. . . 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)
. . . 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 . . .
Yesterday I made the PNB-zombies-Karen post to two FB groups, Pacifica Radio Supporters & Pacifica Radiowaves. I noticed within an hour it had been deleted – praps even instantaneously, for all i know. A notification from FB said the post was spam.
It’s transpired that what FB deems spam is not the post as such but the site it linked to, namely this one, something i’ve often done since the middle of last year.
So the seriousness of the situation is much greater than i first thought. I’ve just noticed that all my posts linking to this blog have been deleted from the FB groups i’ve posted to.
I can’t find a way to appeal FB’s action: does anyone know different?
Anyway, g-d bless Mr Sugar Mountain, not least for the extra money he’s ‘earning’ during the COVID-19 global societal crisis. In the period depicted in the table above, from W18Mar to Tu19May, a day shy of nine weeks, it’s estimated from Forbes figures that his wealth increased by ~$25.3bn, from 54.7 to 80.0. That’s $408m every one of those 62 days; $17m every hour; $283 378 every second, so exceeding the annual wages of seven workers on $19.25 an hour (40 hours x 52) – makes Stalinism seem appealing.
And Pacifica’s revenue in a year? ~$10.9m (the FY2017 NETA figure rejected by the auditors). Zuckerberg ‘made’ that in 38.46 seconds – makes slavery seem fair.
On top of all this, 17 days have almost passed since the 19May calculation, adding perhaps another $6.9bn (17 x $408m). Overall, that’s +59% (32.2 ÷ 54.7) – makes the COVID-19 global societal crisis seem all worthwhile.
W13May2020 UPDATE . . . The Associated Press news agency has now released a 68-page CDC doc which includes the 17-page guidelines it had previously published. They’re here as Appendix 5 (pp. 42-67), albeit in a different format & physical appearance. Note that AP doesn’t shed any light on the 68 pages being “Appendix F”, of some unidentified doc.
The sector guidelines, & some other pages, were as of F24Apr subject to approval by the OIRA – “[t]he Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is a statutory part of the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President. OIRA is the United States Government’s central authority for the review of Executive Branch regulations, approval of Government information collections, establishment of Government statistical practices, and coordination of Federal privacy policy.”https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-regulatory-affairs/
communities of faith (that is, superstition cults);
employers with vulnerable workers;
restaurants & bars; &
mass transit administrators.
The fact the CDC puts superstition cults before workers, only shows how far pre-modern ideological practice has penetrated even the putative scientific. G-d bless Amerika.
Pages 10 & 11, on workplaces, are particularly relevant for Pacifica stations, not least for any resulting litigation concerning negligence, & so on. Also pp. 12-14 for arranging the wining & dining of those targeted donors.
The Emperor With No Clothes has spoken of hitting the body, with a tremendous, a powerful light, getting it inside the body, shining the light, shining the light inside the body. Even spoken of the disinfectant, injecting disinfectant into the veins of Amerika, almost a cleaning. The light. The disinfectant. Using medical doctors. But one thing the Bleach House hasn’t done publicly is revoke its F13Mar plan to vanquish Viro the Virus – but then it’s never been mentioned in a BH media briefing, not even by a journalist. And anyway, what do scientists know, huh? They even say things like “[a] pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness” (p. 4, added emphases), their main working assumption given the paucity of knowledge. That’s scientists for you, eh. Amerika wasn’t made to be constrained by science, by nature. We’re supernatural, extraterrestrial, g-dly.
. . . go! go! USA! . . . USA! USA! USA! . . . four more years! four more years! four more years! . . . this is what winning looks like . . . more & more presidential each & every day . . .#VeryStableGenius . . .
58 318 names appear on the Washington Wall, those who died or remain missing. Others are excluded, at the request of family. And 14 are clerical errors: they survived the war.
