19)
The effort to extend just withered. And died. Never put to the vote. There’s always next time.]

~~~

Apologies to the three- & four-year-olds of Tourcoing, France, on the Belgian border, 12May2020; photographer, Lionel Top.

Also recognition to the teacher, a profession much maligned by the barbarians. But much more meaningful, & solidarian, than verbal support is significant material support: here, the widespread use of daily rapid testing for SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19. As Michael Mina (Harvard public health) et al. argued even in late June, feasible on a universal basis is a $1 test giving a result within 15mins. It’s akin to a pregnancy test: it’s non-laboratory, just saliva on a paper strip impregnated with antigen (that’s a protein from the virus – non-infectious, please note! – that triggers a detectable immune response).

the 5mins vid,

details on the meat, identifying the people able to transmit the virus: that’s why a rapid result is needed, so it’s actionable (note, false negatives are irrelevant in practice coz they’re almost certainly picked up the next day, not least due to massive virus replication), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDj4Zyq3yOA&t=2m21s (15July) & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3seIAs-73G8 (5Aug)

the paper, 27June, ‘Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 surveillance’, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20136309v3 (also as downloadable PDF)

advocacy, https://www.rapidtests.org/ – and for those in the Heimat, https://rapidtests.de/

. . . so much for focusing on massive vaccine development funding, moreover, providing competing pharma with the guarantee that if they fail then the taxpayer pays for their failure, & if they come up with a winner then the shareholders take the profits. Brilliant. Not the Amerikan way but the capitalist way, when capitalist interests run the state . . .

~~~