The Truth is Bitter

All for One and One for All?

A PRAYER TO AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE -

Dear Lord (God/Yahweh/Buddha/Bob/Nobody):

We beseech You, O merciful One, to bring comfort to those who suffer today for whatever reason You, Nature, or the World Bank has deemed appropriate. We realize, O heavenly Father, that You cannot cure all the sick at once - that would surely empty out the hospitals the good nuns have established in Your name. And we accept that You, the Omniscient One, cannot eliminate all the evil in the world, for that would surely put Thee out of a job.

Rather, dear Lord, we ask that You inflict every member of the House of Representatives with horrible, incurable cancers of the brain, penis, and hand (though not necessarily in that order). We ask, Our Loving Father, that every senator from the South be rendered addicted to drugs and find himself locked away for life. We beseech You to make the children of every senator in the Mountain Time Zone gay - really gay. Put the children of senators from the East in a wheel chair and the children of senators from the West in a public school. We implore, Most Merciful One, just as You turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, that You turn the rich - all the rich - into paupers and homeless, wiping out their entire savings, assets, and mutual funds. Remove from them their positions of power, and yea, may they walk through the valley and into the darkness of a welfare office. Condemn them to a life of flipping burgers and dodging bill collectors. Let them hear the wailing of the innocents as they sit in the middle seat of row 43 in coach and let them feel the gnashing of teeth that are abscessed and rotted like the 108 million who have no dental coverage.

Heavenly Father, we pray that all white leaders (especially the alumni of Bob Jones University) who believe black people have it good these days be risen from their sleep tomorrow morning with their skin as black as a stretch limo so that they might enjoy the riches and reap the bountiful fruit of being black in America. We humbly request that Your anointed ones, the bishops of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, be smitten with ovaries and unplanned pregnancies and a pamphlet about the rhythm method.

Finally, dear Lord, we call upon You to have Jack Welch swim the Hudson he has polluted, to force Hollywood’s executives to sit and watch their own movies over and over and over, to have Jesse Helms kissed on the limp by a man of his own gender, to make Chris Matthews go mute, to let the air - quickly - out of Bill O’ Reilly, and to turn to ash all who are responsible for those who smoke in my office. Oh, yes, and unleash with a fury a plague of locusts to nest in the toupee of the Senate Minority Leader from the great state of Mississippi.

May You hear our prayers and grant them, O King of Kings, Who sits on high and watches over us as best you can, considered what screwups we are. Grant us some relief from our misery and suffering, as we know that the men You shall smite will be swift in their efforts to rid themselves of their misfortune, which in turn may rid us of ours.

With this we pray, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy-Spirit-Who-used-to-be-a-Ghost, Amen.

- by MICHAEL MOORE(from Stupid White Men)

Amazing Avaaz

Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people inform global decision-making. (Avaaz means "voice" in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money from governments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based in London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Paris, Washington DC, and Geneva.

In just over 18 months, the Avaaz community has grown to almost 3.4 million people from every country of the world, an average growth of over 40,000 people per week! Working in 13 languages, Avaaz members have taken nearly 8 million actions, donated over 2.5 million Euro ($3.5 million), and told over 30 million friends about Avaaz campaigns. A wonderful new source of global community and democracy is being created, and we've started to win real victories to close the gap between the world we have and the world we want -- on human rights, environmental protection, poverty, global justice and more.

Over the last 3 months, Avaaz members have helped to win the first global treaty banning cluster bombs, successfully campaigned for a ceasefire to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, prevented G8 summit leaders from spinning their failure to act on climate change, run a major global ad campaign in Chinese communities promoting a constructive dialogue with China over Tibet and other issues, and personally rankled the President of Sudan (indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court) with a campaign to help bring him to trial.

The link contains a brief summary of campaigning initiatives on Israel and Palestine, the food crisis, Zimbabwe, climate change, China, Tibet, and the Olympics, Darfur, cluster bombs, and more: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/report_back_2/?cl=119396304&v=2061

I want it all, and I want it now.

The Great Invocation
(released in 1945 by Alice Bailey and The Tibetan, Djwhal Khul)

From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into the minds of men.
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into the hearts of men.
May Christ return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide the little wills of men -
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the race of men
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.

There's more than meets the eye.

Nikkon Company which has been producing cameras and other optic equipment for nearly a century, has made available online a Universcale. This allows viewers to explore comparative sizes of categories of all known entities.