War data are notoriously inexact, & not always made public. Similarly, problems arise in attributing death to a new disease. Nevertheless, trusted sources say the last 58 001 COVID-19 deaths have occurred since Sa21Mar. So not decades or years, but 38 days, 5½ weeks, at the rate of >10 001 deaths a week. Not exactly the message coming daily from the Bleach House.
In Vietnam, the highest annual US deaths was 16 899, in the momentous year of 1968. That works out at 47 a day. Just last weekend, COVID-19 daily death was ~2 001 (three-day rolling average). That’s a difference of x~40. To repeat: the recent daily death rate for COVID-19 is x40 that for the worst year in Vietnam – for Amerikans that is.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus, did the 1968 work of the ‘VC’ in just the last eight days (Tu21 thru Tu28Apr). The shortest time it’s taken is six days, from each of M13, Tu14, & W15Apr.
Amerikans were not the only foreigners who died defending US capitalist imperialism: there were also New Zealanders, Australians, South Koreans, Taiwanese, Filipinos, Thais, Laotians, & Cambodians. A different sort of International Brigade, one could say. LBJ even asked Harold Wilson, the Labour Party prime minister of the UK, to join the invasion; a right-wing social democrat who leant to the centre, he quickly & firmly declined the offer. The ‘special relationship’ isn’t as solidarian as usually touted.
~
~
And the invisible in Constitution Gardens, the presence of absence? Estimates vary, & the wider context is the maintenance & break-up of French Indochina, & its aftermath. Think of 4 000 001. Then think again, & feel. Then act.
Another Vietnam connection with COVID-19 concerns Jonathan Van-Tam, a frequent official spokesman for the UK government. He’s the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, & former influenza & vaccine man with SmithKline Beecham, Roche, & Sanofi. It just so happens that his grandfather was the second-longest serving prime minister of the 1949-55 French puppet state in Vietnam before the US took over, & his uncle was the only head of that state’s armed forces.
~
~~~
Daniel Borgström is a dogged KPFA Local Station Board listener-delegate. He’s fond, & rightly so, of a personal vignette. It’s striking like a haiku, & there’s no better advocacy for Pacifica:
When people ask me why I joined the Marine Corps (at age 18, back in 1959), I tell them, “Because where I grew up there was no KPFA or Pacifica Radio affiliate.”
• Images of SARS-CoV-2 virions (complete virus) & particles: Na Zhu et al., ‘A novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in China 2019’, New England Journal of Medicine, 382, 8, 20Feb2020, p. 731 (e-published 24Jan2020 – article updated 29Jan). The quasi-spherical virion has a diameter of 60-140nm, nanometres (pp. 730-1). Think of a millimetre, mm; divide it into a thousand, that’s a micrometre, μm (formerly termed a micron); within this, end-to-end, one can fit ~7-16 virions.
A digression on the matter of size. Can a SARS-CoV-2 virion pass through the filter of a N95 respirator? It’s very unlikely. (I haven’t seen a paper estimating what proportion gets thru, let alone, crucially, what’s the minimum viral load sufficient for infection.) The N95’s specification is having a 95% probability of stopping a particle of ≥0.3μm (300nm). (N95 = neutralises 95%; its European counterpart is FFP2, filtering face piece, which has a 94% rating.)But as the virion is less than half this size, even a quarter, won’t it sail thru? No. And the reason is perhaps surprising.
The rating standard of a respirator (more precisely its filter) is in terms of a particle of 0.3μm for a crucial reason: it’s the MPPS, the most penetrating particle size, in conditions other than a vacuum. And that’s the clue: Brownian motion. The virion, or the particle it’s on or the droplet it’s on or in, collides with air atoms or molecules, even before it reaches the respirator. And the filter is multi-layered: its barrier isn’t a simple sieve. It means any penetrating pathway is tortuous. So for the combination of air & filter, particles <0.3μm are largely diffused, & those >0.3μm are largely blocked. It just so happens that in air, the smallest sized particle avoiding Brownian motion is ~0.3μm: this makes it the MPPS for an air filter. And that’s why the rating standard is pitched where it is.
