Big Dumb System

Now that I'm in my mid 50s, I am starting to have some brushes with the "end of life racket", which was thankfully out of sight and consequently out of mind for most of my prior life. That racket shows how bleak and regimented the middle class life is.

People march down a toll road over their whole life. They scrimp and save so they can give as much money as possible to hospitals, nursing homes, and finally funeral directors who collect the last fee. A careful person might manage to get a good pile of money to their heirs. A careless person will get worked over by this system entirely and go from a wealthy middle class person to a pauper in a handful of years of decrepitude.

Even body disposal is weirdly expensive. It must be a cartel situation, which is certainly aided by the government and regulation. You could empty out 150 pounds of meat from a freezer, put it in a garbage bag and chuck it in the trash, for example and nobody would bat an eye. Of course there are myriad taboos and legal versions of the same that ensure the funeral racket keeps collecting thousands of dollars per stiff.

I doubt it's legal to build a funeral pyre in most states, for example, but it is legal to incinerate a corpse at a funeral home. A well constructed and fueled wood fire will melt metals. Incinerating a body with a wood fires would be pretty cheap and was fit for kings and warriors for centuries. It's probably also illegal to dig a hole and bury a body like generations of settlers in the US did, although people bury dogs, horses, cows, etc... on their property all the time in rural and even suburban areas.

A few years ago, an unfortunate deer was hit by a car and died on my property. I put her under a large pile of wood chips in the woods, probably double the diameter of her body and three times as deep. I couldn't smell the decomposing body at all, nor did any scavengers disturb the pile. That much carbon rich material basically soaks up any nastiness. I used the wood chips in the garden a couple of years later. Of course there wasn't a trace of flesh left. Eventually even the bones break down.

One of the problems of the "highly organized" economy is the average person becomes a totally unskilled dope whose life is hemmed in by lies spun by douchebags and scammers who want their piece of the money pie. They can't even imagine there's an alternative to the set of cartel offered services and life rituals.

They also are maintained in a sort of fantasy land unreality existence because somebody else "does it" whatever it is. This type of person is the "urban/suburban housecat". They do their job, which is often some abstract nonsense, then pay skilled people to do absolutely everything else in their life. This has apparently led to an overall denial of the realities of life because everything can be managed by "experts" and everything can be "fixed".

Romanization

One of the core elements of the fantasy genre is it is set in the negative space of the current day world which is fully "Romanized" for lack of a better term. Like in the fantasy genre, there's no police officers giving parking tickets to the characters. Instead they are dealing directly with the forces of nature and creatures embodying the same. Also there's no churches and christianity.

Contemplating this topic got me thinking how absolutely weird officialdom is. It's loaded with cosplay and mandatory honorifics and titles and all that kind of nonsense. For example a "judge" wears a robe and people in a courtroom are forced to pay various honors to some rando dude or woman, like "all rise" and such. In England the judges still wear a white wig for some bizarre reason. Lawyers spend their whole professional life in that world of nonsense and procedures. Politicians who are basically the landfill of humanity spend all day citing their titles to each other. "The news" apes that behavior to anybody who cares to listen to their blah blah. Hospitals are another example. The employees wear color coded garments and different outfits that denote their status and rank. The police are a paramilitary organization with ranks and hats. Priests in the Catholic church wear a uniform. When they "perform" a mass they wear a fancy pants version of it. It goes on and on. In fact, almost every aspect of human life is enmeshed in some official structure in the current day world, especially if you live in a city. People believe, for example, professional care is required to die, even.

In the fantasy genre, the characters typically exist in a frontier type world; if officialdom exists in the story, it's typically entirely corrupt. For example, the soldiers guarding some castle or outpost are typically expendable cannon fodder. In movies that's signaled partially by their uniforms which generally contrast with the main character's outfits. The main villain guy might wear some elaborate outfit, sit on a throne, etc...

