Travelogue day 10: Victoria Falls

Getting to Victoria Falls was quite the adventure.  From there we were going on a Safari in the Okavango delta, so we had to reconfigure from cruise-ship mode to safari mode, i.e. a mode where we had a lot of space to put stuff and we didn't have to repack every day to a mode where everything we needed for two weeks had to fit inside a single small duffel bag that would fit in a small plane.  Arrangements had been made to store our excess luggage, but there was some confusion over the logistics.  To make things worse, one of our bags got damaged during the transition and the handle wouldn't retract.  Fortunately it turns out that airlines deal with this sort of thing all the time, and so it all got sorted out, but not before I had accumulated about a year's worth of stress in two hours.

When we finally made it to Vic Falls it took forever to get through immigration.  You have to buy a visa at the airport, and there was a Japanese family who had cut into line ahead of us that had some sort of problem that took forever to resolve.  There were half a dozen immigration agents behind the counter, but it apparently never occurred to any of them to shunt this family off to the side so that the rest of the people in line could be processed.  I learned that there's a local expression for such situations: TIA: This Is Africa.

Victoria Falls is both the world's largest waterfall and the name of the adjacent town in Zimbabwe.  The falls themselves mark the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and the town on the Zambian side is called Livingstone, after the British explorer who discovered the falls in the mid-1800s.  In doing the research for this entry, I found this interesting passage on the Wikipedia page for David Livingstone:

The expedition lasted from March 1858 until the middle of 1864. Expedition members recorded that Livingstone was an inept leader incapable of managing a large-scale project. He was also said to be secretive, self-righteous, and moody, and could not tolerate criticism, all of which severely strained the expedition and which led to his physician John Kirk writing in 1862, "I can come to no other conclusion than that Dr. Livingstone is out of his mind and a most unsafe leader".

We stayed at the Victoria Falls Hotel.  It dates back to 1904, but none of the original construction survives, and the current physical plant only goes back to the 1980s.  But they've done a nice job of keeping the old-school feel.

Vic Falls is in the middle of nowhere, and there is a lot of wildlife that freely roams all over the town including the hotel grounds. You almost don't have to go on a safari after staying here.









That's a baboon, a banded mongoose, a warthog, and a vervet monkey who has gotten into the trash and made a horrible mess.

We also went on a lion walk, where you hang out with lions who (they said) were being raised in captivity for eventual release into the wild.  They had been acclimated to humans, but were allowed to hunt so they would not become fully domesticated.



My caption for that shot is: "Mmmm.... tourists!"

We found out after the fact that these programs are very controversial, and their record of actually releasing lions back into the wild is not good.  Indeed, it is not even clear that this sort of program is necessary at all.  One knowledgable source told us after we got home:

The problem is that the operators are completely misleading travelers (and even their own staff) about the purpose of their operation, and there is no conservation benefit at all from what they are doing. There is no need for captive bred lions anywhere in Africa – the problem is a lack of habitat, not a lack of lions (lions are prolific breeders and will very quickly establish themselves naturally in an area where they can survive). Every suitable piece of habitat on the continent is already occupied by lions, and none of these organizations involved with captive bred lions has any record of ever having relocated a lion to a National Park or other conservation area.

Still, I would like to think that programs like these have enough value in raising awareness to justify their continued existence.  The experience of getting this close to these animals was very profound.  We were also able to get some awesome close-up photos that we could not have taken any other way:

They really are magnificent creatures.

The falls themselves were spectacular, notwithstanding that it was the end of the dry season and the flow was low (by local standards).

Normally the falls extend across the entire face of that cliff, and well beyond on the right hand side.  It's impossible to get the entire waterfall in one frame from the ground.  You have to get into the air, so we did:

On the right hand side of that shot you can see the famous bridge built by Cecil Rhodes (of Rhodes scholar fame) that connects Zimbabwe and Zambia.