• Windrock Coal Miners Memorial Wall, Union Valley Baptist Church, Windrock Road, Windrock, Oliver Springs, Oak Ridge, Knoxville, Tennessee (gratitude to the photographer, John Huotari). Over a 1 000 miners remembered, 13 of whom died at work. Memorial cost ~$7 000. Six years in the planning & funding. Dedicated Sa17May2014. The longest continuously worked TN coalmine, 1904-1960. Union Valley . . . Baptist church . . . the names of the ex-miners present read out by the former manager (so not a union man – yes, Union Valley refers to the Southern rebellion) . . . on 8Nov2016, TN voted Trump 61%, over 1.5m, winning 92 of the 95 counties (losing Memphis, Nashville, & Brownsville); Anderson County, where the mine was, 65%. Further into the hills, Trump was in the low 80s. As context, an excellent study of rule over workers & their families was made in a contiguous county, 40 miles to the north-east, in the Clear Fork valley: John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, Clarendon Press (Oxford), 1980 (link below for either viewing the PDF online or downloading it).
John Gaventa, a Tennessean, first degree at Vanderbilt in Nashville, doctorate at Oxford, lecturer at UT Knoxville, then headed the Highlander Research and Education Center(formerly the Highlander Folk School), 1993-6, before returning to the UK, to the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton. The HREC’s main office, a wooden building, was burnt to the ground, F29Mar2019, in a suspected arson attack by fascists of the ilk of Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party, which had been active in nearby Knoxville: https://knoxnews.com/story/news/local/tennessee/2019/04/03/christchurch-shooter-used-racist-symbol-found-at-highland-center-fire-iron-guard/3347678002/ (by Travis Dorman). On a philanthropic note, linked here is a video about the 1974-6 joint Appalachian-south Wales coalfields project he did with pioneering sociologist Helen Lewis & cinematographer Richard Greatrex: https://southernspaces.org/2015/keep-your-eye-upon-scale/.
• Shell-shocked invader, Hue, 1968 (photographer: the incomparable Don McCullin);
US invaders kidnap blindfolded & bound Vietnamese girl and mother & child (photographer: unknown witness at a crime scene);
just another day’s work for the A-109 Special Forces killers, Thuong Duc, Jan1967 (US state archive; photographer: unknown witness at a crime scene);
just another day’s work (camera operators: unknown witnesses at multiple crime scenes).
(Nina Bernstein, ‘Unearthing the secrets of New York’s mass graves’, New York Times, 15May2016)
Just over six long weeks ago, on Tu10Mar, New York State had 173 confirmed COVID-19 cases. 108 were in Westchester County, all in New Rochelle. It’s just beyond the Bronx, within sight of Hart Island. Hart Island.As was said of something else way back in 1848, ein Gespenst, a spectre. Home of a million people, corpses, neatly arranged in unmarked trenches, watched over until last year by the NYC Dept of Correction, a nice lil earner, an economic opportunity, Rikers prisoners used, at 50¢ the hour in 2016, to dispose of the city’s unwanted. Public service at its best.
(superbly written by Nina Bernstein; a chilling section is on the NYC corpse market;
has three embedded vids)
In the same cold vein, we have the quality of decision-making by Governor Cuomo. He thought he had to do something about the New Rochelle case cluster, so on Tu10Mar he imposed some restrictions on the humans roaming about. But fair being fair, Andrew the Cuomo gave Viro the Virus some leeway, letting the measures come into force two days later, on the Thursday. Fair’s fair. Even Viro has rights in the land of the free. After all, it wasn’t as though anything was at stake, something urgent, some sort of public emergency. As NYS Health Commissioner Dr Howard Zucker said, sitting alongside Cuomo at the daily media briefing, & spreading the sugar, “we believe that the risk generally to New Yorkers is low”. Note that his NYS Dept of Health participated in the major 2019 Crimson Contagion simulation that showed how seriously deficient the US system would be in responding to a virus pandemic. Oh.
