Near-term prospects for Egypt

Nile cruise ship security in action

As I mentioned in my previous post, we've just come back from a two week Nile cruise in Egypt.

From The Economist (reviewing "Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East", by David Kirkpatrick in the August 9th 2018 edition):

"The Brotherhood was Egypt’s biggest puzzle. “For a supposedly secret society, they were easy to spot,” writes Mr Kirkpatrick. Often middle-aged and middle-class, they kept their beards trimmed and wore chinos and button-down shirts. But, before the revolution, their intentions were difficult to discern. When Hassan al-Banna founded the group in 1928 he was fuzzy on whether it should be militant or peaceful, political or spiritual, democratic or authoritarian. Egypt’s dictators by turns persecuted, embraced and tolerated the Brotherhood. America, which lavishes military aid on Egypt, followed their lead.

Opponents of the Brotherhood warned foreign journalists that the group wanted to “Islamise” Egypt. But to Mr Kirkpatrick—and your reviewer, a former Cairo correspondent—the Brothers said all the right things. They advocated the separation of mosque and state, free expression and equality for women and non-Muslims. These views were more liberal than those of mainstream Egyptians. Moreover, to avoid a backlash, the group said during the uprising that it would not seek more than a third of parliamentary seats; later it said it would not field a presidential candidate in the polls following the revolution.

But when those elections came around, the Brotherhood contested most of the seats, winning nearly half and also the presidency. After his victory, Mr Morsi installed Brothers in powerful positions. Months later he issued a decree holding himself above judicial review and pushed through a constitution opposed by liberals. “We thought we were losing our country,” one young Egyptian told The Economist. Millions took to the streets in 2013 calling for Mr Morsi to go. Egypt’s so-called liberals saw those protests as a rerun of the 2011 revolution—another organic uprising; another chance for democracy, as they defined it.

They were nothing of the sort. Egypt’s liberals were not taking back the country—the army was. A slow-motion coup had been in the works since Mr Morsi was elected. Egypt’s generals did not even want to recognise his victory. Mubarak-era judges duly dissolved the parliament. The president’s own foreign minister, a non-Islamist, admitted to poisoning other governments against him, while the intelligence services worked covertly to bring the Brotherhood down. The United Arab Emirates, whose authoritarian rulers fear democracy, especially if it has an Islamic tint, funnelled millions of dollars to the supposedly grassroots opposition to Mr Morsi. Much of it went through Mr Sisi’s defence ministry.

The coup befuddled America. As Mr Morsi teetered, “Washington did not speak with a single, credible voice,” writes Mr Kirkpatrick. Barack Obama, then America’s president, opposed the takeover and leant on Mr Morsi to make concessions to save his skin. (Mr Morsi did invite the opposition for talks—they declined.) But many American officials seemed resigned to, or even encouraged, a military power-grab. Chuck Hagel, then secretary of defence, told Mr Sisi: “I don’t live in Cairo, you do. You do have to protect your security, protect your country.” John Kerry, then secretary of state, said later that the generals “were restoring democracy”.

American officials couldn’t get their facts right. James Mattis, then the commander of American forces in the region, blamed the Brotherhood alone for Egypt’s troubles. He later claimed that the constitution backed by Mr Morsi had been “rejected immediately by over 60% of the people”. In fact, about two-thirds of voters approved the charter, which is similar to the one Egypt has now. Mr Mattis and Michael Flynn, then head of the Defence Intelligence Agency, lumped the Brotherhood in with the jihadists of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, even though the Brothers repeatedly condemned those groups and opposed violence. Both men were given top jobs by Donald Trump.

It is true that the roots of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups can be traced back to Egyptian jails, which began filling with resentful Islamists in the 1960s. Now the jails are bursting again, so much so that new ones have had to be built. The Islamists have been joined by liberals, who quickly soured on Mr Sisi’s inept and draconian rule. Egypt now holds about 30,000 political prisoners, including many journalists. Your reviewer was berated by the foreign ministry for, among other things, referring to Mr Sisi’s takeover as a coup (a label America refused to apply). Mr Kirkpatrick had it worse. Talk-show hosts denounced him on air as an enemy of the state.

