The meek, they ain't inherited nothing. Their leaders are falling behind.

 Before we get too deep in the big muddy, as always, some links from this week's News.

Monday

Wednesday - This actually turned out to be a big mouthful, so I broke it up into two parts.

• Part One: The Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery
• Part Two: Defrauding Mississippi's Welfare Service

Friday

 I'm pretty proud of Wednesday's big monster, as well as the two shorter pieces from it. I'm also glad both topics are getting the national press. Even The New York Times has written about the mess going on in Mississippi, so that's something. And the Arbery killing and resulting cover-up by the local law is just too egregious to pretend it's business as usual.

 Other than that, I've been ignoring a white screen for the past 45 minutes. Let's just start typing and see if we can't knock the word count out sooner than later. This sentence is just to satisfy the "a paragraph must have three sentences" rule that I quite possibly made up.

 The internet's been less spotty today. Matter of fact, it's run pretty good all day. Far as I know, anyway, I spent most of the day napping. Just one of those days I didn't feel like engaging with the rest of the world. The whole COVID-19 business continues to get stupider as more and more people have decided, "Fuck it, YOLO" and since they've never needed a helmet riding a motorcycle or a seat belt when they were driving, this "killer pandemic" is all a bunch of hoo-hah. Probably the entire world secretly plotting together solely to make Father Trump look like a pea-brained jackass.

 I live in the boonies, work from home and am self-employed. I rarely leave the house for any reason besides going to the gym, seeing doctors I have to see, or the odd bit of shopping for stuff I can't buy online. The only time I'm around large groups of people is when we have family gatherings four or five times a year, and I only stay as long as I can handle it after getting a plate.

 So, knock yourself out. Maybe it'll be a big bunch of nothing. Maybe it'll thin the herd. Maybe it will be what finally shows the irreparable cracks and flaws in the American capitalistic system. I don't have to worry about it, you're not interested in what I have to say, so I'm not bothering. I will keep writing about it, sure. Partly because that's how I earn my salt and partly because I enjoy writing the News as much as I enjoy this gibberish.

 But as I get older I find myself less inclined to be a part of society and this is just another excuse/example of why I shouldn't bother. I don't want to insinuate that I suggest this as a proper lifestyle for anybody else. But with nothing invested in the future and just waiting around to die, I don't see any reason to fight to save people who don't want to be saved. Same thing with getting leftists to understand that they don't have to vote for Joe Biden, but they really ought to vote against Donald Trump. People all across the political spectrum have a fantastic, naive perception of what politics is, how it's designed to work and just what all can be done. Stop waiting on people to come save you, neighbors.

 One of today's Twitter ruffles is a column tradcath fenderhead Elizabeth Bruening - the interesting one of the couple; that husband of hers is as dull as dry white toast - wrote a column saying there's no such thing as a "Religious left". She was rightfully dragged, which isn't anything special. Every time she puts pen to paper, she says something dumb enough to deserve a dragging. She claims to be socialist but once Republicans managed to get someone who isn't a moral sinkhole in the White House, I'm sure she'll say the Democratic Party/Democratic Socialist changed, not her.

 Anyhow, while she's catching hell from liberal Jews, Liberation Theory Latino Catholics, the Black Protestant churches where the Civil Rights battled gestated, Unitarians, Sikhs, and just all the groups apart from White Protestants or Catholics, which was all she was going to count anyway, I had a thought. Now, I am neither religious nor spiritual. I've been agnostic since my teen years and pretty much since my twenties, I've considered myself a hardcore philosophical materialism.

 There's no difference in the inanimate atoms that make up my body, the chair I'm sitting in, the air that I breathe or whatever makes up Böotes Void. Consciousness is a result of a quirk of biology that arises from how the brain is structured and, at best, nothing more than an illusion. Morality is all made up and has always been made up by human beings, and generally reflects more the zeitgeist of the times rather than anything axiomatic.

 I'm fine with all that. The universe is amazing enough that I can nevertheless manage to find wonder in it, fairly easily to, without having to have some unseen, unquantifiable force behind it. Math, initiative, imagination, and elbow grease can achieve some amazing things. In other words, when it comes to how religion or spirituality should inform one's politics, I really don't have a dog in this hunt. Momma goes to church because it provides her with a sense of community and comfort. Belief in redemption and heaven help my grandmother and father pass on easier. Some people find comfort and strength in their faith. All fine. Anyone who uses religion as a weapon would be a rotten bastard as an atheist anyway, and we've seen plenty of examples of that.

 But I can't help but wonder why non-religious leftist/liberals/what have you should worry too much about the religious leftists/liberals/what have you. My question is why isn't incumbent on the religious left to put a little effort into mending any bridges to the rest of the left-wing amorphous beast. The hard right co-opted much of American Christianity and it was an established goal since at least the '60s. Again, read The Family or watch the Netflix documentary. This is just anecdotal, but left-wing religious people rarely take any responsibility for it.

 It's like "reasonable gun owners" who don't seem to think they have a responsibility to maybe worry about the dingbats bringing bazookas to Subway instead of complaining that everyone thinks they're just as nutty as the average ammosexual. It's part of the reason I'm so unforgiving when it comes to racism in the South and neo-Confederate ding dongs. I see that as partly my responsibility. Anyhow, it's not my problem, either of it. I reserve the right to treat everyone who has a gun on their hip one mockery of their dick away from unloading on a school bus. Plus, I continue to reserve the right to not really give a damn about your faith unless it breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.

 Okay. Enough of that. I've been playing a lot of Phantom Doctrine. It's pretty decent, sort of like Sid Meier's Covert Action, an old favorite, in that it takes the Len Deighton take on spies and that world. Most intelligence work, like most private investigation work or, for that matter, investigative journalism, is pretty damn dull. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of digging through bland documents and seemingly unrelated bits of information to find that nugget of gold. Phantom Doctrine does a good job replicating that without making it too boring. Plus the turn-based strategy part of the gameplay is a lot of fun. It's made by the same people who made Hard West, and that is definitely a favorite. Looks like they've got an XCOM game based on 1930s bank heists coming, so we'll keep an eye on that.

 Take it easy.