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This month we review Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, one of the great precursers to modernist literature and a masterpiece of Russian theatre. It’s easy to see from Chekhov why a revolution was necessary to catapult the Russian state into the 20th century. No prizes are awarded to anyone who sees a similarity between Chekhov and Ibsen.

We continue our exploration of John Donne’s love poetry, and the lyrics to the earliest written music in the English language are contained in our LocSec’s message for this springtime month.

Our articles include a piece on how to bribe your way into the Chinese news media, and an insightful summary of the tragedy that has befallen public life in Canada, to wit the culture of lies.

And don’t forget our puzzles. If you get them both right, you’re clever indeed.

For immobility and despair, there’s little that can surpass this little gem except perhaps an Ibsen drama in which grandpapa hangs himself in the barn behind the house.

A landowning family has been traveling abroad and is ecstatic on its return. But sale of the estate is imminent to pay the mortgage. The family does not acknowledge the need to act. Evasion is its byword. A rich friend of the family shows them a way to keep the estate, but modernization is required. The orchard must be cut down and the land subdivided for summer homes. The family cannot even discuss this. Modernization is impossible. The orchard is sold.

That’s the plot in a nutshell.

It turns out that the trip abroad was a mini tragedy of its own. The matriarch is a widow. Her husband was a drunk. He died and their son drowned. She fell in love with someone and left the country, but he deserted her. Quelle joie de vivre!

Nevertheless, the key to the play is its balance. There’s language of hope without action, imminent tragedy (foreclosure) that is postponed to the end and situated offstage. Imagine a Hamlet in which the new King is better than Hamlet’s father (murder that results in social improvement), and the final duel never takes place but Hamlet simply goes back to school.

The student in The Cherry Orchard is a perpetual student. Money drops into his lap when needed most. The female head of the family can return to Paris, using money sent by a relative to help rescue the estate. All of this is deus ex machina.
There’s no real hope for them.

Underlying the play is another level of unreality: an orchard was not situated beside the manor, as in this play. And there were no cherry orchards. At most, parts of an orchard were devoted to cherries. And real cherry trees didn’t present the lovely cascade of blossoms that Chekhov depicts, but rather gnarled growth.

The play originated in Russian society at the turn of the 20th century. Decades of reversal in social policy had produced emancipation of serfs without the means for them to survive and prosper. Freedoms were followed by political repression, followed again by freedoms, but the prevailing attitude of government was the iron fist. Censorship was rife; passages in Chekhov were deleted, and in 1903 his plays were banned from theatres, which the working class could afford. A common joke was that it took ten years to graduate from university: five for study, four while you were expelled, and one while it was closed.

Chekhov’s father went bankrupt when he was 16, but Dickens’ father also went bankrupt. The dominant mood of their creative efforts is very different. Chekhov died of tuberculosis at 44. Some of his plays are more interesting than others, but don’t turn to them for bonhomie and good cheer.

AR

2) Our first question involved the triangular numbers, which are 1, 1+2, 1+2+3, 1+2+3+4, etc. What digits can never appear at the end of a triangular number? What is the only triangular number that is a prime? Can you find a natural number that can’t be represented as the sum of 3 or less triangular numbers?

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) Gauss gave us the answer, which is (x/2)(y + z), where x is the number of numbers being added, y is the first number, and z is the last. Thus if we’re adding the first 12 natural numbers, the first number is 1 and the last is 12. The formula gives us (6)(1+12) which amounts to 78. The usual story is that Gauss discovered this method while solving a problem set by his teacher in elementary school, and that the numbers were 1 through 100. Gauss himself, however, said that his teacher had given the class a particular five-digit number and asked the students to add a particular three-digit number to it 100 times in succession, then find the sum of that series. Does the above method work if the story is changed as we’ve indicated?

2) The digits that can never appear at the end of a triangular number are 2, 4, 7, or 9. The only triangular number that is a prime is 3. All natural numbers can be represented as the sum of 3 or fewer triangular numbers (discovered by our friend Gauss).

[This month’s puzzles are adapted from Posamentier and Lehmann’s Mathematical Amazements and Surprises]

Cuckoo Song [Brit. Lib. MS Harley 978, f. 11v]

Sumer is ycomen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!

Ewe bleteth after lamb,
Loweth after calve cow,
Bulloc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Merye sing cuckou!
Cuckou, cuckou,
Wel singest thou cuckou:
Ne swik thou never now!

(For more love and sensual poetry, look at Elsa’s web sites, for example Elsa’s Wild Poetry. Also dive into Elsa’s mind and heart at Elsa’s Love Poetry or Elsa’s General Page.)

The OK Corral, except the gunfight takes place every five minutes and the good guys win by default. What a system, thought Steven as he rang the bell and a South American in tux and tails answered. The man was tall. He had a broad lined forehead and the wide cheekbones of the Incas. Intelligence gleamed from his pores, tempered with the prudence of the conquered. His glance probed Steven’s skin for what made him tick.

