#grifts

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

The world of conservative grifters and hucksters exploded into controversy yet again this past week after serial conspiracy theorist Candace Owens took aim in a YouTube video series at Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow and the new head of conservative pressure group Turning Point USA. While the drama is likely to continue to unfold as the various personalities continue to fight against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s increasingly unpopular presidency, the combat once again served as a reminder of the vast fortunes available in the world of conservative grift.

For decades there has been a ready, willing, and able audience of conservative true believers who are more than happy to buy products, subscribe to shows/magazines/podcasts, and sign up for services that make them feel like their commerce is an extension of their political beliefs. Major and minor figures in the conservative world are more than happy to take in this money for a quick buck, often for shady (at best) services or outright scams. To no one’s surprise, one of the most prominent conservative profiteers is none other than Trump himself. He was perfectly positioned to swoop into this world, based on the mainstream failures of multiple Trump enterprises from steaks to an airline to his infamous Trump University. Once Trump became the center of the conservative universe he was all too happy to sell his loyal supporters things like crypto, cell phones, and even guitars. Once can even buy golden Trump sneakers or a seriously tacky golf club cover.

[...] Right-wing media, and the politicians attached to it, have turned politics into a 24-7 lifestyle. Conservatives are told that the entire world is always out to get them and betray them, be that Democratic politicians, colleges and universities, and even their own left-leaning families and neighbors. They are thoroughly indoctrinated and made to believe that buying goods and services is a path to “fighting back” against the left.

If American politics were an Irwin Allen disaster movie, this would be when the small tornadoes combine to form a giant storm that endangers everyone.

Rick Wilson said it so well yesterday, as he usually does: “One of the safest bets of all time is that Trump has never, ever “learned his lesson,” in the words of the soon-to-be-ex Senator Susan Collins, or experienced some moral awakening, or decided to take a path beyond his own narcissism and greed. He’s pausing his 48-hour deadline to bomb Iran’s power plants into the stone age because of markets, polling, and politics. Trump is looking forward to about 200 days from now and sees a looming electoral disaster that will result in deep and serious investigations of his family’s vast collection of scams, grifts, crypto frauds, and pay-to-play access or pardon-selling. He sees a future where the impeachments for perjury, lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and corruption don’t start with him, but lower down the food chain, slowly knocking out his minions in the Cabinet and the implementers of his corrupt will. He isn’t pausing the missiles out of a sudden respect for international law; he’s doing it because he knows that if the house of cards falls this November, the next two years will be spent explaining exactly how much his son-in-law cleared on the Witkoff-brokered “diplomacy” of the decade. How much he scored in his corruption. Every crime he has committed will be reviewed in public.”

There are some familiar patterns visible behind Donald Trump’s out-of-the-blue claim that the United States wants a peace deal with Iran, and talks are ongoing. On Monday, Trump told reporters: “So tomorrow morning, sometime their time, we were expected to blow up their largest electric generating plants that cost over $10 billion to build. It’s a very good one. There was no dearth of money and one shot, it’s gone. It collapses. Why would they want that? So they called. I didn’t call. They called. They wanna make a deal. And we are very willing to make a deal. It’s gotta be a good deal. And there’s gotta be no more wars, no more nuclear weapons. They’re not gonna have nuclear weapons anymore. They’re agreeing to that. Any of that stuff is no deal.” (ALL OF THAT IS A LIE) Trump was asked, “Iran’s foreign ministry says, you’re not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations to end the war.” Trump answered: “Well, they’re gonna have to get themselves better public relations people. Uh, we have had very, very strong talks. We’ll see where they lead. We have points, major points of agreement. I would say almost all points of agreement, uh, perhaps that hasn’t been conveyed. The communication, as you know, has been blown to pieces. They were unable to talk to each other, but we’ve had very strong talks. Uh, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner had them, uh, they went, I would say perfectly. I would say that if they carry through with that, it’ll end that, that problem, that conflict, and I think it’ll end it very, very substantially. Uh, we have very much in mind our partners in the Middle East. We’ve had great relationships with a lot of them. As you know, a lot of ‘em were surprisingly hit and, uh, I was surprised to see it and so was everyone else. But we have, uh, they’re very much in mind and the discussions. So the discussions took place yesterday. They went into yesterday evening. Uh, they want very much to make a deal. We’d like to make a deal too.”