I walked across the bridge to get my passport stamped (which was the only use I got out of the multi-entry visa we'd waited in line for at the airport).  It's an interesting though not particularly pretty walk through a territorial no-man's-land surrounded on all sides by barbed wire fencing and inhabited mainly by truckers and the odd street vendor.  One of the most common trinkets on offer is old Zimbabwean banknotes.  Hyperinflation got so bad in the last decade that they printed ridiculous denominations, like 100 trillion dollars, but the largest one I was able to find was a mere 20 billion.  Today, the official currency of Zimbabwe is the U.S. dollar, which makes it very convenient for tourists.  One of the biggest problems traveling through Africa is that you want to buy things from people, but they don't want the local currency (because it's worthless), and they can't (or won't) make change in dollars.  So if you run out of small bills you can end up wedged.  That's less of a problem in Zimbabwe, though now there's talk of them adopting the Yuan as well.

Of course there were the usual not-in-kansas any more moments.  I thought this one was particularly cute:

Nothing like a glass of freshly squizzed orange juice after a hard day of touring.

My simplified response to Paul Graham's simplified essay

Paul Graham published a simplified version of his essay on income inequality.  Here's my simplified response:

It is true that many socially worthwhile activities (like developing technology, and starting startups) produce income and wealth disparities.  And a certain amount of income and wealth disparity is not a bad thing.  In fact, having no income and wealth disparity is a bad thing.  We tried it.  It didn't work.  No reasonable person disputes this.

However, too much income and wealth disparity is also not a good thing.  I hope I don't have to convince you that if all of the wealth in a society is controlled by a single family or individual, that's not good.  The optimal point lies somewhere in between those two extremes.

Today, the top 1% control fully half of the planet's wealth.  That is awfully close to the second extreme.  It's very unlikely that this is where the happy medium lies.

It's particularly worrisome because, as income and wealth disparity increases, there is a positive-feedback effect that tends to drive it further and further towards the second extreme: the extremely wealthy use their disposable income to buy political influence, which they then use to get laws passed that favor them at the expense of others (e.g. through regressive taxation).  This lets the already-wealthy accumulate more wealth not by creating more value, but by collecting economic rents.  In the long run this leads to oligarchy and possibly even economic and societal collapse.  We are nowhere near there, but by the time it becomes apparent that this is happening it will almost certainly be too late to do anything about it.  The time to act is now, before it becomes an even more serious problem.

(Paul Graham, like nearly everyone in today's politics, fails to appreciate the near-universal validity, at least when it comes to social and economic policy, of Ron's First Law: All extreme positions are wrong.  :-)

The pernicious myth of individual productivity

This is a followup to yesterday's post about income inequality, possibly the first of many.  This is a complicated issue, and it's very hard to reduce it to a pithy slogan.  Even "income inequality" is a problematic catch phrase because it leaves out at least half of the real problem (political corruption).  And, as an unknown commenter pointed out, it's entirely plausible that corruption isn't really a problem either, at least not by itself.  Corruption may be survivable if wealth is more evenly distributed because then everyone has equal opportunity to buy politicians, and the net result is still something approximating a representative democracy.

It's complicated.  But a good place to start is to dispel the persistent and pernicious myth that a free market does a good job at objectively measuring individual productivity.  The reason this myth is pernicious is that people conclude that it is good policy to let the market distribute wealth because it's good to reward productivity.  I do not dispute that it is good to reward productivity (of course it is!)  What I dispute is that the market reliably measures productivity.  Hence, letting the market distribute wealth does not necessarily reward productivity.  It can (and often does) reward productivity, but it can reward a lot of other things as well (like luck, or gaming the system), and so we have to be more careful when making policy than simply trusting the market.

Take this example from Paul Graham in a footnote to one of his essays:

[I]t is certainly not impossible for a CEO to make 200x as much difference to a company's revenues as the average employee. Look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple when he came back as CEO. It would have been a good deal for the board to give him 95% of the company. Apple's market cap the day Steve came back in July 1997 was 1.73 billion. 5% of Apple now (January 2016) would be worth about 30 billion. And it would not be if Steve hadn't come back; Apple probably wouldn't even exist anymore.