Columbian, Steven guessed. And not the butler, definitely not the butler. Steven gave his name and asked the man’s in return. Gabriel Inarritu, and yes he was a cousin by marriage of Alejandro. “Muy bien de acuerdo,” Steven said. “Alejandro is a talented man.” They passed a few minutes in Spanish, Columbian style and not up-country either. Steven listened to the pure vowels rip through the air. “Let me take you to the meeting. I have a few chores before I go.”

“Chores in a black tie?” Steven asked.

“Chores in a black tie, tick, tick, tick, as T.S. Eliot might have said.” An ungainly smile creased Gabriel’s lips. “Not everyone likes Nike and Salomon. I work better when I’m dressed up.”

“You think quick and clean, keep your eye on the ball, don’t make mistakes.”

Gabriel nodded briefly, escorted Steven down a long hall and around a couple of corners. The floor was parquet, the corridor enlivened with 18th century porcelain.

“What do you do?” asked Steven.

“Research.”

“Remind me to answer a question of yours one day,” Steven said.

Gabriel reacted with surprise. “I do research. Sam asks me something, I get him the answer.”

“They must be profound questions.”

Gabriel shrugged. He opened a door, Sam called out “Our guest, Steven Lin,” and Steven entered an octagonal chamber decorated in blue watered silk that no decorator could succeed in ruining. The chairs were Jacquard, the ceiling high, the walls shrouded and swagged, the floor draped with a Persian rug that a god had woven. The room looked soundproof. Steven had the impression there were a couple of other doors behind the arras, but he couldn’t be sure.

Sam jabbed his stubby forefinger at each person in the room in turn. “You know this thin fusspot here, Ernest Carrera, oncologist and head of the Albany Cancer Clinic. Ernest cleared his throat. He cleared his throat again and picked at his collar that was too tight.

“Next to him, Erskine Thorne.” Sam pointed again. “If you see someone wearing a light brown sweater, that’s him.” Freckles dotted Erskine’s cheekbones and sprawled across the bridge of his nose. His eyes were watery, as though he’d just been crying. “Erskine has been my lawyer more years than I care to admit. Isn’t that right, Erskine?”

Erskine smiled faintly. “I want to get back to this drug business. Can’t we cut the intros short? Steven will figure out who’s who.” He spoke at a murmur, almost too fast to understand, like a sprinter at a geriatrics meeting. His voice was bass and reached itself out of the floor like a sea monster.

“…. Leokadia Thorne, and Fred Beaudine for liaison with Albert.” Fred winked at Steven. He held a notebook in his lap. Steven guessed that everyone else had perfect memories. No one else had paper.

Sam: “Albert is in a heap of shit. The papers blame him for a dozen deaths and more to come. Worse, Americans are a forgiving lot and they have a short attention span, but the papers say he screwed up the distribution of the Immortality pills. They say he couldn’t organize his way out of a brown paper bag. Americans don’t like incompetence. When you fight an election in this country, you should believe in Santa Claus before you admit you messed up.”

Steven agreed 100%. Americans, he knew for a fact, wanted God for President but would criticize him as though he were the Devil. And no amount of argument would change their minds. It was a habit, and American habits were sacred. Pick your battle, Steven told himself. “I agree,” he said. “But our blue ribbon team is on top of it. Read tomorrow’s headlines, you’ll see that the cure is on the way. The real problem hasn’t surfaced yet and both parties are to blame. It’s the economy. No one knows what to do. Jobs are down the toilet. You can’t borrow money without signing your name in blood. In a couple of days, the papers will be all over the economy. Companies cut corners and the result is tainted pills. Cities don’t have cash, they can’t afford to hire quality drivers, pills get stolen. We’re on it. We’ve also covered the next exit on the highway. In a campaign there’s a big difference between rhetoric and real answers. Brull is going to tackle mortgage costs head on. And your food bill. Your hospital charges when you get sick, food inspection, gas for your car. This is a staged advertisement plan. The problems are the Democrats’ fault and the Republicans have the answer. Vote for Albert; your troubles will disappear. It’s smoke and mirrors, but that’s politics. Watch the ads, boys. We’re on the job.”

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons dried oregano
salt and black pepper to taste
2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into 2 inch pieces

2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 cups uncooked short-grain white rice
1 pinch saffron threads
1 bay leaf
1/2 bunch Italian flat leaf parsley, chopped
1 quart chicken stock
2 lemons, zested

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 Spanish onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 pound chorizo sausage, casings removed and crumbled
1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined

Directions
1. In a medium bowl, mix together 2 tablespoons olive oil, paprika, oregano, and salt and pepper. Stir in chicken pieces to coat. Cover, and refrigerate.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet or paella pan over medium heat. Stir in garlic, red pepper flakes, and rice. Cook, stirring, to coat rice with oil, about 3 minutes. Stir in saffron threads, bay leaf, parsley, chicken stock, and lemon zest. Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce heat to medium low. Simmer 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a separate skillet over medium heat. Stir in marinated chicken and onion; cook 5 minutes. Stir in bell pepper and sausage; cook 5 minutes. Stir in shrimp; cook, turning the shrimp, until both sides are pink.
4. Spread rice mixture onto a serving tray. Top with meat and seafood mixture.

