Friday Thoughts: Disagreement vs. Misinformation

I know I’m likely preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to take a few minutes and examine the issue of disagreement vs. misinformation. “Misinformation” is flying about a lot lately and in most cases it is mildly to egregiously misapplied. “Misinformation” is a word that conjures up images of propagandizing evil dictators. People think “Soviet propaganda” or similar when they hear that term. Characterizing statements as “misinformation” conveys to the listener that the statement is not only false, but deliberately misleading and therefore dangerous. Put your hands over your ears immediately before you become contaminated!

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Starting 2023

It’s Sunday morning, the first day of 2023 and I’m drinking cappuccino and thinking about the day and year ahead. For the day, we’re going to a friend’s house and participating in a chili cook-off and tasting that promises to be a lot of fun. We have friends in Texas! Yay! We’ve been in Texas for just over a year now… thirteen months to be exact and every day I’m more and more convinced we made the right move. Not that I was worried it was a bad move, but every day I just feel more comfortable.

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A Living Prison

What the hell was going on? We had landed with no problems. The previous host had easily sent us on our way and the group commander was aware of our intended target. But now that we’d landed, it was almost impossible to move away from the landing sight. Under ordinary – well, for some values of ordinary – circumstances we should have been able to set up a base camp at the landing site and then almost immediately move out to explore the near in area before sending out larger groups of colonists into the further reaches of the new host.

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Merry Christmas!

I am enjoying my first Christmas with family in four years. I’d almost forgotten how much driving between houses there is, but it’s still fun. We spent last weekend with my cousins doing Christmas and today, some are doing a second Christmas with some of the same people, while others are with the other side of the family. We are splitting our time between my husband’s parents and siblings.

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Falling Roses

Roses. What was it with roses and Gran? Lina stared around the kitchen. Between the paper rose in the front window, the writing over the door into the kitchen from the hall, and now this. She had accepted that there was something strange, even otherworldly about this house. Somehow, she knew it had always been like this, even when she was a little girl, living there.

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Book Review: “Bowl of Red” by Sarah A. Hoyt

Bowl of Red is the fourth book in Sarah A. Hoyt’s shifter series. Kyrie Smith and Tom Ormson are about to be parents and about to get married. Since Tom is worried that the new fryer will explode if it’s not monitored constantly, they’re getting married in The George, the diner they own, and their friends and employees are giving them a twelve-hour honeymoon break.

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Fear of Money

Earlier today I saw something about Elon Musk and one of the first comments was something to the effect that it was obscene that Musk was worth as much as he is. Combined with the release of the Twitter files and other things, this got me thinking again. It’s not news to anybody who’s been paying attention that a huge number of people who consider themselves “liberal” or on the left, absolutely hate money. And as the saying goes – we hate what we fear. They hate people who make money, people who try to make money, people who want to keep their own money, people who build wealth, people whose parents are wealthy, people who spend more than they do… whatever. If money is involved, they hate it.

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Odd Prompts: Invisible No More

I stared at the house. I had grown up in that house, but it held no happy memories for me. No, I didn’t have an abusive childhood. Rather, it was simply a neglected childhood. I’d been fed, clothed, and sent to school, but that was it. The people who’d raised me had done so out of some sense of obligation to my parents, but that was it. They’d agreed to look after my needs – you couldn’t really say ‘took care’ of me – until I turned eighteen and was a legal adult. They’d told me I could stay in the house until I’d found a job and my own apartment, but it had been made clear that that had to happen quickly.

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Exploring the Wild

Wandering along the ridge top, Mikhail admired the view. The chain of mountains stretched east and west, and the setting sun sent long shadows streaming across the canyon below on the south side. To the north, broad plains stretched away to the horizon. He could see the rising crescent of what the landing crew was calling Moon #1. Mikhail shook his head in bemusement. The landing crew was devoid of poets or any other creatives. Moon #2 would rise about one Earth hour after Moon #1. He decided that one thing he would do tonight, before sleeping was come up with actual names for the moons. He knew the landing crew would take whatever they could get.

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