When he says “Uh” that often you know he’s making it up as he goes. When he “plays an accordion” with his hands, you know he’s lying. He was doing that. Given Trump’s history and track record, the odds are high that he is making up these peace talks. The signs of a lie are all over Dilbert’s statements.

Prof. Robert Pape has important points to bear in mind about this “breakthrough”: Is there still an off-ramp? Yes, but it is narrower than most people think. A real off-ramp requires more than a pause. It requires credible constraints on future escalation. That means: enforceable limits, verifiable commitments, and consequences for breaking them. Without that, any pause is temporary. The problem is structural: Each side now has incentives to continue; each believes stopping now creates greater long-term risk. That is why off-ramps exist in theory, but are rarely taken in practice. At this stage - Iran in control of Hormuz and all that means - military containment of Israel would have to be part of any diplomatic solution.

Dr. Phillips P. O’Brien also comments: “The basic inability of the US government to say exactly why it started the bombing of Iran and what would represent a positive strategic outcome for from the operation, remains very much in force. The United States government from the President on down has constantly changed the supposed strategic purpose of the bombing, usually so that they can declare “victory” at any point and try to go home. However in the medium term Iran will be able to rebuild and present an even more formidable challenge. It will and has learned from what it will experience, what it must do to make its threat more effective in the future and will probably end up surprising the US down the road with military capabilities that the US did not anticipate. A damaged Iran now holds out the prospect of coming back stronger and better prepared, far more quickly than people realize.”

How much money did the Trump grifters make off Trump’s Tehran TACO with the chaos they created on Wall Street? Speaking on Jim Acosta’s show, Heather Cox Richardson pointed to the fact that on opening today, Wall Street went down from the weekend news of Trump’s threat to “bomb our hearts out” if Iran didn’t open Hormuz by Monday, which then went back up on news of the Tehran TACO. She pointed out that after TACO Boy made his morning tweet, holding off his attack on Iran for the next five days the stock mrket is “coincidentally” open, that the S&P 500 climbed 240 points, while Brent Crude dropped from $112/bbl to $96/bbl. When Iran said there were no talks and no likelihood of any talks, the S&P lost 120 points and Brent Crude climbed to $100/bbl. Prof. Krugman said someone with insider knowledge could have done well on the futures markets. Yun Li at CNBC noted that 15 minutes before Trump’s “TACO”, there was a jump in S&P 500 and oil futures.

Monday, France’s General Michel Richoux told Mad King Dilbert to go fuck himself. On live TV. The general said: “He shot himself in the foot. He wanted to invade a European Union country, Greenland, not long ago. and now, his old friends whom he didn’t consult, whom he scorned, especially the British, telling them, ‘We’ll remember this,’ and now he needs us? Frankly, he can go fuck himself.”

I want to talk about an article I saw from thebookseller.com that came out Monday which talks about a new AI-powered publishing platform called Spines which wants to disrupt the publishing industry by providing a new platform. I encourage you to read the actual article here, but I want to address how they are, based on my own observation as an independent author, a grift and why you shouldn’t fall for it.

Let’s address the first concern which I and probably a few other people have when presented with Spines’s goal of publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone. Doing a very quick, unscientific google search, we can find that of the biggest traditional publishers in the United States, only Penguin Random House and Harper Collins publish more than 8,000 books a year, and these are massive global corporations. The next two largest, Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster, publish only roughly 2,000 books a year and these are still some of the big boys on the block. So the goal of publishing 8,000 books a year is certainly ambitious for Spines. How is this going to be done?