Nutritional Information
Amount Per Serving
Calories: 736. Total Fat: 35.1g. Cholesterol: 202mg

China is notorious for censoring politically delicate news coverage. But it is more than willing to let flattering news about Western and Asian businesses appear in print and broadcast media — if the price is right.

Want a profile of your chief executive to appear in the Chinese version of Esquire? That will be about $20,000 a page, according to the advertising department of the magazine, which has a licensing agreement with the Hearst Corporation in the United States.

Need to get your top executive on a news program by state-run China Central Television? Pay $4,000 a minute, says a network consultant who arranges such appearances.

A flattering article about your company in Workers’ Daily, the Communist Party’s propaganda newspaper? About $1 per Chinese character, the paper’s advertising agent said.

Though Chinese laws and regulations ban paid promotional material that is not labeled as such, the practice is so widespread that many publications and broadcasters even have rate cards listing news-for-sale prices.

And while Western companies and many Chinese journalists are loath to discuss the subject, public relations and advertising firms are sometimes surprisingly candid about their roles as brokers in buying flattering coverage, referred to here as “soft news” or “paid news.”

Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s biggest public relations and advertising agencies, acknowledged that it pays Chinese media outlets for client coverage in some categories.

“Our policy is to advise our clients to not participate in such activities,” the agency’s Beijing office wrote in an e-mail, in response to a reporter’s questions. “However, in some industries, such as luxury, the practice of soft news placements is very common so this is something that we have also done before.”

A Chinese account manager for another American public relations firm was strikingly frank about paying for coverage, although she spoke only on condition of anonymity to avoid riling her industry colleagues and her employer.

“If you want more media coverage, that’s easy to do — we have plenty of channels to get your company shown on television, and in top magazines and newspapers,” she said in a telephone interview.

Media specialists, and Chinese journalists intent on playing by ethical rules, deplore the paid placements they say are all too common in the nation’s media.

“Corruption has become a lifestyle in today’s China,” said Sun Xupei, a journalism fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “But when it happens in journalism it’s even worse than other fields, because people feel there’s nothing they can really trust.”

Executives at the Chinese language version of Esquire magazine say they regularly publish soft news features that are essentially ads masquerading as news.

One example was a feature about a European audio company, Bang & Olufsen, that supplies equipment to Audi, the automaker. Nothing in the magazine indicated that the Chinese Esquire had been paid to run it.

But the magazine received at least $10,000 a page for the five-page feature, according to the publication’s executives, who e-mailed images of it as an example of the paid genre. They, and others who helped produce the article, said Audi was involved in the payment. A spokesman in China for Audi declined to comment. Cheryl Sim, a Bang & Olufsen spokeswoman in the company’s Singapore office, said it was not the company’s practice to pay for news coverage. “We certainly did not pay in this Esquire case,” she said. “But we’ll look into the matter.” The Hearst Corporation declined to comment.

Not all business and company profiles in Chinese media are planted and paid for, of course. But even when they are not, Chinese media organizations often have much laxer rules than many mainstream Western journalists for accepting payments from sources for news coverage.

The highly regarded Chinese newspaper, 21st Century Business Herald, which is better known for its investigative reporting, recently ran an interview with Christophe Navarre, chief executive of the French wine and spirits maker Moët Hennessy.

The article appeared after the company, with the help of Ruder Finn, an American public relations firm, agreed to pay the airfare, lodging and food costs for nine journalists, including one from the 21st Century paper, to visit Moët Hennessy’s chateau in western China. Of the media organizations that rode along, only the international news agency Reuters paid its own travel and other costs, Ruder Finn said.

Moët Hennessy and Ruder Finn, however, insist they did not make any other payments to entice coverage. “Although we know it’s a normal practice in China, we never pay the media,” said Jean-Michel Dumont, chairman of Ruder Finn Asia.

China is not alone in bending boundaries. Media outlets in Europe, Japan, the Philippines, Latin America and even the United States may venture into various gray areas, encouraging companies to pay for journalists’ travel or underwriting favorable reporting or agreeing to take out advertising packages in exchange for coverage. (Mainstream American journalism ethics, including the ground rules of The New York Times, prohibit such practices.)

But media specialists say nowhere are such quid pro quos as common and as aggressively pursued as in China — to the frustration of Chinese business executives.

“If one of my companies came up with a cure for cancer, I still couldn’t get any journalists to come to the press conference without promising them a huge envelope filled with cash,” said one Shanghai-based private equity investor, insisting that he not to be named because he feared journalists would boycott covering his companies altogether.

Six big American companies that operate in China, including Ford and General Motors, declined to comment for this article about the Chinese practice of paying for coverage. So did the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, which represents many of the biggest United States companies operating in China. None of the six companies have been accused of making the payments.

If American multinationals made off-the-books payments directly to Chinese reporters, editors or producers, rather than simply buying space or air time through media agencies, the American companies could be at risk of violating the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The law prohibits people working for American companies that operate abroad from paying bribes or making corrupt payments to foreign officials to obtain or keep business or obtain other business advantages.