There is only a particular range of objects the size of which human beings can perceive. Beyond that spectrum, the cosmos contains a colossal variety of other things outside of our bare physical vision. Calibrated scientific instruments have become so accurate that many of these invisible phenomena can now be transformed into images that can be studied and measured along a grand scale.

This is what Nikkon's Universcale aims to present where users can navigate through the different images and their corresponding sizes to experience the differences themselves - http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/

"You are sleeping, you do not want to believe"

There's a free book to download called The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort at this link- http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22472

He was born in 1874 in New York and died there in 1932. He was a journalist and cattle ship hand at various points, later turning struggling fiction author. He sprung an influential friendship with respectable metaphysicist Theodore Dreiser from 1905 which fired up his imagination to explore esoteric subject matter. His commentaries started with X, which gathered dust on the shelves, concerning evolutionary theology and suchlike. It did not deter him from studying "the oneness of allness"; interconnections between the most unlikely fields. Fort's view was that "if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."

He despised the prevalent ruling scientific materialistic paradigm of the times, which like religion, he considered to be passing fashion only, and he sought evidence of a reality that did not fit into this framework. His Book of the Damned addressed his contempt for the narrow categorisations inherent in the mainstream outlook. He explained, "By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded". In the book he put forth his Law of the Hyphen, whereby all things are part of an ongoing "flow"; claiming his position as a intermediatist - "that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal; that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness". Life to him was an integral system, which depicted him as before his time, as did his last book Wild Talents, which sowed very early seeds of chaos theory by declaring consequences from tiny events e.g "not even a bottle of catsup can fall from a tenement-house fire escape in Harlem"...without affecting events to an unpredictable scale. For such ideas other great minds such as Buckminster Fuller acknowledged Fort as "a man of true vision." And Benjamin De Cessares observed of him that "every once in a while, a strange mind, an unattached mind, a trans-sensory mind, comes into the world to make us laugh, wonder or unhinge us. Such a mind is Charles Fort's".

His arena of study covered anything unexplained conventionally, which encompassed such exotica as spontaneous combustion, rains of fish, poltergeists, UFOs, the idea that human beings are owned, seances and so forth. Because of this he is credited with inventing the supernatural. The term Fortean proverbially refers to the unknown.

Jim Steinmeyer has released his book this year about Fort called The Man Who Invented the Supernatural.

The post title words "you are sleeping, you do not want to believe" are from the 1971 LP Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment In Electronic Communication With The Dead. This LP was recorded by Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, and is claimed to be voices of the dead recorded in laboratory conditions.

- goinghome

Many think, therefore I am.

"The three words Descartes had wrestled from the emptiness were filled with swarms of ancient ghosts, with mobs of long-gone men. Cogito was a term used by millions of Romans and those who'd sheltered behind their shields and swords. Seldom was a word more crowded with flocks and flurries of humanity. For the roots of cogito - com-agito -meant "to drive together, to collect, to crowd, to bring together, to summon, to congretate or convene." The Indo-European hordes - those battling cattle herders from north of the Black Sea who had spread their language with their conquests - had rolled invisibly through Descartes' mind as well, for they had given the Romans these terms for animal roundups. The warrior Indo-Europeans had also contributed the probable root for the ending "o," which they also gave to you and me. The Sanskrit is ahám, from which we've plucked the English version of the Latin "o"- "I". And where had Descartes gotten ergo, not to mention sum? From wave after wave of Ice Age hunter-gatherers, inventing and then polishing the first crude forms of syntax, sentence, suffix, noun, and verb. From tribes of cave-wall painters and armies of empire-builders who were rolled into each word. Yes Descartes had used this mob to state the one thing he knew: that he alone existed - that he alone sat in a room contributed by horders who had invented the hut, the beam, the plank, the hammer, the nail, and the many other techno-turns that had finally made it possible for Descartes to travel on a road into that strange invention called a town. Swarms of the dead swam through Descartes' mind and fed his body, clothing and sheltering him so he could do the thinking he mistook for solitude.

Like Descartes, you think, therefore you are. And through your thinking pours the army of forefathers and foremothers who have gone before. Each one of us is a walking storeroom of this planet's history. Trillions of early beings lived and died to perfect the very cells of which we are conceived. When the skies of this newborn earth rained poisons, our microscopic ancestors sighed oxygen into the stinging air and left us with the atmosphere we breathe. Sea-slitherers and land-lumberers bequethed to us the bones with which we stand and the brains with which we think. Hordes of fellow humans perfected the shoes we wear, the streets we walk, and the paper or computer screen from which we glean our thoughts. From a legacy of billions come our dreams of individuality.

