"Make America Great Again" and the leather trade

[Sheilajeanne]

One thing I like about the area I live in is that people will go out of their way to support local businesses and buy local. I'm in a very small town, which has ONE restaurant. It's been closed for most of the last year for in-person dining due to COVID. But it is doing very well with takeout, and sometimes even sells out its most popular daily specials! Of course, the food IS very good, and portions are very generous. They know how to keep their customers happy. There's a large town just 15 minutes away where local people could buy their food instead, but they know if they do that, the restaurant will have to close its doors.

One of the best things I ever saw in the local WalMart was this:  it was the height of strawberry season here, and the store I usually shop at (FreshCo) was sold out. I reluctantly went to WalMart, but all I could find were berries grown in the U.S.A. As I was making strawberry shortcake for company, and HAD to have berries, I reluctantly picked up a pint.

THEN I got to the end of the aisle, the part that was at right angles to the main aisle, and there was another cooler with the Ontario berries in it!  Yes, they were more expensive, but I didn't care! I took the U.S. berries out of my cart, left them there, and grabbed the local ones!

What really warmed my heart was I could see a number of other people had done the SAME thing!

The main local industry in this area, besides the Honda plant and other manufacturers that support it is agriculture. Local farmers support other local farmers!! 

Edited July 8, 2021 by Sheilajeanne

[Squid61]

All very interesting.  Two points though; someone is going to build "it" because someone wants "it", look around your houses and garages and see how much stuff you have accumulated from cheap sources (many our sworn enemies) before you point fingers. 

Here in the USA we pay people more than minimum wage to not work, we destroy livestock and cattle if we can't get a high enough price, we raise corn to burn in cars even though it's 15% less efficient than gas and much more expensive, we block oil and gas production forcing us to rely on our sworn enemies for their oil and gas, we're even so stupid as to have all our medicines produced by our sworn enemies and we keep electing self-serving morons to "lead" us!

[Rahere]

I am a historian, on the edge of the Warburg Institute, the world's leading research establishment into the Renaissance,  because I spotted something that had been missed.

Sometimes history's a game of billiards. The Han Chinese get about as pissed off with the Goths as the modern Chinese are with the Uighurs, and instead of genocide, kicked them out. Socially disrupted, they broke apart as a tribe into hardcore goths, Eastern Goths (Ostrogoths) and Western Goths (Visigoths). The latter moved too fast for Rome, but were culturally accretive, as they had little of their own other than sourdough and yoghurt. Accidentally demolishing the Western Roman Empire by destroying its civil administration when the sacked the place in 425CE, they eventually settled as the Catalans, and still cause problems of a distinct tribal identity in Spain and France.

That left the Eastern Roman Empire, and a West which wasn't as anarchic as thought 50 years ago. Strong leaders developed family identities, and found themselves repeatedly challenged by nomadic incursions. A major one was the rise of Islam, taking over Spain and threatening central France, which led to the Crusades: the Church was pretty good at eugenics. However, in 1348 a pandemic arose which devastated the population, weakening its economy to the point where plague and a power struggle in France destroyed the economy. Self-help created a new middle class, printing destroyed the authority of the Church, but along the way, it fought back. The Council of Constance allowed new research to replace the old mixture of celtic and christian creed, creating the Protestantism you know in America. They attempted to distract Western Europe by taking on the Ottoman Turks in a projected Crusade to defend Holy Roman Empire lands along the Danube, but the oddest of things threw the plan off course. The Papacy had been reduced to a French puppet in Avignon, Rome was a ghost town, but not everyone accepted French Valois writ: they made their own Popes. The sort-out replaced all the rivals with someone expected to snuff it quickly, which didn't work because the nuns caring for him identified lactose intolerance, switched him to goat's milk, and he lived long enough for the plans to come unstuck. The Valous recovered from Agincourt, and instead of trooping merrily off to the Carpathians never to be seen again (this was the age of Vlad Drakul), they revived the old punch-up around Orléans. That left the Lombard finance pissed off, so they took control of the Church (the Medici and Borgia Popes) who in turn annoyed the Northern European freethinkers. That spun the wilder extremists off to Plymouth Rock, while alchemical breakthroughs in Brussels led to gold fever in monarchy, and modern Chemistry (and if you dob't velieve me, read up on Jan van Helmont's 1618 breakthrough experiment. The UK was fastest in putting monarchy back in its box, and thus we have modern 

So when you talk of local view, you do exactly what Europe did in the 1430s, you take your eye off the wifer picture. Both are necessary. If you can thrive locally everywhere, you create a rising tide which floats all boats. Just control the evil "geniuses" who aren't, and want the whole shebang for themselves. 

