It’s one of the most interesting, enlightening and eye-opening books I’ve ever read: Simon Winchester’s Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (2018). Winchester tells a story of astonishing ingenuity, intelligence and effort from the steam-engine (44) to the “extreme ultraviolet” laser (296). And it’s almost exclusively a story of stale pale males—of White men from northwestern Europe. They’re the ones who have created the modern world, whether living on ancestral soil, like the English ironmaster John Wilkinson (1728–1808) and the Swedish machinist Carl Edvard Johansson (1864–1943), or transplanted to the United States, like the manufacturer Henry Ford (1863–1947) and the space scientist Roger Easton (1921–2014).

Pale precision: the front cover of Simon Winchester’s Exactly (2018)

 Logocentric lawyers vs exotropic engineers

If only one of those names is familiar to you, then you’re not alone. Before I began this book, I had heard of James Watt, John Harrison, Henry Ford, Sir Frank Whittle and “Rolls-Royce.” And that was pretty much it. Although precision engineering has shaped the lives of every human being on the planet (with the rare exception of stone-age tribes like the Andamese Islanders), precision engineers have not usually become household names. That’s partly because engineers in general aren’t interested in becoming household names. Instead, they’re interested in engineering, in solving technical problems, in overcoming the challenges posed by gravity or heat or cold or drag or pressure or vibration or chemical attack or any combination thereof.

The joys of Jewish ideology: a satirical diet-ad about the famines caused by communism

But the anonymity of engineers is also partly due to what you might call the logocentric snobbery of Western culture. As Ron Unz has pointed out, the typical training for a Western leader is that of lawyer, while the typical training for a Chinese leader is that of engineer. This may give China a decisive advantage over the West in the century ahead. Or rather, it may give China another decisive advantage, because China’s racial majority, the Han Chinese, is not under ideological and demographic assault by a hostile elite of Jews and by non-Chinese immigrants eagerly applying the Jewish culture of critique. There would be plenty of material in China for a hostile elite to work with — the brutal subjugation of the Tibetans and Uighurs, for example — but the Chinese don’t intend to surrender control of their homeland to anti-Chinese outsiders. They’ve suffered the calamities of Jewish ideology all the same. Marxism has afflicted them with famines, concentration camps and a high-tech surveillance state, but they remain unrepentant in their ethnocentrism and probably unstoppable in their eugenics.

“The west was built on racism”

Things are very different in the West. Shortly after completing my latest re-read of Simon Winchester’s book, I came across two articles in the Guardian celebrating the work of Kehinde Andrews, the “first UK professor of Black studies.” Professor Andrews claims that he’s “probably done permanent damage to [his] mental and physical health establishing this Black studies course [at Birmingham City University].” But fear not: the sacrifice of his Black body and Black brain has not been in vain. Professor Andrews has spoken harsh truth to hegemonic power and established that “the west” (no capital letter, naturally) “was built on racism” — “that the US was created ‘in the founding fathers’ image of white supremacy’ and Britain’s wealth accumulated through centuries of African enslavement.”

Speaking harsh truth to hegemonic power: Black Studies Professor Kehinde Andrews (who is part-White)

Well, you can be sure that there are no anti-Chinese or anti-Jewish equivalents of Kehinde Andrews in Chinese or Israeli universities. And you can also be sure that Professor Andrews is even more ignorant about engineering than I am. Yes, Britain did indeed accumulate some wealth “through centuries of African enslavement.” But so did the Muslim world and African slave-kingdoms. And slavery was neither necessary nor sufficient for the rise of Britain as an industrial and technological giant. Black slaves effectively played the role of horses and oxen: their muscles powered mechanisms and economic systems created by White ingenuity and foresight, but Blacks had no intellectual or creative role in what they powered.

White men aren’t obsessed with themselves

And “racism” does not explain why White men were necessary (and would have been entirely sufficient) for the creation of precision engineering. But evolution and genetics do, as Kevin MacDonald has described in books like Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. Nevertheless, Kehinde Andrews exposes one half of what I call the pale male paradox. White men have achieved most in all manner of fields, from engineering and mathematics to exploration and mountaineering. But they are also the most vilified group on earth and are held responsible for all manner of evils, from slavery and pollution to systemic racism and police brutality. Why does the highest-achieving group also receive the greatest opprobrium? That seems like a paradox, but I’d suggest it’s easy to resolve. The same factors behind the achievements of White men also explain the vilification of White men.

High amongst those factors is the fact that White men aren’t obsessed with themselves and their own interests. Simon Winchester himself is a good example. I could detect no trace of racial or national pride in Exactly. He didn’t write the book as a White man to celebrate the greatness of White men: he wrote it because he delights in engineering and ingenuity. More generally, you could say that he delights in external reality and humanity’s efforts to understand and control it — he’s written books about everything from maps and skulls to earthquakes and the Pacific Ocean. But he isn’t an autistic technophile and although he describes the astonishing achievements of Henry Ford in Exactly, he also begins the book with a series of quotations from the technocritic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), including the line: “Forget the damned motor car and build cities for lovers and friends.”

Not interested in truth or reality

And he ends the book celebrating both the precise technology and the imprecise artistry of another group of pale human beings: the Japanese. He describes how, in Japan, meticulous electronic engineers co-exist with craftsmen devoted to “wabi-sabi, an aesthetic sensibility wherein asymmetry and roughness and impermanence are accorded every bit as much weight as the exact, the immaculate, and the precise.” (p. 314) In other words, Winchester is objective and able to understand opposing ideas and points of view, quite unlike the rabidly ego- and negro-centric Kehinde Andrews. And Winchester is highly intelligent and scientifically knowledgeable, again unlike Kehinde Andrews.