This reasoning is flawed.  Just because the value of Apple + Steve Jobs is 200x the value of Apple - Steve Jobs, it does not follow that Steve's value is 95% of Apple + Steve.  Why?  Because companies are not linear systems.  In fact, it is trivial to debunk this: just take away the rest of Apple.  By PG's theory, the value of the result (i.e. Steve Jobs working alone) should be 95% of Steve + the rest of Apple.  That's obviously not the case.  Steve was only able to do what he did because the rest of Apple existed.  (But, one might argue, the rest of Apple existed because of Steve!  No, it didn't.  Steve did not build Apple single-handedly.  When Steve built a company single-handedly, the result was not Apple, it was NeXT.)

Here's an analogy: the value of a car lies in its ability to transport you from place to place.  If you, say, remove the spark plugs, the car becomes useless.  If we stipulate that a working car is worth 20 times as much as a non-working car, then by PG's reasoning it would follow that the spark plugs ought to be worth 95% of the value of the car.

Another counter-argument might be that yes, Steve may have just been a spark plug, but he was unique.  Spark plugs are cheap because they are plentiful, but if they were scarce then they would be worth more.

But how do we really know that Steve was unique?  It's possible that there are hundreds — maybe thousands, maybe more — people out there who are capable of doing what Steve did, but we don't know about it simply because Apple never ran those experiments.

In fact, it is extremely unlikely that Steve was actually unique, in the sense that he was the only human being with the innate ability and drive to do what he did.  Why?  Because Steve was born in San Francisco in 1955, which was the exact right place and time to be born to come of age during the semiconductor revolution that made Apple possible.  It was the exact right place and time to be born that let him meet Woz, without whom Apple probably would not have happened.  The odds that the one human being in all history capable of doing these things just happened to be born under these auspicious circumstances are very, very low.

Much more likely is that there are lots of potential Steve Jobs's out there, but they never get the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities because their life circumstances don't allow it.  Maybe they have to work to pay off student loans.  Maybe they are refugees (Steve's biological father was Syrian).  Maybe the reason that Steve Jobs seems like a scarce resource is simply because the world hasn't bothered to try to cultivate more people like him.

Let me be clear: I am not making the Marxist argument that everyone is equal.  Steve was clearly exceptionally talented and motivated.  But what made Apple possible was not just Steve's exceptional talent and motivation, but a whole host of other circumstances and people that happened to put him (and them!) at the right place at the right time.  And if any one of those circumstances had been different, the outcome for Steve and Apple could have been very different.  Steve had a lot of help from people like Woz and Jony Ive.  (But, I hear you saying, Steve hired those people!  Sure, but if you're going to give Steve credit for that, why not give the Apple board credit for hiring Steve?)

My pont here is just this: simply because Apple + Steve was worth 20x what Apple - Steve was worth, it does not follow that paying 95% of Apple + Steve for Steve is a good deal for anyone but Steve.

So we can't measure individual productivity simply by looking at the value of an organization with and without them.  It's a non-linear system.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

So how can we measure individual productivity for creative endeavors like running companies?  It's really hard.  It may actually be impossible.  Certainly we don't have any way to do it today.  The market is clearly not efficient in this regard.  We have CEOs getting paid tens of millions of dollars for running companies into the ground.  (Attention, boards of directors: I will bankrupt your company for half of whatever you're paying your current CEO!)

This is only a tiny sliver of the real problem, but it's an important one because so many people base their reasoning on the false assumption that a free market is a reliable measure of productivity, and that rich people are rich because they are so much more productive than non-rich people.  No.  Rich people are rich because they happened to find themselves in a confluence of many, many circumstances that ended up with their becoming rich.  One of those many circumstances may have been (usually is, but often isn't) that they worked hard and took risks.  But working hard and taking risks is no guarantee of success (that's why it's called "risk").

Note that this observation says absolutely nothing about policy or quality metrics.  That will have to wait for another installment.  Like I said at the beginning, it's complicated.  But if we're going to deal with this situation rationally we have to start by being honest without ourselves about the ground truth.  And part of the ground truth is that there's a lot of noise in the system.  That's one of the things that makes it resistant to simple solutions.

