The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.
So of course Disney has announced it signed a deal with OpenAI today that will soon allow fans to make their own officially licensed Disney slop using Sora 2. The house that mouse built, and which has been notoriously protective of its intellectual property, opened up the video generator, saw the videos featuring Nazi Spongebob and criminal Pikachu, and decided: We want in.
According to a press release, the deal is a 3 year licensing agreement that will allow the AI company’s short form video platform Sora to generate slop videos using characters like Mickey Mouse and Iron Man. As part of the agreement, Disney is investing $1 billion of equity into OpenAI, said it will become a major customer of the company, and promised that fan and corporate AI-generated content would soon come to Disney+, meaning that Disney will officially begin putting AI slop into its flagship streaming product.
The deal extends to ChatGPT as well and, starting in early 2026, users will be able to crank out officially approved Disney slop on multiple platforms. When Sora 2 launched in October, it had little to no content moderation or copyright guidelines and videos of famous franchise characters doing horrible things flooded the platform. Pikachu stole diapers from a CVS, Rick and Morty pushed crypto currencies, and Disney characters shouted slurs in the aisles of Wal-Mart.
It is worth mentioning that, although Disney has traditionally been extremely protective of its intellectual property, the company’s princesses have become one of the most common fictional subjects of AI porn on the internet; 404 Media has found at least three different large subreddits dedicated to making AI porn of characters like Elsa, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Tinkerbell. In this case, Disney is fundamentally throwing its clout behind a technology that has thus far most commonly been used to make porn of its iconic characters.
After the hype of the launch, OpenAI added an “opt-in” policy to Sora that was meant to prevent users from violating the rights of copyright holders. It’s trivial to break this policy however, and circumvent the guardrails preventing a user from making a lewd Mickey Mouse cartoon or episode of The Simpsons. The original sin of Sora and other AI systems is that the training data is full of copyrighted material and the models cannot be retrained without great cost, if at all.
If you can’t beat the slop, become the slop.
“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, said in the press release about the agreement.
The press release explained that Sora users will soon have “official” access to 200 characters in the Disney stable, including Loki, Thanos, Darth Vader, and Minnie Mouse. In exchange, Disney will begin to use OpenAI’s APIs to “build new products” and it will deploy “ChatGPT for its employees.”
I’m imagining a future where AI-generated fan trailers of famous characters standing next to each other in banal liminal spaces is the norm. People have used Sora 2 to generate some truly horrifying videos, but the guardrails have become more aggressive. As Disney enters the picture, I imagine the platform will become even more anodyne. Persistent people will slip through and generate videos of Goofy and Iron Man sucking and fucking, sure, but the vast majority of what’s coming will be safe corporate gruel that resembles a Marvel movie.
At a California State Senate committee hearing this year, the director of CalTrans, Tony Tavares, showed a simple chart that might have caused the assembled lawmakers some alarm.
It was a series of black bars representing the death toll on California’s roads in each of the past 20 years.
Fatalities had been falling until 2010, when the bars started getting longer and longer. A blood-red arrow shot up over the growing lines, charting their rise, as if to make sure nobody could miss the more than 60% increase in deaths.
“We are working to reverse the overall trend,” Tavares said.
No legislators asked about the chart. No one asked the director what, exactly, his agency was doing about it.
Over the next three hours, the Senate Transportation Committee members asked instead about homeless encampments along roads, gas tax revenue, gender identity on ID’s and planning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The chart presented by then-CalTrans Director Tony Tavares at the Senate Transportation Committee hearing on March 11, 2025.
The committee chair said it was the legislature’s first informational hearing on the state’s transportation system in more than a decade. Yet only two senators — both Republicans with little legislative power in a state controlled by Democrats — even asked about dangerous driving, one following up with questions about a deadly stretch of road in her district and the other about a small California Highway Patrol program to target egregious behavior behind the wheel.
Over the past decade, nearly 40,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been injured on California roads. As an ongoing CalMatters investigation has shown this year, time and again those crashes were caused by repeat drunk drivers, chronic speeders and motorists with well-documented histories of recklessness behind the wheel. Year after year, officials with the power to do something about it — the governor, legislators, the courts, the Department of Motor Vehicles — have failed to act.
The silence, in the face of a threat that endangers nearly every Californian, is damning.
California has some of the weakest DUI laws in the nation. Here, DUI-related deaths have been rising more than twice as fast as the rest of the country. But this fall, a state bill to strengthen DUI penalties was gutted at the last minute.
When it comes to speeding — one of the biggest causes of fatal crashes — again the legislature has done little. For two years in a row, bills that would have required the use of speed-limiting technology on vehicles have failed.