Winchester and Andrews are therefore excellent representatives of their respective races: over-achieving, gift-bestowing Whites and under-achieving, grievance-bearing Blacks. Furthermore, Winchester trained as a geologist and has worked with advanced engineering. He’s a writer who’s rooted in reality. Kehinde Andrews isn’t rooted in reality, which you might suppose a fatal disadvantage for a historian and cultural commentator. But Andrews’ career flourishes regardless, because the culture of critique is not interested in truth or reality. Instead, it is interested in political and social power. It’s effectively an ideological parasite that has, so far, done an excellent job of subverting the nervous system of the West and taking control of its economic, technological and cultural muscles. That’s why the Black drug-abuser and criminal George Floyd is vastly better known than, for example, the White engineer Henry Maudslay (1771–1831).

Screw you, BLM!

Again, I hadn’t heard of Maudslay and his “formidable skill in delicate engineering” (p. 54) before I read Exactly. Unlike George Floyd, Maudslay exerted himself to defeat crime, not to commit it. He helped perfect the effectively unbeatable locks of his mentor Joseph Bramah (1748–1814). He then went on, in Simon Winchester’s words, “to become the founding father of precision toolmaking, mass production, and the key engineering concept of perfect flatness.” (p. 62) Among much else, he invented a lathe that could “efficiently, precisely and [quickly]” make something that contributed far more to Britain’s wealth than “centuries of African enslavement.”

The humble but hyper-important screw

What was the something? It was “that most essential component of the industrialized world, the screw.” (p. 63) Henry Maudslay, unlike George Floyd, helped hold Western civilization together — and literally so. In a sane world, his story would embolden Whites to say “Screw you!” to inane and self-righteous anti-White groups like Black Lives Matter. But we don’t currently live in a sane world. Maudslay was an undoubted achiever, Floyd was an alleged victim. And the culture of critique “valorizes” Black victims while anathematizing White achievers. That’s why most of us heard endlessly about Floyd in 2020 and not at all about Maudslay.

Horrific hate-crimes against the Jewish community

Nor did we hear about a Swedish engineer who contributed immensely to perhaps the most important part of precision: measurement. But Winchester points out that the Swedish engineer has been unjustly forgotten for a long time: “Carl Edvard Johansson died in 1943, respected and beloved in Sweden, and forgotten elsewhere.” Johansson (1864–1943) invented measuring instruments known as gauge blocks or Jo blocks, which come in varying sizes and can be fitted together to measure, for example, “any of the 1000 lengths from 3.000 to 3.999 mm in 0.001 mm steps.” Winchester writes that Jo blocks are “machined with such precision that there [are] no asperities whatsoever on their surfaces that might allow air to get between and form a point of weakness. They [are] so perfectly flat that the molecules of their faces [bond] with one another when they [are] joined [and it becomes] impossible to break them apart. … They can only be slid apart.” (p. 3)

Winchester adds that scientists still don’t fully understand the physical mechanism behind the bonding of Jo blocks. In a sense, White ingenuity is still defeating White ingenuity: Johansson’s measuring blocks created a mystery. But another mystery was vigorously probed by the man who employed Johansson after he moved to America. That man, Henry Ford, is perhaps the most interesting and important figure in Exactly. Winchester cleverly contrasts Ford’s success in mass-manufacturing and popularizing the motor car with the elitist engineering and marketing of the Rolls-Royce partnership in England. But he doesn’t say anything about one horrific aspect of Ford’s story: his prolonged hate-crimes against the Jewish community.

Cohesive, in-bred and hyper-ethnocentric

As Kevin MacDonald has described in “Henry Ford and the Jewish Question,” Ford devoted substantial time and money to the mystery of how the tiny Jewish minority has been so influential in — and pernicious for — the Western world. He backed a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that tried to alert gentile Americans to what Ford saw as Jewish conspiracies against the West. And he published an infamous book called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920), which MacDonald describes as “an amalgam of dark speculations on Jewish conspiracy combined with some interesting and, on the whole, accurate information on Jews and perceptions of Jews during the period.”

It’s plain today that Ford succeeded mightily at mechanical engineering and failed miserably at social engineering. His attempts to expose Jewish conspiracy and defeat Jewish power were fruitless, but that’s hardly surprising. Like the other engineers and inventors in Exactly, Ford was a remarkable White male individual, not part of a cohesive, in-bred Jewish community bound by hyper-ethnocentrism and the ruthless pursuit of collective interests. White men are certainly remarkable for their ability to cooperate, but not in pursuit of their own ethnic and genetic interests. Instead, they direct themselves outwards, creating ingenious and awesome machines, scaling the earth’s heights, plumbing the ocean’s depths, and landing in person or by proxy on the Moon, Mars and Venus.

All Blacks Who Ever Lived

If the minds of White men weren’t directed outwards like that, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to parasitic ideologies like the culture of critique and Critical Race Theory. But White men also wouldn’t have achieved astonishing things like those described in Simon Winchester’s book. So is it ironic that Kehinde Andrews and countless other anti-White ideologues go through life relying absolutely on White male invention and ingenuity without acknowledging the debt they owe, let alone expressing any gratitude? No, I don’t think it is. I think it’s entirely predictable. One could hardly expect Kehinde Andrews to admit that merely one tiny White group like the Swedes have contributed more to science and technology than all Blacks who ever lived.

Indeed, the single Swedish male Carl Edvard Johansson contributed more to science and technology than all Blacks who ever lived. As did each of the other stale pale males described in Simon Winchester’s Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Winchester didn’t write this book to refute the culture of critique and the inanities of “anti-racism,” but I think it provides a highly effective refutation all the same. It wasn’t written as a celebration of White male achievement and in fact I didn’t impose that interpretation on it as I read. After all, I’m a White male myself and like Winchester I can rejoice in engineering and ingenuity for their own sake.