Income inequality is both a problem and a symptom

Paul Graham today published two essays in which he challenges the idea that economic inequality is a problem.

Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Some worry this is a sign the country is broken. 

I'm interested in the topic because I am a manufacturer of economic inequality. I was one of the founders of a company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds its founders become rich. And while getting rich is not the only goal of most startup founders, few would do it if one couldn't. 

I've become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I've spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2400 founders YC has funded. I've also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them
detailed instructions showing how. 

So when I hear people saying that economic inequality is bad and should be eliminated, I feel rather like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters. But the thing that strikes me most about the conversations I overhear is how confused they are. They don't even seem clear whether they want to kill me or not.

As someone who believes that extreme income and wealth disparities are indeed bad let me be clear: no, Paul, I do not want to kill you, nor do I want to kill Y Combinator, though upon reflection I can see how someone could get that idea.

My first reaction on reading these essays was: he's attacking a straw man.  Surely everyone realizes that wealth inequality is merely a symptom, not the actual disease.  But then I went and took another look at some of the political rhetoric being bandied about and I realized that this is far from clear.  For example, here is what Bernie Sanders has to say about it:

The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.

The reality is that since the mid-1980s there has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the wealthiest people in this country. That is the Robin Hood principle in reverse. That is unacceptable and that has got to change.

Despite huge advancements in technology and productivity, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. The real median income of male workers is $783 less than it was 42 years ago; while the real median income of female workers is over $1,300 less than it was in 2007. That is unacceptable and that has got to change.

There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans.

If you stopped reading there you might be forgiven for assuming that Sanders thinks the solution to this problem is to simply re-distribute wealth from the rich to the poor.  And indeed, some of his policy proposals seem to reinforce this idea.  He wants to raise taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy ("Demand... that the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes..."), raise the minimum wage, and have the government pay for college tuition.

If you look more closely, though, the Right Answer is actually in there, but it's buried pretty deep inside the leftist rhetoric:

The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.

This is the problem.   It is not income or wealth disparity per se.  If the differences in income and wealth were entirely reflective of people's productivity and contributions to society there would be no problem.  But they aren't.  Instead what is happening is that the ultra-wealthy are using their disposable income to buy political influence, then using that influence to get laws passed that allow them to collect rents.  They then apply the proceeds of those rents to buy more political influence.  The result is a positive-feedback loop that concentrates power in the hands of a small minority and thus undermines both democracy and capitalism.

Graham doesn't buy this:

Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth, certainly. But a significant number do, and the Baumol Effect means all their peers get dragged along too.

The Baumol Effect, in case you didn't know, is the tendency of wage increases that come from increases in productivity to "spill over" into jobs where there have been no productivity increases.  In other words, it's trickle-down economics under a fancier name.  The problem with trickle-down economics is that wealth only trickles to a few places.  I can only wear so many clothes, drive so many cars, live in so many houses, hire so many house keepers.  Once I have everything I want, I'll stop spending money on stuff and start spending it on... well, if society is lucky I'll start investing it in startups.  If society is not so lucky, I'll start buying politicians.

Here's Graham's bottom line:

You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.

Graham is saying that you can't solve the "problem" of wealth inequality without suppressing or destroying the wealth-creating processes that led to the inequality in the first place.  And who would want to kill that golden goose?

But this is a false dichotomy.  It completely ignores the other cause of inequality, the fact that "Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth."

It is possible to address this problem without killing the golden goose.  How?  By rolling back some of the legislation that was put in place by undue political influence.  At the very least, we should strive for a non-regressive tax system, which is what we have now.  If we are to be the kind of nation that we like to think we aspire to be, we should also have enough social safety nets in place that people do not end up destitute through no fault of their own.  We can do all these things without destroying the incentive to innovate.