[Sheilajeanne]

Rahere, I can sort of follow what you're saying, but autocorrect has really done a number on your post. Suggest you read it over and fix it before the edit window expires!

3 hours ago, Rahere said:

take your eye off the wifer picture = um, yeah...

The Council of Constance  - you mean Constantinople, the Council of Nicea, in 325 A.D.

The Valous recovered - who??  And who was this that had lactose intolerance?

That spun the wilder extremists off to Plymouth Rock, while alchemical breakthroughs in Brussels led to gold fever in monarchy, and modern Chemistry (and if you dob't velieve me, read up on Jan van Helmont's 1618 breakthrough experiment. The UK was fastest in putting monarchy back in its box, and thus we have modern   - this all needs some major editing to make sense!

 

 

 

[Rahere]

That's the thing about packing 600 years of history into a paragraph. Valois. The Council of Constance was a premeditated European Council convened by the Church between 1414-18 to sort out the new society: the Papacy was no longer a political puppet, but the moral authority, which was soon perverted. Agincourt happened in the middle of it, destroying French feudalist authority. The lactose-intolerant Pope Martin V was a stop-gap sop to the traditionalists, allowing a temporary return to how things were before charging off down a new path, where Popes weren't elected from a cosy clique of Roman famiglias: his successor Eugenius IV broke the Petrine line, as he was Venetian, therefore Marcine, and a Windesheim man into the bargain. The Lombard take-over which followed lost the support of Northern Europe, with Luther and Erasmus - both Windesheim men - leading a new Enlightenment which turned into Calvinist Puritanism, while secular power became increasingly dogmatic, leaving the Pilgrim Fathers no real choice but to flee into exile. It's much more complicated than that, if course, but essentially James I's Scottish Catholics were intolerable to them, and vice versa.

A similar thing had been happening in the Low Countries. The Dutch revolt threatened Brussels, and Felipe II thought he'd succeeded in near-enough bankrupting the Flemish, until they had a breakthrough in gold production. There's no doubt about it, I've seen the receipt in the French Regional Archives in Lille: someone produced 40 000 mountons d'or! It forced the King's hand, so he had those responsible executed (the Counts of Hoornes and Egmont) for heresy and tried to go into production for himself; Prof René Taylor's Magia y Arquitectura (Siruela edition: the English translation misses the key appendices) cites his correspondence on the subject, repurposing the Escorial as the Third Temple of Solomon, with a decidedly alchemical orientation. The bloke responsible fled, and only resurfaces long afterwards, in 1618: he's destitute, but is soon back in funds, and does a demo before van Helmont: read up on that 1618 experiment, it's the birth of empirical observation. That the alchemist could only work in Brussels explains why the furore which swept Europe (Elizabeth I and John Deee, Rudolph II and the Prague experiments) got nowhere: there was key kit in Brussels. I've reluctantly had to accept the History of Science position that alquimia may have had something to it after seeing with my own eyes a bunch of Royal Arch masons working for London's top gold refiners break through in medical practice: I think I've described the Platinol/Cisplatin history, haven't I?  The Philosopher's Stone, catalytic platinum.

This is the common ground of the Royal Society: Newton wrote twice as much on it as he did on physics. It's why he became mixed up in the Royal Mint. Thus far, I can see how you transmute an atom of Hg (AW80) into Au (AW 79), you strip the electron shells away and add an anti-proton. Fine now, but in 1568? The two processes of Alchemy give a hint: Wet Path used conventional wood-firing for a year (Felipe jests that he has a forest needing clearing!) whereas the new Dry Path, just a month. The Law of Conservation of Energy implies the latter process would be twelve times as hot as a wood fire, which is in the 200-300°C bracket: 3000°C is a plasma temperature, needed to strip the electron shells. I'm now tinkering with Heisenberg determinism to see if the philosophic side of the corpus could supply the quark package needed. I know exactly what the power source was, the only source of electric power before Faraday. I'll leave you to puzzle that one out, it explains why chest capacitors date back that far.