“A work of staggering genius”

And Winchester also speculates whether the Industrial Revolution could have happened more than two thousand years ago. He begins the first chapter of this book writing about the Antikythera mechanism, a “lump of calcified bronze and wood” (p. 24) recovered from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean in 1901. It turned out to be “a mysterious computing device of unimagined mechanical complexity … that had evidently been made in the second century B.C. and was clearly a work of staggering genius.” (p. 25) It was White genius, but not in northwestern Europe: rather, the mechanism was made by another incredibly talented European group, the ancient Greeks. And why did their genius not bear greater fruit? At the moment we can only speculate, but cliodynamics and historical genetics may soon be able to tell us why Exactly was published in 2018 and in English, rather than two millennia ago in Greek or Latin.

A work of staggering genius: the 2100-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek analogue computer and orrery used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes (modern reconstruction)

If the Industrial Revolution had indeed started in the Ancient World, White men might have reached the stars by now. It didn’t and it’s the Chinese who seem best-placed to carry on the legacy of the White engineers described in Winchester’s book. Unless White men start devoting some of their genius to the problem of self-defence, they won’t have a future. Or even perhaps a past. The culture of critique is already proclaiming that Black women “played a crucial part” in the Moon Landings and the creation of GPS, the global positioning system whose genuine White male creators are described in Winchester’s book.

Proud Black wimminz in, hate-filled honkies out

As Black women are written into the history of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), White men will be written out. Our hostile elite aren’t really following the script of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but they might as well be: “In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.”

The steam engine, the aeroplane and the helicopter are all products of White male genius. The parasitic Party had already claimed two of them for its own in Orwell’s novel. In our reality, the parasitic culture of critique is beginning to assign the products of White male genius to Black women. That’s false history, but lies power leftism and it’s precisely because White men have flown so high that the culture of critique intends to bring them so low. Simon Winchester’s Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World describes the heights of White male achievement and serves as an excellent, if implicit, refutation of the anti-White ideologies now infesting and undermining the West.

Since this is Black History month (how can we forget?), it is important (since there is no White History month) to pay tribute to the humble contributions that White folks have made to our culture and to Western Civilization.

I don’t want to risk bragging by enumerating the obvious and blaring it out like some digital-lit billboard on the Interstate, but there are a whole lot of accomplishments that any White person over the age of (hmm) thirty is faintly familiar with. Such as the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, the wisdom of  ancient Greece, Christian morality, the Enlightenment, the King James Bible, the common law, property rights, religious tolerance, habeas corpus, universal suffrage, equality under the law, the Golden Rule, free-market economics, the abolition of slavery, respect for women. . . okay, you get the picture.

And the names, my gosh, where do I begin? Let us take note of Joan of Arc, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Leonardo Da Vinci, the mathematician Hypatia (d. 420AD), Michelangelo, Vermeer, Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, Goethe, Moliere, Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Charles Darwin, Watson & Crick, Olinto De Pretto, Samuel Johnson, Emmeline Pankhurst. . . the list is virtually endless.

My goal is to entertain as well as enlighten the reader with a few not-as-well known, or so-well-known but taken-for-granted inventions, happenings, and ideas, and a modicum of names of White people who deserve to be listed in the pantheon of The Great Whites. Let us begin.

Arthur Scherbius

Arthur Scherbius was a German electrical engineer who patented an invention for a mechanical cipher machine, later called the EnigmaC:\Users\kmacd\Desktop machine. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany and studied electricity at the Technical College in Munich, and then went on to study at the Technical College in Hanover, finishing in March 1903. The next year, he completed a dissertation titled, “Proposal for the Construction of an Indirect Water Turbine Governor” and was awarded a Doctorate in engineering.

He subsequently worked for a number of electrical firms in Germany and Switzerland. In 1918, he founded the firm of Scherbius & Ritter. He made a number of inventions, for example, asynchronous motors, electric pillows and ceramic heating parts; his research contributions led to his name being associated with the Scherbius principle for asynchrous motors. He applied for a patent in February 1918 for a cipher machine based on rotating wired wheels, what is now known as a rotor machine. (Thomas Jefferson invented a cipher wheel also.) His company also purchased the rights to another patent for a rotor machine from Hugo Koch—patented in 1919.

His firm’s cipher machine, marketed under the name “Enigma,” was initially pitched to the commercial market. There were several commercial models, and one of them was adopted by the German Navy (in a modified version) in 1926. The German Army adopted the same machine (also in a modified version somewhat different from the Navy’s) a few years later.

Just like all the other rotor machines, this apparatus had both electrical and mechanical systems. The mechanical part of the system consisted of rotors which were arranged along its spindle, a keyboard, and a stepping component which turned one of the rotors when a key was pressed and a sequence of lamps for all the letters.

The machine was used to encrypt any plaintext message and for every letter typed by the operator the lamp showed a different letter as per the pseudo-random substitution. The letters displayed by the lights were recorded as the enciphered substitute. When the key is pressed, it moves one of the rotors, so that the next key uses a different electric pathway, therefore, producing a different substitute alphabet for all the letters. The cyphertext is then transmitted to another operator who deciphers the message. As long as the settings of the deciphering equipment resembled that of the enciphering machine, the message could be deciphered.

Scherbius’ Enigma provided the German Army with the strongest cryptographic cipher in the world at the time, until the code was broken by Polish mathematicians in the 1930s, as discussed in the following section.

Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki

While Alan Turing gets all the credit for breaking the code of the Enigma machine, probably due to his cult-like celebration for being a brilliant homosexual and due to the hit movie The Imitation Game, it was actually three Poles who cracked the code. Their story is virtually non-existent to the public.

The earlier Enigma machines were adopted by the government and military services of numerous nations like Germany who used it to send and receive messages before and during the Second World War. The British and their allies understood the problem posed by this equipment in 1931 when a German spy known as Hans Thilo allowed his French spymaster to take a photograph of a stolen operating manual for the Enigma machine. The manual included all the keys and plugboard settings which the Germans used in September and October 1932.

The British and their allies could not decipher the message; therefore, they handed them over to a Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski. Rejewski together with Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki managed to build an Enigma double. They developed numerous techniques for defeating the plugboard and get all the components of the keys, thus making it possible for them to read all the German enciphered messages from 1933 to 1939. With the 1939 German invasion imminent, the Polish government decided to share their secrets with the British.

Less than six weeks before World War II began, on September 3, 1939, Lieutenant Gwido Langer, head of the Polish Central Staff’s cipher bureau invited British and French intelligence chiefs to a meeting at his secret cryptology centre at Pyry in the Kabaty woods near Warsaw.

There he revealed to them that his team, Rejewski, Zygalski, and Rozycki, had cracked the Enigma code seven years before and had been reading German messages ever since. This was five years before Alan Turing had even started studying cryptology – he was still working on a degree in mathematical logic at Princeton University in the United States.

The GC&CS (Government Code and Cipher School) in Buckinghamshire became the Allies’ center for dealing with the war-induced changes in the enciphered messages.

Since the Germans were convinced that their technology could not be deciphered, they continued using the machine for different types of communications with their secret services, in the sky, and on the battlefield. The decoded messages were given to a few commanders who used it cautiously making sure that the Germans did not find out that their cipher was broken.

Alan Turing, gay icon, will be the face on Britain’s next £50 note, which we’ll see in 2021 and is acknowledged as the father of computers. Turing’s legacy is carried on by the annual Turing Award that is the highest recognition in computer science since 1966.

The three young Polish mathematicians who were the first to crack the new German military Enigma code got their faces on a Polish postage stamp in 1983.

Claude Shannon

Have you heard the term “Information Theory?” No? Then perhaps you’ve been watching too many faux movies, like Red Tails (on the Tuskegee Airmen), or reading factvels (novels passing themselves off as non-fiction) like Hidden Figures (on African-American women involved in NASA).

Claude Elwood Shannon wrote the most important master’s thesis in history in which he, at twenty-one years old, applied Boolean algebra to switching circuitry titled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.” In this paper Shannon invented new mathematics to describe the laws of communication. It was a transformative work, turning circuit design from an art into a science, and is now considered to have been the starting point of digital circuit design.

In a 1939 letter to his mentor at Bell Laboratories, Vannevar Bush, Shannon outlined some of his initial ideas on “fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence.” After working on the problem for a decade, Shannon finally published his masterpiece in 1948: “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”  He introduced new ideas, like the entropy rate of a probabilistic model, which have been applied in far-ranging branches of mathematics such as ergodic theory, the study of long-term behavior of dynamical systems. Shannon’s theories have now become the standard framework underlying all modern-day communication systems: optical, underwater, even interplanetary.

His theories laid the groundwork for the electronic communications networks that now lace the earth. As noted by Ioan James, Shannon biographer for the Royal Society, “So wide were its repercussions that the theory was described as one of humanity’s proudest and rarest creations, a general scientific theory that could profoundly and rapidly alter humanity’s view of the world.”

While Shannon worked in a field for which no Nobel prize is offered, his work was richly rewarded by honors including the National Medal of Science (1966) and honorary degrees from Yale (1954), Michigan (1961), Princeton (1962), Edinburgh (1964), Pittsburgh (1964), Northwestern (1970), Oxford (1978), East Anglia (1982), Carnegie-Mellon (1984), Tufts (1987), and the University of Pennsylvania (1991). He was also the first recipient of the Harvey Prize (1972), the Kyoto Prize (1985), and the Shannon Award (1973). The last of these awards, named in his honor, is given by the Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and remains the highest possible honor in the community of researchers dedicated to the field that he invented.

But Shannon was also a fun-loving joker; he invented something called the “Ultimate Machine,” a machine—a box really—containing a replica of a human hand whose sole purpose was to turn off a switch that had been turned on by its user. Shannon approached research with a sense of curiosity, humor, and fun. An accomplished unicyclist, he was famous for cycling the halls of Bell Labs at night, juggling as he went. His later work on chess-playing machines and an electronic mouse that could run a maze helped create the field of artificial intelligence, the effort to make machines that think. Yeah, we call them computers.

As Stanford University Professor David Tse says, Shannon “invented the future.”

You can watch a recent documentary on Shannon’s life at Amazon Prime.

Oscar H. Banker

If you had never heard of Claude Shannon, then I can guarantee that you’ve never heard this man’s name. You should know it. . . you probably drove or were driven somewhere recently using two of his historic inventions — the automatic transmission and power steering.

Oscar H. Banker (b. Asatour Sarafian, May 31, 1895) was an Armenian-American inventor who patented a number of works, including an automatic transmission and power steering for automobiles. He is considered the “father of the automatic transmission.”

General Motors incorporated the semi-automatic transmission system into some of its vehicles in 1934, oddly enough the same year that Banker filed for a patent on the automatic transmission. The GM design had many flaws, leading Banker to propose his system to the company, asserting that it would be safer and more durable. After battling for eight years, Banker’s design was adopted and GM finally offered the American driver automatic transmissions using Banker’s design in 1940 in Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs, the first mass-produced automatic transmission vehicles. It was a marvel of engineering complexity that simplified driving so much that today, 97 per cent of all cars have just two pedals.