It is unclear whether any Americans have been prosecuted on suspicion of paying journalists in China or elsewhere.

“Journalists are considered government officials because generally all the press is government-controlled in China,” said Lesli Ligorner, a Shanghai-based lawyer at Simmons & Simmons, an international law firm. “So making an illicit payment to a journalist would be an F.C.P.A. violation.”

Such payments also violate Chinese law. China’s propaganda authorities prohibit news outlets and journalists from accepting payments to cover news conferences or to publish news. Accepting secret payments can also be prosecuted under the nation’s laws against bribery, and some cases have been. Convictions can result in prison sentences.

But so much money is sloshing around, analysts say, that enforcement is rare in China. Instead, the government occasionally issues general warnings, which go widely ignored.

Newspaper and magazine advertising departments continue to openly discuss their rates — even when a researcher making inquiries identifies herself as working for The New York Times.

“If your company’s boss wants to be shown twice, in an audience seat, for a total of five seconds, the average price is $5,000 on some popular news programs,” said Wang Limin, an account manager at Yashi Media, a Beijing agency that helps companies obtain coverage in print and broadcast media.

“If your boss wants to comment on something brief and we shoot him in a news program for 15 seconds, it would be $9,000. And if your boss wants an exclusive interview for 10 minutes, the rate is much higher.”

(David Barboza, New York Times, 3April2012)

It’s a sad state that few Canadians appear surprised by the auditor general’s findings that Parliament was kept in the dark over the real costs of this program and what looks to be a $10-billion overrun.

Many seem to assume that misleading and denying whenever it suits is a government’s normal default position. After all, this government seems to have done it for years on Afghanistan and with its other problems in national defence.

In my own attempts to unravel the F-35’s real costs I never once met a single soul outside government and knowledgeable about defence purchases who believed the prime minister’s promise that the planes could be delivered for a bargain-rate $75 million each.

I never met anyone inside the Canadian military who thought so either.

I’m sure thousands in the aviation industry who follow these programs, especially in the U.S. and Europe, simply assumed Ottawa was dealing in fairy tales for public consumption, from which it refused to budge.

This is why we need to see if this current mess is part of a pattern of official “misstatements” on defence matters. If so, we’ve got a serious national problem.

If we look for trends, the Afghanistan mission offers so many of these quicksand moments over direction, policy and costs that it will baffle historians for years. It certainly confused Stephen Harper’s own minister in its day.

Defence Minister Peter McKay in the cockpit of a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in July 2010. Canada is planing to buy 65 of the new jets from Lockheed Martin, but at what price? (Reuters)Remember when the prime minister was never going to “cut and run” but then suddenly switched 180 degrees to launch the 2008 election with the promise of a full pullout in 2011.

The defence department was stunned, and so was his minister Peter MacKay.

“I don’t know,” MacKay told reporter Murray Brewster when asked how the historic shift came about. “I heard about it the same time you did.”

Military officers were also perplexed when Harper reversed himself again at the Lisbon NATO Summit in 2010 and committed 900 Canadian Forces personnel to stay on in Afghanistan for some years after the pullout on a training mission.

He was under enormous pressure at the time from Washington to help out, and described the training mission as not very risky.

But everyone involved knew that foreign military trainers were fast becoming the new targets of insurgent groups, as the past many months have clearly demonstrated.

Throughout the war, inquiring journalists found our military to have become increasingly secretive and at times even untrustworthy, as National Defence and PMO communications staff snatched control of information away from officers in the field.

For long periods Canadians were denied information on the number of Afghan detainees that Canadian soldiers handled, the tally of firefights our soldiers were involved in, the number of attacks on Canada’s main base in Kandahar, even the full number of our wounded.

What’s more, they were constantly assured the Taliban was being battered into weakness, despite quite contrary evidence.

As for the total cost of the Afghanistan adventure? That was, and remains, as murky as the cost overruns of the F-35 program.

Even supporters of the war, like leading historians Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson, in their Lessons Learned? study last October revealed horrible mismanagement.

Today that study reads like a primer for the F-35 shambles. We see layer after layer of weak political leadership, jealous bureaucratic infighting, and a complete lack of strategic insight from the top on down.

The prime minister’s office has not only rigorously controlled every aspect of government communications, muting the military’s own voice, but it seemed determined to give Canadians as little information as possible on the war, the study said.

In the historians’ words: “The prime minister may have concluded that the war could not be won, was politically costly and, therefore, the less said of aims and objectives the better.”

The same attitude, of saying as little as possible, seems to have been at play again during this long process over the F-35 purchase, with the government simply refusing to retreat from its predictions that these next-generation jets would cost only $15 billion over a 20-year period.

That is quite a gap from the $25 billion lifetime cost that others, including the parliamentary budget officer (and even some DND officials, the auditor general has now revealed) felt was reasonable.

When pressed, Harper’s team even denies it has agreed to buy the plane. Yet it was the only warplane ever held up for Canada’s defence needs, while a fresh competition involving other planes was totally ruled out.

I’d like to think our top soldiers would refuse to go along with misleading Parliament. However, the public relations domination of National Defence has been eating away at even some core ethics of our military for some years now. The way it did in the RCMP.