So why doesn't Graham recognize and advocate this?  Perhaps it's because two of his biggest golden geese — Uber [See correction below] and AirBnB — are actually relying on exactly the kind of political influence I'm calling out here in order to survive and prosper.  Both of these companies have business models that rely to a certain extent on doing end-runs around regulations that apply to their competitors.  It is no accident that both of these companies have quietly hired a small army of lobbyists.

So once again, let me be clear: I do not want to kill Y Combinator, nor do I want to kill Uber or AirBnB.  I am in fact a very happy Uber user.  They provide a terrific service.  They've raised the bar on taxi companies, which very much needed to be done.

On the other hand, I also want an effective, democratic government to provide infrastructure, protect people from extreme economic contingencies (like war and hurricanes), prevent people from profiting from economic externalities (like pollution) and provide oversight for well-regulated, free and transparent markets.  And that's not the direction we're heading.  We're heading towards political power being concentrated irreversibly in the hands of a small minority.  We're heading towards oligarchy.

And that is a problem.

[UPDATE:] Turns out Uber is not a YC company.  I could have sworn they were, but I was wrong.  I apologize for the error.  (But AirBnB is a YC company, so my main point still stands.)

Travelogue day 11: Walvis Bay, Namibia

Namibia is not nearly as poor as most of its West African neighbors, but it's still not rich (measured by GDP per capita).  It's right in the middle of the rankings, about the same as Egypt and Indonesia.  So I was expecting to find yet another typical third-world country, but I was very pleasantly surprised.  It is impossible, of course, to get the full measure of a country in a day, but Walvis Bay, at least, turned out to be surprisingly civilized.  There was some low-income housing on the outskirts of town, but no shanties, no vendors selling furniture by the side of the road, no animals in the street, no fleets of broken-down taxis, no one pulling carts by hand.  The town of Walvis Bay itself was virtually indistinguishable from parts of California.



It was at once a relief and a disappointment: western suburbia is comfortable, but it's kind of boring.

Nancy and I went on different excursions that day.  She got to see flamingos:



while I went out into the famous Namib desert, to an area aptly named the "Moon landscape":



It looks barren and god-forsaken (and it is) but there's actually a lot of interesting stuff going on here. There's some really cool geology:



There's some plant life too, if you look closely.  These lichens, for example, are normally black:



but when they get wet they turn green:



These lichens got wet because we tourists were pouring water on them from our bottles, but normally they get their water from coastal fog that blows in from the ocean about ten miles away.  In fact, when we arrived it was actually raining gently at the coast!

This plant is called a Welwitschia:



It's actually a tree (closely related to evergreens like pine and spruce), and this one is probably several hundred years old!  It is found only in the Namib desert.

Of course no self-respecting desert would be complete without sand dunes.  The dunes here are so big and persistent that they have names (or at least numbers).  This is dune #7:



Climbing up was not easy.  Walking was impossible without sinking in up to your ankles.  I tried taking my shoes off, but it was much too hot to walk barefoot so I just made my peace with the fact that my shoes were going to fill up with sand and slogged my way up to the top.



Up there, whenever the sand was disturbed it would flow down the side of the dune almost like water.

Even the art work in Namibia seemed like it was of higher quality than the rest of Western Africa.  Most of the art we've seen in Africa is wood carvings, but here in Namibia we found a lot of really beautiful and intricate stone sculptures:



There must be some poverty in Namibia somewhere, but they did a really good job of hiding it from us.

Travelogue, day 10: Luanda, Angola

Luanda, Angola is the worlds' most expensive city to live in, due mainly to the effects of oil money pouring in.  We were there on a Sunday, so everything was closed.  Hotels and churches were open, but nothing else.  No restaurants.  No shops.  Nothing.  There weren't even street vendors hustling us by the dock.  That was a first.

It was a little eerie.

Despite the shiny modern facade, the smell of urine permeated the 95-degree air.  Did I mention that everything was closed?  So no public restrooms.

Oh, the military museum, built in to an old Portugese fort, was open.



