Cynicism and Politics
By and large, I don’t get too worked up over whomever the President is. The only reason I have a serious personal beef against Donald Trump is that we will be living for years with the fallout of the COVID-19 virus and his gobsmacking incompetence which is killing many of us and destroying the very society we live in.
In general, I stay away from Donald Trump stories because everyone else already has a strong opinion and is endlessly sharing it. I also have friends in Kern, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties who are ardent Trump supporters, and I respect their right to say and believe as they choose.
The causes for concern surrounding Italy are growing, even as the ECB keeps a tight lid on its bond yields, pushing its debt servicing costs lower as its debt explodes higher.
The Euro Area’s weakest link, Italy, is once again in the familiar grip of a political crisis. The trigger this time was a decision by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to orchestrate the resignations of two ministers from his fledgling IItalia Viva party. Renzi accuses the current premier Giuseppe Conte of amassing too much power during the coronavirus crisis. He also challenges Conte’s reluctance to draw upon European Recovery and Resilience funds and the European Supervisory Mechanism, which Conte fears could come with all sorts of nasty strings attached.
In the past, despite having had to impose more moderation tripwires, the site admins have generally been able to operate in a minimal-intervention mode, with moderators approving most comments and deleting posted comments rarely and with great reluctance.
However, due to an rise in sheepdog-style, talking point-driven commentary and other forms of thread-jacking, we are going to be in zero tolerance mode until readers understand that this site is not the place for mere personal opinion. That includes cheerleading (“+1000”). If you have nothing of substance to add to a comment you like, please don’t. Readers are already saying they can seldom digest our daily Links. In light of general information overload, we’d rather have 100 thoughtful comments (such as links to articles or topics that weren’t included in Links or Water Cooler) than 250 that consist largely of noise.
By Lambert Strether of Corrente
As it turns out, I have narrow but deep expertise relevant to the discussion of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) paper on the Pfizer vaccine study, “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine” (“Safety and Efficacy”), so I thought I’d weigh in, albeit a little late, on the protocols and “exclusion criteria” discussion.
In a past life, several careers ago, I consulted to various large firms, among them medical publishers, on complex document structures; my deliverable would be a formal definition of such structures, plus documentation. For example, and without getting into the weeds on syntax, the structure of all posts at Naked Capitalism includes editorial elements like: a headline (one, required), author (at least one, with an optional bio), and then a long string of running text elements (paragraphs, images, tables, lists, and so on) in any order and any amount greater than one. There are also elements that o