Lawmakers did pass legislation a couple years ago that allows the use of speed cameras. But it’s just a pilot project in a handful of jurisdictions.
Marc T. Vukcevich, director of state policy for advocacy group Streets For All, considers it a win — but a modest one.
“This shit is not enough to deal with the size and severity and the complexity of the problem we have when it comes to violence on our roadways,” Vukcevich said.
Erika Pringle, at right, embraces Allison Lyman, whose son died in a collision, during a candlelight vigil as part of The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims at the Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters
Gov. Gavin Newsom declined an interview request. Last year, he vetoed a bill that would have required technology that alerts drivers when they’re speeding.
The state DMV, which is under his authority, has wide latitude to take dangerous drivers off the road. But it routinely allows drivers with extreme histories of dangerous driving to continue to operate on our roadways, where many go on to kill.
Steve Gordon, whom Newsom chose to run the agency in 2019, won’t talk about it. He has declined or ignored CalMatters requests for an interview.
The agency simply released a statement from him in March, after our first interview request, touting modernization efforts that reflect an “ongoing commitment to enhancing accountability and transparency while continually refining our processes to ensure California’s roads are safer for everyone.”
Neither Newsom nor Gordon has announced any major changes since then.
How a bill to fight DUIs fails in Sacramento
For a brief moment earlier this year, Colin Campbell thought the state might finally do something about the scourge that changed his life one night in 2019.
A repeat drunk driver slammed into his Prius on the way to the family’s new home in Joshua Tree, killing his 17-year-old daughter, Ruby, and 14-year-old son, Hart.
Campbell, a writer and director from Los Angeles, began advocating for California to join most other states and create a law requiring in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI.
At first he was encouraged when the bill coasted through two legislative committees. But then came the roadblocks.
The ACLU opposed the measure, calling it “a form of racialized wealth extraction,” according to a Senate Public Safety Committee report from July. In California, people forced to use the devices have to pay about $100 a month to a private company to rent them, though there’s supposed to be a sliding fee scale based on income.
Then the DMV told lawmakers that it could not “complete the necessary programming” for the law, citing possible technology delays and costs of $15 million or more.
The bill was gutted. California couldn’t do something that nearly three dozen other states could.
Campbell called the sudden reversal a shameful example of forsaking public safety for bureaucracy.
“Our lives were destroyed that night,” he said. “If these people’s children had been killed by a drunk driver, there is no way they would be objecting to this.”
Even if the law had passed, DMV data suggests that California judges would have mostly ignored it.
State law says judges have to require in-car breathalyzers for people convicted of repeat DUIs. Last month, the DMV issued a report reinforcing what a similar report laid out two years earlier. Judges across the state ordered the devices just one-third of the time for repeat offenders. In 14 counties, they ordered the devices less than 10% of the time for second-time DUI offenders. The counties are: Alameda, Colusa, Glenn, Lassen, Los Angeles, Madera, Mono, Plumas, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Sierra, Tulare and Yuba.
DMV officials did not answer questions about what, if anything, the agency was doing about it.
We reached out to all 14 counties’ courts. Only eight responded to questions.
Chris Ruhl, executive officer for the Glenn County Superior Court, said the court is looking at local changes.
“Given the light CalMatters is bringing to this issue … the Glenn Court will review its current DUI sentencing practices,” according to a statement.
Glenn was one of a number of counties — including LA, Alameda and San Luis Obispo — that also suggested it wasn’t their judges’ responsibility to issue a court order. They said they only needed to notify the DMV of the convictions.
However, the law is clear: It’s the judge’s job to order the offender to use the device, said Jerry Hill, the retired Bay Area Democrat who wrote the bill.
When he worked in the Capitol, Hill said he also saw little urgency to rein in intoxicated driving.
“If you ask any legislator, they are going to say it’s a terrible, terrible thing,” he said.
But he said committee chairs and staff members who set the tone and write analyses often shied away from increasing criminal penalties.
“That’s where we see a lack of understanding, in my view, of the devastating effect of drunk driving in California,” he said.
Lawmakers say next session could bring change
A number of lawmakers said they are aware of the carnage on our roadways and plan to do something about it this coming legislative session, maybe.
Sen. Bob Archuleta, a Democrat from Norwalk who sits on the Transportation Committee, lost his granddaughter to a drunk driver just before Christmas last year. He said he recently met with representatives from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and is considering possible bills.
“This is not a Republican issue, a Democrat issue, an independent issue — or political issue. This is a life-saving issue,” he said. “We should all take it as seriously as the family that lost a loved one.”