Think of the number of events where misleading stories are put out there. Defence Minister Peter MacKay uses a search-and-rescue training flight to prolong a fishing trip. Any waste is denied, until the media shakes out the details.

Then, as payback, military officials tamely sent over information on opposition members’ flights to the minister’s office, so he could throw these back at his opponents in question period.

There was also the case last fall, when reports leaked out that Chief of Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk had used a government jet to connect to a family vacation in the Caribbean. His staff bitterly complained that he had been set up by “higher ups” in government and it’s widely believed he felt that way too.

Petty? No, it suggests just how much dark infighting is going on between defence and politicians, as the culture of secrecy and even intimidation spreads.

At times, these attempts to mislead can be quite farcical. Like last summer when one of Canada’s four submarines crashed on the ocean floor and the deputy-commander of the navy dismissed the incident as a mere “fender-bender.”

Actually, the hole in the hull was so extensive that the sub commander was relieved of his command and HMCS Corner Brook is not expected back in service until 2016.

This trend towards denial makes everything about the misstated F-35 billions a deeply serious affair.

We really need to know how deep the deception went in this case. And we ought to be much more curious about what is being carried out in our names under the cloak of secrecy.

(Brian Stewart, CBC News, 4 April 2012)

In retrospect, there’s still nothing quite as startling as this in the auditor general’s report on the F-35 program: page 27. That’s where Auditor General Michael Ferguson skewered the government with evidence that the charge dogging it for two years was true: that it concealed the full cost of the new fighters.

Ferguson’s Page 27 lays out the facts very simply to show that the government told itself the costs were $10 billion higher than the figure it gave to the public.

In one column, Ferguson shows the internal estimate that was “used for decision making,” one month before the government announced its decision to buy the F-35 in July of 2010. The figures were not made public — until Ferguson found them.

They showed a purchase price of $8.9 billion, plus personnel, operating and maintenance costs of $16.1 billion, for a total of $25 billion.

Ferguson said that’s too low — largely because the costs were estimated over only 20 years when the plane may be in service for nearly twice that long — 36 years. Still, the estimate did include those personnel, operating costs and maintenance, among other extras.

The $25 billion figure also held up well when compared with an independent estimate made nine months later, in March of 2011, by the Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

Page said the “total ownership cost” would be closer to $29 billion. And the difference —even at $4 billion — seems surprisingly small considering the large uncertainties in both estimates. Does anyone know what jet fuel will cost in 2030?

The similarity of the estimates seems more striking still, considering the different methods used to reach them. Instead of the government’s 20-year lifespan, the PBO used 30 years — but the bottom lines still came out close. So did the details: the government said personnel, operating and maintenance would cost $16 billion; the PBO said operating and support would cost $14 billion. They reach those figures differently, but still end up in nearly the same place.

So, give or take a few billion — which is what you have to do with these gargantuan projects — there’s not a whole lot of difference to argue about. The problem is that the government did argue, and strongly. With an election looming, it denounced the PBO, his methodology and his total — even though it was not far off its own. What changed?

Answer: for public consumption — poof! — the government made $10.4 billion disappear.

It did that by simply removing, entirely, the entries for contingency ($860 million), for operating costs ($4.8 billion) and personnel ($4.7 billion.) At a stroke, the $25 billion figure it used internally shrank to $14.7 billion. And thereby hangs a tale.

In the wake of the auditor general’s revelations, the government has argued that operating costs were properly excluded, since those costs would be incurred with any plane we buy and are paid today for the CF-18s.

That explanation does not fit with the Treasury Board guidelines, or with previous scoldings by the auditor general, with which the government has agreed — or said it did. The auditor’s argument is that we still have to disclose and to budget for all the costs, even if we are going to pay them anyway.

The government’s insistence that operating costs are “paid anyway” also runs into two other problems. First, the F-35s will be more costly to operate and maintain than the existing CF-18s — according to the Pentagon, much more costly. So, at the very least, the difference has to be counted as a new, additional cost beyond what we’re paying now. Second, the claim that operating costs should not be included doesn’t explain why they were included in the internal estimate.

A third problem is that the government, despite having that estimate for its own use in June of 2010, insisted that it did not exist five months later. Here, the story gets even stranger.

In November of 2010, the House finance committee demanded “all documents that outline acquisition costs, lifecycle costs, and operational requirements associated with the F-35 program” be produced immediately. The Department of National Defence said this was impossible because it would take 10 weeks of work by the entire F-35 program management team. “As such, a complete response to the request cannot be provided within the required seven calendar days.” the Department huffed.

So the incredible, disappearing ten billion stayed out of sight during the election campaign. But not forever.

(Terry Milewski, CBC, 13April2012)

Views are added from time to time as they are received.

Find our events for April right Here. And talk to us on Facebook . Or read further for feasts of reason and flows of soul.

Interested in joining Mensa? The next test will be conducted at 1:30 p.m., on Saturday, April 21, 2012, at the University of Calgary. If you are interested in attending this session, please contact Marie Wildenborg directly for further information: mensa.proctor@shaw.ca. And don’t hesitate to share this invitation with anyone else who may be interested in joining Mensa.