Thing is, Viro’s a virus. No cognitive capacity. No sense of reasonableness. Unable to recognise give & take. Viro simply lacked the capacity to wait 48 hours before carrying on doing what a virus does. So carry on it did. Whilst Cuomo waited to apply his measures. Viruses, eh. And the folly of humans. (Not least in accepting a positivist conception of scientific knowledge, especially of a new object.)
While Cuomo was waiting, the next day, W11Mar, the World Health Organization, those pesky globalists, declared that the disease was so wrapped around our mortal coil that it had to be recognised as a pandemic. Oh. Then two days later, F13Mar, the Very Stable Genius declared a national emergency. “Two very big words”, said he, in the Rose Garden, fresh from having kicked around in his playroom these additions to his lexicon.
New Rochelle was a healthcare disaster – for the town, the state, & beyond. The containment attempt failed miserably. This has not been adequately described & explained by any journalist. There were 108 known infected individuals. But what proportion of their ‘close contacts’ was identified, traced (found), & then tested for infection? What proportion of these was infected, subsequently placed in supported & monitored isolation? (If diagnostic tests were unavailable, were those close contacts all placed in supported & monitored quarantine, to use the CDC’s specific jargon?) In turn, what proportion of their identified ‘close contacts’ was tested, etc.? What did the rapid containment force consist in? Why did it fail? Indeed, for the ~20m of the NY Metro Area, was there a pre-existing, well-drilled, coordinated network of rapidresponse teams for identify-trace-test-isolate/quarantine, ITTIQ (or IFTIQ), the first line in avoiding containment? If not, why? One could go on. By comparison, with no-one to learn from, Wuhan City alone, from 23Jan, the start of the virus-suppression operation, used at least 9 000 field tracers, organised as 1 800 teams of five or more (28Feb WHO report, page 8). Who’s the ‘Third World’ country?
Cuomo’s star may be rising, contrasted with the darkening shadow of The Don, but his partial responsibility for the New Rochelle failure remains. And don’t forget, this is the man who decided in January to effectively chop future Medicaid funding for the state’s residents, shovelling responsibility, the cost, onto the cities & counties. Refusing to raise taxes, this was the thrust of his response to NYS’ fiscal crisis, announced 21Jan in his fiscal 2021 plan (year-end 31Mar2021 – the day by which Pacifica has to pay the $3.265m principal to the Foundation for the Jewish Community, FJC).
Meanwhile, WBAI carried on being WBAI. That was until M30Mar, 20 days after Cuomo’s New Rochelle announcement, when WBAI started a new programme, Going Viral. It broadcasts live each weekday, so now in its fourth week, at 8.45pm EDT (7.45pm CDT, 5.45pm PDT), for roughly 1½ or 2 hours. Helpfully, it’s linked from the homepage of the Pacifica meetings archive, with a ‘button’ to listen live. It also has an archive (there’s no programme for Tu14Apr).
Going Viral is presented by Jim Dingeman, Local Station Board listener-delegate, & it’s obvious from the PNB Programming Cttee he chairs that he’s a wannabe presenter, so this was his chance. Cometh the moment, cometh the man.
It started off a bit rough, made on the fly. And it’s still a bit rough. Not what Maxie Jackson, former ED, would call best practice. It’s a live conference call, with the usual four or five co-presenters all trying to speak over one another, with Otis Maclay, Pacifica’s technician-who-never-sleeps, also being asked what he thinks about the topic in hand. If Michelle were around, she’d be asked for her opinion too. But it’s more civil than the usual PNB meeting, & it is gratifying not to hear the continual grating of a ‘point of point, Madam Chair’, & suchlike.
Going Viral is admittedly a low tech production, but no other Pacifica station runs a COVID programme. So why not ask your local station manager to consider it?