From there you could see the nice spiffy new city under construction on one side:



And this shanty town on the other:



You can't really see it from this picture, and I wasn't able to get any better shots because I never got on the ground down there, but there's a high wall surrounding the slum so you can't see it from the road.  Inside there are mountains of garbage.

Then, next door, so that the slum is literally in its shadow at certain times of the day, is this multi-hundred-million-dollar memorial to Angola's first president:

I don't think I've ever been offended by a building before, but this one did.  If you were going to design a building with the intent of giving the middle finger to a bunch of poor people you could hardly do better than this.  They have the money to build this monstrosity (and don't even get me started about the new Parliament building!  And the presidential palace!), but they can't clean up the trash next door.  Yes, all this is typical of African corruption, but the Angolans have taken the brazenness of it to a whole new level here.

As ever in Arica there were the usual WNIKAM (we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more) moments, like this guy slapping the water with his oar:





Never found out what that was all about.  Nancy suggested that maybe they were trying to stun some fish, but if that's the case it wasn't working very well.

There is apparently some stunning natural beauty in Angola, but unfortunately we didn't get to see any of it.

Travelogue day 9: São Tomé and Príncipe

I'm going to get lazy here and just quote Wikipedia:

São Tomé and Príncipe is a Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. It consists of two archipelagos around the two main islands: São Tomé and Príncipe, located about 140 kilometres (87 mi) apart and about 250 and 225 kilometres (155 and 140 mi), respectively, off the northwestern coast of Gabon.

The largest town, Sao Tome, sits almost walking distance from the equator (0.3 degrees north).  In other words, Sao Tome has all the makings of a tropical paradise.

Alas, Sao Tome is also one of of the poorest countries in the world, not in terms of GDP per capita (it ranks around 150 by that measure).  But with a total population of less than 200,000 people, its nominal GDP is one of the lowest in the world, about $338 million per year.  To put that number in perspective, if Bill Gates were to put his net worth in a savings account at 1% interest he would make more money than the total GDP of Sao Tome.

So while the place has some nice curb appeal...



...once you get on land it's a bit of a fixer-upper.







The market is one of the most depressing I have ever seen.  It was so bad that I couldn't even bring myself to take photos of the worst of it.  Here's my best shot:



You can't really tell from here, but just about the only product on offer is mangos and limes.  Some of the merchants sitting out on the sidewalk (and I do mean sitting on the sidewalk) had a total stock of a dozen limes or so.  Even the stray dogs were starving. We tried to find something to buy that we could feed them (because Nancy can't stand to see animals suffering) but the only protein of any sort that we could find was this fellow selling squid out on the street:



At least, we think he was selling them.  He was actually a couple of blocks away from the main market, and in the half hour or so that we were hanging out in this part of town we didn't see him make a single sale.  So maybe he was just waiting for a ride.  I have no idea.

Still, there were some hints of real ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, like the vehicle that this guy was using to get around:



And once you got out of town and into the rain forest it was quite lovely

This is an old coffee plantation



All in all though, by the time this day was over I was really starting reach the limits of my tolerance for seeing such abject poverty.

So what? They're Jewish!

One of these quotes is real.  Can you tell which one?

Adolf Hitler's spokesman, Joseph Goebbels, in an interview with the Völkischer Beobachter yesterday insisted that his candidate’s plan to bar all Jews from immigrating to the Germany is “really nothing new,” and even if it were, it wouldn’t matter because “So what? They’re Jewish!”

Donald Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, appeared on CNN’s “The Lead” yesterday to insist that her candidate’s plan to bar all Muslims from immigrating to the United States is “really nothing new,” and even if it were, it wouldn’t matter because “So what? They’re Muslim!”

The parallels between Trump's supporters and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in the early days are really starting to be quite disturbing.

Travelogue day 8: Lome, Togo

According to both the World Bank and the IMF, Togo is the 11th poorest country on Earth by GDP per capita.  That makes it the poorest country we have ever visited.  (We did once set foot in Mozambique, the seventh poorest country in the world: in 2008 we were on a safari in the Kruger national park in South Africa, driving along the fence that marks the border between South Africa and Mozambique.  Elephants had torn a big hole in the fence, so on a lark we walked through the hole.  But there was no one there to stamp our passports so I'm not sure that counts.)