Renew your Mensa Membership online at Mensa Canada.

This month we review The Hidden Reality, by Brian Greene, published in 2011. If you’re interested in the science behind parallel universes, this is the place to start. Greene has a first class mind and knows his subject inside out.

We continue our exploration of John Donne’s love poetry.

A look at the latest simulation of war with Iran reveals a dark cloud hovering over our lives. If you want to know what the future will likely hold, this article is a must-read. And finally we touch on the reasons for Harper’s bilateral trade talks. This isn’t business as usual, nor is it a simple exercise in brinkmanship with the United States over the Alberta-Texas pipeline. Learn some of the complex issues involved.

And don’t forget our puzzles. If you get them both right, you’re clever indeed.

This book, written for the general educated public, is an effort to detoxify the notion of parallel universes. The question isn’t simply whether the effort succeeds.

For a start, the logic of the book flows admirably. The reader feels in contact with an exceptional physicist, who tries hard to express mathematical concepts through metaphor. There is broad agreement that Brian Greene is one of the best at this task. He knows the field and treats science as it should be: with subtlety but without deference. Moreover, he isn’t out to deceive. Greene cites numerous arguments against his parallel universes. We see fairness in debate, and a rational tone. This isn’t always the case in books written by scientists who have devoted decades to a particular avenue of research. Finally, Greene admits that we may not see an answer to the key issues during his lifetime. We sense that he longs to know the result, and he gives examples of how the balance-beam of science may tilt in favour or against the existence of parallel universes, but he says clearly that we may never know the truth. Who could ask for a less partisan conclusion?

Many branches of science have independently led to the prospect of parallel universes. This is one reason why the notion should be given a hearing. Cosmology, quantum mechanics, string theory (if correct), and computer science are just four among many. Common sense has difficulty with the concept, but common sense has proven ineffective as a trustworthy guide to the world. For the very fast (special relativity), the very large (general relativity), and the very small (quantum mechanics), our senses are no judge at all. The same is true for fields generally, and magnetic as well as electrical fields have been discussed for more than a century. It would be astonishing if the Copernican revolution ended arbitrarily at the point where our universe, coincidentally suited to our survival, happens to be the only one.

Greene is forced to explore the term “universe” from several directions. We use the word to mean “everything”, yet something can be infinite in one sense and finite in another. A leap of imagination is needed to take a two-dimensional creature on an infinite surface into three dimensional space; why wouldn’t we need the same when we contemplate what lies outside the landscape in which our senses have evolved?

Greene explores nine models that give rise to parallel universes. These range from a quilted multiverse in which the fact of infinite space requires that conditions repeat, through the bubble multiverse in which our expanding spacetime occupies a small part, the brane multiverse according to which our universe exists on a three-dimensional brane floating in a higher-dimensional expanse along with other branes, quantum theory’s realization of every probability in a vast ensemble of parallel worlds, holographic multiverses, simulated multiverses, and so on. There are experimental or observational findings that may lean us towards one or more of these, while others lie entirely beyond our present ability to detect. The fact is, however, that there are compelling reasons to contemplate the possibility of parallel universes, reasons arising from undisputed fact. For those of us who want to know what the fuss is about, this book is an indispensable read, and it joins Brian Greene’s other offerings to the educated public (The Elegant Universe, and The Fabric of the Cosmos) as necessary components of any sophisticated library.

Reviewed by AR

2) In our present calendar, is the probability exactly 1/7 that December 25 will fall on a Sunday for a randomly chosen year?

The answers to last month’s puzzles were supplied last month.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The question plunges us into what physicists call a perturbative approach. When calculating, it’s often easiest to make a first pass that incorporates only the most obvious contributions, then make a second pass that includes finer details. Adele has overestimated her chances. If she wins the first round, playing the second time won’t increase her chances, because she’ll already have won. The second round won’t matter. For a precise answer to the question, you have to subtract the odds of winning both rounds (one in a billion multiplied by one in a billion, which is .000000000000000001) from Adele’s calculation (two in a billion). The final tally is .000000001999999999.

2) The first step is to account for leap years, remembering to discount leap years divisible by 100 unless they’re also divisible by 400. Four consecutive years contain (365 x 4) + 1 days, or 1461. Four hundred years contain (100 x 1461) – 3 days, ie 146,097. This is exactly divisible by 7, which means that any relationship between dates (December 25) and weekdays (Sunday) that exist in one 400 year period exist in all such periods. But 400 itself doesn’t divide exactly by 7. Accordingly, the chance that any particular date will fall on a particular weekday in the 400 year span isn’t precisely 1/7. As 400 is the core cycle of our calendar, repeating indefinitely, the likelihood that December 25 will fall on a Sunday in a random year isn’t exactly 1/7.

[Both of this month’s puzzles are adapted from Edward J. Harshman’s Fantastic Lateral Thinking Puzzles]

(For more love and sensual poetry, look at Elsa’s web sites, for example Elsa’s Wild Poetry. Also dive into Elsa’s mind and heart at Elsa’s Love Poetry or Elsa’s General Page.)