It's maybe not such a surprise the northern europeans "remember" their heritage via the fantasy genre, especially if it's encoded in their DNA, even after 1000+ years of romanization and absolutism of the catholic church. Romanization basically ends where the pavement does, which is also quite a fascinating pattern to think about.

More of The Fantasy Genre

 

There's a band named Heilung who according to the wikipedia

...describe their music as "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe". Their music is usually about Germanic deities, the Jǫtnar, and valkyries. "Heilung" is a German noun meaning "healing"

Maybe there's a core set of feelings and ideas associated with genetics that the fantasy genre expresses. Perhaps that used to be the religion of the northern europeans.

Metal Popularity and Hunter Gatherer DNA

This is a follow up to the "what is the fantasy genre" post.

It's pretty common for metal bands to borrow or embody tropes from the fantasy genre. The band "Castle Rat" is a case in point.

If you look at a map of "hunter gatherer" DNA in western europe and a map of metal band popularity they seem to overlap well.

Metal Bands per Million People by Country

WHG Admixture Map

The different color schemes in the maps make the correlation hard to see clearly, but it seems pretty good. There are some outliers, like Greece has a really high number of metal bands per capita compared to the WHG admixture, but the overall scheme lines up.

A Problem with a Life Based on Utilitarianism

The thing I really wanted to get to in the previous post is many of the activities people engage in out of apparent "utility" are really cult rituals: high school band or football are two great examples. The average family when I was in school thought those activities were valuable and heavily censured many non-sanctioned activities which were only for weirdos, like a kid who might continue playing dungeons and dragons into their senior year in high school, or who played with matchbox cars or whatever age inappropriate thing would be seen as a total freak or "loser", which was the ultimate bogeyman when I was a kid.

It turned out that "band" was significantly more useful than football in my high school than any of the organized sports. A weirdly high number of kids in my band program went on to be professional musicians in some capacity. Some became successful professional musicians. Others went on to be music educators. AFAIK, none of the people who played football went onto be a professional athlete of any kind and those who went onto earn high incomes in their adult life were in professions that had nothing to do with organized sports and are lawyers or dentists or whatever, which is really the norm for the "successful" band people too. Thankfully, I don't think any of the kids in our school suffered CTE or other chronic injuries from football, but that does happen of course. Some kids did get their knees wrecked and a few were chronic 'roid abusers, but I don't think they continued that after high school, but even a few years of heavy steroid use can cause long term physical damage to key organs and tissue.

I think the typical lesson an adult would draw, in retrospect, from their time in various organized activities like sports or band or school plays would be: "I learned to train and prepare and get better at something." That is, even though what they did was boring, maybe high pressure, or even painful and physically demanding, they were able to plow through and maybe even win, or perform perfectly and get applause or whatever. 

A kid could learn the same lessons, maybe in a significantly better way, from self directed ad hoc activities and games. I can cite several examples of kids, including myself, who became proficient at a hobby well outside the official activities of a school. For example, one of my good friends in high school went onto be a professional race car driver for a few seasons and ended up making car racing his vocation. I raced bicycles through college and into my adult life and always did that in a self-directed trial and error way and managed to at least win some races over my amateur career. I even helped organize a handful of amateur races over the years through the early 2000s. The people I know who do self-directed endurance sports, like running, triathlon, road bike racing, or similar sports are, as adults, even adults in their 70s, significantly healthier than their peers. I know a guy who in his early 70s completed a grueling gravel bike race with several thousand feet of elevation gain for example. 

In retrospect, the claims of utility made by the "organized" sports or activities in high school, that is, it would eventually "pay off" while the self-directed ad hoc activities were seen as second or third tier by comparison were severely overstated, at least for me and the people I grew up with.

Serious LARPs

When I was in middle school and high school my friends and I played lots of different kinds of games. For some years, we played AD&D almost every weekend. We also played different board strategy games like Conquest of the Empire. We also organized paintball tournaments, which got quite popular so there were dozens of kids running around in the woods. All that stuff was very fun but those things also had the tendency to fizzle out for reasons that were mysterious at the time, and even with 40+ years of hindsight, I'm not sure why they fell apart.

