Puzzling for Western Civ.     May was a deeply unproductive month. I didn’t travel anywhere, didn’t get much reading done, fell behind on home repairs. What did I do? A jigsaw puzzle.

Actually I need the present continuous tense there: I’m still doing the durn thing.

It’s the second of two puzzles that were gifted to me at Christmas by a friend. The first was a mere 1,000-piecer; I knocked it off between breakfast and lunch one morning. (Wel …)

This second one is more of a challenge: 3,000 pieces and artfully difficult. ”Skill level: Intermediate” says the Amazon page. I dunno; ceteris paribus it should be only one-third as difficult as the 9,000-piecers I’ve done, but it seems harder than that, especially when Mimi’s on the prowl.

Gotta see it through, though. This puzzle is made in Turkey. It’s the end of May as I write, and some of us haven’t forgotten Terrible Tuesday. And then, Gallipoli. There are old scores to be settled here.

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The seasons of AI.     In a segment on Artificial Intelligence in my Diary last month I mentioned an article I wrote for a student magazine back in my college years, the mid-1960s.

I can’t remember the subject of that article. With one exception, I remember nothing of what I wrote. I seriously doubt there was anything much worth remembering. I was introverted, unworldly, and not terrifically smart—certainly no Frank Ramsey.

The one tiny thing I can remember is that I predicted AI+, the form of intelligence that doesn’t just mimic the human variety but goes beyond it to superintelligence. I wrote something like: ”In the near future, perhaps before the end of this century, we shall be sharing our planet with beings more intelligent than ourselves.”

I went on to lament that I had lost the article long since, and that the only sign it might have survived the decades was a suggestive reference in the online catalog of Harvard Divinity School Library, a reference that did not get me

Text adapted from VDARE.com video below—headline adapted from Dead White Male William Shakespeare’s King Lear ACT III, SCENE IV

VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow: VDARE.com is facing an absolutely mortal threat—and we need your help to stave it off. We’ve been attacked by a black Soros prosecutor—Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State—and she’s trying to beat us to death with endless subpoenas for documentation without actually making any allegation of wrongdoing that we can refute.

How I got myself in this mess?  Obviously, I’m from England originally, so I’m an immigrant doing a dirty job that Americans won’t do—namely write about the post-1965 immigration disaster. I was a long-time financial journalist in New York, and I worked for Fortune and Forbes and Barron’s and at one point, incredibly, for the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. But in 1992 I wrote a cover story called ”Time to Rethink Immigration” for National Review, which is sometimes credited with restarting the modern immigration debate. I turned that into a 1995 book called Alien Nation, which was kind of a cult hit. However, in 1997 Bill Buckley was prevailed upon by the donors and the Congressional Republican Party to purge immigration patriots from National Review. Fortunately for me, the internet came along, and we were able to launch VDARE.co, on Christmas Eve of 1999. And we’ve been at it ever since.

VDARE.com Publisher Lydia Brimelow: The role of VDARE.com in this environment is to inform the fight to keep America American. And what we mean by that is constantly, every day, posting multiple blogs and articles and videos that are aimed at the general public, but also at people who are in politics, or in a position of influence, to understand what is at stake in losing America to mass immigration, both legal and illegal. That it’s a serious risk that, we’re on the verge of having that happen and what a loss it would be. To lose VDARE.com would be to lose the voice of the Historic American Nation.

Peter: The lawyers say that “the process is the punishment.” What has happened here is that New York State Attorney General James launched a massive subpoena attack on us. There are things that she’s asking for that are completely irrelevant to any conceivable oversight. They’re just inflicting as much punishment on us as possible.

It’s quite obvious what Letitia James’ motives are. As in the Trump case, it’s nakedly political. And as with the NRA: she ran for Attorney General saying that she was going to prosecute Trump and the NRA. even though at that point she had no grounds for doing so. She had to dive into the documents and do thousands of pages of discovery, just like she’s doing with us, to try and find an excuse to prosecute him. It’s just a raw exercise of Totalitarian power.

Lydia: VDARE.com has not been accused of anything. Our lawyers have repeatedly, over and over, asked what it is they’re looking for, what it is that they’re concerned about, what it is that they’re investigating. And their response is: as the Charities Bureau of the State of New York, we have broad authority to investigate you for whatever we want.

 At one point, they implied that there was some problem with the way that we did the paperwork on the purchase of this Castle venue, where we hope to have conferences and meetings. So our lawyers preemptively said: ”Okay, we’re going to turn over that production first. We’re going to turn over all the paperwork that has to do with that.”

But they never acknowledged that we turned over

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Earlier, by Steve Sailer: Three Years Of Racial Reckoning: How's That Working Out For You?