1940 Oldsmobile

In Banker’s memoirs titled Dreams and Wars of an American Inventor: An Immigrant’s Romance published in 1983 he writes: “America is yet the greatest country existing for opportunity, for achievement and if a person can endure the hardships, ridicule, rebuffs, whatever and keep on going! That is what counts. And absolutely nothing else.”

The Drinking Bird

It would seem that brilliant people have a penchant for designing useless toys if you follow the examples of Claude Shannon and Miles Sullivan both of whom worked for Bell Labs in the 1940s. Sullivan filed for a patent on his toy in 1946.

The drinking bird is an iconic desk toy, but can you explain how it works? The principle is unintuitive at first glance, but beautifully simple in hindsight, like only the most brilliant inventions are.

At its core, the drinking bird is a heat engine, not unlike a steam turbine or diesel engine. When the bird’s head dips in the water, it gets wet. When the water evaporates, the bird’s head cools. This temperature change in-turn changes the internal pressure of the bird’s vacuum sealed body, and the movement of the gases and liquids inside propel the bird’s motion.

The bird’s underlying principle is unintuitive at first glance, beautifully simple and a mesmerizing feat of engineering. The drinking bird illustrates many principles in chemistry and physics: boiling and condensation; combined gas law; torque; the center of mass; capillary action (wicking of water into the felt); wet-bulb temperature (temperature difference between head and body bulbs depends on the relative humidity of the air); the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution; heat of vaporization/heat of condensation; and the functioning of a heat engine.

It’s best just to watch it in action and listen to the engineer guy explain it.

The Columbian Exposition of 1893

The World’s Columbian Exposition celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. (Or as Wikipedia says, Columbus’s arrival in the new world.)

There hasn’t been a World’s Fair in North America since 1986 in Vancouver, B.C., and the last one in the US was in New Orleans in 1984. During the Fairs’ heydays, wealthy and middleclass families would make pilgrimages across the seas to meccas of modernization to see the wonders firsthand.

Rather than trumpeting how great each nation was or could be, the Fairs became pitiful reminders of how desperate we had become. World’s Fairs don’t even try to capture the imagination like they used to. The 1939 World’s Fair’s Dawn of a New Day slogan exuded aspirational wonder as nations shamelessly hawked their latest kitchen appliances or technological innovation.

The 1964 Fair held in New York focused on Peace Through Understanding—how many foreign wars has the US engaged in since then? The last Fair in 2015 in Milan, Italy had as its theme — Feeding the planet, energy for life — it focused on ending hunger and developing food sustainability for impoverished nations. . . what a downer!

Dubai, a sheikhdom in the United Arab Emirates, bet billions of dollars on an Expo to rejuvenate its struggling economy. That Expo is now postponed to Oct. 1, 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

But the Columbian Expo held in Chicago was probably the pinnacle of global mankind’s demonstration of striving for excellence.

Fredrick Law Olmsted, possibly the world’s foremost landscape architect, laid out the plan to build on a swamp requiring wood pilings driven into the ground to support the buildings. He also created a system of lagoons and lakes in which full size replicas of Columbus’ ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria floated. 40,000 skilled and unskilled laborers (making ten cents a day) constructed the fair’s buildings.

There were over 65,000 exhibits at the fair covering 630 acres. The Chicago skyline was dominated by a 250-foot-high Ferris wheel, designed for the fair by inventor George Ferris. It was 100 feet taller than today’s Ferris wheel at Chicago’s Navy Pier and had 36 cars capable of holding 60 people each. Fully loaded, it could carry 2,160 people and took a full twenty minutes to make one rotation. The commission responsible for the Fair believed it couldn’t be done. But Ferris, embodying the spirit of American ingenuity and doggedness, built it anyway.

The color of the material generally used to cover the buildings’ façades, white staff, which was a type of plaster of Paris, gave the fairgrounds its nickname—the White City. Its scale and grandeur far exceeded all prior world’s fairs including the one held in Paris in 1889 symbolized by the Eiffel Tower. The Columbian Expo became a symbol of emerging American Exceptionalism.

The main entryway was a peristyle of forty-eight massive fluted columns on either side of an arch in the style of the Arc de Triompe.

Every US state built an exhibition house or building to show its products. California had, among other things, a full-size medieval knight on a horse made of prunes. Missouri showcased a replica of the Statue of Liberty made of sugar. Philadelphia sent the Liberty Bell to grace Pennsylvania’s building.

This was the first Fair to solicit exhibits from foreign countries and forty-six heeded the call. It seemed that each nation was in a fierce competition to excel the others. France built a nearly full-size wing of the Palace of Versailles.

On October 9, 1893, nearly a million people paid 50 cents to attend the opening where President Grover Cleveland pushed a solid gold button to switch on George Westinghouse’s electric lights that illuminated in a bath of brilliant whiteness the staff-laden buildings of the Fair. Nearly half of the total population of the US attended the Fair.

It is impossible to describe the awesome accomplishment of the White men and women who came together to create one of the wonders of the modern world. Everything about it was the biggest, the best, the greatest. It had the longest telescope in the world, the largest building in the world, and a choir of 2,500 singers.

A good book to read on the subject is Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. Another place that I really recommend is the documentary narrated by Gene Wilder titled “Magic of the World’s Fair.” Trust me, the documentary will amaze you.

If you watch the documentary, and I hope you do, you will be left with a sense of appreciation for what white people have achieved. Like George Ferris who was not content to allow the erector-set appearing Eifel Tower to stand as the crowning glory of civilization, there were others who motivated by money, fame, or ego, would scale mountains of obstacles, and leave their indelible record in the history books and in their genes for future generations.

