Takuan Seiyo is difficult to edit because he hates it (cf. Steve Sailer) and because because his discursive style bothers me on behalf of VDARE.COM’s busy readers. Nevertheless, our Letters Editor, Joe Guzzardi, tells me that his articles get an extraordinary amount of email.

Seiyo’s (Tekuan’s?) Brussels Journal piece entitled (to my eye) elliptically From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 7: The True Horror in Hitchcock Films, is, for all its discursiveness, brilliant, and I urge VDARE.COM readers to study it and click on its amazing links.

Right now, I offer only this excerpt:

Here are James Stuart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, taking a walk in the fabled Muir Woods, a few miles north of San Francisco. This footage has been dubbed into Italian, but it doesn’t matter. The main actors here are the magnificent redwoods.

On their walk, Scottie and Madeleine/Judy, stop by a cross section of a giant redwood. There are markers next to the tree’s growth rings, to show how old it was when cut down. The tree was over-1,000 years old. To visualize that, there is an arrow close to the center, marked 1066 – Battle of Hastings. Other arrows, in an outward progression, mark 1215 – Magna Carta; 1492 – Discovery of America; 1776 – Declaration of Independence.

A pivotal exchange between the two characters takes place, prompted by the 1000-year calendar that the tree expresses. But what’s important for our purpose here is that this is a real redwood section, and those arrows and dates are real, and they were there on my hundreds of walks in that forest.

One day, Body Snatcher State that administers the park – for it is a U.S. National Monument – rearranged the arrows. The redwood calendar now looks like this:

The Battle of Hastings is gone. Instead, marking the pivotal event of the 11th century, of the greatest significance to Americans, is the building of cliff dwellings by murderous, self-extinguishing cannibals in a rock in Mesa Verde, Colorado.

The Signing of the Magna Carta as the late Middle Ages event of most significance to Americans is gone too. Instead, there is a new arrow that wasn’t there when Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak visited. It’s marked 1325 – Aztecs Begin Construction of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. Thus doth Body Snatcher State announce to its subjects, children of the people who walked through the frames of Hitch’s movies, that their country has been snatched away from them.

Now, the Battle of Hastings is of no emotional significance to me. I don’t have a drop of Norman or Anglo-Saxon blood in me, and until I was 20 I didn’t even speak English. But I emigrated to the United States because it had been founded by descendants of those Normans and Anglo-Saxons, and its founding institutions embodied the virtues of those people and of their singular document, the Magna Carta.

So that we don’t get our arrows confused, the way the U.S. Federal Government has, let us recall why the Aztecs began their construction of Tenochtitlan in 1325. Two years earlier, in 1323, these refugees, who had been welcomed and allowed to settle among the people of Culhuacan, and to intermarry and mingle with their hosts, had done something to celebrate their strength in diversity.

The Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, asked the king of Culhuacan, Achicometl, for permission to make his daughter into their goddess. Their wish was granted. What the Culhuacan king didn’t know was the details of this “canonization.”

He would learn soon enough. At a feast celebrating the new goddess of the Aztecs, their priest appeared, wearing the flayed skin of Achicometl’s daughter. That is why the Aztecs had to flee the wrath of their hosts to an island on Lake Texcoco, where they began to build their city Tenochtitlan in 1325.

Now if this is what the United States Government wishes to celebrate, instead of one of the founding documents of Western Civilization and of its own Constitution, things have gone seriously awry. But that’s because the demographics have gone seriously awry. The people milling about in Hitchcock’s train stations and train cars, streets and restaurants, office and hotel lobbies, were replaced, when not by the “GLBTA community,” by Aztecs imported by bleeding-heart Body Snatchers and by fathomlessly greedy “capitalists.”

