Notices by Brian Jopek (brianjopek@mastodon.world)

I could see it. 😁

Winter Solstice at Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England, 20 December, 2025. Photo by Josh Dury.
#Solstice
#England
#Bucketlist

Yes, just what are they hiding? 🤔

Last Saturday, I braved 10 below zero temperatures to get photos at a nearby national cemetery at Wreaths Across America and with it being subzero, it was brief. A WAA rep had three wreaths for me to place at the cemetery where my son Ryan is buried; one for him, one for the young man he’s buried next to KIA in Iraq a few months before Ryan and one for an 18 year-old kid KIA in Vietnam during 1968 one of my grandsons is named for. It was warmer yesterday after work and the wreaths were placed.

Next time Trump claims that he is bombing Venezuelan “drug boats” because they are killing American kids, remember that no one is killing more American kids than his HHS Secretary RFK Jr., by destroying the childhood vaccine schedule. - Andy Borowitz

Cartoon by Dave Granlund.

Morning Mallard butts bobbing in the cold water, Kaukauna, Wisconsin, 17 December, 2025. Photo by James Brey.
#BirdsOfMastodon

I rarely ask readers to share posts, but I think Patricia’s story deserves the largest audience possible. When corporate media won’t report on the fascist regime destroying our country, it’s up to each of us. - Andy Borowitz

https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/the-hero-we-need-now?fbclid=IwZnRzaAOuYcJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEe02FVIE6RKvIIKukgtYb_FIpHXwyDK4i0-ekfUu_67UoAO-Vop0dR52F8crU_aem_hpmzxm6aSu8dl2MmPH_SYA

Word.

Can’t make this shit up. 😁

45 friggen years: somewhere in my stuff is the cover of the 22 December, 1980, edition of TIME Magazine; for the first few years after it was published, I had the magazine cover on the refrigerator door of my apartment when I lived in Minneapolis in ‘83 and the apartment I had in ‘84 and ‘85 when I was at my first radio job in Alliance, Nebraska. My copy is, the last time I ran across it not long ago, actually in pretty good shape nearly 45 years later.
#MindGames

Poetry indeed.

“Get it now? 🧐” - The Resistance

Yes!

This would be, without any doubt, a war crime committed by the United States. We prosecuted Germans and Japanese for doing this exact thing in WWII. - VoteVets

Cartoon by Matt Davies.

If the US military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the defense secretary] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under US law for murder." - Former JAGs Working Group

Obviously, the guy had issues but VanDiver states what should be the obvious.

“You can’t paint with a broad brush this entire community. The vast majority of Afghans who have come here are just good upstanding citizens,” said Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who heads the group AfghanEvac. - Brian Mann/NPR
https://apple.news/AeK5m9biNQa226IiXHYQlWA

Adam Kinzinger, in an emergency video that should be required viewing for every American who thinks “toughness” means murdering drowning men, laid it out with military bluntness: This is the moral equivalent of shooting prisoners. It’s the kind of thing the U.S. condemned as a capital offense at Nuremberg. - Mary Geddry

https://marygeddry.com/p/no-quarter-the-collapse-of-competence

Thank you, Dr. Morale. 😡

“Jeff Sharlet, a leading scholar of Christian nationalism and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, has described Pete Hegseth as a clear, self-identified Christian nationalist whose ideology is explicitly militarized and apocalyptic, not just culturally conservative. Sharlet emphasizes that Hegseth’s own writings and symbols reveal a project of holy war within the United States, not merely a defense of traditional values.” - Constitutional Crisis Alert