LIFE IS FOR LIVING

27 September 2026

1 Noël Coward

With lyrics

There is a line I remember from Noël Coward, in his song “A Bar on the Piccola Marina”, written in 1954 - so the generation of my father - about a respectable English widow, Mrs Wentworth-Brewster.

Coward himself introduced the song by saying that its heroine had:

“discovered in the nick of time that life is for living."

And then, no interest in grieving, she goes off the rails completely in one of the most improper widowhoods ever written about.

So, Mrs Wentworth-Brewster has spent most of her life as a model wife and mother, but not a woman in her own right. But now, her rather dreary husband has died. At the funeral wake, she suddenly realises that she has been living according to everybody else’s expectations and she makes up her own mind on what comes next, according to her own dreams and desires and imagination.

Her immediate conclusion, in the song at least, is that the old life is over, her real life is only now beginning, and it is high time she had some fun!

She goes to the island of Capri,  off Sorrento, and discovers the bar on the Piccola Marina. There, she drinks, flirts with fishermen and sailors, and discovers a new and quite different version of herself.

2 But what actually made life worth living?

Ahaa... this is the interesting part... It wasn’t simply pleasure, ok!

Coward’s joke is that Mrs Wentworth-Brewster discovers aliveness.

She had been existing rather than living.

Her life had been organised around

• duty
• respectability
• family expectations
• convention
• being a “good” wife and mother.

In short, supressing or postponing personal pleasure for the good of the family and the expectations of others.

Then suddenly she experiences

• novelty
• adventure
• sexuality
• friendship
• spontaneity
• freedom
• pleasure

ie, the feeling of being noticed as an individual rather than just as somebody’s wife or mother.

That is why the phrase works so well - living here means actively participating in your own existence not just fulfilling a role assigned to you.

3 And there is a deeper philosophical point

This is very close to something I have been exploring in Joseph Campbell's writings. We discover that there's a difference between having a life and living a life.

• Existence is biological: you are alive.
• Living is experiential: you are engaged with the world.

That can involve pleasure for sure, but also curiosity, love, friendship, creativity, discovery, risk, achievement and simply paying attention to the extraordinary fact that you and I are here at all.

There is an interesting parallel with William James:

“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

James was making a serious philosophical point: the value of life is not necessarily something we first discover objectively and then decide to participate in it. Our willingness to engage with life helps create the experiences that subsequently make it valuable. Quite encouraging to know we can shape our world and our destiny.

4 So Coward’s joke is actually quite profound

Mrs Wentworth-Brewster doesn’t discover why life is worth living in some grand philosophical revelation, no. She discovers it by living itself.,, isn't this the point?

You cannot necessarily sit in a room  at your desk or in a comfy chair and reason your way into discovering the value of life. Sometimes the value is generated by getting on down and boogeying: go somewhere, meet somebody, fall in love, learn something, make something, laugh, take a risk, go see something beautiful.

Or, in Coward’s very English formulation:

"She discovered, in the nick of time,
that life is for living."

And the delicious irony is that she discovers this only after her husband dies.

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FROM "RUSSIA DOES OUTREACH" TO "RUSSIA IS WAGING WAR ON YOUR BRAIN"

25 September 2026

*How "Russia does outreach" -> "Russia is waging war on your brain".*

Is the Institute for the Study of War trying to say that Russia spreads propaganda? Who'd'uve thought. 

But it is interesting how they go from the usual international media influence to "cognitive warfare".

I mean, Russia operates RT, Sputnik and TASS; it works with foreign media organisations; it runs journalism-training programmes; these are all expanding esp. in Africa, Asia and Latin America + some must offer paths into Russian state media as we see the likes of Pilger and Galloway on RT.

The trick for a good contrarian as always is not to automatically oppose what the official media anywhere are telling us, but just simply to separate fact from the v slick way the ISW interprets what is an everyday media influence op - it is PR.

https://www.livingintheair.org/2026/08/edward-bernays-man-nobody-had-heard-of.html 

A "partnership" -> "recruitment pipeline", so nefarious enlistment techniques worthy of Mossad. 