You might also feel a bit wistful if not melancholy as you contemplate that White people descended to the deepest part of the oceans, climbed the highest land masses, and flew to the moon to go for a walk.

Can we ever attain the impossible tasks again? Or have we lost that intangible component, that antecedent of accomplishment, that precursor of victory, and that faculty of deliberative striving?

Have we lost it — our will?

Four generations of Americans have now lived with kosher certified food, soap, detergents, food wrap, appliances and more, regardless of their religious faith or whether they even knew that this religious certification enterprise existed. Most consumers likely see the “Kosher” section of an “International Foods” aisle in their supermarkets, and would never imagine that the other fifteen aisles were saturated with kosher certification symbols, usually obscure and small to the typical consumer and never textually displaying the words “KOSHER CERTIFIED” on a label[1]. But the truth is that a preponderance of most shopping carts are filled with kosher certified goods, largely from the number one agency that began it all, that of OU Kosher[2].

So how did this all begin, and what are we to make of it? If you follow the articles and blogs at www.TheKosherQuestion.com, then you may have come across a brief history of the kosher industry as it pertained to riots in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1902[3], destructive protests rivaling that of today’s Antifa and BLM, demanding lower costs and honesty in kosher meat markets. This movement was entirely spawned by new immigrants to America, largely fleeing Eastern Europe from what they claimed were persecutions. Now, residing on the land of the free, they embarked on a mission of the brave to regulate and codify the kosher market to meet the needs of Jewry.

But while new laws and regulations helped with the authenticity and economics of what constituted “kosher,” the industrialization of the food industry made matters more impractical for the Jewish community, as assessing food production facilities and the contents inside modern packaging (e.g. canned goods) resulted in new problems. As technology marches forward, humanity loses more and more freedom. Such is the conundrum dealt with by philosophers of technology like David Skrbina, Ph.D.[4], who look deeper into how all this progress affects us all. But look at one of Skrbina’s subjects to get a closer peek at the relationship between food and technology: Theodore Kaczinski [from his diary January 21, 1978]; “[M]odern society probably gives me better assurance of food supply than I could give myself as a primitive hunter-gatherer. But that’s beside the point. As a primitive I would have the right to deal with the problem myself and make my own decisions regarding it. As it is, the system makes all the decisions for me and I can do nothing about it.” [our emphasis]

Were the advances in technology the coup de grâce for the Jewish followers of Kashrus, the dietary laws of Judaism? Had they lost their freedom to inspect the contents of the packaged food they bought or make decisions as to how their food was produced? The answer would come in 1923 when the Heinz Corporation began cooperating with the rabbinical staff of Orthodox Union to produce the first mass kosher-certified vegetarian beans. Very gradually more and more corporations contracted with kosher agencies who oversaw the ingredients, the machinery, and the processing of the food they produced, stamping a hekhsher (i.e. kosher seal) on the label to signify its kosher status. The promotion of this practice created an entirely new industry, one that grew almost like an elaborate pyramid scheme since producers of kosher raw ingredients were rewarded when food with numerous ingredients required kosher certified sources. The rabbis were now in control, applying and reinterpreting their ancient religious laws from Leviticus, Deuteronomy and the Talmud, building their database, and training more mashgichim[5]. A decade later, the secret ingredients of Coca Cola were shared with a rabbi, who changed it so that this most popular soda could also receive a kosher seal[6]. And by the Fifties, kosher certification reached enough products, both edible and inedible, that some outside the Jewish community began to notice.

A 1954 speech given by Mrs. Marian Strack of the Daughters of the American Revolution presented the first challenge to the burgeoning kosher certification practice at a Trenton, NJ, DAR conference. But what was the objection?  Her boldest part of the speech was as follows, and it drew a great deal of public criticism in the press: “Clandestine Kosher markings on canned goods symbolize how a bold minority can impose its will and even its religious observances upon an apathetic majority.” And she was correct in using the term ‘clandestine’, as very few consumers today can recognize the ubiquitous certification seal of OU Kosher[7] after nearly a century. In fact, research studies have shown that kosher seals have minimal transparency, averaging just one tenth the size of all those other seals found on packaging[8].

But what Marian Strack noticed and feared for above the naivety of her fellow DAR members and critics was that the system was steadily changing the culture of America towards the needs of a tiny minority instead of assimilating the tiny minority into Americans. A 1966 newspaper article, “The ‘In’ World of Kosher Food,”[9] featured Rabbi Alexander S. Rosenberg of the OU Kosher Certification Service admitting that “THE SYMBOL was devised to indicate the products that have been certified kosher in an unobtrusive way that would not offend the sensibilities of other faiths.” [our emphasis] The rabbi continues: “While the ‘U’ is small and unobtrusive, it nevertheless has drawn vilification from certain people whom Rabbi Rosenberg has termed ‘the lunatic fringe’…”

That newspaper article from 1966 was most certainly a response to the testimony from a leader of the KKK in a House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings, where this leader had “financed literature aimed at exposing ‘the kosher food racket.’” The article was clearly framing the kosher industry in a positive light by using the phrase “The ‘In’ World” in its title, but the article also framed anyone who counters kosher labeling as “the lunatic fringe,” someone who could now be linked to the KKK. As time moved on, the ADL would continue using the same strategy with its internet article The Kosher Tax Hoax: A Recipe for Hate.[10]

Let us pause for a moment to summarize what had evolved: 1) a small group of religiously devout immigrants found dishonesty and criminal wrongdoing surrounding a kosher meat market; 2) rioting ensues; 3) new laws and regulations are created for small group, 4) industrial technology further complicates the kosher status of food; 5) the small group contracts with the food processors to certify their products; 6) this results in food processing technology then conforming to the dictates of the small group to support their religious observance; 7) the small group purposely obscures the technological scheme; 8) critical thinkers and observers of out-groups examine this barely transparent business ;9) critical thinkers in support of out-group interests, especially religious or economic, are at first labeled “lunatic fringe”, and as time goes on, “haters” and “anti-Semites” by the system.

