Pandemic lies

 Nate Silver, on venues where he's frightened of catching COVID-19:

LOL the Louvre's only crowded in the one spot pic.twitter.com/tGfkE9tRcP

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

While just across the room... pic.twitter.com/UuYQCm7AOx

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

I don't know how commonplace this knowledge is, but in my younger years, when I had a number of opportunities to visit the Louvre, I learned that you shouldn't bother to try to look at the Mona Lisa, because you won't be able to. There are too many bourgeois there with their checklists of things you have to do in Paris, and looking at the Mona Lisa, the all-time no. 1 greatest painting ever, is the thing they need to do, and be photographed doing, when they go to the Louvre, and they've always got it surrounded, whenever you can get into the museum. The biggest and most ironical thing being that right there in the same space was a spectacularly complicated and gorgeous Leonardo that nobody was looking at, depicting a Virgin sitting on her mother's lap as the baby Jesus plays with a baby lamb, and these fantastical landscape configurations, that you can stare at forever.

About that brokered convention...

Via fivethirtyeight.com.

fivethirtyeight now gives the best chance of winning the primary campaign before the convention to Nobody. 59% compared to Sanders, the runner-up at 27%. Is that at all clarifying?

— Swami Vivi-ka-Newman (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2020

That's overnight. Biden has pulled well ahead of Sanders in North Carolina in their simulations, just ahead in Virginia, virtually even in Texas for Super Tuesday, and well ahead in Missouri, Mississippi, and Florida a week or two later. A couple of days ago Biden seemed likely to lose in his own home state. Not today:

I can't imagine there's much of a chance for Elizabeth Warren (or Buttigieg or Klobuchar, let alone Bloomberg) to take the nomination in Milwaukee in July—don't even have an idea how you'd go about calculating it—but I hope she has lots and lots of delegates anyway, for the leverage it'll give her, and women, in the writing of the platform and selection of a nominee. That scenario that looked like a hopeless but entertaining daydream last Wednesday is now something people need to be planning for, and some are. Fivethirtyeight isn't saying it out loud in their coverage, so you may have read it here first (Martin, who I've been neglecting lately, has more to say).

Damn the exit polls, full speed ahead!

Nate says the phatlady has not yet sung:

Our live forecast based only on actual results so far (not exit poll) now on CON 292, LAB 255. http://t.co/jUgmZjR3Si pic.twitter.com/FBgiR1yYpr

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 8, 2015

It would really be fun if the exit polling was off, Steven Erlanger. It's startling to see them all the way outside Silver's 90% margins; I can't believe he could be that far away.

Via Global Economic Analysis.