How did I miss the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death? Were the media caught sleeping? Three years ago, Floyd was given funerals in three states, carried in a gold casket and driven to his final resting place in a horse-drawn carriage. It was like the funeral for a pharaoh.

Minneapolis mayor sobs uncontrollably at gold coffin of George Floyd at memorial led by Rev. Al Sharpton https://t.co/8KfVnhCxqE pic.twitter.com/Q1r5lmYxfy

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) June 4, 2020

From Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, to the end of the year, the New York Times alone ran more than 4,000 articles about him. But exactly three years later, Floyd’s name made it into only three Times items—fleetingly and barely.

Are the media (and Democrats, and Hollywood, and corporate America, and the universities and grade schools, and hospitals and military and President Biden) hoping we’ll forget about their weird campaign to make black Americans even angrier?

Since May 25, 2020, the single-minded message delivered to black people, without interruption or contradiction, has been that they live in a country steeped in white supremacy, anything bad that happens to them is proof of racism, and oh by the way, the police are trying to kill them.

The You Are a Victim! message is unlikely to produce stellar behavior in anyone. Directed at a group that already had a pretty high rate of criminal offending, it nearly destroyed our country.

By the end of 2020, the national homicide rate had shot up an unprecedented 30% and has continued to climb since then.

As Heather Mac Donald writes in her new book, “When Race Trumps Merit”:

“New homicide records were set in 2021

The feast day of St. George Floyd, Holy Martyr, passed on May 25 without much commemoration in the news media. Actually I didn’t see any commemoration at all—unless you count James Fulford’s mention of him in his Memorial Day piece. But I did come across something much better in the New York Times: Three Years After a Fateful Day in Central Park, Birding Continues to Change My Life, by Christian Cooper, NYT,  May 26, 2023.

You may remember the ”Central Park Karen” incident. That was also May 25, 2020. But early in the day, it dominated news and social media even more than the George Floyd story did. It certainly contributed to the BLM riots that broke out soon after. To refresh your memory, here’s the typical news spin we got:

A white woman was walking her dog, off-leash, in a hilly wooded area of New York’s Central Park, called The Ramble. A large black man came from behind a bush and yelled at her to leash the dog. The woman was terrified, and took out her mobile phone to call for help. She said she would tell the dispatcher an ”African American man” was threatening her and her dog. The ”African American man” videoed some of this, sent it to his sister, and it soon went viral on social media. The woman was thenceforth denounced as ”Racist Central Park Karen.” A couple of days later she was terminated from her job as insurance portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton.

In short order the news media began to inform us that this large black man was some kind of local hero. He’s a birdwatcher. He’s a Harvard graduate in his late fifties. He used to write for Marvel Comics. He’s even gay! (Coincidentally or not, The Ramble is a famous cruising area in the Park.) Christian Cooper is his name, and National Geographic television has given him

You have to feel sorry, sort of, for GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott, the black senator from South Carolina, who was Affirmatively Acted into the Senate by the appalling Nicky Haley in 2013 to replace Jim Demint: his announcement last week was completely stepped on by Ron DeSantis. But Scott boasts the support of many powerful Republicans and donors who boneheadedly believe his being black is a plus. This despite the fact that Scott is probably the worst candidate in the field: His goal is for the GOP/GAP to abandon the Historic American Nation and embrace multi-culti America. No immigration patriot should want him anywhere near a GOP presidential ticket–even as vice president, the real threat.

Scott’s opening pitch on video hurled boilerplate Republican platitudes. America is the land of opportunity, he said. “Made in America” is his story. We should emphasize patriotism over pity, he averred, and victory over victimization. He highlighted five trends the left promotes in the country: crime in our streets, inflation in our economy, a culture of victimhood, and indoctrination in our schools. Not a bad list, but immigration wasn’t on it.

I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity.

Made in America. That's my story.

To the radical Left that says we're an evil declining country, I say the truth of my life disproves your lies.

I have faith in America & our president should too. pic.twitter.com/pERJgVIjGY

— Tim Scott (@votetimscott) May 23, 2023

But he did address immigration, sort of, at his launch rally in North Charleston. “If you don’t control your back door, it’s not your house,” he said. “And if our southern border is unsafe and insecure, it’s not our country. Hundreds of people on our terrorist watch list are crossing our borders.” He also discussed deploying the military against the cartels.

It’s a decent stance on the issue, but of course he didn’t mention legal immigration.

Scott’s overall pitch: “What would happen if we put the rocks down and stopped being red and blue and black and white and we literally just became one American family?” he asked NBC News’s Tom Llamas [Read the full transcript of NBC News’ exclusive interview with Sen. Tim Scott, May 22, 2023].

It’s corny. It’s tone deaf. And, unfortunately,