The farms of Argentina feed you, the oil of Arabs speeds you, and the citizens of Asia labor to supply your needs. For you, you are a multitude. And much of that same multitude resides as well in me."

Excerpt from an article in What is Enlightenment Magazine, Issue 41, Aug-Oct 2008, called "The Ghosts of Millions in the Lonely Mind: Descartes' Delusion," by Harold Bloom.

A Little more Conversation, a little less action?

The following are some quotes from a book called Emotions: a brief History by Keith Oatley.

"To whom shall I speak today?
No-one is cheerful.
He with whom one walked is no more.
To whom shall I speak today?
I am burdened with grief
For lack of an intimate.
To whom shall I speak today?
Wrong roams the earth
And ends not.- The Dispute between a Man and His Ba (soul), Egyptian writer, over 3000 years ago.

“At first he [anyone] is conscious of an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is, “I feel…I don’t know how I feel”. From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also has something to do with consciousness; the emotion expressed is the emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer conscious.”- The Principles of Art, by R.G. Collingwood (1938)

[since pre-history] “Do we see calm rational people whose beliefs about value are for the most part well based and sound? No. We see people rushing frantically about after money, after fame, after gastronomic luxuries, after passionate love, people convinced by the culture itself, by the stories on which they are brought up…a sick society, a society that values money and luxury above the health of the soul” - The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum, 1994.

“When problems have appeared insoluble, when life has seemed to be meaningless, when governments have been powerless, people have sometimes found a way out by changing the subject of their conversation, or the way they talked, or the persons they talked to”. – Conversation, Thomas Zeldin, 1998

"Primates need a third of their time for sleep, and a third of their time to travel and forage for food, so they can afford a mazimum of a thrid of their time for grooming. But as group size increased towards human numbers, the time needed to maintain affectionate relationships exceeded this amount. The solution that Dunbar [Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language] proposed was that, between a quarter-of-and half-a-million years ago in human history, language emerged and enabled conversation to begin to take over the principal function of maintaining relationships. Conversation is verbal grooming... Perhaps people talk about their emotions for reasons Collingwood ascribed to artists...: to make meaningful sense of what they feel. To do this they need to express the emotion in language, the language of conversation. The feeling becomes not just a feeling. It can become consciously understood, and explicitly part of the relationship with the person with whom we are conversing. Conversation is part of our genetically given human adaptation: a part in which we can more reliably attain purposes that are human rather than those of our selfish replicators, our genes. This occurs because in the comparisions of conversations, we explore and definte amongst ourselves what it is to be human". - Keith Oatley.

Thoughts are Signature Bearers

"Most of our thinking carries us away from the present moment. We get lost in the past and the future. This kind of thinking prevents us from being truly alive. In this context we can say: "I think, therefore I am not there." But there is also positive thinking that helps us look into the nature of things and understand the present moment.

In Buddhism, we call this kind of thinking "right thinking." What is right thinking? It is the kind of thinking that helps you to understand more deeply, to be loving, to be compassionate, to be free. Right thinking reflects our deep understanding of reality. Right thinking reflects a situation as it is, free from wrong perceptions. It is possible to train ourselves to set our thinking right.

When painters create pieces of art, they always sign their names. In your daily life you produce thinking, speech, and action. Your thoughts are your creation and they always bear your name. If your thinking is right thinking, it is a good work of art. If you can produce a thought that is in the direction of understanding and compassion, that is your creation, your legacy. Looking into your thinking, whether it is right or wrong, we see your signature. Thsi is why in our daily life we have to be careful to produce thoughts that are in line with right thinking. You have an opportunity to produce right thinking in every moment of your life. It is what you transmit to your children and to the world.

Everything you say is also a product of your person. What you say may cause a lot of anger, despair, and pessimism, and that, too, bears your signature. With mindfulness, you can produce loving thought and speech that will bear your signature. "

Excerpt from Keeping the Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh

Oceanic Paintings by Kurt Jackson

Click here to view:
Mordros: The Sound of the Sea Online Only Granta

"Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future; we enter it with the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by it's content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere."
- from Eye of Spirit, by Ken Wilber

Addressing the Roots of Violence

"In law enforcement, detention centers, and prisons, we try to suppress symptoms of violence. At the same time, we allow violence to be fed in our daily life - in our family, in our school, in our society. It does not mean much to try to suppress the symptoms. You have to deal with the roots. Suppressing violence with violence does not make any sense, becase the person in charge of suppressing violence may have a lot of hatred, fear, and despair within himself.

