Lies/Misinformation and Hummingbirds

Dear Ted and Jody:

Today, on my way over to Goble, I listened to NPR’s Sunday Morning Edition. One of the stories was about the massacre in Moscow. An expert, I know not her name, said, “We will never know the truth from Russia as they will put out misinformation.” She also suggested Putin would use it to increase conscription by blaming Ukraine and not the Afghan branch of ISIS which has claimed it did it. (I still think he is looking for an excuse to use a nuke.) Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, why all these substitutes for lies? Why can’t we say, the Russians will lie about what happened? The same thing holds for social media. Social media is blamed for misinformation. Why doesn’t we simply say, what we read on social media (or see in a video) is a lie? The reason I ask, is using big words like “misinformation” makes it somehow different from a lie. It isn’t. Not true is not true, so call not true for what it is, a lie. I think that humble little three letter word has much more power and meaning than the 14 word substitute we use for it all to often. We were taught as children that lying is bad. I don’t recall any instructions on misinformation. So lets call lies out for what they are—a lie is bad.

Images from today.

Images from yesterday.

You might recognize that second from the last image as a remake of one sent yesterday, but again . . .

We haven’t seen the Eastern Cottontail rabbit, Long Ears, for close to a week. Even though we keep the kale we get for it in “greenies,” {Green bags} it was starting to wilt. So we fed the kale to the deer. Nancy thinks she is off having and nurturing baby rabbits. That got me to thinking that we have very rarely see a hummingbird of late. But then I realized that there are now blooms about and think they are off to feed on nectar, which has to be more nutritious than the cane sugar dissolved in water in the feeders we put out. Depending upon the variety of hummingbirds (and therefore their size) in nature, they spend 5 to 8 hours/day feeding on several hundred blossoms to over a thousand blossoms a day. The sugar water we human beings put out does them just fine in the winter, and during the time they are raising young, but for the rest of the time, when there are blooms, if I were a hummingbird, I think I would rather have real food rather than “fast food.” (So, you see, hummingbird feeders are nothing more than the Mickey Dee of he bird set. However, during the winter it does keep them alive if they stick around rather than flying south.)

Love, Ed