The coup also fuelled a jihadist insurgency in Sinai that continues to torment Egypt. Yet American officials, citing renewed “stability”, argued that the Brotherhood’s overthrow was the least bad option. The alternative “wasn’t Jeffersonian democracy”, Mr Kerry tells the author. “Over whatever number of years we have put about $80bn into Egypt. Most of the time, this is the kind of government they had—almost all of the time. And the reality is, no matter how much I wish it was different, it ain’t going to be different tomorrow.”

Today’s American administration does not even wish it were different. To them, Mr Sisi has said all the right things. He wants to moderate Islam and reform the economy. He calls Mr Trump “a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible”. Mr Trump, in turn, celebrates Mr Sisi’s tough leadership and calls him “a fantastic guy”. Like so many others, the American president seems unconcerned that autocracy is again breeding misery and extremism in Egypt."

As usual, The Economist wrung its hands and didn't know what outcome it would really have wanted (from the set of outcomes actually available - and not those emerging from wishful thinking).

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From Garett Jones's "Hive Mind", the table of national IQs (ie average IQs):

Egypt: 81-83

In the UK, subpopulations with this level of average cognitive capability (-1.2 SD) populate deprived neighbourhoods. Our experience of Cairo and other Egyptian conurbations doesn't seem so surprising.

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In "2020: World of War", authors Paul Cornish and Kingsley Donaldson suggested Egypt as a near-term candidate for another Islamist insurgency, possibly leading to a Caliphate uniting that country with Libya. The trigger would be a 2019 global recession leading to a collapse of the fragile Egyptian economy.

These thoughts were on my mind as we jetted out from Cairo en route to London Heathrow.

Some thoughts on Egypt

Clare ignores the Nile (from our cabin) in favour of The Times

Clare and myself were recently in Egypt; specifically we signed up with the "Wonders of the Nile" cruise with Riviera (excellent, by the way). This was the first time we had visited a lower middle income country.

Arrival

We arrive at Cairo airport at 9 pm. The short, tubby, authoritative Egyptian guy (the Riviera official) is the local big man, there to welcome us, smooth our way through customs, organise our police escort.

There are 34 of us.

The three baggage handlers are black cotton ninjas. The largest, the one with the psychopathic smile, demands tips. One of our number, tired and intimidated, offers a two pound coin. It's indignantly rejected. "Paper," he hisses.

I ask the Riviera guy whether we are expected to tip (at this point none of us has any local currency). He says Riviera has sorted it all out, but "Of course you are free to tip if you wish." This will become a familiar refrain.

Egypt is a poor country and wages are low. Five English pounds equate to more than 110 Egyptian pounds. There's a local fortune to be made by a little hustling.

We are advised to check with our own eyes that our suitcases have been loaded onto the coach (what could possibly go wrong?).

Did I mention that the Middle East is a low-trust culture?

Security

We were rather shocked when we noticed that the athletic young man with cool jacket and shades sitting behind the driver was armed with a pistol at his waist-holster.

Our armed guard

When the coach leaves our moored boat (south Cairo) the next morning the escorting police cruiser slews across the road, blocking three lanes of traffic to allow the coach to U-turn. Everywhere we go we're cocooned within an armed security screen.

I think we're in a bad area (half-constructed tenements, rubbish heaped up in the gutters and side roads) but it turns out all of Cairo is like this.

We're told that each building is occupied by one extended family and will be extended upwards when the sons marry and require their own apartments. Meanwhile the tower blocks look like Swiss cheese. Empty windowless flats are holes; steel wires sprout into the sky above load-bearing columns.

