Relative Something

Apparently we are all in this together in these challenging times. That’s the message coming through the airwaves and print ads day after day. Doesn’t really feel like it to me. There are an awful lot of people who are voicing an interest in self over others. I continue to argue that all times are challenging in one way or another, so repeatedly echoing that trope gets annoying.

In the face of the ever-present risk of COVID-19 virus infection spread, we have avoided doing a lot of things. Today is the Memorial Day holiday in the U.S. and we have not hit the road to the lake place this year.

I spent yesterday trying to mow our amazing crop of dandelions. The ability of those dandelion stems to survive the spinning blade that severs all the green leaves and grass blades around them is difficult to fathom.

Staying at home provides a little extra time to peruse the news floating around the interweb and I have found a new favorite morsel of absurdity in the Associated Press page of “Not Real News.” It’s a look at what didn’t happen each week.

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media.

For those of you who tour Facebook and Twitter, I recommend you review claims being shared there which raise your ire might turn out to be untrue. There are multiple cases where photos used to make a point have been manipulated, often using images that are years removed from what they are intended to portray.

I do not participate in the primary social media apps so I don’t learn about some of these claims until finding them in the AP article.

Really? There is a circuit board for a 5G installation that has COVID-19 printed on it? Um, no.

A couple of the claims are aiming to make government officials and policies look more inept or corrupt than they really are. Is it much of a stretch to imagine the source of such noisy disruption to our actual news information could be coming from foreign governments? No.

Let’s all be in this together and none of us allow any of the flaky claims to spread. We want the disinformation to all shelter in place!

Be safe out there.

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