Slop.

They're still going on about dyed hair and piercings

LINK https://x.com/Acyn/status/2088363447159509300

LINK https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera/posts/breaking-us-president-donald-trump-said-that-he-would-soon-declare-the-strait-of/1536650485175967/

https://nitter.net/RobSchneider/status/2087178200451264527

Not working?... https://xcancel.com/RobSchneider/status/2087178200451264527

https://x.com/RobSchneider/status/2087178200451264527

https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/08/13/uss-abraham-lincoln-deaths-brawl/

According to U.S. Central Command, however, "These reports are false."

"As we have continuously seen, Iran continues to spread lies and false information," Emma Thompson, Central Command spokesperson, said in an email to Snopes.

We have not rated this claim because we don't have additional details about this rumor. Iranian media included very little concrete information, including the date of the alleged incident, making it more difficult to independently disprove the claim.

Still, there's no evidence that Central Command's statement is incorrect. Given reported communication between those aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and their families — and heightened media scrutiny — it seems unlikely that the military could hide the deaths of seven service members due to a knife brawl.

The ACP is and always will be pee pee poo poo from my stinky doo doo ass.

This really seems like a false flag op that sputtered out. So much speculative assumptions going in the reporting. How likely are we to see more of this kind of thing as the slow progress of the RF continues?

https://bsky.app/profile/mluckovich.bsky.social/post/3msvjlyrhvk2n

~5% of the time Mike Luckovich creates c/slop content. The rest of the time it's just very bad.

https://archive.is/20260812161853/https://www.ft.com/content/1b0a8ed9-d55a-49ea-971e-39e01e588632#selection-1799.0-1871.323

Because his writings turned the world upside down, it is natural to forget what a normie Karl Marx could be. He quit Soho for a life of suburban routine when circumstances allowed it. His attitude to various ethnic groups was of its time, at best. The great snob was also, according to one biographer, “ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh”. A “von”, no less. You can kick the boy out of Prussia . . . 

From the beginning, it was possible to be a socialist, the socialist, and culturally middle-of-the-road. It was possible to believe in seizing the means of production without being avant-garde on matters of sex, race, crime or war. That point has got lost over time, to the left’s immense cost.

The District of Columbia is about to join New York in having a mayor from the Democratic Socialists of America. Soon, Michiganders will be able to vote for a US senator of a similar bent. In 2028, perhaps in an atmosphere of AI-induced job anxiety, someone DSA-ish could become the Democratic nominee for president. I can hear a tapping sound, as readers of a certain financial bracket dial the phone numbers of their wealth managers. But there has been talk of a socialist breakthrough before, for example in Britain under Jeremy Corbyn and more lately under the Greens’ Zack Polanski. If it never quite materialises, the reason tends to be the same.

In the end, the hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic programme with a provably hated cultural one. The mystery is why.

The DSA wants to “disempower police unions”. (Some workers, as ever, are more equal than others.) The ultimate aim is “fully abolishing the police”. There would be no Department of War. The group also calls for race reparations and an end to visa caps. Some DSA candidates have de-emphasised these ideas in favour of economic populism. Zohran Mamdani is one. In a presidential race, however, no one could survive even tangential association with this cultural prospectus. The Republican attack ad writes itself. It would gloss over the tax-the-rich stuff, which after all polls well, highlight instead the police-bashing, and that would be that. In 2026, the rich are lucky in their enemies. If a politician could decouple socialism from the set of cultural ideas known as “woke”, he or she would be difficult to stop. Bernie Sanders half-tried, though no one was going to trust a man in the autumn of his life to face down as tenacious a movement as the cultural left. After that, examples dry up. If anything, Corbyn regarded socialist economics as a diversion from the real fun of nuclear disarmament and uniting Ireland. The one place that might have produced a culturally conservative or at least culturally neutral socialism is continental Europe, but even the French left has absorbed American woke jargon, perhaps recognising in it the authorial stamp of Michel Foucault.

And so capitalism glides on, never quite facing what would be its sternest political test. The question is why the left allows it to happen.

Perhaps they know what they are doing. Perhaps the appeal of woke is underrated. Almost half of all voters support the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A US that is failing to win in Iran, as it failed to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, could become receptive to the DSA’s line against foreign wars. But I don’t sense it is as calculated as all that. Marx himself would have put forward another answer. The fact that socialists pick vote-losing cultural fights is proof of the “superstructure”: the intellectual atmosphere of society, which subtly protects the interests of the asset-owning class. Woke has been such a godsend for capitalism — making its enemies look ridiculous — that it can seem almost engineered for that purpose.