Kin Groups

Egypt is not European. We're in a society of extended families, kin groups, tribes and patronage networks. As "rich Europeans" we're near the top of the status hierarchy. We are instructed to lose our English politeness and egalitarianism and to act imperiously - especially with hawkers .. and with the staff. We have a role model: our armed security guard is a senior officer in the Tourist Police. I try arrogance. It works.

Today our boat left Cairo at 6.30 am and we are presently cruising south upriver. The banks are a mix of mansions, fields and hovels. Donkeys and goats graze, children play amidst the litter and women wash clothes in the Nile. There are many derelict-looking buildings. Tall chimneys emit black smoke, borne south on the wind.

Hygiene

Since the recent fatalities of British tourists in Egyptian hotels (E. Coli? Fumigation chemicals? Both?!) the staff here are big into hygiene. When we return to the ship after an excursion, the first guy in the waiting line of greeters has a hospital-style antibacterial hand sprayer (the hot towels are second and the refreshing drink third). Ditto at the restaurant entrance before every meal. At the induction meeting yesterday, our guide reassured us that food hygiene on board was organised and monitored by a specialist English company.

Before coming, to be honest, my personal security concerns had been totally focused on ISIS and Al Qaeda.

WiFi

The boat's WiFi is said to be provided by satellite (via MikroTik). It's clearly under tight regulatory control. My Vypr VPN won't connect. I run Orbit (client for the Tor dark network, sometimes in VPN mode) and the log shows connections breaking every few seconds. I briefly had Vrpr VPN running over Tor but it went down after a few minutes.

The alternative Vodafone mobile network is excellent. As a recognised UK customer, it looks like my traffic is staying on their network until their UK gateway as the BBC News app works fine without me having to fire up the VPN (although it may simply be using my BBC account credentials).

So I'm using mobile data roaming, the phone WiFi is turned off and I have the phone configured as a WiFi hotspot for the tablet and Kindle. I notice that the Vodafone network doesn't like Tor too much. Traffic hangs. Perhaps that was the deal with the authorities?

Egypt is one dimensional for mobile companies. Just string towers along the Nile and the signal propagates easily to the edge of the desert. But then there's twenty million strong sprawling Cairo .. .

A walk around an Egyptian town

Last night we moored at Minya where our group was offered a walk-around in the town. I think we had visions of mud-brick buildings, locals ambling around picturesque byways, late-evening market bustle, a chance to relax and unwind.

Minya is a little Cairo: half-finished concrete and breeze-block tenements, dusty rubbish-strewn streets in poor repair, everywhere garish neon-lit, open-fronted shops selling clothes and food.

The mannequins carefully do not show a human face, heads covered by underwear or the features obscured by thick, horizontal wavy lines.

Our 40 minute tour required a complete security screen: police motorbikes to stop the traffic and block all side roads; four young and tense members of the paramilitary police in their dark blue uniforms and flak jackets, masked and carrying Kalashnikovs or the equivalent; khaki-uniformed regular police armed with snub-nosed machine guns; a very portly Police Captain in charge .. and of course our own armed security detail.

Part of our security screen at Minya

The bolshy questions from our group before we left: "We can pop into the shops, can't we?" ("No") were revealed as being entirely beside the point. Stories soon circulate about tourists held hostage inside shops until they buy something.

What did the locals make of these well-dressed prisoners, escorted under heavy security through their town?

The young women, walking arm in arm in jeans, frocks and hijabs ignored us, laughing and chatting with each other. Small boys smiled and shouted their few words of hustle-English - and were cuffed by the old men as a life-lesson. The young men stared at the police from kerbside seats, side alleys and their motorbikes with impassive, sustained hostility - one was dragged off his 500cc monster as he imprudently tried to weave between us.

The young men protecting us walked nervously, guns across their chests, swivelling to scan the crowd. The police captain was sweating.

Words like "powder keg" came to mind.