. . . Recital B: the directors have committed Pacifica to “a swap or sale of one or more radio station licenses or a sale of other Pacifica owned assets of sufficient value to repay this Loan (as defined below), or such other sources that will become available” https://mega.nz/#!5NMhHAxI!QzMtaBd0iRTZJ_YNmh2KZ1xKu7Qh_hQ6IcPMVkGWX94 . . .
As the other Bill wrote, about the land where Chris Albertson spent some of his childhood, “TikTok or Tick-Tock, that is the question” . . . Given Pacifica’s age structure, we know the answer. The foundation now has exactly a year to pay $3.265m to another foundation, the Foundation for the Jewish Community, that operates as FJC.
For two whole years, the directors have sat on their paws. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. FJC loan? Excuse me? How many millions? Due when? Why worry? Thoughts & prayers. Thoughts & prayers. It’ll just go away. One day we’ll wake up & it’ll be gone. Like a miracle. It’ll just disappear. Yes. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. Thoughts & prayers. Thoughts & prayers. The loan, under control. Things. This FJC thing, it’ll just run its course. Let it rip. It’ll all work out well. Victory. The next PNB election. Incredible. Leadership. Be appreciative. A lot. A lot. This is what winning looks like. Stronger. Better. Victory. PacificaWorld, RealWorld. Country with a stockpile? Or all pile & no stock – a pile of BS, & a pile of gravestones. (But always a stockpile of nuclear weapons: priorities.) Vicious. Carnage. Keeping Amerika great. USA! USA! USA! Ode not to joy but to the United Scarves of Amerika.
Meanwhile, back in PacificaWorld, it’s from the ballot to the bullet – and the bullet has to be bitten. And now. How to pay the principal of $3.265m has to be decided now. And, rationally, that requires knowledge of the options Pacifica has.
The directors, since 2Apr2018, have lacked not foresight on this but due diligence. It didn’t even require vision; just plain diligence. Everyone knew what has to be re-paid, & when. The question was, how. The 2018 directors, by agreeing to the contract, identified two particular ways of getting the money to FJC: signal swap or sale of assets. The third way was generic, “other sources that will become available” – such as cash provided by another lender. So what’s it going to be: signal swap? buildings sales? extend the loan? find new lender? maybe the Jesse James approach, improving on the Symbionese Liberation Army?
There’s no evidence that research was done on any of this by the then executive director, Tom Livingston. Nor by ED Maxie Jackson III, or ED Grace Aaron, or ED John Vernile, or ED Lawrence Reyes, or the current ED, Lydia Brazon.
So, obviously, the PNB needs to immediately direct ED Brazon to conduct or commission an authoritative report on Pacifica’s options. The PNB meets on Thursday, 2Apr. Will a director make the necessary motion?
Thoughts & prayers. Thoughts & prayers.
Since 2Apr2018, Pacifica’s being & future had been structured most forcefully by the FJC loan. No more. Since mid March, that’s been replaced by the spread of disease, of COVID-19. It’ll collapse Pacifica’s revenue. And well before the principal is due. Pacifica’s executive & national governance aren’t noted ballerinas, nimble. And confirmed cases are cascading. NYC’s first was Su1Mar. 1Mar. The Bay Area shelter-in-place started 0001, Tu17Mar. The US’ first 100k confirmed cases took 68 days, M20Jan to F27Mar. The second took 5 days[UPDATE, W1Apr]. It was as if federal officials were watching Fox & CNN rather than the world news. (Guess Al Jazeera America was ahead of ‘the market’, one suffused with national chauvinism.)
