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Just to be clear, the Cathedral is about a mile away from the Capital building, and someone murdered one of our reps today. Someone who had a conservative manifesto and a flyer for this rally in their car.

I was with kiddo and did not attend. But we ran into several smaller rallies with the same message, all over the city. This was just the largest.

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"Now I've shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat." (From his Wikipedia article).

Neil Munro "Bunny" Roger

June 9, 1911-April 27, 1997.

Bunny Roger killed a bunch of Nazis and then invented Capri pants.

He was expelled from Oxford for his indiscrete gayness (discrete gayness being perfectly fine at Oxford and part of the curriculum until...today probably, at least like 1992?). Then, having been sent down to London, he started his own fashion business, and his first client was Vivien Leigh.

Bunny served in WWII, killing fascists in North Africa and Italy, and often wearing a mauve scarf in the field. Roger claimed that he had gone into a battle brandishing a rolled-up copy of VOGUE and commanding: "When in doubt, powder heavily!"

Roger was known in high society for his themed soirées; Diamond, Amethyst, and Flame Balls were held to celebrate his 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays. He wore a curious plum colored catsuit with a feathered headdress at his 70th birthday ball in 1981. At his 80th, he made his entrance in a catsuit of scarlet sequins with a cape of orange organza, greeting his guests from behind a wall of fire. His parties were covered by the newspapers, including a New Year's Eve Fetish Ball where the proper upper class mixed with young guests in rubber S/M gear.

From an obituary: "Beneath his mauve mannerisms, Bunny was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates, a life enhancer and exemplary friend."

From another obituary:

He served valiantly in every way.

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Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo (06.23.2025):

On Saturday night East Coast time, the White House, without first obtaining authorization or even consulting with any Democrats in Congress, committed an act of war against Iran by dropping bunker buster bombs and firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at three of its nuclear facilities. It was a serious escalation that ended all ongoing diplomatic efforts, and it marked the entry of the U.S. into Israel’s war with Iran. Yesterday morning, citing historian Timothy Snyder, I noted in a special edition of this newsletter five things to keep in mind as events unfolded. Many of those, unfortunately, are already coming to pass. Indeed, by Sunday afternoon, it was already apparent that the entire White House narrative around the war was in shambles. Let’s discuss three reasons why.

“Totally Obliterated” or nah?

On Sunday I cited Snyder for an important first principle of war: “Many things reported with confidence in the first hours and days will turn out not to be true.” One of those things Trump proudly proclaimed in his speech to the nation Saturday night. He boasted, “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” But by Sunday morning, as I noted earlier, the Pentagon had walked that back, saying that while it believed the sites were “severely damaged,” it was “way too early” to assess the actual damage. But what if the amount of damage to the Fordo bunker and other sites wasn’t what really mattered? To build a nuclear weapon, a nation needs two things: 1) enough enriched uranium to make a weapon, and 2) a way to reliably deliver that payload and cause it to undergo a catastrophic nuclear reaction. [...]

No regime change… or MIGA?

In yesterday’s piece, I cited Synder for the following proposition: “The rationale given for a war will change over time, such that actual success or failure in achieving a named objective is less relevant than one might think.” It turns out that “over time” means “overnight” with this White House. On Sunday, White House officials fanned out across the talk shows to insist that the strike on Iran was limited and the U.S. was not seeking “regime change” in Iran.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went before cameras to insist, “This mission was not and has not been about regime change.” JD Vance went on Meet the Press to claim that the administration’s view “has been very clear that we don’t want a regime change.” And he wins the prize for best Orwellian-speak after claiming that we aren’t at war with Iran, but with Iran’s nuclear program. Just a few hours later, Trump threw that out the window. He posted on Sunday afternoon that “if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” [...]

Going with instinct over intelligence

Third, and as many have noted, our own intelligence agencies had found that Iran was not close to making an actual nuclear weapon. Tulsi Gabbard testified to that in March. Democratic leaders, such as Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), who is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and is privy to intelligence briefings, confirmed this assessment in an interview with Jim Acosta. Yet the White House ignored our own intelligence and now insists based on “instinct” that Iran was near to making a nuke.  [...]

Fake WMDs redux

Watching these official lies bubble up in real time, I am reminded of the other time, over 20 years ago, that another Republican administration lied to the American public about Weapons of Mass Destruction. It used those lies to lead us into a disastrous and costly war in the Middle East under false pretenses. We are all relieved to see that Iran did not immediately retaliate against Saturday night’s attack, at least for the moment. But the long term situation could actually grow more dangerous than ever, and a protracted war is still a distinct possibility, even if things go quiet for a time. Why is that? Iran now knows not to trust in diplomacy. Any moderates in Tehran arguing for talks and negotiation have been forever discredited. Iran now understandably believes it can only hope to defend itself against a power like the U.S. by brandishing nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent.

The Trump Regime’s narrative on Iran is failing, and cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

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Arrest the MAGA J6 crooks posing as ICE.

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"Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let’s say there’s a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in winter, brown in summer, but mainly just report that it’s there. It’s scenery. But if you hear that mountain, then you know it’s doing something. I see Mount St. Helens out my study window, about eighty miles north. I did not hear it explode in 1980: the sound wave was so huge that it skipped Portland entirely and touched down in Eugene, a hundred miles to the south. Those who did hear that noise knew that something had happened. That was a word worth hearing. Sound is event.

Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it’s always event.

Walter Ong says, 'Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.' This is a very complicated simple statement. You could say it also about life. Life exists only as it is going out of existence.

Consider the word existence, printed on a page of a book. There it sits, all of it at once, nine letters, black on white, maybe for years, for centuries, maybe in thousands of copies all over the world.

Now consider the word as you speak it: 'existence.' As soon as you say 'tence,' 'exis' is already gone, and now the whole thing’s gone. You can say it again, but that is a new event.

When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener’s listening enables the speaker’s speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically, immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves. The act of speaking happens NOW. And then is irrevocably, unrepeatably OVER.

Because speaking is an auditory event, not a visual one, it uses space and time differently from anything visual, including words read on paper or on a monitor.

'Auditory space has no point of favored focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing.' (Ong)

Sound, speech, creates its own, immediate, instantaneous space. If we shut our eyes and listen, we are contained within that sphere.

We read printed on a page, 'She shouted.' The page is durable, visible space containing the words. It is a thing not an act. But an actor shouts, and the shout is an act. It makes its own, local, momentary space.

The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers: an intimate sphere or area, limited in both space and time.

Creation is an act. Action takes energy.

Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic — it is action.

To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful.

Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.

This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Information, 2004.

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emory douglas 

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SO-CALLED UNITED STATES - Black Panther Propaganda Art by Emory Douglas

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Emory Douglas

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