By contrast, the "official" activities like organized team sports or various music or performance oriented activities like band or plays, happened year after year and consumed probably hundreds of hours of mine and my friends lives per year. The ad hoc play activities which were generally much more "fun" competed for just a few hours of time per month maybe.

I was in several high school band activities and was good at playing so eventually I had a scholarship in college for it, but I was never that interested in it, and never contemplated it as a vocation. I knew all along I'd stop playing once I was free from school. I sold my sax the same day I graduated from college. I probably played two times in the subsequent decades.

High school band is a weird ritualistic activity. Most kids who are really into music are interested in pop music, rock and roll and other genres which are mainly guitar based and all about getting the attention of the fans. However, when I was in school, there were never guitar parts in band, nor any opportunity to learn or play guitar in school. At least 50%, probably more like 75% of the kids in the band were not even interested in music as a hobby or as an important element of their life. They were in band because their parents thought they should do something like that because colleges wanted kids to be in extra-curricular activities.

In retrospect, it's obvious that organized high school sports were a version of the same thing, but with some game involved. In our school, football was the big sport, and it was even more pointless and ritualistic from the point of view of life prep than even band was. Some of the high school football kids suffered life changing injuries like completely blowing out their knee, or took steroids to be on the team and got nothing out of it beyond high school.

As far as I know, none of the kids in my graduating class went on to play division 1 college football and nobody in the history of my high school ever played professional football. Just a handful of my classmates that played high school football went on to play football in college for small liberal arts schools where the sports programs were de-emphasized to the point it was more of a liability or an opportunity cost to play.

In spite of that, in the years since I graduated high school, the community plowed a huge amount of resources into the high school football team, literally millions of dollars to build a fancy new stadium, but the program continues in the same mode as the late 1980s in terms of not creating NFL players or Division 1 quarterbacks, etc...

Anyway, this is just another investigation into what people consider "serious" versus "play". All the official high school sanctioned activities like football or band were in the "serious" category versus our paintball games, however, as discussed above they're all basically the same kind of thing, basically LARPing.

What is The "Fantasy" Genre?

I recently watched a few videos by the band "Castle Rat".

The lead singer is a pretty woman in her prime, and wears a skimpy outfit, but apart from the side boob and butt cheeks in the videos, the compelling thing about them is nostalgia for 1970s/1980s Sci-Fi and Fantasy media from that era. It really takes me back. It's like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. I can smell the used book store scent in my mind.

I'm not sure how that aesthetic continued on to the present day so the artistic style of a band made up of people born maybe in the late 1990s or early 2000s would be steeped in it. I stopped paying as much attention to the fantasy genre by the time I was a junior in high school and was learning to drive. 

One of my good school friends and I are still in touch regularly and both were into the sword and sorcery stuff in the middle school years and occasionally reminisce about it. I was really steeped in that realm of concepts for a few years from maybe from around 1982 until 1986 or so. We played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back then, and it was sort of part of the "job" to read and steep in the lore of the overall genre.

The sword and sorcery fantasy realm is another instance of a very detailed "shared hallucination" as is evidenced by the Castle Rat videos which draw on the shared visual vocabulary of that genre. My friends and I sort of lived in that fantasy realm and visited the "real world" of school and the like from the age of about 12-14 maybe 15 at the latest. We also had a "real world" version of the fantasy realm, like exploring caves and cliffs in our neighborhoods in Munson or having a campfire at the end of the day of exploring and hanging out.

All that stuff was pretty fun and interesting. I'd say, in general, "real life" failed to measure up. This is a really common scenario, by the way. Most people I know seem to vastly prefer their LARPs and hobbies to their jobs and the day to day grind of life.