Haggling

Every site we visit we are pestered endlessly by lines of hawkers peddling scarves, postcards, cold drinks, small trinkets and guide books. Our tour guide recommends to look ahead, keep walking and don't engage in conversation, especially not to say "no, thank you" (it's an opening).

It's a scenario from game theory, from microeconomics. There is clearly demand for all their items: the hawkers do succeed in making a living and I've observed sales - we buy a few things ourselves.

If they all collaborated and set a market rate (like in England) they might collectively make more money.

Yet there is asymmetry. Tourists have little idea of the (low) prices that would emerge through perfect competition. The tourists are, in local terms, inordinately rich and able to bear gouging. In a somewhat rushed itinerary, there isn't time to engage in the lengthy process of haggling. Perhaps many introverted Brits neither warm to the process nor possess the nontrivial skills.

The hustlers either make a sale before any quieter and less hassling breed of vendor gets a look-in or simply drive customers away. This is how the good guys get crowded out.

We experience the suboptimal equilibrium of defect-defect between vendors.

We're at the cafeteria in Luxor at Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. I order two coffees. The guy says, with the slightest of pauses, one hundred Egyptian pounds. I know it's too much but have no idea how to respond. Do I haggle? What would be a fair price? I pay with ill grace.

Security for our walk-around in Sohag

Litter

Every occupied part of every town we visit is festooned with litter. They say that litter - all kinds of discarded cans, paper, plastic bags, cardboard, rags, burned wood - is the common feature of the third world. That it's more correct to say that the litter-free parts of the first world are the real anomaly. After a while you can habituate, become litter-blind.

Cairo street scene from our coach

It's tempting to blame individual fecklessness but weakness in public institutions and infrastructure is characteristic of poor countries and this includes sanitation and waste-disposal. This weakness, in its turn, derives from the inadequacy of the available human capital - those small, tight-knit kin/patronage groups display a very low level of society-wide assabiya.

Negative externalities are always someone else's problem in this defect-defect equilibrium.

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You may also be interested in the follow-up post: "Near-term prospects for Egypt".

"Dichronauts" - Greg Egan

Amazon link

Grant Hutchison wrote this insightful review on Amazon.

"To some extent this is a companion volume to Egan's Orthogonal trilogy. In those books, he imagined what it would be like to live in a universe in which the time dimension behaved geometrically in exactly the same way as the three spatial dimensions, rather than with the hyperbolic coordinate relationship (described by special relativity) that we see in our own universe.

In this book, Egan describes a universe in which one of the spatial dimensions has time-like properties - introducing the hyperbolic relationships of relativity into everyday spatial coordinates. (The title, Dichronauts, meaning "travellers in two times" is a reference to the fact that his story universe has two time-like dimensions (time and "axial") and two regular spatial dimensions.

So we have a world in which simply trying to rotate an object can change its apparent shape; where it's impossible to rotate a north-facing object to face east, or an east-facing object to face north; where the stable shape for a planet is the hyperboloid depicted on the cover; where light can't travel to the north or south; and where falling over in those directions can have lethal consequences.

As with Orthogonal, Egan's aliens have one utterly alien property (in this case, we have two intelligent species that exist as commensals, one threaded through the skull of the other), but otherwise behave and speak like clever and amiable humans. And that's fine, because Egan's imagined world is strange enough without him expecting us to accommodate to an alien society, too. I'm therefore reminded of Hal Clement at his best, though Egan's characters have more humour.

The story is a quest, in which the reader finds out more about the world along with the story's characters. There are some surprises, and one toe-curling moment I certainly didn't see coming.

I knock off a star only because I think Egan's world may simply be too strange for many readers. In Orthogonal, one could amble along accepting that there was something a little odd about time without fretting about the details. In this story, almost every event is influenced by the strange spatial geometry, and if you don't find the geometry of special relativity engaging, you may be left floundering.

Egan provides some explanatory detail in the Afterword (which could productively be read first, since it contains no significant spoilers), and much more information on his website."

