IoS letters, emails & online postings (29 July 2012)

Your leading article "Ready, steady... go!" (22 July) is oddly convincing. If the Olympic Games will really reap some £6bn of benefit to Britain, then I promise to stop whingeing for the duration after one last big whinge.

Please, do stop being so unreasonable in asking me to have a "surprisingly good time". To support the Olympics because they benefit us (which I doubt since I do not see any benefit to the little person in McDonald's, Coca-Cola and other multinationals cornering the market) I can tolerate. To be asked to "enjoy" the Games is a step too far. Ten million people watching the torch's progress is an embarrassment, since all it showed is sheep unthinkingly following the crowds. Similarly with the meaningless Games themselves. Thankfully, we live in a democracy which allows us to bestow venomous hatred liberally on all sporting activities.

Right! Whingeing button off. Henceforth, I will be hiding in my garden. Food parcels without McDonald's or Coke, please. Just an east London punnet of chips... if ever it can be found and if Lord Coe allows.

Dr Faysal Mikdadi

Dorchester, Dorset

Your front-page headline "Welcome to the capital of the world" (22 July) is just the sort of self-aggrandising, self-promoting, self-regarding narcissistic nonsense which alienates London from the rest of us.

As someone who travels occasionally, I am often told (by people from London, of course) that "London is the engine which drives the British economy". And they are right – London has driven the British economy into the ground!

Between the spivs and professional gamblers in the City and a bunch of millionaires in Parliament, the rest of us have been brought to our financial knees, while London will benefit from massive investment in the Olympics.

M J Tuckwell

via email

Matt Chorley's story about geothermal energy is excellent news ("Cheap power under our feet", 22 July). A pity it comes on the same week that we learned that the Government was courting the Chinese in a bid to have them build a new range of nuclear power plants in the UK.

We should be investing our money into the development of technologies such as geothermal energy that are sustainable in the long term and not investing in other peoples' technologies.

DJT1million

posted online

Here in France, a country that is a larger beneficiary of the European Union CAP subsidy than the UK, a litre of fresh semi-skimmed milk is around €1.10 to €1.29 (86p to £1.01) in the supermarkets ("Morrisons backs down on cut-price milk", 22 July). There is also not much on display in the majority of supermarkets because most French people drink UHT, which is a lot cheaper. In fact the range of cream products for such a culinary nation is woeful.

Colin Stone

Oxford and France

Jewish voters in the United States may be mathematically insignificant, but Christian fundamentalist conservative evangelicals in the US aren't ("Today Jerusalem. Tomorrow Washington?", 22 July). And Christian evangelicals of that ilk are fanatically pro-Israel.

It's a marriage of convenience. The ideologies of the two factions, at bottom, are radically incompatible and opposed; Christian evangelicals, indeed, believe that Israel has to be restored before the Final Judgement can take place, and at that judgement everyone who won't acknowledge Jesus as God and Saviour will be consigned to hell for eternity – which would include Jews! But, at present, the agendas of the two sides converge, on something like the principle that "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Just for now.

John Bellis

Posted online

If you want an Aids-free generation ("10 steps to an Aids-free generation", 22 July), then surely it is important to reduce people's promiscuity which makes them more likely to get the disease, whether gay or straight?

Tim Mickleburgh

Grimsby, Lincolnshire

There are so many things that upset me and disgust me in this world. The naked rambler (22 July) is not one of them – let him roam free.

Forber

Posted online

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Letters to the Editor, The Independent on Sunday, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5HF. Email: sundayletters@independent.co.uk. Online: independent.co.uk/dayinapage/2012/July/29