Voodoo is a significant presence in Togoan culture.  51% of the population holds "indigenous beliefs."  This was reflected in the costumes worn by the welcoming committee:

Had a few more we're-not-in-kansas-any-more moments.  Here's a fellow walking down the middle of a major highway carrying a poster featuring anatomical drawings.



I never did find out what he was doing.

Here they are selling coffins by the side of the road:



I did not realize just how desperately poor Togo was while I was there (I'm ashamed to admit that I did not do my homework at the time).  I was just struck by how much more pushy the street merchants were than other places we've been (and that's saying something!)  I was just about ready to give up on the place and retreat back to the ship when something inside me said, no, you're giving up too soon.  So I went back out and immersed myself in the fray, and ended up meeting a gentleman who called himself Benjamin but whose real name is Kenake Kodjo.  I ended up buying a pair of figures carved out of bone from him, and he later emailed me this description of their significance:

(Click on the picture to enlarge it so you can read the text.)

But the most interesting part of the visit was seeing an actual voodoo ceremony.  There was some disagreement about just how touristified it was.  On the one hand, they waited until four busloads of tourists were all seated before starting.  On the other hand, they didn't really play to the audience, and some of what we were seeing looked pretty real.  Not real voodoo magic, of course, but real in the sense that this is what they really do, and it's not just a show that they put on for the tourists.

There was drumming and dancing, and after a while the men started to go into trances.



They seemed to really lose control over their bodies.  They had to be restrained, and a few of them were carried off "stage" by their compatriots.  The first time it happened I thought a fight had broken out.



After a while, they dug a hole in the ground in which they buried a bag of broken glass:



Some of the men used pieces of the broken glass to cut themselves.  Real blood was shed, which was one of the things that convinced me that we were seeing the real deal and not just a theatrical performance.



This particular tribe does this even when they aren't in voodoo trances.  They consider the resulting scars attractive.





After a while they dug the bag of broken glass up and presented it to the chief.  The glass had been magically transformed into coins.



That's the chief in the middle with his wife and son on either side of him.  He looked extraordinarily bored throughout.

BTW, I didn't actually realize that what we'd seen was supposed to be a magical transformation until after it was over.  There was no explanation given (another indication that it wasn't a performance).  It just happened.  They didn't do anything to draw our attention to it or to set it up as a proper magic trick.  And people were going into trances and turning into whirling dervishes the whole time they were doing the coin trick.  It was only after the fact that our guide explained what was going on.

Apparently, magic tricks of this sort figure prominently in Togoan voodoo ceremonies.  There was another group that saw a different ceremony where there were these little hut-like things that moved around, apparently under their own power.  Of course, there was a person inside "driving", but occasionally they would lift up the little "hut" to reveal a small animal (and no human) inside, so it was clearly intended to look like magic.  I don't have many regrets in life, but not having a chance to see that with my own eyes is probably going to be one of them.  (I found this video of what seems to be what the other group saw.  And here's a better one.  It's actually a pretty good trick.)

The interesting question to me, and which I never got a chance to find out (they ushered us away while the ceremony was still going on -- we were told it would go on for hours) is whether these things were intended to look like real magic, or if it really is just supposed to be theatre all of the participants know that they are tricks.  If it's the former, that raises an interesting question: who among the participants is in on the trick?  And how do they decide who to initiate into the circle of trust?

Maybe I'll email Benjamin and ask him.

Well, at least they've got rules

ISIS leaders have issued rules on the treatment of sex slaves:

Islamic State theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when "owners" of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females.

I've been staring at that passage for five minutes trying to come up with something to say about it, but I'm sorry, I've got nuthin'.

No, I take that back.  I do have something to say:

Ever since the end of WWII the Western world has recited the mantra, "Never again."  Well, here it is happening again.  If anything, ISIS is even more brutal than the Nazis were in the early days.

Neville Chamberlain must be smiling in his grave.