There are two possibilities and one is that a lot of this is going to be books produced in part or entirely by plagiarism software (“AI”). I want to acknowledge that as a real possibility, but I want to go forward with the good-faith assumption that there will be a significant number of passionate people who have poured their heart and soul into writing a book and are going to be taken advantage of by these techbros. Even before plagiarism software became widely available, self-publishing on Amazon had exploded and we saw millions of books self-published in just an ebook form every year. So I imagine that these people, who are self-publishing on Amazon and other places, are probably the market for Spines.

Now how do I know this is a scam? I do not have a ton of experience is self-publishing because I’ve only published two books at time of writing, but I do have recent hands-on experience which makes me qualified. There isn’t a lot of info in the article on what services Spines is offering but we get an exact number on cost as well as types of services in the article. “Spines costs $1,200 to $5,000 to automate proofreading, cover design, metadata optimisation and limited translation services, starting with Spanish.” Now, this may, on the low end, be cheaper than hiring professionals to do this kind of work, but it’s still going to be a scam because you’re going to get a shoddy product.

Let’s start with proofreading, which is under the umbrella of editing but is one of several types of editing. As Reedsy explains, there are four distinct types of editing, all of which come with specific costs. First there is editorial assessment, which is when you have a very, very rough draft and need some direction on writing it. (I have not yet done editorial assessment because I have been fortunate enough to be plagued with the knowledge of what I’m writing.) This is very broad advice which an AI cannot provide but a human can. Second is developmental editing for a finished manuscript, which is where you have an editor go through, provide specific feedback on areas for improvement and suggestions, and point out any major issues. This is where you get into rewrites and polishing a manuscript to a finished product. Again, and AI cannot do this.

So we finally come to copy editing and proofreading. Now, I’m going to fold them together although they are technically distinct because copy editing includes proofreading as well as making sure capitalization is consistent, tenses remain consistent, you don’t repeat yourself too much, all the little things which help polish the rough edges off of your manuscript. Proofreading is checking for spelling and typos, as well as grammar issues and any formatting issues. AI can do this, as tools like Grammarly exist for this sort of thing for a couple years now. (I wouldn’t recommend using Grammarly, but that’s a separate rant for a separate day.) Plus, you know, spellcheck which has been around since the 1990s. Technically this is a task which AI can do, but it can still make mistakes such as with homophones (the train went threw the tunnel). And with so many free tools available if you’re going to have AI do this task, why pay someone else to do it? AI is not going to give you insightful, meaningful feedback on your manuscript, but it will do spellcheck for you and LibreOffice does that for free anyway. So paying to have AI proofread your manuscripts doesn’t make any financial sense.

Let’s move on to the next area they want to automate, cover design. Again, I have limited experience and I can say very definitively that you can get a good cover for about $750 USD from a professional artist who will produce what you want and will be able to keep things you like but change things you don’t with an incomplete project. Plagiarism software that creates images cannot do that. Unless they’re hiring artists to touch up and improve generated images (which I doubt), all Spines is offering is another service you can get for free or cheaper elsewhere online. I highly advise against generating your cover images, if only for the fact the computer cannot give you exactly what you want. You can feed prompts into it and maybe get something close enough, but if you have a specific image of what you want for your book cover you cannot get that from AI. There are a lot of ethical arguments against plagiarism software as well, but I won’t repeat those here just for brevity’s sake. Again, if you’re willing to use plagiarism software to make your book cover, which is what the guys at Spines are offering, then you can do that cheaper elsewhere.

The final one which I can speak with any authority on is metadata, which I’ve had to enter for my own books before and you can too. For those who don’t know, metadata is information attached to the book’s ISBN and publication info that provides info about the book. This can be basic info such as the intended audience, the genre, and the subject matter, but it can also be more granular like what type of fantasy novel you have (romantasy vs cozy). While it can be an annoying or frustrating task, such as when every word to describe my book flies out of my head when I have to actually describe it, it’s also fairly simple. And I’m going to be honest, I don’t expect the AI to do much more beyond algorithm scraping and suggesting metadata like “for you” and “trending”. (Sort of like those videos that spam every popular tag in the hope of getting traction.) So I seriously doubt that this will be a service worth any sum of money.