The fantasy genre is really ancient, of course, it goes back to the oldest known recorded story: The Epic of Gilgamesh so it seems likely people had a similar fantasy versus the drudgery of normal life split in their minds. Anyway, it's interesting to ponder what people are "really doing" with such a pastime. The woman in the Castle Rat videos is acting out concepts that people have in their heads for thousands of years, like walking around in the woods with a sword or bow and arrow drawn and ready to fight some mysterious foes.

A lot of hobbies that aren't really obviously related to something like the fantasy genre exist in a similar realm of mind, like Mountain Biking or Road Biking are that for me. An MTB ride is a little adventure excursion and battle against various forces and trying to rack up experience points, basically.

Hyper Frenetic Tech Industry

Bicycles are my go to example for how new technology actually, really "wins" and becomes part of the civilization toolkit. There's an innovation process and a winnowing process constantly at work, so over time "truth" is revealed and the stuff that's no good ends up in the trash can of bike history.

For example, there's a constant parade of "bottom bracket" designs. (The bottom bracket is the part that holds the cranks in a bike frame.) They all appear to "work" initially, but then suffer from real world problems, like they creak too much, or are too hard to install or remove, or require tight tolerances during manufacturing, etc... These problems don't show up in an engineering lab and are only revealed through use.

By contrast, the tech industry has no winnowing process now. New stuff comes out at such a frenetic pace that it's not really possible to even evaluate in depth. At my job, I'm currently thinking through an approach for a new gizmo. The approaches of like 5-10 years ago are hopelessly obsolete junk. There's myriad new stuff that's better. However, by the time I might prototype and propose a scheme, it'll already be old and maybe surpassed.

This is a novel scenario in my tech career. In the early 2000s, the shelf life of approaches to product designs might last 5 years or more. Now it's like 6 months at most. The things that are just a few years old but already obsolete can have a Weekend at Bernie's zombie existence and endless unwilling minions that maintain and operate them.

This is an unnatural state of affairs because there's endless money for tech projects but of course there's limited energy, natural resources, and human time and interest. Everything in the natural world is cyclical, and the cycles are hard wired into people's minds and bodies.

Elon Musk is the public persona associated with this scenario. The Elon character always proposes wacky tech plans and gets endless investment. It's not clear if the stuff he's financed is really viable long term, like SpaceX or Starlink, etc... Several companies he owned/promoted failed, but apparently it doesn't matter. Some ideas he promotes are retarded, like space AI data centers, but people pretend like its a good idea because "it might work" and be the "next big thing".

The frenetic behavior associated with the tech industry is like aversion to opportunity cost or commitment of resources, but actually is an opportunity cost itself. As everyone chases the next big thing, they leave the previous projects partially finished. There's an accumulation of losses and debts in financial terms which manifests as severe loss of purchasing power for the average joe and jane's dollar.

Mega-distortions of History

When I was in middle school I had a couple of books called "The Penguin Atlas of World History". The books were printed on an unusual, fairly dense paper, and were kind of small but heavy for their dimensions. Unfortunately, they were also bound in a kind of slipshod fashion and eventually they fell apart because I read them frequently. They basically told a story of "the world of men" in maps. I was always particularly fascinated with the so called "age of migration" in the early medieval world when european people were moving around because it was presented as a sort of "beginning" point of europe, therefore of my ancestors.

However, even when I was 12 or so, that didn't make any sense for very basic reasons. It was an entirely arbitrary "beginning" because of course those people who migrated to europe came from somewhere else and in fact europeans had been living in that region for tens of thousands of years prior, so the narrative was nonsensical. I read and re-read the sparse text of that book to try to understand what I was missing, but never found it.

The reason I didn't find it was the info in the book was presented out-of-context because the authors of that book were Germans and they were presenting "the official narrative" they learned in school which conflated "the beginning" of europe with its christianization. For example former President of France Charles deGaulle said:

"For me, the history of France begins with Clovis, elected as king of France by the tribe of the Franks, who gave their name to France. Before Clovis, we have Gallo-Roman and Gaulish prehistory. The decisive element, for me, is that Clovis was the first king to have been baptized a Christian. My country is a Christian country and I reckon the history of France beginning with the accession of a Christian king who bore the name of the Franks."