The people involved all become a "cadre" -> a putinist network subverting and shaping under SSB orders. 

And we finish with -> "cognitive warfare infrastructure", that's some fancy language, putting diplomacy into the asymnetric crypto military division. 

The stated Kremlin strategic goal, known to ISW we know not how, is to "shape the decisions and will of its opponents". 

And the goal of the ISW? To make us fear and hate the enemy.

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DID YOUR PORTFOLIO PERFORMANCE MEET YOUR GOAL

If a portfolio rises by 5% in a year while the cost of living rises by 8%, has its owner gained or lost?

Fast Track (30 seconds)

• A result means nothing until it is set against a goal: the same return can be a triumph or a failure.
• Seven goals form a ladder, from “do not lose my money” to “earn the most for the least pain”. Each has its own test.
• Every test needs a yardstick: inflation, a safe government bond, or a tracker index that simply copies the market.
• Diversification is the simplest way to stop one mistake wrecking the plan.

Introduction

A portfolio can rise in value and its owner can still be poorer. That points to a neglected fact: a result means nothing until it is set against a goal.

This article sets out seven such goals, arranged as a ladder, and shows the yardsticks that make each one testable, from inflation to an index that copies the market.

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ROAD TO THE FRONT 2 - RUSSIAN EDITION

The Road to the Front

Russian edition: real headlines

Spot the spin, or get swept towards the front line.

How to play

Take turns rolling the die. Each roll reveals a real headline from the British media. Name which step of the campaign it carries, or spot when a headline pushes back against the narrative.

Spot it and you hold your ground, stepping one square back towards home. Miss it and you're swept forward by your roll.

The game ends when someone reaches the front line or the headlines run out. Whoever is furthest from the front wins.

The six steps

How many players?

Player 1's turn

?

Spot the spin

Which step does it carry?

Player	Squares from the front	Spins spotted

Spot the steps. Ask the questions. Real headlines from UK outlets, shown with outlet and date. A headline appearing here doesn't mean the reporting was false or coordinated, only that it carries a persuasion technique worth noticing.

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MIDDLE EAST RESET - WEST ASIA EMERGES

The Geopolitical Reset of West Asia:
The Breakdown of Western Hegemony and the Resurfacing of Indigenous Power

Contents

1. The Collapse of the American Security Architecture
2. The Non-Vacuum: Why Russia and China Do Not Simply Replace the Hegemon
3. The Resurfacing of Historic Civilisational and Tribal Power Structures
   1. The Historic Civilisational Balance (Iran and Iraq)
   2. Tribal Sovereignty and Border Dissolution
   3. Cultural and Esoteric Islamic Rebalancing
4. Regional Realignment and the Crisis of Post-Colonial Constructs
5. Conclusion

The geopolitical landscape of West Asia - historically referred to in the West as the Middle East - is undergoing an epochal transformation. This realignment is fundamentally driven by the collapse of the post-World War II American security architecture and the squeezing out of Western military hegemony. Crucially, this exit is not creating a political vacuum to be filled by rival external superpowers like Russia or China. Instead, the region is experiencing a profound reversion to its pre-colonial civilisational, historical, and tribal power structures - dismantling the artificial borders and client-state dynamics imposed during the era of Western imperial dominance.

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1. The Collapse of the American Security Architecture

For decades, Western strategic dominance in West Asia rested upon an artificial security framework designed to control energy flows, protect key proxy states, and maintain regional hegemony. This framework was explicitly articulated in strategic blueprints such as the 1996 "Clean Break" strategy (crafted by Richard Perle, David Wormser, and Benjamin Netanyahu) and Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2006 regional realignment policy.

These policies sought to re-engineer West Asia by placing the entire weight of American energy dominance and Israeli security onto a narrow pillar: the Al Saud monarchy and the Sunni sheikdoms of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). To secure this arrangement, Western strategy actively sought to neutralise historic regional powerhouses like Syria, Iraq, and Iran through military intervention, sanctions, and the deployment of proxy forces.