In fact the best advice is to read Egan's website physics primer first.

I read the first volume of the Orthogonal series and could't get into it. I felt that Egan was basically interested only in the setting - the physics - and was merely compelled by the fact that he was writing a novel to parachute some characters and plot in. Alternate spacetime topologies are plainly somewhat interesting, but one feels that 90% of the value is to be found on Egan's website in the relevant physics essays.

So I don't think I'll be reading Dichronauts any time soon. As another reviewer wrote:

"I really wish Grey Egan would stop writing these thought experiment alternate physics books. They're too much like hard work and are, frankly boring. He is a writer of enormous talent and needs in my opinion to concentrate on narrative and character rather than narrow concept world building."

My thoughts exactly.

Life on Mars

The Atacama desert in Chile is high, dry and cold. It has been used by NASA as a Mars simulator.

No-one lives there.

Yet people say they want to live on Mars.

Revealed preferences say: no, they don't.

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It would not be too difficult to engineer a replica lunar or martian landscape in the Atacama. The excess gravity would be the only inauthentic part of the experience since tourists would be wearing climate-controlled spacesuits. Perhaps there's something you could do with a gantry and bungee cords.

I suspect the mean excursion time might be an hour - more if there was a pressurised dome with a coffee shop and cakes.

Or there again, hyper-realistic VR might do it.

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All the universe we know about is like this, except where it's worse (planetary gas giants, stellar surfaces).

I'm really not sure galactic tourism is all it's cracked up to be.

Oh yes, aliens. Those creatures which emerged as the top predators on their planet and - subject to the usual biological instincts to expand their numbers and range - have ventured out into the Galaxy.

I suspect they will look ugly and scary, and will consider us competitor-vermin. Even the deepest dyed-in-the-wool liberal might have to accept that there are species-boundaries to effective altruism.

So let's not go there for our vacation. At least not until the Terran Space Navy has thoroughly pacified them.

Human Dodos, Communist Man, Draka Serfs

Amazon link

A couple of years ago I wrote some posts reviewing Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order". From the Wikipedia article:

"From chimpanzee hunting groups to tribes

In his quest for the origins of political order, he first looks at the social order among chimpanzees, notes that the war-like hunting group, rather than the family, was the primary social group, and claims the same for humans. Humans went further: to survive they formed tribes, whose armies were superior to hunting groups by their sheer size.

He uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau. He suggests that Hobbes and Locke present a fallacy when they argue humans developed cooperative ability only as a result of the invention of the state.

This is because chimps, the genetic ancestors to humans, engage in kin relations based on cooperation, and so Hobbes and Locke must be mistaken suggesting humans were once sociable, lost this instinct and then regained it due to the state.

Challenge of tribes on the road towards the state

The next step was to escape beyond tribalism and the "tyranny of cousins", to join tribes into larger coalitions towards states, again due to the advantage of larger armies. This was done with the aid of religion. This was because as groups grew in size, maintaining cooperation became more difficult as face-to-face interactions with much of society became difficult. Religion offered a way of providing a combining social force to hold society together.

For example, Fukuyama cites Mohammed as an example of what Weber labels a "charismatic leader" because he used the idea of an 'umma' (community of believers) to bind together the territory that he ruled over. This challenge to transcend tribalism partly remains today in many parts of the world outside Western civilization, for example in Afghanistan and in Somalia.

Restrictions on marriage and inheritance as a strategy against corruption

Loyalty to the tribe or the family, rather than to the state, leads to corruption and weakening of the state. Various strategies were used to overcome the corruption. One such strategy was restrictions against marriage among the ruling official class to make sure that loyalties would not lie with family or tribe.

• Mandarins or Scholar-officials, who were the ruling class of China, were not allowed to pass on the lands given to them by the emperor to their own children and were restricted as to whom they were allowed to marry.


• Mamluk slaves, the ruling class of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, were told which slaves to marry while their children could not inherit from them. Janissaries were originally forced into celibacy or prohibited from having a family.