There's a specific mega-distortion in histories that for whatever reason I tuned into at the age of 12 or so. Historical narratives are presented as a necessary sequence of events with rational causes and effects rather than entirely contingent and arbitrary outcomes. The "official" narratives are carefully crafted lies that are trademarked by the ruling class and inculcated into the population via schools in the present day. A "good student" is just a parrot. Even in a nominally "free" society while an individual can say or write almost anything they want, only the ruling class opinions, that is, the official story is set on blast.

When I was looking at those maps of medieval europe as a 12 year old kid, I was trying to figure out why the europeans abandoned their prior religion and became "christians". No such explanation is in that book because it's understood as a necessary "watershed" moment. Over the subsequent decades of my life, I tried many times to research the subject, but no authors presented it in a manner that makes sense to me, that is, it was an entirely contingent thing and the current timeline is really a series of arbitrary outcomes.

One obvious example of that in the historical record is the early version of christianity in Europe was so called "Arian" christianity, but that was replaced with a different trademarked version of christianity--catholic christianity. It seems pretty likely the catholics murdered the guy who had the trademark on Arian christianity. To this day catholics recite the "nicene creed" which commemorates how the "church fathers" settled the beefs they had 1700 years ago with poison.

Another more recent version of this historical distortion is found in the history of the settlement of Ohio. In retrospect, the outcome was always "up in the air" and often times events were farcical, such as the French claims on "ownership" of the New World which turned into British Claims, then American Claims. Each claim was based on a prior fraud, and the ostensibly "competing" governments colluded to bolster their legitimacy. Of course, this lesson can't be taught in a school even though it's the most important lesson of that era.

In other words, the claim of History as a subject is: things came to be as they must, that is, they were pre-ordained and the current order of the world is "just" because it won. This is how the "christianization" narrative is presented in many books, even by secular scholars. I recall reading a book that presented christianity "winning" out in darwinian fashion over the prior religion. Some authors make bizarre claims that became really widespread like christianity "created" the concept of being an individual that is the "content" of the christian religion won out over the content in the germanic religions because it was intrinsically better.

That's not what happened at all. Christianity's the ultimate example of something that's entirely contingent and arbitrary. For example, the "core" of christianity is actually Greek philosophy, but because it started off as a jewish cult it's associated with the bible which some modern religious christians still regard as a historical narrative rather than a collection of Mediterranean world myths. Both the jews and the greeks had been absorbed into the roman empire and as rome collapsed as an organized political/military entity its religious institutions morphed into the "Roman Catholic" church.

As with the "settlement of Ohio" narrative, because all the parties involved were weak AF, the series of events that followed, like the "baptism of Clovis I" was all pretty arbitrary and could have turned out any number of ways. Two weak players, Clovis and the early catholic church partnered up to bolster each other, but any number of other gangsters of that era could have buddied up and formed a winning combo. The search for an answer "why they won" as in, it was a necessary outcome, is an ex post facto distortion. It really "just happened to work out".

A very weird modern wrinkle on this "necessary cause and effect" narrative is the variations introduced by women's studies or black people studies or native american studies. That is the "official ruling class narratives" are now ammended with mentions of a woman, or a black, or whatever, but the overall theme remains the same. For example, one uncomfortable fact of French settlement of the new world is the Indians bartered their women's beavers to the French like they bartered their beaver pelts and in fact, they did it in gratuitous fashion. Basically the women would put on a strip-club type show and offer up their asses since they didn't share a language. The leadership of the Indians basically pimped out their hoes for material gain. The narrative has to be altered to make this a woman-power move.