That Western-constructed architecture has now entered terminal collapse:

• Military Vulnerability and Forced Retreat: High-precision resistance attacks on critical US installations - such as the major strike on the American airbase in Jordan that destroyed vital aviation and logistics infrastructure - have demonstrated that forward US military positions across the Persian Gulf and Levant are unsustainable. American forces are being squeezed out of peripheral bases and forced to consolidate within Israel, where they represent an increasingly concentrated and vulnerable target.
• The Failure of American Guarantees: Washington’s inability and refusal to protect its regional partners from devastating strikes on core petroleum infrastructure - such as Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq processing plant and the East-West pipeline - shattered confidence in the US security umbrella. When Washington repeatedly declined emergency Saudi requests for direct military intervention against Ansar Allah in Yemen, it signalled the end of active American security management in the Persian Gulf.
• Depletion of Military and Economic Resources: The US military and its regional allies have largely exhausted their stocks of advanced air defence interceptors. Coupled with the total disruption of maritime shipping through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and bombing of the East-Weest pipeline, the petrodollar energy framework that underpinned Western economic hegemony for half a century is rapidly dissolving.

Glossary

Ansar Allah - also widely known as the Houthis, are a Zaydi revivalist and Shia Islamist political and military organization that emerged from Yemen in the 1990s.

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2. The Non-Vacuum: Why Russia and China Do Not Simply Replace the Hegemon

Standard Western geopolitical analysis assumes that when a global hegemon retreats, it inevitably leaves a "political vacuum" that rival global superpowers must fill. The evidence from West Asia contradicts this imperial assumption:

• Indigenous Security Ententes: Rather than seeking a replacement foreign patron, regional actors are building independent security mechanisms designed to exclude external superpowers. A prime example is the emerging tripartite entente between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey - an arrangement explicitly formed to replace Western security management with local forces beholden neither to Washington nor to Beijing or Moscow.
• Multilateral Rules vs. Imperial Commands: While Russia and China maintain significant diplomatic presence through forums like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), their engagement differs fundamentally from Western military hegemony. Chinese and Russian diplomatic involvement focuses on promoting consensus-based international law, trade frameworks, and non-aligned de-escalation rather than establishing replacement military blocs or deploying occupying forces.
• Rejection of Foreign Alignment: The overarching movement across West Asia and the Maghreb (North Africa) is an anti-colonial national liberation wave. Regional populations and leaderships are asserting sovereign self-determination, explicitly seeking to prevent any foreign power - Western or Eastern - from dictating their internal affairs.

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3. The Resurfacing of Historic Civilisational and Tribal Power Structures

With the unravelling of Western-imposed borders and client regimes, West Asia is undergoing a historic reversion to the deep-seated civilisational centres and tribal networks that governed the region for centuries prior to Western colonial intervention.

3.1 The Historic Civilisational Balance (Iran and Iraq)

Historically - prior to twentieth-century Western line-drawing and British-American backing of the Al Saud family - the authentic institutional, intellectual, and civilisational power centres of West Asia were Iran and Iraq (Mesopotamia). The era in which small Gulf sheikdoms exercised outsized geopolitical influence was an artificial anomaly built strictly on temporary petrodollar wealth and Western protection. Power is now shifting back to its historic civilisational roots, as reflected in the massive popular mobilisations across Iraq and the Levant that transcend Western-imposed political boundaries.

3.2 Tribal Sovereignty and Border Dissolution

The revolution led by Ansar Allah in Yemen represents a central catalyst in this regional reset. As the original Arabs of the peninsula, the Yemenis possess deep historical and tribal connections that ignore modern state lines:

• Penetration into Saudi Arabia: Yemeni tribal networks extend directly into the northern Saudi provinces of Asir, Jizan, and Najran - territories annexed by Ibn Saud in the early 1930s without local consent.
• Resurgence of Disenfranchised Tribes: Regional actors are engaging directly with traditional tribal leaders within Saudi Arabia who remain aggrieved by the historical suppression of their rights and authorities under Al Saud rule. This tribal resurgence directly undermines the centralisation established when St. John Philby and later US Vice President Dick Cheney attempted to anchor Western influence onto one ruling family's victory over its historical rivals.

