Sunrise on a rainy Wednesday...

"But, without Mamaw around to guide him, JD lost his faith in God. 'With her gone, no one really cared about my faith, and soon I stopped caring too.'"

"By 2006 'I was no longer, in any real sense, a Christian.' Instead, he took up the winner-takes-all, blessed-are-the-rich philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he summarises as 'stop whining, stop praying, and start working your ass off.' Hers was the materialistic faith he followed through Ohio State University and most of Yale Law School, where they regarded Christianity as 'a weird superstition.' He now thinks his loss of faith was not primarily intellectual, but the inevitable result of transferring his political allegiance to an ungodly liberal elite. 'It was the equivalent of divorce. I was severing myself from my roots.' But then, around 2014, after he’d fallen in love and got married, he began to see that by becoming 'so focused on winning the game of life… I had neglected the deeper truth.'"

From "God, guns and 'Mamaw' — JD Vance’s memoir is part rant, part sermon/In Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the US vice-president explains why the liberal elite pushed him into the arms of the Church — and Donald Trump" (London Times).

"So I decided to ask them: Can you tell me what, exactly, you like about ultimate fighting?..."

"I couldn’t get my 18-year-old to talk about it, but my 15-year-old — a thoughtful kid who last week told me, 'U.F.C. literally takes up 99 percent of my brain space' — was happy to oblige. He explained in excruciating detail the various weight classes and fighting techniques.... 'I know it’s marketing, I really do, but their characters are so entertaining and their work ethic really impresses me.' Another thing he finds compelling about U.F.C., he said, is how 'real' it is. Most professional sports are 'fictional' made-up games in which people throw or kick or hit round rubber things in order to amuse themselves and a bunch of strangers. Fighting, he pointed out, is primal, 'in our blood'...."

Writes Hope Reeves, in "My Teenage Sons Love U.F.C. Here’s What We Saw at the White House Cage Match" (NYT).

"The performance turned out to be a string of gags about Bankman-Fried’s and Diddy’s sins that largely spared Mangione of the worst ridicule."

"It instead featured running jokes about how parts of the internet find him attractive, while the titular character is gifted love ballads, literally and metaphorically. His cast members call him a 'prodigy' and a 'legend.' His response: 'I’m not a celebrity. I’m just a normal, exceedingly handsome guy. To make matters worse, they all sing...."

From "'Luigi: The Musical' is a fever dream from hell/The show isn’t meant to 'glorify violence,' but it does. The protesters outside, meanwhile, think it doesn’t go far enough" (WaPo)(gift link).

"The musical has a bare-bones plot, practically no choreography and nothing in the way of a set apart from a couple of chairs and one prop, a gun. All that could be forgiven in a staged reading, but what is glaringly absent is any serious mention of [Brian] Thompson’s name or the wife and two sons he left behind. It’s clear the show’s creators think they have tapped into some profound observation of the nihilistic trends running through today’s culture: our numb responses to mass violence, the disintegration of societal trust. 'What kind of sick f---- would buy tickets to something like that?,' the characters lament onstage about the musical, in what’s meant to be a self-critical, meta moment...."

"I think they think I was right. I’m sort of always right, you know, when you get down to it."

"They think I was right. They feel good. Now all of a sudden they all want to be involved."

Said — it's so obvious (who talks like that?) — Trump.

Quoted in "G-7 ends without rupture as allies praise Trump for ending Iran war/For the other leaders of the Group of Seven nations, success was defined as avoiding a public fight with the U.S. president" (WaPo).

The same allies that have worked to build economic, diplomatic and military hedges against Trump’s unpredictability found themselves applauding his role in restoring a measure of stability.... 

"This way, if it works, I take the credit. If not, I blame JD! You better be careful, JD!"

🚨 LMFAO!! Funniest president ever 🤣🤣

DOOCY: Why not stick around in Europe for the Iran deal signing this weekend?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I might, but this is a Memorandum of Understanding...if it works, I take the credit. If not, I blame JD! You better be careful, JD! He's gonna… pic.twitter.com/O1h8TVsLbX

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 17, 2026

"The storm comes and splits at the White House and goes around the White House and the Ellipse. The President believes that… it was divine intervention."

Dana White on the storm going around UFC Freedom 250: “The storm comes and splits at the White House and goes around the White House and the Ellipse. The President believes that… it was divine intervention.” pic.twitter.com/uWFETwVL9H

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) June 17, 2026

This skirt is messing Obama up.

Barack Obama "is really messed up. I'm giving him some time because this beautiful skirt that my stylist Meredith Koop picked out that is my favorite portrait of my mom. He didn't know it existed until just a few minutes ago. I've had a few weeks to settle down"
- Michelle Obama pic.twitter.com/YbjPXRy0OS

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) June 16, 2026

ADDED: I've seen faces on shirts but I can't remember ever seeing a face on clothing below the waist. I went looking and found this from Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1990s. I think it works because the faces are small and numerous, making it not that different from, say, a floral print.