Deception

Deception typically involves causing others to accept something that is invalid to be valid. When Orthodox Union’s Rabbi Rosenberg in 1966 stated that its kosher symbol was “devised…in an unobtrusive way that would not offend the sensibilities of other faiths,” he was in one way being honest that they put some thought into the design of this kosher seal. He was also honest that their seal was “small” when found on labels. But he was also deceiving the public as to their intent when suggesting that the seal was small so as to be unobtrusive (i.e., not blatant or aggressive). For what could be more obtrusive and “offend [people] of other faiths” than to impose its minority religious laws on the free food market of an entire population? In truth, they made deliberate efforts to hiding or obscuring their activities, making their certification seal difficult to notice or understand so that few people outside their small in-group would follow their scheme as it grew nationally and internationally. For who in 1923, 1954, 1966, or even 2021 would readily know that the small letter “U” within a circle on a label would indicate a kosher status?

The deception (the obscure symbol) was set to progress within the system, and a healthy dose of self-deception buttressed its ethical and moral standing, Rabbi Rosenberg likely believing “We are not offending the sensibilities of other faiths.” This framework of deception and self-deception has been theorized “as mechanisms for furthering evolutionary goals.…Self-deceiving individuals are able to present an appearance of trustworthiness and sincerity and to believe their own rationalizations.”[11] Well what better means of promoting that trustworthy, sincere appearance than getting the message out in a well-controlled newspaper article titled “The ‘In’ World of Kosher Food”?

Let’s look closer at self-deception in the kosher world. We have shown OU’s earlier admittance that they were purposely designing their kosher seal to be small. But 55 years later some of our supporters would share with us responses from OU Kosher as they complained that the seal was “too small.” Their Marketing Director replied “As is the norm in the kosher industry, we cannot control if, where or how large a company uses our symbol on their packaging.” This is a fascinating statement, given all the contractual stipulations and even surprise inspections that are involved in this industry. It might be more accurate to say that they are deceiving themselves that they can’t mandate a minimum size for their ubiquitous seal and can’t insist that “KOSHER CERTIFIED” be stamped next to or around the hekhsher. But while the OU Marketing Director makes bold statements like “we cannot control any aspect of the kosher seal,” is there an evolutionary instinct driving her into self-deception, knowing that the kosher certification industry has evolved into a mega-money making business that supports her community, her people’s interests?

Another supporter of ours may have provided the answer. Recently, he wrote the same agency with specific questions challenging them on the unusually small OU Kosher seal found on Cascade dishwashing detergent while also inquiring as to how they felt ethically or morally about the deceptive nature towards non-Jews in this matter (He asked “Why do you wrap your Twitter avatar with ‘KOSHER CERTIFICATION SERVICES’ but display no similar textual descriptor on the actual food labels?”). And after much evasiveness, she finally professed, “To simplify your extremely detailed [questions], most kosher consumers worldwide recognize the OU Kosher symbol as a mark of trust and recognition. We have never had the need to add anything additional as a descriptor and most of our certified companies are quite content with the symbol and what it represents for their business.”[12]

Assuming she believes this, do you see the self-deception? Our supporter specifically brought up his concern for the consumer who is NOT a kosher-keeper, but all this marketing director could care about was “most kosher consumers worldwide.” She had an automatic suppression of how others might feel, a lack of introspection because if anyone objected based on religious freedom, economics, fair financial disclosures, or just truth in labeling, they have been relegated to (allow us to repeat) “the lunatic fringe” of “haters”, “extremists”, and “anti-Semites.” It’s all about her community — her community only. That is why she evaded detailed answers. The whole point is to keep the entire scheme on the down-low.

In fact, other consumer critics have written kosher agencies and received similarly vague, selfish responses like: “Our company’s financial information is confidential,” “Kosher certification is not regulated by any authority,” “As kosher certification is a sensitive area, we try not dictate,” and “We can only recommend to our customers where and how to display the OU Kosher symbol.” And from manufacturers: “Unfortunately, we are unable to provide the information you requested,” “We pay a standard annual fee,” “We are not allowed to discuss this,” “the OU symbol [without any KOSHER text] meets our standards,” “OU standards align well with our company mission and values,” “We do not track [how many patrons are kosher keepers],” “A great deal of thought goes into the artwork that goes on our limited package space,” and “the way it’s currently displayed is in line with the guidance for use of the symbol.” Neither the kosher agency nor big corporations are willing to detail what that specific guidance is.