3.3 Cultural and Esoteric Islamic Rebalancing

Culturally, the rigid, reductionist Wahhabi and Salafi doctrines exported from the Najd desert are losing their dominant grip. They are being supplanted by a resurgence of the region's older, esoteric Islamic traditions - including Zaidi, Ismaili, and traditional Shi'i heritage - that historically anchored West Asian civilization. Furthermore, the Sunni-Shia sectarian divisions previously exploited by Western strategy are diminishing, giving way to pragmatic realpolitik, shared indigenous identity, and regional anti-colonial solidarity.

Glossary

Iran - For more than two and a half millennia, the West called this land Persia while its own people called it Iran. In March 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked foreign governments to use 'Iran' in all official correspondence — and a diplomatic note settled a question that had been waiting since Herodotus and “Arabia Felix”.

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4. Regional Realignment and the Crisis of Post-Colonial Constructs

The breakdown of Western hegemony is creating severe crises for post-colonial state structures and entities that depended on Western backing:

• Saudi Arabia’s Credibility Trap: Riyadh finds itself caught between its inflated narrative as a global Islamic leader and the stark reality of its military and economic exhaustion. Faced with depleted missile interceptor stocks, halted grand Vision 2030 megaprojects (window dressing), lost oil revenues, and the need to sell its gold (selling US Treasuries was made difficult) and seek World Bank loans, Saudi Arabia has been forced to accept defeat and request Iranian mediation to negotiate peace with Ansar Allah.
• Israel’s Strategic Isolation: Israel’s long-term strategy of using Gulf monarchies as a shield while maintaining regional military dominance has been demolished by resistance control over vital maritime choke points like the Bab al-Mandeb and Strait of Hormuz. Facing seven multi-front strain that its military leadership acknowledges would require multiple duplicates of the IDF to sustain, Israel is experiencing severe internal political disarray, economic contraction, high-level professional emigration, and growing global isolation, leaving a population that have little connection to the original Ashkenazi colonisers from Europe.
• Fragility of Artificial Border States: Western-created buffer states are suffering acute internal strains. Jordan, for example, remains heavily dependent on dwindling financial subsidies and faces deep internal fractures between its Hashemite Bedouin establishment of long date and its Palestinian majority from the time of the Naqba, leaving it highly vulnerable to regional collapse.

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5. Conclusion

The geopolitical reset of West Asia marks the end of an era defined by Western line-drawing, military occupation, and client-monarchy management. As American power is squeezed out, the region is not collapsing into an empty void for new global empires to claim. Instead, West Asia is re-establishing its own historical balance - driven by civilisational continuity, tribal sovereignty, and indigenous self-determination.

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ROAD TO THE FRONT 1 - IRANIAN EDITION

The Road to the Front

Spot the spin, or get swept towards the front line.

How to play

Take turns rolling the die. Each roll reveals a headline, advert or slogan. Name which step of the campaign it's using.

Spot it and you hold your ground, stepping one square back towards home. Miss it and you're swept forward by your roll.

The game ends when someone reaches the front line or the headlines run out. Whoever is furthest from the front wins.

The six steps

How many players?

Player 1's turn

?

Spot the spin

Which step is this?

Player	Squares from the front	Spins spotted

Spot the steps. Ask the questions. A hypothetical playbook based on how governments have built support for past wars. All headlines are invented.

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WHY AMERICA ISN'T THE BOSS ANYMORE

17 September 2026

High prices at the petrol pump and supermarket are episodes in a story that started 200 years ago.

You've noticed it at the till. A tank of petrol, a trolley of groceries, a packet of sweets, the heating bill: all of it keeps creeping up. Most explanations stop at "inflation" or "the war". But to understand why your money buys less, you need three old stories, and you need to see where they collide.

An Old Fear of Russia

Two hundred years ago, Britain ruled India and called it the "jewel in the crown". Russia was a vast empire pushing south and east across Asia, and British leaders grew frightened that it might one day reach India and seize their jewel. For most of the 1800s, the two empires spied on and outmanoeuvred each other across Central Asia. People called it the Great Game.