• Pope Gregory VII forced Catholic priests in Europe to become celibate and they were prohibited from having a family for the same reason.


• Spanish administrators in South America were restricted from marrying local women and from establishing family ties in the territories they were sent to."

It should be added that the elites of empires of archaic despotism used extreme violence to break the powers of the clans. People do not take kindly to having a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

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The three articles I wrote were:

1. 'The natural state of humanity is clannishness'
2. Human Dodos
3. Human Dodos: the FAQs

which should be read in that order. I compared Jonathan Haidt's liberals (Myers-Briggs NFs) to dodos. Their naive optimism, their overarching (albeit abstract) compassion and their gullible belief in generalised human 'goodness' makes them easy meat for predators. Social liberalism is very much a northern european psychological trait, while most of the world's population (to its own economic detriment) continues to organise itself clannishly. Fukuyama's taming process has a way to go - and is not making any progress.

It's generally observed that extreme liberalism is required in a population to make Communism work. No more state, no more police, no more armies, no more war. We'd better believe in general niceness.

Just as Marx suggested that the historic role of capitalism was to develop the productive forces to enable the communist transition, perhaps it also has the historic task of breeding humans nice enough to make communism work at all. Then recall that a society of doves is unstable in the presence of predators. And then there is always the way of the Draka, which always seemed to me more likely.

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It's worth noting that western societies - so apparently liberal in appearance - are capable of extreme and non-liberal violence whenever push comes to shove. In America only about 20% of the population self-declare as liberals. Despite much sjw noise and fury, social liberalism is more a convenient facade for the imperial west.

I recall that fateful phrase: "Notice how the liberals all leave the room, wringing their hands, once the bullets start flying."

The Interpretation of Quantum Theory (again!) - Philip Ball

Amazon link

I'm into extreme diminishing returns on books about the interpretation of quantum theory. And here is another, only worth considering because Peter Woit has bothered reviewing it:

"Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird is the best popular survey I’ve seen of the contemporary state of discussions about the “interpretation” of quantum mechanics. ...

Instead of spending a lot of time in the rut of Bohmian mechanics, Ball dismisses it quickly as:

But it is hard to see where the gain lies… Even Einstein, who was certainly keen to win back objective reality from quantum theory’s apparent denial of it, found Bohm’s idea ‘too cheap.”

Dynamical collapse models like GRW also get short shrift:

It’s a bodge, really: the researchers just figured out what kind of mathematical function was needed to do this job, and grafted it on… What’s more of a problem is that there is absolutely no evidence that such an effect exists.

As for the “Many-Worlds Interpretation”, which in recent years has been promoted in many popular books, Ball devotes a full chapter to it, not because he thinks it solves any problem, but because he thinks it’s a misleading and empty idea:

My own view is that the problems with the MWI are overwhelming – not because they show it must be wrong, but because they render it incoherent. It simply cannot be articulated meaningfully… 

The MWI is an exuberant attempt to rescue the ‘yes/no’, albeit at the cost of admitting both of them at once. This results in an inchoate view of macroscopic reality suggests we really can’t make our macroscopic instincts the arbiter of the situation…

Where Copenhagen seems to keep insisting ‘no,no and no’, the MWI says ‘yes, yes and yes’. And in the end, if you say everything is true, you have said nothing.

There’s a lot of material about serious efforts to go beyond Copenhagen, by understanding the role that decoherence and the environment play in the emergence of classical phenomena out of the underlying quantum world. This discussion includes a good explanation of the work of Zurek and collaborators on this topic, including the concept of “Quantum Darwinism”. ... "

The comments on Woit's post are also interesting.

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For what it's worth (which is nothing) I suspect that we don't understand what the equations of quantum theory mean because we're still thinking in terms of the primacy of the 4D continuum. Starting from a more foundational space, ('spacetime is emergent'), quantum theory might just seem .. obvious.