Democratic Assemblymember Nick Schultz of Burbank said he is considering introducing at least one measure next year to address loopholes and weaknesses in state law.
Schultz, who started his career prosecuting DUI cases in Oregon and now chairs the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, said he is weighing several potential measures that would address issues CalMatters highlighted in its reporting this year, including lengthening license suspensions after fatal crashes, lowering the bar to charge repeat drunk drivers with a felony, strengthening breathalyzer requirements and making sure vehicular manslaughter convictions get reported to the DMV.
“People are tired of seeing the needless loss of life on our roadways,” Schultz said. “There’s no way to legislatively make someone make the right choice. But what we can do is create an incentive structure where there are consequences for bad decisions.”
In the absence of more leadership at the state level, road safety advocates — many of whom joined the cause after losing a loved one to a preventable car crash — are taking it on themselves to try to force change. They’re meeting with lawmakers and officials, holding public events, telling their stories.
First: At far right, Fumiko Torres speaks about losing Rayanna Diaz while standing alongside other family members during a candlelight vigil as part of The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims event at the Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025. Last: Allison Lyman stands at a table honoring her son Connor, who was killed in a traffic collision, before the start of a candlelight vigil as part of the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims at the Capitol in Sacramento on Nov. 16, 2025. Photos by Fred Greaves for CalMatters
Jennifer Levi started working with MADD after her son, Braun, was killed in May while he was out walking with friends in Manhattan Beach. She said they’d only recently relocated to the area after the family home burned down in the Palisades fire, destroying “all of Braun’s pictures, videos from when he was born.”
The driver who killed her son was allegedly intoxicated and had a prior DUI arrest.
“The worst day of my life is now my life’s work. I will not stop until California changes,” Levi said.
In the months since her son’s death, Levi said, she’s met with any officials or influential people she could — current and former lawmakers, district attorneys, local council members, a lobbyist, and members of the media. Among the changes she wants: to make it easier to charge repeat DUI offenders with murder when they kill someone, to make fatal DUIs a violent felony and to increase penalties for hit-and-run fatalities. As CalMatters reported in October, California law often treats drunken vehicular manslaughter as a nonviolent crime with minimal time behind bars.
Levi calls her push to reform the system “Braun’s Bill.”
Many grieving families share a similar goal: for those they lost to be remembered by a state and society that seem indifferent. That desire was on display last month during an event in Sacramento to mark the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.
On a cold Sunday evening in mid-November, after a break in the rain, dozens of relatives of people killed in car crashes gathered on the dark steps of the state Capitol for a candlelight vigil. They fought to keep photos on posterboards upright in the gale-force winds. Family by family, they ascended the steps, stood above a display of orange cones lit with strands of white lights and addressed the onlookers, talking about their loved ones and what was lost — children left without their mother, mothers without their children, a wife left without the love of her life.
“Every day I live and I wake up and I pretend like I’m happy. Every day I wish my stairs would make noise. I miss being called mom,” said Angel Dela Cruz, whose 17-year-old son Edward Alvidrez Jr. was hit by a truck while riding a dirt bike in Madera County in 2022.
“I hope we all get justice,” she said.
The event ended with a moment of quiet reflection and a prayer before the families put away their pictures and walked off, the Capitol behind them locked, silent.
Ideas like making it easier to charge repeat drunk drivers with murder when they kill people seem good, at least on the surface. So does mandating the use of breathalyzer ignition locks for DUI offenders. I'm not a big fan of putting speed limiters in vehicles, but holding people accountable when they violate the rules of the road should be pretty uncontroversial.
H.R., a physical education teacher at a high school in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, on Nov. 7, 2025. Photo by Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters
Since September, American employers have been required to pay a $100,000 sponsorship fee for new H-1B visas, one of several policy shifts under President Donald Trump to restrict who gets to come in and out of the country. But while much attention has been paid to what this means for applicants in California’s tech industry, the rule affects its public school system as well.
As Sophie Sullivan and Alina Ta of CalMatters’ College Journalism Network explain, K-12 schools employ skilled foreign educators, particularly to staff language and special education programs. In 2023, West Contra Costa Unified School District hired about 88 teachers on H-1B visas, most of whom came from the Philippines, Spain and Mexico. Even then, hiring those teachers required paying application fees ranging from $9,500 to $18,800.
Sylvia Greenwood, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources: “With our shortages in special ed, they were a good fit for our district. … We kept that pipeline open and brought teachers here from the Philippines to support our students and our students with special needs.”