Whatever the explanation, we should not normalise, just because we have grown up with it, the strange blend of command-and-control economics and ultra-progressive culture. Nothing about the one implies the other, except that both constitute a kind of rebellion. If anything, it is capitalism that pairs better with woke, in that both emphasise the individual. The right to keep one’s earned income, the right to cross national borders and the right to self-define in gender terms all spring from the same root.

One day, a political entrepreneur will notice the unmet demand for a culturally moderate-to-conservative socialism. At that point, the game will be on. A century or so after Das Kapital, some British dockers marched in defence of Enoch Powell, a Tory minister who had been fired for a speech against non-white immigration. The march wasn’t, and isn’t, peculiar. The conservatism of even the organised working class should not be news. Unable to come to terms with it, the modern left retreats into a sort of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh fantasy world, in which Christian and Muslim, native and migrant, blue-haired teenager and laid-off steelworker, are forever teaming up to fight the real Other, which is neoliberalism. As middlebrow cinema, this is harmless enough. As electoral politics, it is pure denial. Socialists are in the business of winning and holding power. It could happen, if they did not keep offering economic dirigisme and identity politics as bundled software. Those who want them to lose on both counts are forever grateful.

I hate this so much. The part that really gets me is that it's "good" enough that it could absolutely serve as a low effort corporate slop factory for any outfit with a few tens of thousands in computer hardware to trivially churn out absolute garbage that would previously cost tens of thousands per episode at least, while still being completely useless in practice because it's still just a slop gacha. Like it's not a useful, production boosting tech that could also give low-budget creators a way to actually produce their vision (the way something like SFM did for enabling amateurs and hobbyists to start animating with no barrier to entry), it's a random slop generator that makes garbage only suitable for grifters and corporate slop factories.

Also the paired audio and visual generation getting that "good" is fucking horrifying for so many other reasons too. This is something that can only make everything worse, like those fucking chatbots that are poisoning everything.

by Louis Juricic

Wed, August 12, 2026 at 3:35 PM EDT

Investing.com - Paramount's chief legal officer said Wednesday that selling CNN is "on the table" to resolve a 12-state antitrust lawsuit threatening the company's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Makan Delrahim made the disclosure at Politico's California Agenda conference, according to Reuters, signaling that Paramount is willing to go beyond internal safeguards to salvage a deal that has become one of the most politically charged media mergers in years. Warner Bros. Discovery is the publicly traded parent of CNN (NASDAQ: WBD), and the merger's fate directly determines whether Ellison's Paramount consolidates control over both CBS News and the cable network.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Paramount has discussed creating an editorial board for CNN and establishing other safeguards to protect the network's editorial independence, with those internal talks beginning before the antitrust suit was even filed. The company offered a measured response: "We always remain open to internal improvements to journalistic integrity."

The twin disclosures come as Paramount faces a hard deadline. David Ellison told senior executives he will begin relocating company operations out of California on October 1 if the lawsuit is not settled by September 30, Variety confirmed. That same date triggers $7 million per day in ticking fees owed to WBD shareholders, a clock that keeps running until the deal closes.

The California-led coalition, backed by 11 other states, argues the combined company would control nearly one-third of theatrical film distribution and one-third of basic cable channels. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has shown little interest in the pledges Paramount has floated. Writing in a Deadline guest column on August 10, Bonta called the company's assurances "piecemeal promises" and described the lawsuit as a "straight up antitrust enforcement case." He added: "Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court."

The political crossfire around Ellison is intensifying alongside the legal battle. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Ellison on Wednesday accusing him of "colluding" with President Trump and demanding a transcribed interview, citing reports of political interference at CBS News and Paramount's broader dealings with the Trump administration, CNN reported. Ellison, the son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, pushed back in a New York Times op-ed, arguing that "great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle" and suggesting the lawsuit is designed not to protect competition but to block him from owning CNN specifically.

Skeptics have reason to question promises about CNN's independence. Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit by President Trump over the editing of a "60 Minutes" interview, and a number of CBS correspondents have alleged political interference since Ellison appointed Free Press founder Bari Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief. CBS has denied any political interference. Critics note that assurances made about CBS were rapidly followed by the very editorial controversies Ellison had pledged to prevent, and they warn that a CNN editorial board could become similarly decorative.

The regulatory picture outside the United States has cleared. Britain approved the Paramount-WBD takeover after securing five-year guarantees on programming and editorial independence for Channel 5 news from CNN International and CBS News, Reuters reported, leaving California's suit as the deal's sole remaining obstacle.

With no settlement in sight and Bonta giving no public indication of what structural divestitures he would accept, the case appears headed toward a trial before U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín scheduled to begin March 2, 2027. Should proceedings run that long, the ticking fees alone could reach into the billions, though Paramount has not publicly verified a specific ceiling figure. The September 30 settlement deadline Ellison set is now the industry's most closely watched date.