IT’S QUITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT…:
😂🤣😂 pic.twitter.com/Y0LdOPkv45
— Lola voting Reform 🩵 (@Bebs1000) June 22, 2026
…but over the last ten years, Britain has gone through nearly twice as many PMs as Italy.
June 23, 2026
YOU WERE ONLY SUPPOSED TO BLOW THE BLOODY OARS OFF!! Michael Caine’s AI-Generated Voice to Narrate The Odyssey Audiobook Ahead of Christopher Nolan’s Movie.
The sprawling nature of Homer’s epic “Odyssey” poem makes it understandable why a Hollywood studio would shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to bring it to life on the screen. But in ElevenLabs‘ AI audiobook version, all it requires is four producers, several AI tools and a replica voice of Christopher Nolan stalwart Michael Caine.
The AI audio firm is using Caine’s voice to anchor a new, roughly 13-hour version of “The Odyssey” weeks before Nolan’s upcoming film hits theaters. Released on Tuesday through the company’s ElevenReader audiobook app, the new audiobook version was created entirely by AI tools, including voices on ElevenLabs’ voice library along with sounds and a score generated through the firm’s music generator. The firm hopes the AI audiobook serves as a complement to Nolan’s film, one that lets readers catch up on the source material ahead of Nolan’s epic.
“Our version of it is another retelling of it that we think is really strong — it does justice,” Dustin Blank, ElevenLabs’ head of partnerships, told Variety in a recent interview. “It has a cast of 20 characters, all from our voice library, and Michael Caine is a legend. He is a national treasure, and his voice means so much to so many people, and we thought that he, as the narrator, would be the perfect person to help tell this story for his part in it, and I think he does.”
Caine’s affiliation with ElevenLabs isn’t new, as the Oscar winner licensed his voice and likeness last year to the firm’s “Iconic Marketplace,” its collection of characters that companies can pay to use for commercial purposes. But this partnership expands the arrangement, one Blank said is rooted in “consent and compensation.” ElevenLabs pays creators every time their voices are used in ElevenReader, and in Caine’s case, he was specifically consulted about the project and approved the marketing materials, Blank said. (Whether he’s heard the final project, however, couldn’t be determined.)
I hope that ElevenLabs listened to the finished product very carefully; AI narrators have a habit of mispronouncing common words and abbreviations, betraying their synthetic nature.
LOL. Gross.
Absolute vomit.
And just why?
What a complete idiot move. https://t.co/Rcj1IvG978— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) June 23, 2026
LOOK WHO’S SILENT ON TRUMP’S IRAN MOU: Did you notice that when Secretary if War Pete Hegseth spoke last week at a NATO gathering in Brussels he said not one word about the Trump deal with Iran? Richard Pollock did. Is a major split in the Trump cabinet about to become public?
PRIME DAY DEAL: roborock Qrevo CurvX Robot Vacuum and Mop. #CommissionEarned
SPACE: Kennedy Space Center not ready for era of super heavy rockets.
NASA’s infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center, the crown jewel of US spaceports, is aging and approaching its limit due to increased demand from private companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, a new report finds.
“NASA’s launch infrastructure is vital to providing the agency, other government agencies, and commercial partners access to space for their most complex and expensive missions,” states the report, published by the NASA Office of Inspector General. “Nevertheless, NASA’s launch infrastructure is dated and often does not provide the capacity to meet the growing demands of the agency and its partners.”
The report covers NASA’s launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. However, the most noteworthy information in the report concerns the Florida spaceport, where demand from SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch vehicles is expected to stress NASA.
Maybe Washington should offer to get out of the way and let Blue Origin and SpaceX make the necessary improvements.
COFFEE AND CLICHES: Lefty owner of anti-Israel NYC coffee shop calls US ally ‘Nazi Germany of our time’ in hateful online outburst.
The radical leftist owner of a woke Brooklyn coffee shop that boasts about discriminating against pro-Israel Jewish customers on social media has a history of deranged anti-Israel LinkedIn posts — including accusing the Jewish state of genocide and comparing it to Nazi Germany.
Parviz Mukhamadkulov, founder of Poetica Coffee in Park Slope, regularly engages in comment threads under posts about Israel or the horrors committed by Hamas, in which he justifies the terror group’s atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.
“Israel is the Nazi Germany of current time,” he wrote in response to a video posted by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Curiously though, Tucker Carlson is no fan of Israel, and neither is world’s biggest Totenkopf stan:
Leftists: "If Graham Platner is a Nazi, then why does he hate Israel so much?"
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) May 4, 2026
IF YOU THINK YOU’RE HEALTHY IT JUST MEANS YOU HAVEN’T HAD ENOUGH TESTS: Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info?
NOT EVEN I NEED THE COFFEE THAT BADLY: If You’re in Brooklyn and Hate Jews, That and $9.82’ll Get You a Cup of Coffee.