The set of loan documents are linked from the below webpage (it consists in the 19July2019 PacificaWatch summary of the loan, including details of the attendant advertising contract Pacifica’s directors agreed to, worth $37 000):
Please note, as of tomorrow, W1Apr, the $3.265m owed to FJC is no longer a long-term liability: it becomes a current liability. In so doing it significantly worsens Pacifica’s illiquidity quotient, the measure of Pacifica’s incapacity, in terms of current assets, to pay current liabilities, that is, those falling due within 12 months. Even before this $3.265m became a current liability (albeit mitigated by the $2.361m written off by Democracy Now!, announced to Pacificans by ED Maxie at the 12Mar2019 PNB Finance Cttee), Pacifica was last liquid, according to audited balance sheets, at 30Sep2009. Yes, 2009. Pacifica’s latest audited balance sheet is at 30Sep2016 (the FY2017 one, proffered by NETA, wasn’t audited thru lack of supporting documentary evidence). That’s exactly 3½ years ago. And the illiquidity ratio was 11.54: that means every Pacifica $ of current assets was being chased by $11.54 from the short-term creditors (7 356 997 / 637 716 per auditor’s report, p. 2). Micawber would be cheered, yet saddened, seeing someone worse off than himself – splendidly cheered, m’boy.
Referenda voting ended Thursday, 19Mar, on the proposed new Pacifica constitution. A ‘no’ vote was rejecting the anti-democratic, authoritarian move by the breakers, longstanding campaigners to break up the Pacifica network.
Three topics:
expected listener-member turnout
predicted listener-member voting
the staff-member referendum
Expected listener-member turnout
The above table is an expectation of listener-member voting in the referendum, generated by the application of two assumptions upon published & reliable leaked data.
Highlights:
if the culture of high paper-voting on the East Coast persists, the NES’ data imply an unusually high total turnout from those stations, delivering big ‘no’ votes, 43% at WPFW & 51% at WBAI;
this compares with KPFA achieving 37%;
expected total turnout, 31%;
actual turnout by online-voters alone is twice that of each of last year’s two rounds of total LSB voting (so including their paper-voting); &
total turnout is expected to be x3 that of those 2019 LSB rounds.
the proportion of each station’s paper-voting (‘e:p’ in the table, the ratio) is the same as given in the last publicly available LSB data, per the nominal 2018 final report (the Jan-Mar2019 voting for all stations bar WPFW; that station in the 2016 LSB election; please see pp. 17 & 19); in all likelihood it’s less, with increased internet usage, but applying a factor of 10% or 20% (a deflator) would be unnecessarily speculative; &
final online-voting (‘e-voting’ in the table) is split between the stations in the same ratio as at F6Mar; so this assumes the KPFA online surge at 6Mar not only didn’t exhaust itself but was maintained, so keeping its 40% share of online-voting.
Predicted listener-member voting
Station . . . . No . . . . .Yes . . Yes %
KPFA . . . . . 2000 . . .2571 . . . 56
KPFK . . . . . 1400 . . . .748 . . . 35
KPFT . . . . . . .582 . . . .400 . . .41
WPFW . . . .2400 . . . . 162 . . . .6
WBAI . . . . .2800 . . . . 111 . . . .4
Total . . . . . 9182 . . . 3992
Two assumptions are made above, & in the 11Mar post a guess was made of the breakers’ core support, 1 200 – 1 500 KPFA & KPFT listener-members. Given this, the above rough prediction is made: a ‘no’ vote of 70% wins, rejecting the breakers.
Remember, the breakers need to win both referenda to effect their proposed change.
The electorate was 955. Paper-voting is likely to be immaterial; for example, it was only 4 out of 466 in the Jan-Mar2019 LSB voting. In the referendum, the NES says 51.4% voted, so 491. (Turnouts in last year’s LSB voting: 47.6% in Jan-Mar, 36.7% in Aug-Oct.) If all 491 are valid ballots, that means 246 wins – this is 32 more than the KPFA electorate. The station turnouts at F6Mar: KPFA 36%, KPFK 17%, KPFT 27%, WPFW 35%, WBAI 44%. Being so high, it makes no sense trying to estimate expected station final turnouts.
Could the breakers have garnered 246 staff? Unlikely.