One giant face, larger than the face of the wearer, feels quite obtrusive. But it's long been accepted above the waist. How long have those things been around? I remember the Che Guevara shirts, circa 1970, but what was the original T-shirt with a big face? My quick research says it was probably the Thomas E. Dewey 1948 U.S. presidential campaign T-shirt — Dewey's face and the slogan "Dew-it with Dewey."

"Lately, it seems that many women — perhaps especially white millennial ones — are indulging in the same fantasy."

"According to endless social-media posts and group-chat messages, Adult life sucks lately. I’m opting out. It’s as if a generation raised on the dream of the girl boss has become disillusioned by the promise that hard work will get us anywhere (and to be fair, there’s no guarantee that it will). Struggle is for chumps! 'I’m just a girl,' and I don’t want to learn about balancing my checkbook or filing expense reports or how to parallel park. The 2020s have been a weird time for womanhood. (Then again, when hasn’t it?) Greta Gerwig’s record-smashing Barbie, more phenomenon than movie, and Taylor Swift’s mind-bogglingly profitable Eras Tour had women spending collective billions to proudly and unapologetically relive their sparkly, pink-tulled girlhoods. Fashion has trended toward the young and feminine, too: : ribbons and bows, beads and sparkles, mary janes and ballet flats. By the end of 2023, Isabel Cristo wrote in this magazine, 'The market [had] conspired to sell us one thing, rendered every which way, and that thing was: girl.' Ours is a time in which 'the only way to have fun [it seems, is] by turning away from adult womanhood wholesale and toward a breezy, bright alternative. Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance?'"

Writes Shannon Keating, in "Confessions of a Recovering Baby Woman On the enduring fantasy of being 'just a girl” — and how I finally decided to get a grip and grow up" (The Cut).

Panorama at 5:09 a.m.

"Last Friday Kuzovkov protested outside the Russian embassy in Berlin with a satirical painting of Putin and Joseph Stalin."

"It depicted a tiny Putin sitting on Stalin’s lap. He also stuffed a Russian flag into a bin during the protest, which was staged on the Russia Day national holiday.... On Saturday Kuzovkov posted a painting on Telegram showing [Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov and his teenage son, Adam, as pigs. His work included sexually explicit images of Kadyrov that suggested the Chechen leader was gay. He also mocked Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces unit...."

From "He made Putin look grotesque. A gunman shot him dead in a car park/Two Belarusians have been arrested over the killing of Robert Kuzovkov in Poland. The case may be murkier than it first appears" (London Times).

  

They had to know this would happen: "Trump’s $14m 'American flag blue' reflecting pool turns green with algae."

I'm reading the news in The London Times.

[E]xperts who warned that the dark blue colour would absorb more sunlight than the original light grey concrete and become a perfect environment for algae to bloom were quickly proven correct... This week workers appeared with bottles of hydrogen peroxide that they poured into the 6.75 million gallon pool. Officials said that this would work with the new ozone-injected nanobubble filtration system that was supposed to combat the growth of algae... “This is some six-and-a-half million gallons of water we’re talking about here, so that’s a lot of bottles of anything that you’d have to add,” Steve Goodale, a pool maintenance expert.... “But the hydrogen peroxide is an oxidizer itself, in the same way that the nanobubbler system is, so the two systems are essentially the same thing, just a different approach to it.”

I hope they fix it, but for now, it's at least embarrassing.

Sunrise.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

JD Vance gets a word in edgewise on "The View."

It's not easy, but he keeps his cool and maintains a friendly manner even as the women try very hard to put on the pressure: 

Whoopi Goldberg asks JD Vance why the Trump Administration is "stigmatizing" black people.

*JD Vance asks for specific examples*

Whoopi: "Ummmm Uhhhhh Ummmm" pic.twitter.com/mPPon5eprX

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 16, 2026

"Politicians’ constant compulsion to blame the gap between policy victories and political support simply on poor communications, or worse, poor 'messaging,' is a bit too pat..."

"... both self-serving and self-exonerating. If only they knew about all the great things I’ve done! But Biden — who, by late in his term, 'had become among the most inaccessible presidents in modern history,' Timothy Naftali of Columbia University writes — did himself few favors on that front. 'He did not just fail to tout his achievements; he seldom even tried,' Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, complains.... In her memoir, Jill Biden reimagines her husband’s communications struggles as something between a mistake and a virtue. 'While Joe was in office, I think he and I both erred on the side of silence, dignity and letting news cycles run their course,' she explains.... 'We were trying so hard to reassure everyone that we didn’t take the time to acknowledge that he looked very unwell in that debate, to say to the public: 'Yes. That was bad, no doubt.'"

Writes Carlos Lozada, in "The Verdict on Biden Is In" (NYT).

Raindrops on purple water.