June 23, 2026

HMM: Liberals see promise in tax-credit scholarships; conservatives see dangers.

“If policymakers are making their decision strictly on the merits, they will see it’s a no-brainer,” says Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform.

“Students will be eligible for scholarships as long as their family income is 300% of their area’s median income or lower,” writes Stone. “That threshold encompasses most U.S. students, including families earning more than $500,000 in Westchester County, N.Y., on the high end and $114,000 in Wolfe County, Ky., on the low end.”

Tax-credit scholarships could create a “slush fund for public schools” and a way for government regulators to control private schools, warns Daniel Buck of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. It “could be an utter disaster.”

“Ideally, this program will create a funding stream to allow struggling Catholic and Lutheran schools to prosper, homeschools and microschools to flourish, and public schools to offer a litany of new, supplemental services,” he writes.

More likely, he predicts, school districts could send out mass emails to encourage donations to their preferred SGO, one that would fund the district but not homeschooling co-ops.”

“In time this program will become a stick that the federal government can wield to thwack private schools into submission,” he writes. Once their budgets become dependent on federal scholarships, they’ll lose their academic independence. Administrations change.

I’ve said for years that the modern administrative state turns the old adage on its head: Once you take the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

FA, MEET FO:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

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:

UPDATE:

Jim Treacher writes that “Poetica Coffee has now taken down their Facebook page and all their other social media:”

They’re getting clobbered on Yelp. Oh, and they’re being investigated by the Department of Justice. So that was a big Sunday for them.

I’m not a big fan of Dan Goldman, but it’s not because he’s a Jew who believes Jews have the right to exist. I’m with him on this one.

Fortunately for Poetica Coffee, the press — most of the press — will go easy on him because they’re left-wing antisemites.

Not at the Washington Free Beacon, though. They’re reporting that:

The coffee shop is owned by Parviz Mukhamadkulov [I hope I’m pronouncing that wrong], an immigrant from Uzbekistan who is a donor to far-left Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner…

On its website, Poetica incongruously touts its “radical hospitality” and proudly notes that guests are “sacred” and “the door is open to everyone…”

They also owe the state of New York almost $400,000 in unpaid sales tax. So that’s something. And I guess they’ve had a bunch of sanitation problems. Go figure.

Now, a lot of people on both sides of the aisle seem to agree with these bigots at this coffee shop. I’m not one of them. I hope you’re not either.

Exit quote: “Do you want Nazis? Because this is how you get Nazis.”

 

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 2:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CAPITALISM, THE UNKNOWN IDEAL:

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reports:

Offer not valid for OnlyFans stars:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S A GOOD START: Andy Ngo: North Texas Antifa Terror Cell Members Sentenced to Combined 450 Years in Federal Prison.

The New Republic describes this as a mostly peaceful “noise demo” with a mere soupçon of violence:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Yeah, You’d Better Scratch China Off Your Bucket List. “While it isn’t like China will send secret police to arrest me here in the U.S., my new Japanese acquaintance noted that ‘the moment you travel to China or even just transit through a Chinese airport, you risk being detained out of nowhere.'”

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green

DEMOCRATIC PARTY POLITICS YIELD HOT PUTZ-VS.-PUTZ ACTION:

Posted at 1:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NARRATIVE-ENFORCEMENT INDUSTRY ENFORCES NARRATIVE: Liberal Media Ignores the Ravaging of Britain. “With the release of the report, the British government is no longer able to pretend that the crisis doesn’t exist. But the liberal media is still doing its best to hide what happened by simply not covering the story at all.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

MAXIMUM KUBRICK-A-BRAC: Criterion to Release Stanley Kubrick Box Set with All 13 of His Films, Including ‘The Shining’ International Cut.

The Criterion Collection is about to give Stanley Kubrick fans everything they’ve asked for: All 13 of the director’s features in one box set.

As the company has done with the likes of Wes Anderson and Ingmar Bergman, Criterion’s “The Complete Kubrick” brings together all the director’s movies in 4K, with the set hitting shelves on October 20, 2026. Watch a teaser for the box set below.

The films are “Day of the Fight” (1951, in both original and RKO versions); “Flying Padre” (1952); “Fear and Desire” (1952); “The Seafarers” (1953); “Killer’s Kiss” (1955); “The Killing” (1956); “Paths of Glory” (1957); “Spartacus” (1960); “Lolita” (1962); “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1962); “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968); “A Clockwork Orange” (1971); “Barry Lyndon” (1975); “The Shining” (1980, in both theatrical and international versions); “Full Metal Jacket” (1987); and “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999).

Notably, the international cut of “The Shining” is rarely available on home video or widely seen in North America; it’s shorter than the theatrical version by about 20 minutes, removing several pieces of exposition to create an even more ambiguous (as if!) suffocating atmosphere of dread.

I have a number of these films in Blu-Ray or 4K already, so I’m not sure if I’m going for this, but I might have been enticed if Criterion had managed to find the original extended cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Shining, before Kubrick shorted these films not long after their original versions had been shipped to theaters. The original ending of The Shining in particular would be fun to see:

After its premiere and a week into the general run (with a running time of 146 minutes), Kubrick cut a scene at the end that took place in a hospital. The scene shows Wendy in a bed talking with Mr. Ullman, who explains that Jack’s body could not be found; he then gives Danny a yellow tennis ball, presumably the same one that Jack was throwing around the hotel. This scene was subsequently physically cut out of prints by projectionists and sent back to the studio by order of Warner Bros., the film’s distributor. This cut the film’s running time to 144 minutes. Roger Ebert commented:

If Jack did indeed freeze to death in the labyrinth, of course his body was found – and sooner rather than later, since Dick Hallorann alerted the forest rangers to serious trouble at the hotel. If Jack’s body was not found, what happened to it? Was it never there? Was it absorbed into the past and does that explain Jack’s presence in that final photograph of a group of hotel party-goers in 1921? Did Jack’s violent pursuit of his wife and child exist entirely in Wendy’s imagination, or Danny’s, or theirs? … Kubrick was wise to remove that epilogue. It pulled one rug too many out from under the story. At some level, it is necessary for us to believe the three members of the Torrance family are actually residents in the hotel during that winter, whatever happens or whatever they think happens.[44]

The general consensus among those who saw the first few shows was that the film was better without it because keeping it would weaken the Overlook’s threat to the family and reintroduce Ullman, who had barely had a leading role in the story, into the conflict.[123] Co-writer Diane Johnson revealed that Kubrick had a certain “compassion” from the beginning for the fate of Wendy and Danny, and in that sense the hospital scene would give a sense of a return to normality. Johnson, on the other hand, was in favor of a more tragic outcome: she proposed the death of Danny Torrance. For Shelley Duvall, “Kubrick was wrong, because the scene explained some important things, such as the meaning of the yellow ball and the role that the hotel manager played in the intrigue.”[123] Kubrick decided that the film worked better without the scene.[124]

Still though, for somebody who wants an immersive deep dive into one of the 20th century’s greatest film directors, many wonders (and questions) await here.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S QUITE THE ACCOMPLISHMENT…:

…but over the last ten years, Britain has gone through nearly twice as many PMs as Italy.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

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.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

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?

Posted at 1:06 pm by Mark Tapscott

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.

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green