~~~
POSTSCRIPT on the virus (SARS-CoV-2) causing the disease (COVID-19)
Article by Mike Davis, from last Saturday, 14Mar; hopefully he’s interviewed by KPFK, if not KPFA.
Public health officials, worldwide, knew a global health emergency was coming. The World Health Organization (WHO) even explicitly warned of highly infectious disease yet to come into existence, which it designated as Disease X: “[t]he needs for research preparedness for a new disease were also deemed to fit into the ‘urgent’ category” (report on 8-9Dec2015 workshop, page 2). WHO also made a very short vid on this, Mar2018. And it was even discussed 10 months before the COVID-19 outbreak, at the winter playground of the Masters of the Universe, Davos – discussed when the media were focusing on Greta.
Healthcare professionals also did their part preparing the public. In 2018, for example,Peter Piot, head of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, gave a Royal Institution lecture, ‘Are we ready for the next pandemic?‘.
The public was also made aware through simulations such as this, also from 2018, one that took place in Australia, ‘This is not a drill: a hypothetical pandemic‘.
Finally, handwashing vids from WHO & the US’ CDC; the WHO one is done by Dr Tedros, the world’s fave Ethiopian, who when he’s not modelling, pursues his day job, Director-General of the WHO:
“A pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness”
(p. 4, added emphases)
“Supply chain and transportation impacts due to ongoing COVID-19 outbreak will likely result in significant shortages for government, private sector, and individual U.S. consumers” (p. 4, added emphases)
“Universal susceptibility and exposure will significantly degrade the timelines and efficiency of response efforts” (p. 4, added emphases)
“A COVID-19 pandemic environment will require modification to concurrent disaster response operations (e.g., increased levels of personal protective equipment (PPE), restricted interactions with survivors and stakeholders, resource prioritization)” (p. 5, added emphases)
“Implementation of community mitigation measures may adversely impact sustained operations of U.S. healthcare facilities, critical infrastructure, and government” (p. 5, added emphases)
“COVID-19 vaccine research, development, production, and distribution are under rapid development and will take extended time to develop” (p. 4, added emphases)
Aim: “COVID-19 response and recovery worker safety and health protection measures have been developed and compliance measures have been implemented” (p. 7). Already not achieved.
“Purpose[:] This plan outlines the United States Government (USG) coordinated federal response activities for COVID-19 in the United States” (p. 1)
“A nimble, effective COVID-19 response with flexible sustainable capabilities will save lives and mitigate social and economic disruption” (p. 7). Sure.
“The first U.S. case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Washington State on January 20”
(p. 1, added emphases)
(“PanCAP Adapted”, in the doc’s title, means this COVID-19 response plan is an adaptation of the Pandemic Crisis Action Plan: “[t]he PanCAP, approved in January 2018, operationalizes the BIA [Biological Incident Annex] with a focus on potential viral pandemic pathogens. The COVID-19 Response Plan outlines adapted federal response actions for the response to this disease” (p. 6, all added emphases, for the titles).)
~~~
. . . meanwhile they frolic in the Floridian ocean . . .
. . . it may be Spring Break for humans, but for Viro the Virus it’s work, work, work . . .
Pacifica’s future was largely structured by the $3.265m loan from the Foundation for the Jewish Community, FJC. Now it’s the effects of the virus, SARS-CoV-2.
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Breaking the story: Peter Baker & Eileen Sullivan, ‘U.S. Virus Plan Anticipates 18-Month Pandemic and Widespread Shortages’, NYT, Tu17Mar2020:
UPDATE: On conviction, felon 20B0584 was transferred from Rikers to an Oz of New York State, maximum security Wende correctional facility, near Buffalo. On Su22Mar he tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19. So in addition to his ostracism, he’s now in solitary. Labelled inmate 20B0584 in the de-humanising system now organising his life, this man was previously known as Harvey Weinstein.
PacificaWatch 