The core of all this bullshit is to make it seem like the world is as it must be, which is of course what the ruling class people want everyone to believe. The reality is its entirely contingent and nobody can really make a claim on "legitimacy". It just doesn't exist.

Perpetual Psychosis

There is a plaque in Fairport Harbor that commemorates the French explorer La Salle's trip through the area in the 1600s. 

Nations like France would base their claims of ownership of vast territories on some French dude setting eyes on it first. That was the "Doctrine of Discovery". The dude would often perform a ceremony of some kind as well, like erecting a cross or installing a lead plaque, or some other such thing. They would also make these claims to the Indians in various ceremonies, presumably in French, but I don't know that for sure.

At the time, and definitely in retrospect, such claims were absurd yet grown ass men who were officials of a government earnestly made those claims after much trouble and expense and years of their lives. Those claims were joined with the construction of forts, which were basically part of the beaver pelt trade network the French built. Other nations, like the British, would sometimes dismiss those claims as nonsense, and sometimes would acknowledge them as the basis of treaties for transfer of "ownership" of a region. The Americans, also would acknowledge these claims, for example, in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the government paid Napoleon millions of dollars for land the French couldn't really defend anymore when they could have just stated the original claim was null and void because it was nonsense.

Another element of these claims was the non-Christian people had no legitimate claims to anything, even their own personal sovereignty. This was a legalism pronounced by the Catholic church very early on in the age of spanish and portuguese imperialism, which presumably continued on during the french empire's expansion into the fur trade. This claim was absurd from the start, but even moreso after the reformation, which called bullshit on the vatican's copyright on christianity.

Anyway, this all seems nuts to a modern person who might, instead, at least prefer the Dutch/Jew empire approach to "buying" land from Indians with a box of beads, a couple of guns and some booze, oh and also a big piece of paper with some legalisms, aka a contract even if they recognize that's also nonsense. That's the approach the American government eventually adopted as well, which became its policy via Henry Knox during the very early days of the US.

What that generally meant was wealthy cronies involved in the land deals could cash in on bulk land sales to the masses of european settlers when they moved into an area like Ohio or Indiana or Illinois and in fact they, that is the mass of middle class people, truly established sovereignty over an area and implemented "the system".

Another more practical and pragmatic "doctrine" for establishing government claims of ownership to Indian land was the "well, they aren't doing anything with it" claim. That is, since land wasn't surveyed, cleared, cultivated and was in a wild state, nobody owned it, which of course was most of the land in the US since the Indian's economic system and pattern of land use was totally different than the europeans' model. Obviously the use patterns were incompatible which eventually caused much destruction of the Indian population and wildlife in the US.

Let's take a step back to those French "explorers" of the 17th century and their state of mind to make nonsensical claims on behalf of a "king". It's psychotic, meaning, totally divorced from reality, yet it's a psychosis they managed to impose on, at the time, untold thousands of people. The "Sixty Years War" battle for the Old Northwest was really a battle of insane people over whose psychotic episode would be adopted by the masses.

COVID was a great current day example of that. 80% of people around the world adopted the insane, manufactured, scripted perspective sold by a piece of shit human like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci. I saw friends and family eat that lie up and become a little violent authoritarian creep who wanted to inject people with COVID vaccines by force, even though so many people had that cold before the magic juice was ready. I had out of body experiences during discussions with people about the absurdity of Billy Gates involvement in the farce. I knew Bill was a turd even before the depth of his association with Epstein's cult/mafia were revealed. For some reason average Joe people thought Bill Gates was a credible spokesman for COVAIDs.

I eventually realized it's pointless hoping normie people will "wake up". They never will. They're so accustomed to being psychotic that they'll immediately transfer to the next imaginary thing like an election and a battle between two dirtbag politicians/lawyers and won't even notice nothing changes when the new guys come into office.

COVID followed the Dutch/Jew Empire pattern, by the way, which is why it's such a bummer that the masses are insane retards. That is, the evil wizards/scammers create an imaginary system that the mass of people actually cement into "reality" the same way a box of beads and a piece of paper could create a new State.