With the cost of hiring those teachers now exceeding $100,000 following Trump’s new policy, it’s likely those positions will be left empty. Without international employees to fulfill hiring gaps, the workload for other teachers will also increase, said one Ford Elementary School teacher in the district.
H.R. is a physical education teacher in West Contra Costa who works on a short-term J-1 visa. He and his family moved from Mexico to the U.S. three years ago, but he now expects to move back after his visa expires in June 2026 because the district is unlikely to pay for his immigration fees.
H.R.: “Everybody says here that they need teachers in California … but they don’t want to do anything to (help us stay) here.”
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Other Stories You Should Know
PG&E secures another permit for nuclear plant
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in Avila Beach near San Luis Obispo in 2008. Photo by Michael A. Mariant, AP Photo
On Thursday the California Coastal Commission approved Pacific Gas & Electric’s permit to keep operating the state’s last nuclear power plant, but only under key conditions, reports CalMatters’ Nadia Lathan.
Located along the San Luis Obispo shoreline, Diablo Canyon provides about 8% of California’s total energy. Originally due to close this year, the plant remains open through 2030 following a state law passed in 2022 to keep Diablo Canyon operating. Because the plant operates within the coastal commission’s jurisdiction, however, PG&E still needed its separate approval.
The commission gave that approval on the contingency that PG&E also conserves about 4,000 acres of land on its property that would not be developed for any commercial or residential use.
The vote renewed debates about keeping the plant open. The plant draws in 2 million gallons of water from the ocean daily to cool its systems. In addition to the harm this brings to marine wildlife, environmentalists have also raised concerns about radioactive waste.
Proponents say the plant provides reliable, clean energy and keeps thousands of people employed. PG&E now awaits federal approval for a 20-year relicensing permit through 2045.
The Colorado River winds through farmland near Fort Mohave north of Needles on Sept. 23, 2022. Photo by David McNew, Getty Images
A new report finds that California cities pay more for water than what irrigation districts pay to supply water to farms, write CalMatters’ Rachel Becker and Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett.
Cities pay on average about $722 per acre foot for water, compared to just $35 agricultural districts pay, according to researchers at UCLA and advocates with the Natural Resources Defense Council. One acre foot can supply roughly 11 Californians with water for a year.
The difference in water prices depends on the source: Water supplied from federally managed rivers and reservoirs costs far less on average than water from state-managed distribution systems or through water transfers, which drive up prices with each change-of-hands.
Researchers attributed this 20-fold difference to the cost of delivering water to cities and water transfers. The most expensive water in California, for example, flows from Northern California rivers all the way down to the San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency in Riverside County, which costs more than $2,850 per acre foot. Meanwhile, three California agricultural suppliers with rights to the Colorado River receive water for free from the federal government.
CalMatters columnist Dan Walters: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s critics exaggerate nuggets of facts to depict the governor as corrupt and incompetent, but there’s plenty of material in Newsom’s political career for legitimate criticism.
Berkeley has become one of California’s most surprising housing reform success stories, but its pro-development progress remains fragile, writes Rigel Robinson, former Berkeley City Councilmember.
Other things worth your time:
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Trump administration adds militarized zone in CA along southern US border // AP News
CA delays wildfire rules that would force homeowners to clear vegetation // San Francisco Chronicle
Fed lowered interest rates Wednesday. Will CA consumers notice? // The Sacramento Bee
So I got this email a while back from Gun Owners of America, one of the many gun rights groups that has been building a name for itself now that the National Rifle Association is faltering. Going out over the signature of Executive Vice President Erich Pratt, it’s an amazing bit of fantasy:
Mark – President Trump has made it crystal clear: he’s committed to restoring and defending your Second Amendment rights. But the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, is actively IGNORING the president, betraying gun owners, and trampling your rights.
While Bondi’s DOJ has taken some positive steps for Second Amendment rights, the department is now acting on its own—defying President Trump’s directives and letting gun owners down in the process.
The GOA letter lists some anti-gun things the DOJ has done:
THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE’S TERRIBLE SECOND AMENDMENT STANCES
A rogue ATF employee declared pinned-and-welded barrels “not permanent” after destroying a sample with a vise. ATF has refused to reverse this Biden-era reinterpretation, threatening millions of legally configured rifles.
The concern here is that it is (effectively) illegal to have a rifle with a barrel shorter than 16 inches, but many rifles are sold with barrels slightly shorter than that, to which they permanently attach a muzzle device, such a flash suppressor or compensator, using the pin-and-weld method. This has long been recognized as bringing the gun into legal compliance.