CHUCK TODD: Obama radicalized the far right; it was the same thing. The far right viewed Obama as some left-winger when Obama was basically a degree more liberal than Bill Clinton.
CHRIS CILLIZZA: Temperamentally a moderate, right? Probably liberal on policy, but temperamentally a moderate.
CHUCK TODD: What policy was he that liberal on, Chris?* It’s one of the biggest–
CHRIS CILLIZZA: It was because he was black.
CHUCK TODD: Thank you. The only reason people think he was liberal is because he’s black.
Like it’s this, he governed more closely to George W. Bush than Donald Trump.
* Almost 20 years later, and NBC News alumni still pretend to still be baffled by Obama’s worldview and politics: Tom Brokaw on the eve of the 2008 presidential election: “We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.”
DON’T GET COCKY IN TEXAS EITHER: Democrats Just Got Brutal News About Their Texas Senate Dream.
DEMS DO SEEM TO LOVE THEIR ISLAMIC TERRORISTS:
The terrorist group (PFLP – who started modern terrorism) Sama Safi belongs to has killed over 20 U.S. citizens. https://t.co/frFi7s5eTH
— Nick Matau (@nick_matau) June 23, 2026
As high-stakes negotiations to end the Iran war continue in Switzerland, the maritime industry’s message to the White House is clear: Don’t allow Iran to formalize its tolling racket over the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran wants all commercial shipping vessels to register with a newly formed Iranian agency in order to pass through the narrow entry to the oil-rich Persian Gulf — but Western insurance underwriters are refusing to comply, slamming the mandate as a sanctions trap, The Post has learned.
Senior sources say unless US negotiators force Iran to completely dismantle its unilateral insurance mandates and fully clear international waters of underwater mines, trade in the region will never truly recover.
Maybe that’s the point, reducing dependence on Persian Gulf oil flows. The Arab Gulf states are already planning accordingly: Gulf States Fast-Track Pipeline Projects to Bypass Volatile Strait of Hormuz.
THIS STORY KEEPS GETTING STRANGER: So a ‘Jellyfish’ Drone Swarm Might Have Shot Down Our F-15 Over Iran.
PRIME DEAL: Apple AirPods Pro 3 Wireless Earbuds, Active Noise Cancellation. #CommissionEarned
I MISSED THIS ONE OVER THE WEEKEND: ‘Send them back’ chants rock European Parliament after landslide vote to speed up deportations.
Members of the European Parliament voted 418 to 218 Wednesday with 30 abstentions to approve the Return Regulation, a measure designed to speed up the removal of third-country nationals who are staying illegally in the European Union.
The moment quickly turned explosive. After the vote was announced, right-wing lawmakers stood, applauded and chanted “send them back,” according to a video of the meeting.
Lawmakers on the left responded by chanting “shame on you.”
The legislation still requires formal approval by the Council of the European Union and publication in the Official Journal before it goes into force, but the confrontation underscored how sharply divided Europe remains over migration, even as the bloc’s institutions move ahead with policies once seen as politically taboo.
The new rules would allow member states to detain some migrants for up to 24 months, with a possible six-month extension, and create a framework for “return hubs” outside the European Union in third countries willing to receive migrants with return decisions.
Those are baby steps, but at least they’re in the right direction.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ASU professor docked for ‘Christian bias’ after asking students about ‘highest good.’
PRIME DAY DEAL: Levi’s Men’s 501 Original Fit Jeans. #CommissionEarned
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Syracuse student questions ‘value’ of degree as university misses enrollment target amid tuition hike, budget woes.
SOUNDS LIKE THEY’RE UNFIT TO PRACTICE LAW: Roughly one-third of UC Berkeley law students claim ‘psychological’ disabilities.
Recent UC Berkeley Law graduate Andrew Testerman notes in a James G. Martin Center article that 37.5 percent of UC Berkeley Law students get some sort of disability accommodation, a figure greater than the total number of male students at the school.
Ninety-eight percent of those “have a primary or secondary diagnosis of ‘ADD/ADHD,’ ‘anxiety,’ or (somewhat less commonly) ‘depression.’”
By comparison, American community colleges have a disability rate of 3-4 percent, and U.S. senior citizens about 24 percent.
“Yet we are asked to believe that students at elite law schools are significantly more likely to be disabled” than the elderly, Testerman says.
Maybe it’s all that time spent at Berkeley.
THE STATE OF FREE SPEECH IN EUROPE IS EVEN WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. Once a country gets comfortable treating offensive memes, private texts, and unfashionable opinions as police matters, identity verification stops looking like safety infrastructure and starts looking like a searchable database for the next speech crime.
2004 FLASHBACK: Instapundit is not a news service. “I do try to call attention to stories that I think deserve more attention than they’re getting from Big Media outlets, but that very effort means that InstaPundit isn’t going to be ‘balanced.'”
HARDER TO BE A YOUNG MAN: HillFaith’s Amanda Hughes digs into new survey data showing growing challenges for young men to be … genuinely masculine young men.