Finally I’m going to touch briefly on translation because I haven’t translated a book and I don’t know what goes into translating one either but I can make an educated guess that it’s going to be the equivalent of pasting your manuscript into Google Translate. If you’re willing to accept that level of quality, you can get it for free. If you want a good translation you’re going to have to shell out far more money to get an actual person to do it.

And all of this doesn’t even get to a very important part of publishing, ISBNs. If you’re self-publishing you absolutely want to buy your own ISBNs, and buy multiple because they cost less if you buy them in bulk and you will need separate ISBNs for both the print and digital editions of your books. I don’t know if Spines is offering ISBNs as part of their package, they certainly could, but for independent authors it’s best practice to use your own ISBNs because you can control those opposed to whatever platform you publish on.

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

President Donald Trump’s second term is so chock-full of corruption and grift that it seems almost too small to mention that the Trump Organization, his private company, just applied for trademarks for “Trump 250” in conjunction with America’s 250th birthday. America! Get hyped for “Trump 250” bumper stickers, tote bags, drinkware, clothing, and golf balls, among other trash. And enjoy the opportunity to line Trump’s pockets while purchasing what will no doubt be some of the tackiest shit imaginable. Just look at what you can buy from Trump’s online store, which sells ugly merchandise that veers into “Dear Leader” territory pretty often.  In the terrible timeline we’re currently in, it makes perfect sense that Trump would seek to trademark this phrase. He is already warping America’s birthday into a celebration of himself instead. One of the proposed logos Trump wants trademarked is his name below five fighter jets, while another is just “TRUMP 250.”

Better yet, the person soliciting donations for Freedom 250 is Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s fave fundraiser, who is also netting him millions in donations for his gaudy ballroom on the former site of the White House’s East Wing. But those things allow only the rich to throw money at the president. What about the little people? Well, rest assured: “Trump 250” merchandise seemingly will include some affordable items that allow you to honor Dear Leader.  The Trump Organization also made sure to file to trademark all variations of “President Donald J. Trump International Airport” just before the Florida legislature voted to rename the West Palm Beach airport after him.  The company generously told the airport that it could use the name at no charge and would not profit from the renaming of the airport as far as signage, advertising, and promotions. Sure, but that applies to only the airport itself. Presumably, everyone selling airport-related merchandise, for example, will still get the privilege of paying to use the name. 

Alex Samuels at Daily Kos:

The Trump family’s latest business venture is here, and it’s just as ridiculous as you’d expect: a Trump-branded cell phone service and smartphone line, complete with a MAGA price tag and a healthy dose of self-promotion. Unveiled Monday by President Donald Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, “Trump Mobile” will launch with a single plan—the “47 Plan”—for $47.45 a month, a not-so-subtle nod to Trump’s being the 45th and 47th president. The company claims that the service will run on a 5G network with coverage comparable to the big three—and, yes, it’ll work with existing phones. 

But if you want to go full MAGA, the company is also pushing its own device: the $499 “T1 Phone” in a gold finish with an etched American flag. According to the Trump Mobile press release, the T1 is a “sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States.” It runs Android 15 and is available to preorder now with a $100 deposit. Ship dates are inconsistent—either August or September, depending on where you look. Eric said the device will be manufactured in the United States and that the company will operate a domestic call center as well. And the service won’t just include the basics, with Donald Jr. claiming that the $47 plan will offer “an entire package of products,” from telemedicine and roadside assistance to unlimited texting across 100 countries. The launch, not coincidentally, is tied to the 10th anniversary of Trump’s infamous golden escalator ride, but it marks yet another example of the Trump family blurring the line between public office and private profit.

On the 10-year anniversary of the infamous elevator ride down, the Trump Family introduces Trump Mobile (T1 Mobile), yet another grift.

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