I couldn't agree more. I can't find the remote fast enough to switch to another channel when an NSPCC ad comes on.

And I also found this piece of 'research' dubious in its conclusions, and just adding another flail to the Guardian/Observer collection of things we parents should beat ourselves up with. The researcher clearly had a point she wanted to prove with her research - namely that children should be allowed to express themselves freely otherwise they will be repressed adults, and therefore found evidence of stress in children's brain patterns when children are told not to cry or throw a tantrum. Personally, I think learning to repress wilder emotions is one of the important skills to learn in order to become a civilised adult. More repression would be helpful, it seems to me, looking at the way many adults now behave.

Two contrasting articles in the latest Business Week, Speed Bumps on the Road to More Jobs and Britain's Amazing Job Machine.

Actually (with no evidence other than my own experience, conversations with friends and what I've read), I think there's a jobless recovery going on in both countries for similar reasons. Key quote in the US article is "businesses are getting around these costs [health insurance and social security] by depending more on contract workers and temporary help." My American aunt and uncle both confirmed to me this weekend that health insurance costs are a big consideration for US firms these days, and I suppose not such a concern for UK companies, thanks to the NHS.

But I think the supposedly healthy rate of UK job creation could prove to be a bit of a red herring as well. Key points in the article about the UK are: "over the last seven years, public sector employment across Britain has risen by 7% to 5.3 million" (that's nearly 10% of the UK population, and nearly 15% of the working population folks). How much longer will this be the case once Gordon Brown's reorganisation of the civil service takes effect? Not to mention the large amounts of money swilling around in the public sector for employing private sector consultants (yes, thanks very much, XXXX development agency paid a lot of my mortgage last year too). This might get cut as well. The other factor mentioned is the creation of more jobs in the City - again. Well, easy come, easy go.

My experience, from which I am therefore extrapolating big time, is that the UK looks healthy jobwise because large numbers of white collar professionals did not bother to sign on when they became unemployed over the last 3 years, and are now self employed. And companies are quite happy with being able to buy little bits of people, without having them on the payroll. When they do hire, they are very very specific about what they want. Similarly the self employed have to be very very specific about what skills they have to offer. And the longer you are self employed, the less likely you are to have the specific skills wanted by companies for their full timers (must have managed X number of people, budget of X million, worked in a large US multinational etc).
I'm not saying this is a bad thing - being self employed has lots of pluses. But you do miss out on the health insurance, pension, maternity leave, nursery vouchers etc etc - a substantial proportion of the related benefits that the government has introduced to help working parents. So my big plea to the UK government is to recognise this trend, and make sure that all the child related benefits are available to the self employed.

OK so I am quoting Michael Portillo with approval. I am beyond help. Actually my liking for him has been sneaking slowly up on me, compounded by that TV programme a few months' back when he tried being a single parent mother of several children for a week. Anyway, he wrote an article for the Sunday Times yesterday where he talks plainly but with feeling about his Spanish family, and going to the vigil outside the London Spanish embassy. The final few paragraphs are the ones that caused me to cut the article out.

I guess it may have been Al-Qaeda and I guess they may wish to intimidate the public in every democracy so as to weaken the efforts of their governments in fighting back against terror. It’s important we get something straight. No country can opt out of the struggle against terror, sitting on the sidelines like a wallflower at a village dance.
The Saudis who were blown up in Riyadh and the Moroccans slaughtered in Casablanca were not murdered because their governments stood shoulder-to-shoulder with America in Iraq. They were massacred because Al-Qaeda aims to replace their governments with fundamentalist regimes. Terrorism did not start when we ousted Saddam. It didn’t even begin with September 11, 2001. New York was attacked when America was perceived to be unwilling to defend itself, after a decade of weak responses to Al-Qaeda atrocities and to defiance from Saddam.
The terrorists offer us no way out. They do not guarantee that if we distance ourselves from America or bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians they will leave us alone. Appeasement would make us more vulnerable, not less.

This is why I started this blog I guess. Despite being educated and articulate, I don't seem to be able to express myself very well when it comes to politics, which is why despite my political activism, I never tried to become an MP - I couldn't face Question Time. I have an aversion to political arguments. But I do want to argue against a lot of things that chattering, liberal middle class people like me are supposed to believe unquestioningly - namely the evils of globalisation, multinationals, GM food and now the war on terrorism. So with a blog I get to quote those people that do articulate these arguments so much better than I would, and I suppose try to formulate or re-articulate those arguments for myself.

I regard fatness as an input and output problem - like most sane nutritionists who don't have some sort of complex about multinational food companies and an insufferably smug look about them (perhaps not funding their research as much as they'd like?). I agree that the USA has an input and output imbalance - any European who has eaten in a restaurant there (that isn't Chez Panisse or similar - nostalgic sigh) will have noted the huge portions. Similarly the sizes of things in American supermarkets is quite mind boggling - chips, dips, icecream etc.

I really do think in European we are getting our knickers into a twist about the input side though - particularly with regard to our children. Yes they may watch junk food ads and be influenced by them but most non-paranoid parents are grateful for their little ones to eat anything, don't want to give them a complex about food and think "well if you can't eat Rocky Road icecream now, when can you?" Where I do get all fascistic is the issue of output - the parental paranoia that stops them from letting their children go outside to play in the street or park on their own, that makes them drive right up to the zig zag yellow lines or double yellows on a corner nearest their school at breakneck speed (yes crazed Windlesham Mercedes mother I am talking about you) because a bus is too 'common 'and bicycling or walking might possibly be dangerous. Dangerous because you might mow them down in your 4x4 with kangaroo bars.