Long term patterns

This weekend, our well pump died. I would have preferred to just call somebody and have them replace it, but an emergency plumber or well service would cost several thousand dollars for what's actually a pretty simple DIY repair, so I resigned myself to spending a good portion of Saturday replacing it. It was actually simple since the original installers did a good job, but was still time consuming because there are several steps involved and it all needs to be done carefully for obvious reasons. I'll buy a backup pump and a couple of nice-to-have well pump removal tools in case I have to do it again in the future.

I believe most of the households in my neighborhood have the skills and tools to fix their own stuff like that as well. At least half the households have at least a farm tractor. A number of them have metal working equipment. Some have heavy equipment like an excavator. People rent lifts and take down their own trees, etc... People don't do their own work because they're poor; some of the people have or had a fancy job, like a tech executive or an executive at a tool company or whatever. I think they're a bunch of extremely competent people.

That pattern likely goes back several generations. It does in my family. As I got into my 40s, I realized I was replicating the pattern my grandfather and great grandfather followed by setting up a "hobby farm" mainly because I don't really trust "the system". The "hobby farm" and the competent family is a pretty old scenario. It is and was the typical scenario in the Northern US, and also in several European countries. In the north of the US, the typical scenario for hundreds of years since Europeans settled the continent was  a smallish "subsistence farm" which would provide some portion of necessities, maybe an income, plus a clever person might be able to do some type of value added labor as a small business, or maybe go work for others. The Amish people who live in my area follow this same pattern today.

In the southern US states, though, the plantation system created an aristocratic slave economy. The southern US could grow "cash crops" that were easily monetized by exporting them to Europe. Most of those crops were bulk commodities, like cotton, tobacco, sugar, or whatever, so the money-making model that "worked" was slave labor + giant plantation with minimal overhead. That enabled bankers and other "investors" in Europe to make money with their money by financing such operations too.

I was curious if this scenario persists today, and indeed, it does, though the regional differences get less stark as the generations go by. One bit of evidence for this pattern is the patents per capita by state in the US. There's an obvious split to this day. Basically the subsistence farmers turned into factory workers, engineers, etc... through the industrial revolution. The slave economy of the south, though formally destroyed almost 200 years ago, still affects the pattern of activity and investment in those states many generations later.

Note that "subsistence farming" like the northerners did 200 years ago was replaced with "subsistence factory work", that is a j-o-b, just over broke.

Another pattern that goes way back in the northern US is there is an often uneasy relationship between the wealthy "merchant class" and the northern farmer types who choose to help those people out with their businesses and schemes, versus slaves who were compelled into work. The US federal government serves as a proxy for the northern merchant interests and schemes.

It's interesting the southern plantation class was super influential early on in the US; many of the so called founders of the US were Virginia planters. The plantation owners' influence waned quickly after the very early days of the United States. Really it seems like the "Articles of Confederation" was the southern oriented organizing document of the US, then the US Constitution was the norther oriented one, even though the institution of slavery persisted for a while. 

The "MAGA" movement is a great example of the uneasy relationship between the merchant class people, like Trump and his cronies, and the average dude. The merchant class wanted to reduce labor costs in the US and establish a new type of slavery by importing workers from overseas, or shipping jobs overseas. That undercut wages for the past 50 years. Periodically the merchants have to give the northern farmer types "a new deal". Trump's administration seems like a fraudulent new deal scenario. Some lip service is given to the concerns of the citizenry while the overall screw job of the merchant class continues and even significantly accelerated under Trump.

In the early US there was a conflict between northern subsistence farmer populations and the plantation owner/slave society. Slavery was ostensibly kept out of the "north" for moral reasons, but it was really about the subsistence farmers' ability to make a living. The idea that people who were wiping out the Indians were "moral" about blacks is pretty stupid.

Anyway, it's interesting these patterns last such a long time.