Steven caught a quiet moment in the early afternoon. Not to eat lunch, nap, or walk around the block, but to think. He spent his days creating Democratic policy and responding to Republican attack. It felt like firing a machine gun and dodging bullets. He had to consider now and then, for the tiniest moment and without admitting it to anyone, whether there was a war at all and – if there was – did he want to fight in it.

He asked Micky, his bisexual assistant, to take his calls. Micky wore red most of the time. She wanted to stand out from the crowd. Good, Steven thought, let’s give her a chance. Steven asked for a few minutes calm every couple of weeks. Micky could handle that much. It gave her an opportunity to show she could respond to crises on her own, if there were any, and she responded properly. Neither of which were at all certain.

Steven put his feet up on his desk. He ticked off facts on his fingers. Republicans and Democrats were interchangeable. The fundamentalists and hardliners didn’t count; every politician learned to avoid them in grade school. The country’s prosperity depended on cycles and natural resources, not congress. The military demanded and got their wars whoever occupied the White House. The rise and fall of nations depended on population, raw materials and greed. Steven couldn’t do anything about any of that. He didn’t want to and never had.

On to question number two. Did he want to participate in battles without a purpose? Well, he had goals outside the conflict between elephant and donkey. Helping Albert Brull would place Steven at the heart of the White House, assuming Albert won of course. There was a good chance he would, with Steven’s steady hand at the helm. And from the White House, Steven accomplish those goals he told no one about.

Which took Steven from strategy to tactics. Arthur was working on the lawsuits. They could leak stories about the Republicans and New York’s mayor, a Republican, being responsible for the deaths in time for the evening news. Raylene was hunched over at her laptop fantasizing like mad. The net was full of stories she’d fabricated about who poisoned whom and why. The deaths were rumours. They were a hoax created by hackers with a grievance against their principal, or as part of a school assignment. The students had gone overboard. They broke into a reporter’s computer at the New York Telegraph. The reporter emailed the coroner’s office, and the students faked confirmation of the deaths. From there the story spread like wildfire. What newspaper can afford to research stories? That’s old. Another Raylene special: some ladies at a Church social forgot to wash their hands and you suddenly had a listeriosis thing. Nothing to worry about. It’s a common bacteria, mutates suddenly, dies out just as fast. No problem. But TV news whipped up a panic. Her best one was that Republicans had infiltrated Mafioso types from Sicily with a batch of pills that were bad. The DA’s office was investigating, and miracle of miracles, the DA confirmed that police were looking into deliberate tampering that sacrificed American lives.

And so it went. Steven was pleased. Milly and Raylene had a whiteboard of ideas for Brull to announce in the next three weeks, all harmless but exciting, designed to get more money into the average American’s pocket. Who could argue with that? Steven hitched his feet off his desk and put on his jacket. He pressed the button for Micky, who twitched her nose, pursed her lips, put on her wonkiest smile and reported nothing new. It was show time for Steven Lin at the OK Corral.

This month, instead of exotic fare, here’s how to use that left-over ham from Easter dinner. A quick and easy but attractive dish.

Preparation and Cooking Time: 1 Hr 10 Min
Six servings

Ingredients
6 cups water
4 cups uncooked egg noodles
1 onion, chopped
1/2 cup sour cream
1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of chicken soup
2 cups diced cooked ham
2 cups shredded Swiss cheese
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs

Directions
1.Preheat an oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 2-quart casserole.
2.Bring water to a full rolling boil in a pot. Cook the egg noodles in the boiling water, stirring occasionally, for 3 minutes; remove from heat, cover, and let stand until the noodles are tender, about 10 minutes. Drain.
3.Stir the noodles, onion, sour cream, chicken soup, ham, and Swiss cheese together in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Spoon into the prepared casserole. Sprinkle the top with bread crumbs.
4.Bake in the preheated oven until the casserole is bubbling and the bread crumbs have browned, about 40 minutes.

A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.

The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action — and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.

But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.

The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.

The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years. However, other Pentagon planners have said that America’s arsenal of long-range bombers, refueling aircraft and precision missiles could do far more damage to the Iranian nuclear program — if President Obama were to decide on a full-scale retaliation.

The exercise was designed specifically to test internal military communications and coordination among battle staffs in the Pentagon, Tampa, Fla., where the headquarters of the Central Command is located, and in the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of an Israeli strike. But the exercise was written to assess a pressing, potential, real-world situation.

In the end, the war game reinforced to military officials the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of a strike by Israel, and a counterstrike by Iran, the officials said.

American and Israeli intelligence services broadly agree on the progress Iran has made to enrich uranium. But they disagree on how much time there would be to prevent Iran from building a weapon if leaders in Tehran decided to go ahead with one.

With the Israelis saying publicly that the window to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb is closing, American officials see an Israeli attack on Iran within the next year as a possibility. They have said privately that they believe that Israel would probably give the United States little or no warning should Israeli officials make the decision to strike Iranian nuclear sites.

