#ann
Trump's lawsuit against Ann Selzer is textbook #authoritarianism
Reading the complaint in Donald Trump’s lawsuit against
pollster #Ann #Selzer
over her 2024 poll that found Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa,
it’s hard not to give in to thoughts of how comically obscene it is.
The suit stretches the interpretation of the relevant law
— Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act
— well past the breaking point.
It leans heavily on “facts” that are nothing but Trump quoting Trump about being mad.
It spends a good deal of time citing hard-right outlets like Breitbart as if they are neutral.
It’s hard not to laugh at how absurd it is.
-- But then you remember that ABC just gave Trump a total of $16 million rather than fight the paper-thin defamation lawsuit he brought against them.
And that even after ABC knuckled under, Trump still haslawsuits against CBS, Simon & Schuster, and CNN.
And then you also remember that Trump has stated he’s going to use all his might
— and that of the government
— to bury media he doesn’t like.
All of this makes trying to rationally assess whether the lawsuit will succeed nearly impossible.
Trump can afford to go scorched earth whether his claims have any merit or not.
He has bottomless wealth,
particularly regarding legal fees,
as he’s made his donors cover at least $100 million of them so far.
He’s utterly unconcerned about whether something is true,
and he seems to have a never-ending stream of lawyers willing to step up
even though several have ended up facing sanctions, criminal charges, or both.
Put simply, he has no incentive to back down, ever.
All that being said, the lawsuit against Selzer is still straight-up trash,
even if it’s trash that somehow manages to succeed because of the unique blend of horrible characteristics exclusive to Trump
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-ann-selzer-lawsuit-explained?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Trump’s retribution may focus on individuals,
but it’s a collective harm
-- So it makes sense to spread the cost of dealing with it.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory and promised revenge tour,
a number of individuals have proposed the creation of an organization or fund
which would take on the job of defending the various lawsuits, prosecutions and generalized legal harassment Trump will bring to the table in the next four years.
It’s a very good idea.
It’s a necessary one.
So a few days ago I started reaching out to some people in the legal world and anti-Trump world to find out what’s going on,
whether any efforts are afoot and who is doing what.
What I found out is that there are at least a couple groups working toward doing something like this.
But the efforts seem embryonic.
Or at least I wasn’t able to find out too much.
The overnight news that Trump is now suing #Ann #Selzer and the #Des #Moines #Register over her final election poll for “election interference” makes me think that these efforts aren’t coming together soon enough
or can’t come together soon enough.
(If you’re not familiar with the details, Selzer is a pollster of almost legendary status
and in what turned out to be her final public poll, dramatically missed not only the result of the election but the whole direction of it.)
Let’s take the Selzer/Des Moines Register suit as our example.
Trump is claiming that he was damaged and should be made whole
because of a poll that showed him behind and turned out to be wrong.
His lawyers are trying to shoe-horn this claim into an Iowa consumer fraud statute.
But we shouldn’t be distracted by that.
The idea that a political candidate has a cause of action over a poll is absurd on its face.
And really that is precisely the point.
Trump casts penumbras of power and fear with talk; he holds public space; he keeps opponents off balance and guessing.
This is another example.
A lot of the power and point of such an exercise is precisely the absurdity of it.
It is meant to spur a chorus of “You can’t do that” and
“How can he do that?”
But he does do it.
We have that same mixture of outrage, incomprehension, uncanny laughter,
the upshot of which is an overwhelming and over-powering belief that the rules somehow don’t apply to this guy.
That’s his power and that is the point.
It is a performance art of power enabled by a shameless abuse of the legal system
Trump’s opponents need to learn to speak in that language.
Otherwise it’s a professional wrestling grudge match,
a taunt-fest with only one side taunting.
I fear some folks simply don’t get this dimension of what’s going on.
It’s not something you learn in law school and not in conventional, old-style politics either.
Defending the targets is key. But that’s not the only point or even the main one.
It’s about demonstrating the limits of Trump’s power and embarrassing him, President or not.
Greg Cocks A Machine Learning-Based Approach For Flash Flood Susceptibility Mapping Considering Rainfall Extremes In The Northeast Region Of Bangladesh
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2024.10.047 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #water #hydrology #climatechange #extremeweather #flood #flooding #flashflood #maps #susceptibility #Bangladesh #remotesensing #field #historical #rainfall #extremes #AI #machinelearning #ANN #RNN #RFGB #CatBoost #risk #hazard #model #modeling #planning #management #preparation #prediction #precipitation
![maps - comparison of the machine learning models [results] for creating the flash flood susceptibility maps in the case of RX5_100Y - (a) ANN (b) RNN (c) RFGB, and (d) CatBoost](https://files.techhub.social/media_attachments/files/113/392/581/992/722/169/original/d488f362e9ae018b.jpg)
Backed by a cabal of wealthy conservative patrons like industrialist #David #Koch,
banker #Richard #Mellon #Scaife,
and the devout Catholic entrepreneur #Frank #Hanna,
the Federalist Society under Leo became a breeding ground for conservative judges who were recruited at law school,
groomed through the society’s program of events and talks,
and then bound together through their careers.
“The key was to figure out how to develop what I call a ‘pipeline’
— basically, where you recruit students in law school,
you get them through law school,
they come out of law school,
and then you find ways of continuing to involve them in legal policy,” Leo later explained.
In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for #John #Roberts
— a former member
— to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court,
the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate.
A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court
— #Harriet #Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society
— and pressured him to nominate #Samuel #Alito, one of its members, in her place.
Leo worked closely with the "Judicial Confirmation Network",
a new nonprofit organization set up using funds from #Robin #Arkley, a California businessman known as the
“foreclosure king,” who had made billions buying up mortgages of people in financial difficulties.
The idea for #JCN had been hatched at a dinner in Washington attended by Leo and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shortly after Bush’s reelection in late 2004.
JCN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on radio and online advertisement to shape public opinion.
It was run by #Neil and #Ann #Corkery, a couple who had been members of #Opus #Dei since at least the eighties.
Neil had been a critical figure in getting a new residence for male, celibate members of the Catholic movement built in Reston, Virginia.
“Opus Dei members preach their faith through their work as well as the friendships they develop,” Ann explained.
She and her husband would later preach their faith by becoming central figures in a series of nonprofits that would channel dark money for Leo’s efforts.
#BASEsearch technology update:
We ripped out the #DDC classifier created by Mathias Lösch 12 years ago and replaced it with one created by Christoph Broschinski. It is using #annif, the automated subject indexing toolkit.
DDC classification is what allows users to browse our index by subject area: https://www.base-search.net/Browse/Dewey
Christoph found out that the decision tree based #Omikuji https://github.com/tomtung/omikuji outperformed #ANN-based https://fasttext.cc/ so we are luckily using explainable AI #XAI.
Useful new observational technique.
"The goal of the neural network setup is to learn temperature patterns across the United States and then identify whether climate change effects have exceeded the range of natural variability that has occurred in the past. This is called the timing of emergence (ToE), which is the first year that the effect has clearly appeared."
No plot spoiling. Results at #OpenAccess article.
#ClimateChange
#ClimateResearch
#ANN
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003981?af=R