In the 1850s that fear turned into real war, when Britain and France fought Russia in Crimea. Fifty years later, a British geographer named Halford Mackinder gave the fear a theory. Whoever controlled the "heartland", the great middle of Europe and Asia where Russia sits, could dominate the world. The lesson his followers drew was simple: never let Russia grow too strong.

That idea never died. Britain handed it to America, and many European leaders still carry it today. Whatever Russia actually does, it is cast as the dangerous giant.

The Playground With One Big Kid

For most of the last century, there were two big kids on the playground: America and the Soviet Union. Neither could push everyone around, because the other would stop them. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. America was suddenly the only big kid left, and it decided to run the whole playground, forever.

Israel's Story

To understand the Middle East, or West Asia as many now call it, you need one more story.

For centuries, Jewish people in Europe were persecuted and attacked in violent riots called pogroms. In 1897, Theodor Herzl led the founding of Zionism, a movement with a dream of a homeland where Jewish people would finally be safe.

Then came the Holocaust, when Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews. In its aftermath, the UN proposed dividing Palestine, and in 1948 Israel was put on the map, although the UN conditions were not fulfilled. But Palestinians already lived there. Thousands were killed in the wars that followed, and around 700,000 were driven from their homes and never allowed to return.

In 1967, Israel won a major war against its neighbours and took more land: the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Syria's Golan Heights. Flush with confidence, a dream of safety now became something very much darker: a drive to hold and expand that land, build Israeli settlements on it, displace or exterminate hundreds of thousands, rule over millions of Palestinians who have no say in their future. Some call this the vision of a "Greater Israel" a murderous update to Herzl's Zionist ideology: The West Bank (which the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are the very lands the world has long treated as the basis of a future Palestinian state; some also describe this as "ethnic cleansing" and even  "a genocide".

Over time, Israel's leaders came to believe their country could only be safe if every neighbour was weak, submissive or broken up: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran, as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

This is about the zionist policies and actions of the Israeli state and its leaders, not Jewish people overall - many Jews worldwide oppose these policies on religious and moral grounds.

Where the Stories Meet

Israel's leaders and their supporters in Congress have long pushed America to fight Israel's enemies. And America, wanting to stay boss of the playground, has often agreed. For decades it has fought, openly or in secret, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now Iran. It has spent staggering sums and rarely achieved what it promised.

Meanwhile, the rest of the playground moved on. China grew strong by building roads, railways and trade links instead of fighting. Russia got back on its feet. Countries like India and Brazil started making their own choices.

Why Your Shopping Costs More

Now America and Israel are at war with Iran. The fighting began at the end of February and has now dragged into its seventh month.

Iran sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel that before the war carried roughly a fifth of the world's oil out to world markets. For months, Iran has choked it almost shut. Shipments of refined fuels like diesel and jet fuel are running at a fraction of pre-war levels, and ships are being struck near the strait. Peace talks are stuck as well: latestas of October is that Iran offered to reopen the strait within a week if the US lifted its naval blockade and oil sanctions, and President Trump rejected the offer.

Same demand, less supply, more risk: prices go up.

And oil is in almost everything. If it isn't in the products you buy, it's in the processes that make and deliver them. Fertiliser for the fields to grow our food, fuel for the tractors, and for the lorries that bring food to the shops, energy for factories that make our goods, gas for heating and electricity, even helium for hospitals and high-tech industries. So expensive or scarce energy means expensive food, heating, goods, medicine and travel.

Wars also cost governments fortunes. When they spend more than they have, they borrow or create money (to cut public services or raise taxes is difficult). Whichever way they choose, money loses value. That's inflation: over time, your money buys less.

The Simple Story

An old fear of Russia. An ally that wants its rivals crushed. A superpower determined to stay boss. Together they have dragged the world into war after war. The playground bully is getting weaker, and ordinary people everywhere are paying for it at the petrol pump and the supermarket.

A boss who has to keep fighting to stay the boss is a boss who is losing.

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