The GOA says that an ATF employee claimed a muzzle device was not permanent because they could tear it off with enough force, even though that damaged the barrel enough to render the gun unusable. It’s questionable whether this actually changes anything, and rifles with pinned and welded muzzle devices are still being sold by major manufacturers.
Here are a few other complaints:
After a pro-gun Supreme Court victory in Garland v. Cargill crushed the bump stock ban, Bondi’s DOJ refused to pay GOA’s legal fees, punishing grassroots defenders and discouraging pro-gun litigation.
The bump stock ban was enacted by an Executive Order that Trump signed in 2018. You folks at GOA fought him on it, so he’s not about to pay your bills. Not paying bills is kind of his brand.
ATF weaponized background checks, spying on lawful sales, and leaving loopholes to expand this unconstitutional surveillance in the future.
DOJ is using Biden’s anti-gun playbook to attack Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act, making arguments nearly identical to those used under the Biden regime.
Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act aims to prevent local police from helping enforce federal gun laws. Of course Trump’s Attorney General doesn’t like it: It mirrors the logic of sanctuary cities, which Trump hates, and it takes power away from Trump’s federal government, which he hates even more.
Bondi’s DOJ is defending unconstitutional suppressor bans, parroting the failed arguments of California’s anti-gun politicians.
I don’t like them either, but they haven’t been found unconstitutional.
In case after case, DOJ drags its feet, blocks legal fee recovery, and argues to keep Biden’s anti-gun rules alive for a future anti-gun president.
The DOJ supported warrantless home searches in Montana, putting your Fourth Amendment rights at risk.
The DOJ is even defending gag orders that prevent GOA from sharing FOIA documents.
Pratt then goes on to say:
Mark, President Trump is standing up for our rights. But the Department of Justice and Pam Bondi are BLOCKING his pro-2A agenda and ignoring orders from the top. This is an outright betrayal.
Oh, it may very well be a betrayal, but not by Pam Bondi.
Trump has done very little to help gun owners. He managed to eliminate the fee for a National Firearms Act tax stamp, which is required for suppressors and short-barreled rifles, but he didn’t get rid of the requirement for registration and ATF approval. Nor did he do anything about state laws banning such weapons.
Trump is no friend to the right to keep and bear arms. Blaming it on Bondi is just Pratt’s transparent attempt to avoid angering Trump supporters who donate to pro-gun organizations.
It is funny and sad seeing how many pro-2A organizations engage in this willful self-deception. Trump DGAF about your gun rights. Sorry, those are just the facts.
Do Kwon, the founder and former CEO of Terraform Labs, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in the approximately $100 billion collapse in valuation of the Terra/Luna system, according to updates from Matthew Russell of Inner City Press.
The 34-year-old pleaded guilty in August to wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud after the US charged him in 2023.
Last week, Kwon’s lawyers requested a five-year sentence, arguing that the 12 years requested by prosecutors was “far greater than necessary” to achieve justice.
Judge Engelmayer: You have been bitten by the crypto bug and I don't think that's changed. You must be incapacitated. If not for your guilty plea, my sentence would have been higher. You pled early. Your letter is beautifully written, for your daughter one day
However, US prosecutors disagreed, claiming that five years was “utterly insufficient,” and accused Kwon of “underselling the gravity of his crimes.”
The judge additionally noted that he believed a more severe sentence than what the prosecutors were requesting was necessary, settling on the 15-year sentence that was handed down.
Kwon’s team also noted that he still faces another trial in South Korea, which carries a potential 40-year prison sentence, and pointed out that he’s already served three years “with more than half that time in brutal conditions in Montenegro.”
Following the conclusion of his topsy-turvy legal battle, Kwon joins other high-profile crypto criminals who have served time in the US.
These include Sam Bankman-Fried, who was handed 25 years for FTX-related fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, and Alex Mashinsky, who was given 12 years for fraud relating to the manipulation of Celsius’s token.
Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to a more manageable four months last year for crimes related to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.
One of the updates from Russell noted that Kwon will receive credit for time served, both in the United States and before his extradition. Additionally, he will be extradited to South Korea for the back half of his sentence.
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Is this the tiny “kei” car everyone is talking about? Not exactly. Jeep maker Stellantis announced plans to bring the tiny Fiat Topolino EV, which sells for under $12,000 in Europe, to the US.
I get teased because my EV doesn't have enough range to get to nearby cities, but at least min can go at hjghway speeds. This Fiat can't even reach city speeds.
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A rogue ATF employee declared pinned-and-welded barrels “not permanent” after destroying a sample with a vise. ATF has refused to reverse this Biden-era reinterpretation, threatening millions of legally configured rifles.