As usual, the offshore media is more candid than the American: Bloomberg’s Galleon’s Rajaratnam Charged in Biggest Hedge Scheme By David Glovin, Katherine Burton and David Scheer Oct 16 2009 pussyfoots around:

“The defendants operated in a world of, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said at a press conference today. “Greed, sometimes, is not good…
The SEC’s complaint said that Rajaratnam didn’t deserve his reputation for “genius trading strategies” or “astute study of company fundamentals or marketplace trends.”
“Raj Rajaratnam is not a master of the universe, but rather a master of the Rolodex,” Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement at the SEC, said at the press conference.

The Indian Diaspora web site Thaindian.com gets straight to the point:
World’s richest Sri Lankan, two Indian Americans charged with insider trading by IANS October 17th 2009

“This is not a garden-variety insider trading case,” Preet Bharara, Indian-American US Attorney for Manhattan, said… One of the criminal complaints accuses Rajaratnam of conspiring with Intel Capital treasury department managing director Rajiv Goel and Anil Kumar, a director of McKinsey & Co.

Of course, Rajaratnam ( a major Democratic donor) may be innocent. And he may be acquitted (a different thing).

But we are going to see a lot more of this sort of news, as I said at the time of the Vivek Kundra mess. Introducing clannish ethnic groups from deeply corrupt cultures into a society with a more honest (and therefore less protected) tradition can only have one result.

The only reason why more of it has not been detected yet on Wall Street is that most of the Asians there are still very junior. As I have seen myself, it is very common to attend analyst meetings now where half those present are either South or East Asian. Usually less a third are white men – and that includes Jews.

As for WASPS, as our correspondent Henri Roussseau noted, forget it.

Why is this happening? Lies frequently bandied about include ability and cheapness. These are nonsense. Hiring on Wall Street is a process of intense cronyism – and increasingly it would seem, racially motivated. Large firms will be/are experiencing the process laid out here.

21st Century Wall Street – Minority Occupied Territory.

The Moochicans aren’t leaving in any substantial numbers–no real surprise there given the full refrigerator of goodies that America offers, like the “food donations from local church groups” mentioned in the article.

Furthermore the “crackdown” they face from the Obama administration exists in the complaints of open-borders extremists only.

Many Mexican migrants stay put in U.S. despite crisis

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican workers in the United States have lost jobs and faced a crackdown on illegal immigration but are not heading home in droves despite the worst recession in decades, officials and researchers say.

There is no record of those leaving the United States by land but anecdotal reports suggest some families have packed their belongings into trucks and crossed back into Mexico as construction, food and as farm jobs have evaporated.

A record 12.7 million Mexican immigrants lived and worked in the United States in 2008, more than half of them illegally, according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The vast majority have chosen to stay and weather the crisis. Rights groups say Washington needs to pass an overhaul of immigration policies because Mexicans are not going home.

“There is no evidence of a massive return,” said Adriana Valdes at the Mexican consulate in Denver. “People may move because of the crisis, but they are not moving to Mexico where the situation is no better.”

Mexico has also suffered its worst recession since the 1930s and illegal Mexican workers living and working in the shadows say they can still earn more in the United States.

“If things are bad here, they’re worse in our country,” said Christian Dominguez, 21, who has worked in Phoenix since crossing illegally to Arizona 15 months ago from Mexico.

Dominguez earns just $80 in a bad week, shares an apartment with seven other migrants and relies on food donations from local church groups to get by. But he says it is still better than in his home state of Chiapas in southern Mexico

The farther back you go in time for about 350 years, the easier to be a polymath. In the 18th Century, Franklin, Kant, and Goethe could make sizable scientific contributions in their spare time. In the 17th Century, polymathic geniuses were thick on the ground, such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal.

What 20th Century figure would have cut the widest swathe in the late 17th Century? Off hand, I’d guess John von Neumann, the mathematician-physicist who played such a large role in the Cold War despite dying at only 53 in 1957. Considering he made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, I could imagine him converting earlier in the old Austrian empire and rising to be Prime Minister as well as a towering figure of Newtonian proportions in the sciences.