That is why we have to reconsider our approach. We have to bring a spiritual dimension to our way of working, and of solving problems. This does not mean that we have to be religious. We have our human nature. We have our animal nature. We have our Buddha nature, our spiritual nature. It's possible that the human nature and the Buddha nature can live together with the animal nature in peace. This is called civilisation. We still keep our animal nature, but it is under control. It doesn't have to suffer. We enjoy transformation and healing. We have to organise our life - individual, family, institutional, societal - in the light of that kind of insight.

We don't like terrorism. We don't like people terrorising us, attacking us, killing us. We declare war on terrorism. We want to strike at terrorism. We want to use violence to deal with violence, to suppress symptoms of violence. Every spiritual tradition can tell you that using violence to suppress violence is not the right thing to do, because it will never bring peace. The desire to remove violence and terrorism is a good desire. It is authentic, legitimate. But the means that we use in order to remove violence and terrorism should be effective. By using violence to suppress violence we create more violence....if we have some time to look, we will realise that only understanding and compassion can neutralise violence. Violence only adds to violence and creates more hatred, more enemies, more terrorists. This is a fact. If you look deeply into the situation, this is clear.

We are so busy with our daily lives. We have allowed the situation to become what it is now. The siutuation is a collective creation of our mind. We have voted for our Congress. We have voted for our government. But we have not had the time to help them, to support them, to offer them insight. We leave everything to them. Each of us should organise our life is such a way that we have the time to be in the here and the now, to touch reality deeply, to get understanding and insight. Insight is nourishment for our life. But it is also a contribution to our society. The collective insight that we offer will serve as the light to lead the nation and the world out of this difficult situation..."

Excerpt from Keeping the Peace (2005) by Thich Nhat Hanh

Give Peace a Chance

The Intention Experiment is embarking on a series of scientific studies to determine whether ‘group mind’ has the power to increase peace and cooperation in war-torn areas around the world experiencing high levels of conflict and violence.

Lynne McTaggart, architect of the experiments and author of the best-selling book The Intention Experiment, has enlisted a team of internationally recognized scientists from University of California, Princeton University and University of Arizona and elsewhere, to help design these studies.

Although many meditation groups and other peace initiatives are being formed and studied, the Peace Intention Experiment represents the first scientific study of whether collective targeted intention can restore peace.

This project was sparked by the numerous Transcendental Meditation studies showing that when a critical mass of meditators regularly meditate in an area, the crime rate goes down.
The TM organization has also targeted global conflict. In 1983 a special TM assembly met in Israel to attempt to use meditation to resolve the Palestinian conflict. During their sessions, they made daily comparisons between the number of meditators working on the project and the state of Arab–Israeli relations. On days with a high number of meditators, fatalities in Lebanon fell by 76 per cent. Ordinary violence – local crime, traffic accidents and fires – also all decreased.

But the TM studies mostly concern group attention. In many instances, the meditators are not people who maintain a focused intention to change something else. The Peace Intention Experiment will take their work one step further by examining what happens when a large group sends a highly specific intention to make a change.

The first study will begin on September 14, 2008, to tie in with the Unity Church’s Eleven days of Unity, and run for 10-minute intervals each day at the same time for one week.

To participate, sign on here: http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/peace/about.htm

There is a Light That Never Goes Out

(The Smiths performing live in Nottingham in 1986)

Take me out tonight
Where there's music and there's people
And they're young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one
Anymore

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please don't drop me home
Because it's not my home, it's their
Home, and I'm welcome no more

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care
And in the darkened underpass
I thought Oh God, my chance has come at last
(But then a strange fear gripped me and I
Just couldn't ask)

Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one, da ...
Oh, I haven't got one

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Oh, There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out

- The Smiths

(Morrissey sang this as the encore for his show in Tel Aviv on 29th July, telling the Israeli audience beforehand, "all of you, you are the light that never goes out")

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas Movie

Last night as a member of Amnesty International, which benefitted from ticket sales, I attended the world premiere of the new film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The story has become already extremely popular through the book of the same name on which it is based, written by John Boyne. Both the author and director Mark Herman said a few words.