Anyway, it's on my Kindle stack to look at later.

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Update: Here's the review/

Shades of Scarlett Conquering

There was an interview with Elvis Costello in The Times yesterday: "My culture fix: Elvis Costello". He was asked this question:

"The lyric I wish I’d written

There are countless couplets to admire, but they could only have been imagined by their authors, so envy is futile.

Lines I love are: “I believe in love, Alfie/ Without true love we just exist, Alfie/ Until you find the love you miss you’re nothing, Alfie,” from Alfie by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

And: “Dressed in stolen clothes she stands, cast iron and frail/ With her impossibly gentle hands and blood-red fingernails,” from Shades of Scarlett Conquering by Joni Mitchell."

Good choices.

'The Hissing of Summer Lawns' was Joni Mitchell's 1975 transition album, as she began to explore jazz. For me the standout tracks are: "Shades of Scarlett Conquering",  "Edith and the Kingpin" and "Harry's House; Centerpiece".

Here's the track.

... and here are the lyrics - Elvis Costello's choice in verse 4.

Out of the fire like Catholic saints
Comes Scarlett and her deep complaint
Mimicking tenderness she sees
In sentimental movies
A celluloid rider comes to town
Cinematic lovers sway
Plantations and sweeping ballroom gowns
Take her breath away

Out in the wind in crinolines
Chasing the ghosts of Gable and Flynn
Through stand-in boys and extra players
Magnolias hopeful in her auburn hair
She comes from a school of southern charm
She likes to have things her way
Any man in the world holding out his arm
Would soon be made to pay

Friends have told her not so proud
Neighbors trying to sleep and yelling "Not so loud!"
Lovers in anger Block of Ice
Harder and harder just to be nice
Given in the night to dark dreams
From the dark things she feels
She covers her eyes in the x-rated scenes
Running from the reels

Beauty and madness to be praised
'Cause it is not easy to be brave
To walk around in so much need
To carry the weight of all that greed
Dressed in stolen clothes she stands
Cast iron and frail
With her impossibly gentle hands
And her blood-red fingernails

Out of the fire and still smoldering
She says "A woman must have everything"
Shades of Scarlett Conquering
She says "A woman must have everything"

Brilliant. But listening to the album overall (including this track) it's difficult to disagree with this sentiment from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone:

" Four members of Tom Scott's L.A. Express are featured on Hissing, but their uninspired jazz-rock style completely opposes Mitchell's romantic style ... "

With characteristic thoroughness and total concentration, Joni focused on selecting just the right jazz musicians to play with. The result, in 1976, was that work of genius, Hejira.

Diary: Bikes in Barnstaple

We were in Barnstaple yesterday for the Tour of Britain, stage 2.

Barnstaple is the main town of North Devon in the southwest of England. Old and quaint, it's been ravaged by post-war planning: the old medieval streets pierced by a throbbing, flashing dual carriageway while sixties brutalism - white slats and breezeblock - infiltrates streets of older, fading yet more humane architecture.

The town seems on a cusp. There are pockets of gentrification, where the facades, decor and offers (coffee, food) are just as urbane and hipster as any bubble metropolis. Elsewhere you encounter boarded-up shops on the High Street, a general shabbiness and too much litter. There are beggars.

Barnstaple needs an injection of capital, a spring in the step and a sense of civic pride. As a typical English market town, it's far from alone in lacking these things.

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So this is the Tour of Britain swishing through their first pass of Barnstaple (the finish was also here later).

As you can see, Clare and myself were encouraged by the motorbike-marshal to join with others in blocking the main Alexandra Road so that the riders would continue straight on to Victoria Road.

Chris Froome leads the peloton on to the roundabout

... closely followed by the rest of the Sky team: G is third in the picture

We passed Chris Froome and the rest of the Sky team later in the afternoon. This was on the M5 near Taunton heading up towards Bristol (stage 3): they were in the team bus and we were heading home.