Open a newspaper, and you'll probably see headlines such as these:

• UAE arrests 45 over Iran strikes videos
• Sweden investigates government platform hack
• Is Dubai finished?
• EU divided on Iran war

This or that country is supposedly acting in perfect concert, in each of these reports; and their detail will usually use the same abbreviation over and over. It's entirely normal. Very likely, I've done it myself.

But the UAE did not arrest anyone. Sweden did not look into what hackers had done. The lives of all Dubai residents are not about to end. True, members of the EU are not agreed in opinions about Epic Fury, but that exception proves my point: that to suppose the whole population in a country is united in thought or action is ludicrous. Such reporting is false.

Nations are named as if each was singular; a piece, on a chess board. What reporters mean, when they write such falsehoods, is that the government of each nation, or its employed agents, have done this or that. The image being presented, and all the apparent thinking by the participants, is that pieces are being moved on the board so as to gain advantage, to capture opposing pieces and eventually perhapes checkmate the King so as to win the game and... rule the world, or whatever.

Real people are mere pawns, expendable in the grand effort of conquest, by "diplomacy" or force of arms. As in chess, or any other game, a move is calculated after all preceding moves have taken place; those don't dictate what the present move shall be, but they do constrain it, determining what limits shall apply. In chess all pieces of one color are controlled by one player; in the real-world and more deadly "game" each piece makes its independent moves and since knowledge of other players' plans is partial at best, that adds enormously to the uncertainties of outcomes.

Accordingly, few overall plans actually follow their intended paths. War plans, in particular, are usually out of date almost as soon as the first shot is fired; nothing ever goes exactly as intended. After Putin had succeeded in turning the Ukrainian army away from its intended targets in the South East, he failed to complete the plan to surround the capital so as to force a change of régime or at least of policy; his army was unprepared for the Javelin-based resistance and had to retreat. So a 4-week war became one of 4 years and counting.

Similarly, at this writing Trump appears to have underestimated the ability of the Iran régime to survive an immense bombardment - and to have overestimated the willingess of the population to rise up and rebel against it.

This kind of deadly rivalry between and among governments has been going on ever since they were invented, about ten millennia ago; in the previous fifty millennia it was unknown. It will continue for as long as governments do, along with the poverty, misery, death and stunted progress that always accompany it. My Denial of Liberty shows some details.

A Numbers Game: If you think you can do arithmetic, try this. It's part of an 80th birthday speech in Cambridge by the Hungarian mathematician Professor Bela Bollobas, when he was 81.

"As you all know [!] 2025 is likely to be the only perfect square in our lifetimes. [A perfect square is a number whose square root is an integer.] 2025 is also the product of two perfect squares. [Which?] It is also the sum of the cubes of all the numbers from 1 to 9, and the square of the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 9. Also, 81 is the last perfect square I shall live to be, and the greatest fourth power any one of us will live to be." See if you can validate each claim.