Shooting from one of the hardest-hitting angles on the implications of the Holocaust, it is based on the accidental stolen friendship that develops between the spoilt 8-year-old son of one of the soldiers running a nearby concentration camp, and a Jewish boy of the same age who meets him at the edge of the barbed-wire fence around that same camp. The unsentimental denouement sends the message that insofar as we treat other people inhumanely, in some way or another we do it to ourselves too.

The outstanding thought is how easily a similar scenario could be imagined between a prosperous Israeli child and an insecure Palestinian boy at the wall recently built between the borders of those two unharmonious states. Both the tensions between neighbours, and the legacy of German atrocities, were daringly and maturely explored in Eytan Fox's 2004 Walk on Water, starring Lior Ashkenazi and written by Gal Uchovsky.

A full house in the Savoy cinema, Dublin, applauded the well-crafted screening of this anti-discrimination script. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was a good choice of partner for Amnesty who deserve the spoils for their work at the forefront of resisting complacency.

- goinghome

The potential to be Messiah

“Now, all right. From what I have heard,” Landsman continues, “and I certainly don’t claim to understand it, your son – as a boy- he showed certain, well, indications, or…that he might be…I’m not sure I have this right. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, is that it? If the conditions were right, if the Jews of this generation were worthy, then he might reveal himself as, uh, as Messiah.”

“It’s ridiculous, nu, Detective Landsman,” the rebbe says. “The very idea makes you smile.”

“Not at all,” Landsman says. “But if your son was Messiah, then I guess we’re all in trouble. Because right now he’s lying in a drawer down in the basement of Sitka General”.

“Meyer,” Berko says.

“With all due respect,” Landsman puts in.

The rebbe doesn’t answer at first, and when he finally speaks, it is with evident care. “We are taught by the Baal Shem Tov, of blessed memory, that a man with the potential to be Messiah is born into every generation. This is the Tzaddik Ha-Dor. Now, Mendel. Mendele, Mendele”.

He closes his eyes. He might be remembering. He might be fighting back tears. He opens them. They’re dry, and he remembers.

“Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not of the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was a fire. This is a cold, dark place, Detectives. A gray, wet place. Mendele gave off light and warmth. You wanted to stand close to him. To warm your hands, to melt the ice on your beard. To banish the darkness for a minute or two. But then when you left Mendele, you stayed warm, and it seemed like there was a little more light, maybe one candle’s worth, in the world. And that was when you realised the fire was inside you all the time. And that was the miracle. Just that”.

Excerpt from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabbon

Only two things are certain in this life

This letter, purportedly issued by the British Inland Revenue Department was reprinted in The Guardian newspaper on 27/9/03.

- Dear Mr Addison,
I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more than prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise.

I will address them, as ever, in order. Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last communication as a “begging letter”. It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a “tax demand”. This is how we, at the Inland Revenue have always, for reasons of accuracy, traditionally referred to such documents.

Secondly, your frustration at our adding to the “endless stream of crapulent whining and panhandling vomited daily through the letterbox on to the doormat” has been noted. However, whilst I have naturally not seen the other letters to which you refer I would cautiously suggest that their being from “pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers” might indicate that your decision to “file them next to the toilet in case of emergencies is at best a little ill-advised.

In common with my own organisation, it is unlikely that the senders of these letters do see you as a “lackwit bumpkin or, come to that, a “sodding charity”. More likely they see you as a citizen of Great Britain, with a responsibility to contribute to the upkeep of the nation as a whole.

Which brings me to my next point. Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay “go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services”, a moment’s rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to “stump up for the whole damned party” yourself.

The estimates you provide for the Chancellor’s disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark. Less than you seem to imagine is spent on “junkets for Bunterish lickspittles” and “dancing whores” whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, “that box-ticking facade of a university system”.

A couple of technical points arising from direct queries:
1. The reason we don’t simply write “Muggins” on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system;

2. You can rest assured that “sucking the very marrows of those with nothing else to give” has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn’t render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.

I trust this has helped. In the meantime, whilst I would not in any way wish to influence your decision one way or the other, I ought to point out that even if you did choose to “give the whole foul jamboree up and go and live in India” you would still owe us the money.

Please forward it by Friday.

Yours Sincerely,

H J Lee -