Officials said that, under the chain of events in the war game, Iran believed that Israel and the United States were partners in any strike against Iranian nuclear sites and therefore considered American military forces in the Persian Gulf as complicit in the attack. Iranian jets chased Israeli warplanes after the attack, and Iranians launched missiles at an American warship in the Persian Gulf, viewed as an act of war that allowed an American retaliation.

Internal Look has long been one of Central Command’s most significant planning exercises, and is carried out about twice a year to assess how the headquarters, its staff and command posts in the region would respond to various real-world situations.

Over the years, it has been used to prepare for various wars in the Middle East. According to the defense Web site GlobalSecurity.org, military planners during the cold war used Internal Look to prepare for a move by the Soviet Union to seize Iranian oil fields. The American war plan at the time called for the Pentagon to march nearly six Army divisions north from the Persian Gulf to the Zagros Mountains of Iran to blunt a Soviet attack.

In December 2002, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who was the top officer at Central Command, used Internal Look to test the readiness of his units for the coming invasion of Iraq.

Many experts have predicted that Iran would try to carefully manage the escalation after an Israeli first strike in order to avoid giving the United States a rationale for attacking with its far superior forces. Thus, it might use proxies to set off car bombs in world capitals or funnel high explosives to insurgents in Afghanistan to attack American and NATO troops.

While using surrogates might, in the end, not be enough to hide Iran’s instigation of these attacks, the government in Tehran could at least publicly deny all responsibility.

Some military specialists in the United States and in Israel who have assessed the potential ramifications of an Israeli attack believe that the last thing Iran would want is a full-scale war on its territory. Thus, they argue that Iran would not directly strike American military targets, whether warships in the Persian Gulf or bases in the region.

Their analysis, however, also includes the broad caveat that it is impossible to know the internal thinking of the senior Iranian leadership, and is informed by the awareness that even the most detailed war games cannot predict how nations and their leaders will react in the heat of conflict.

Yet these specialists continue their work, saying that any insight on how the Iranians will react to an attack will help determine whether the Israelis carry out a strike — and what the American position will be if they do.

Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.

“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”

(Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, New York Times, 19 March 2012)

Canada is launching free-trade talks with Thailand and Japan in case Plan B must turn into Plan A, because Plan A is in trouble, thanks to what is being described as American bullying.

Plan A is the Trans Pacific Partnership, a set of trade talks currently involving the United States and eight other Pacific nations that Canada badly wants to join. Negotiators from the two countries are attempting to secure a pre-agreement so that the Americans will support Canada’s accession to the talks.

But the Americans are being particularly bloody-minded, from the Canadian perspective. Supply management is the biggest issue. This is the system of quotas and tariffs that protect the Canadian dairy and poultry industry from competition.

Canada is willing to put everything, including supply management, on the TPP table, but only after reaching that table. The Americans, however, insist that Canada must signal its readiness to abandon supply management as a condition for joining the talks.

The American intransigence – “bullying” is the word that gets most often used – has led to a theory that is making the rounds in Ottawa circles.

According to that theory, the Obama administration is employing a hub-and-spoke approach to foreign trade.

That is, as the Americans pursue new trade agreements, they seek to place the United States at the hub of any relationship, with smaller nations serving as spokes.

The spokes supply the U.S. with whatever it needs to make things, and the U.S. then sells the finished product back to the spokes and to other countries.

The Americans see Canada as a valuable spoke, safely secured through the North American Free-Trade Agreement. But that agreement is imperfect, in American eyes, because Canada continues to protect certain sectors of the economy, including dairy and poultry.

The Americans seem to think that if the Harper government is willing to surrender those protections in order to get America’s blessing to join the TPP, all well and good. If not, then there’s no need to let Canada into the TPP, since it is already joined to the American hub through NAFTA. This, at least, is how the Canadians characterize the American position.

From this side of the border, it looks as though the American are attempting to negotiate a NAFTA 2, with everything to the American’s advantage and nothing to Canada’s. Such a position for Canada is a non starter. Stephen Harper may be willing to sacrifice supply management as the final stage of signing a Trans Pacific Partnership treaty. But he is not going to make such a politically charged decision until all other options – including entrenching protections for Canada farmers within that treaty – are exhausted.

There is still plenty of space, and several months of time, for the Americans and Canadians to forge a compromise on TPP. In the meantime, there’s Plan B, which involves negotiating a separate set of bilateral agreements with Asian nations. A free-trade agreement with India is already underway, and exploratory talks have started with China. The South Korean talks are stalled, but could restart if there is real progress with the Japanese. And Thailand offers another opportunity to deepen trade within the Asian market.

These one-on-one deals are not easy. The countries involved are afflicted with complicated domestic politics; non-tariff barriers that are hard to capture in a free-trade agreement are rife; in some cases, corruption undermines the government’s ability to stand by its word.

But the Harper government’s determination to expand trading relationships is a hell-or-high-water priority. If multilateral agreements are unavailable, then bilaterals will have to do.

And increasingly there is another aim to Plan B: to show the Americans that Canada is no longer willing to be just another spoke.

(John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail, 27March2012)