So no to junk food taxes and bullying stores into removing their snack bars from the check outs and yes to making it as difficult as possible for people to drive themselves and their children to work and school. Walk, get exercise, meet your neighbours, note the passing of the seasons....

My local junior school does both - they have a crocodile for children to join in to walk to school (hurrah) and are now trying to bully the school and local council into going organic (oh great, so my child gets to eat unadulterated 'natural' sulphates with his organic locally produced celeriac - all the way through winter). I would predict in ten years time the graduates of our local junior school will have learnt only too well the joys of using food as a weapon. I just hope we've moved or we've managed to persuade our son to enjoy his food, and play lots of sport and not get neurotic and aneroxic and dazzled by crap science.

There has been an outbreak of bloggers (unfortunately ones I enjoy: Au Currant, James Lileks (still blogging - writes for a living, but wife has just got a job, so constant apologies for blogging less) and Socialism in an Age of Waiting) saying that they are suspending blogging or dramatically decreasing their output, due to having work to do. Hypothesis: rise of blogging was due to unemployment of knowledge workers and assorted computer geeks - now these people are finally working again, blogging will die down, apart from those who write for a living anyway.

New Covent Garden Soup Company gets duffed up by something called Consensus Action on Salt and Health for having 'too much' salt in its soups. CASH's website violates various principles of good website design - nothing to tell you who they are or how to contact them (they just describe themselves as "a group of specialists") There are various dead-end pages - where you click to then can't click back to the home page. Grocer's apostrophes also make a few appearances. Also I wonder what the www.hyp.ac.uk part of their URL refers to - if you click on it you just get a set of folders and directories that you obviously aren't supposed to see. ac would suggest academic. University of Hype? Ah I've just found via Google that CASH is headed by Graham MacGregor, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at St. Georges Hospital, London, who is also President of the Hypertension Society. So this is his life's work, and he ain't going to give up in a hurry, even if anyone proves him wrong.

New Covent Garden Soup Company is a nice scalp to claim of course, because the company used to be much loved by the organic food eating worried middle classes but now it's owned by an evil multinational - Singapore Food Industries.

Apparently public health minister Melanie Johnson has given processed food producers until February 27 to prove to her they mean to cut salt or she has warned tough measures could follow.

All this happened to coincide with my reading a chapter on salt in Jeffrey Steingarten's book "The Man Who Ate Everything". He says of the the Intersalt survey of 1988 which conducted surveys in 32 countries around the world to examine the link between salt and hypertension, that "the results were extremely distressing to those who had hoped to prove a link, once and for all, between salt and blood pressure." It did show that the more salt people eat, on average, the more likely it is their blood pressure will increase as they grow older. But it's not hugely significant - if everyone in the US slashed his or her salt consumption from 8 grams a day to 2, the average blood pressure would go down by only 2%. Losing weight and cutting back alcohol are much more important contributors to lowering blood pressure. Some people are extremely sensitive to salt - about 8% of the US population apparently. "The other 92% of us can handle just about all the salt we feel like eating".

It's not just Jeffrey Steingarten that says don't panic.

Tricky this one - I'm married to a teacher but also worried what will happen when our young 'un stops going to nursery and starts at primary school and wants to come home at 3pm.... A lot of teachers already have very long hours for little pay (ie the hubby - but then it's mostly GCSE and A/S level pupils that make him stay late, he's not a primary school teacher). I'd happily pay 80 quid a week for the little chap to hang out with his mates for a bit longer whilst we put in a full day of work. Much cheaper than the 700 quid or so a month I pay for his nursery right now.

Hah! and Hah! again. But those who wish to believe that we are all getting sick thanks to evil (= American) multinationals profiting from drugs and processed foods will continue to believe this whatever the evidence.

Naomi Klein says in The Grauniad that those who supported the Iraq invasion should recant, because the civilian body count has just topped 10,0000 according to Iraq Body Count. She thinks the Iraq Body Count lot are authoritative - a description disputed by Oliver Kamm and Iain Murray in the past.

She also gets indignant about "the US actively and openly rewarding itself with huge reconstruction contracts". Umm, presumably as in paid for by US taxpayers' money, and also not in anyway likely to recompense the US for the cost of the invasion in the first place (the U.S. Congress appropriated around $160 billion for the conflict as far as I can ascertain - reconstruction contracts awarded this year and next year total $24bn so far). Oh but of course, the US is coining it from Iraq's oil reserves isn't it? Er no - "On an annualized basis, [Iraq] oil exports are running $1.5 billion ahead of projections by U.S. authorities and Iraqi technocrats, who forecast 2004 revenue at $12 billion". Oh I suppose if the US somehow manages to grab all Iraq oil export revenues for the next twenty or thirty years the "Iraq invasion project" might have a positive net present value. No doubt that's the real reason the US invaded - the kind of calculation that is guaranteed to please American voters - not.

I heard this piece on Radio 4's Today programme too, and felt the same way . I found myself wanting to do an impression of Pamela Stephenson on Not The Nine O Clock News from 20 years or so ago, when she played a social worker saying "I know these people, I understand what they have been through and I think we should.... cut their goolies off". I think empathy is important and all too often lacking, but as Josie Appleton says, it can be so narcissistic and ultimately sterile to keep going on about how empathetic one is.