Perhaps when self-deception becomes so grossly ingrained into a culture and a system, it is transformed into delusion. In the field of psychology, delusion is a persistent false psychotic belief regarding self and others outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, and it can involve tricking or deceiving others.[13]

For nearly one hundred years, the kosher agencies and complicit corporations have deceived consumers on kosher seals while concealing their detailed financials. The stakeholders tied to this religious enterprise are delusional in their belief that all angles of this service are beyond reproach. So why do kosher agencies hide the detailed truth while at the same time receiving extremely generous IRS privileges such as tax-exemption and disclosure-free financials? Dr. Kevin MacDonald, a leader in evolutionary psychology, explains that “[T]ruth is not a requirement for the effectiveness of the rationalizations, apologia, and self-deceptions so central to maintaining positive images of the Jewish in-group throughout history.”[14] Indeed, while the kosher certification industry may only be a recent historical phenomenon, it certainly is reflective of the Jewish in-group, and, according to the theory in his book Separation And Its Discontents, it must now be maintained for its important role in supporting Jewish evolutionary group success.[15]

After four years of persistent researching into the kosher certification industry, we can firmly say that there is a dense firewall keeping the truth from within our reach. And then we read this:

“The OU prides itself in our level of transparency. The more the public is aware of kashrut, the more they will demand, which helps us up our game. We welcome that scrutiny.” — Rabbi Moshe Elefant, COO of OU Kosher[16]

If the rabbi really believes this, it’s a prime example of self-deception given how opaque the kosher industry is when it comes to sharing financial data. Moreover, unless he’s strictly talking to his kosher consumer base, his delusion is extremely offensive to the non-Jew who doesn’t keep kosher and seeks out answers. We have documented Israeli reports of extortion-racket systems related to kosher certification in Jerusalem[17], controversial remarks made by professionals from the International Food Safety & Quality Network (IFSQN) regarding questionable kosher supervisors[18], the New York Daily News literally calling the business a mafia run by “Kosher Cops”[19]. We also have performed a substantial amount of surveys and research on the subject-matter. We know that about 39% of consumers do not want religious intervention in the production of their food, but still we cannot get honest answers. We know that 19% of shoppers on top of the 39% want higher transparency in this area, but instead we are not dealt with in good faith! We are not privy to the information we need and deserve.

A small group took to overseeing an entire free market of sustenance, first by deception, backed by self-deception, and sealed with bad faith. While many of us tolerate ubiquitous kosher certification today, we must be wary of the technocratic power that such a blending of religion and technology may present, as Canadian author Suzanne Bousquet has warned the reading public in her book From Kosher to Halal that the sneakiness, the politics, and the associated greed of this enterprise pose a threat to Western Civilization.[20]

So while the masses are not yet protesting against kosher certification, and while we tolerate the escalating supremacy of it all with gracious permissiveness[21], take this time to ponder and reflect on the sanctioned business of a “persecuted” people: Has kosher certification been absorbed into the system, or is the system kosher-certified?

Dr. Andrew Joyce, a scholar of Jewish Studies and staunch advocate for Europeans, might rebuke Ms. Bousquet’s comments with a starker taste of reality: “We no longer have a Civilization, but a System that is killing us as a people. And we shouldn’t defend the System in the illusion that we’re defending Civilization. Modern understandings of the West (civic, commercial, atomistic, ‘open’, diverse) poison and deracinate us.”

Perhaps the time is overdue for Dr. David Skrbina to coin a new techno-philosophical term, for are we all not living in Kosher Delusion?

[1] https://mynkcproducts.com/data-critical-study-on-kosher-seals/

[2] A branch of Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, https://www.ou.org/

[3] “Women Resume Riots Against Meat Shops” – The New York Times, May 18, 1902, p.3

[4] https://www.davidskrbina.com/

[5] Plural of “mashgiach”; an observant Jew who supervises the status of Kashrus in a food production plant or food establishment; a Kosher supervisor

[6] https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-real-thing-how-coke-became-kosher

[7] https://mynkcproducts.com/2019/08/25/survey-results-on-kosher-recognition-and-more/

[8] https://mynkcproducts.com/data-critical-study-on-kosher-seals/

[9] “The ‘In’ World of Kosher Food” by Leonard Sloan, Tampa Bay Times, March 26, 1966. p.48

[10] https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/the-kosher-tax-hoax-anti-semitic-recipe-for-hate

[11] Separation And Its Discontents, by Dr. Kevin MacDonald, p.247 (Praeger Publishers, 1998)

[12] “The best deceivers are self-deceivers because they do not show any psychological tensions or feelings of ambivalence.” – Trivers, R. L. (1985) Social Evolution. Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park, CA; (1991) Deceit and self-deception: The relationship between communication and consciousness. In: M. Robinson and L. Tiger (eds.) Man and Beast Revisited, Smithsonian, Washington, DC, pp. 175–191.

[13] Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of “Delusion”

[14] Separation And Its Discontents by Dr. Kevin MacDonald, p.16

[15] “Jewish self-deception touches on a variety of issues, including personal identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g., economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in traditional and contemporary societies.”, SAID, p. 248; “Evolutionists have shown considerable interest in deception and self-deception as mechanisms for furthering evolutionary goals…Self-deceiving individuals are able to present an appearance of trustworthiness and sincerity and to believe their own rationalizations.” SAID, p. 247

[16] https://oukosher.org/passover/articles/on-a-mission-to-educate/; In a reply made to one of our supporters, the OU Marketing Director stated the following: “We do have complete transparency when it comes to Kashrut, but when it comes to the use of the OU symbol and its trademark, that becomes a legal issue, both for marketing and Kashrut uses”

[17] https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4891347,00.html

[18] IFSQN Forum: “All the rabbis know each other…it’s like a mafia. You pay a lot of money for the kosher symbol…Rabbis and the Kosher certifiers can be “swayed”…if you know what I mean. Also, they like clients who are generous with their products” – Ryan M 8/16/2019

[19] “They operate like the mafia,” Forster said. “If they pull your hechsher (kosher certification), you are screwed. They tell other places not to give you a hechsher.” – https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-kosher-restaurant-comic-20181209-story.html

[20] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/from-kosher-to-halal-suzanne-bousquet/1136379404

[21] Keeping in mind the following: “It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness” – Industrial Society And Its Future by Theodore John Kaczynski