Our kids are abused by the corporate state from the beginning. Starting with scanning in the womb, hospitalised monitored labour, vaccination and all the antibiotics anti this and that, steroid treatments resulting. Strafed by the television, computer games, advertising, peer pressure and numb parenting - leading to them wanting McDonalds/Disney type happy crap. The addictive quality of child orientated food - perhaps in those undeclared flavourings, formulae all protected. Harry Potter has indeed led to kids of 9 and 10 wanting to read. What's the message? It's repeated on loads of kids cartoons - try watching UBOS on BBC2 at about 07.50. It's a softening up process.

The characters in modern children's cartoons are increasingly evil. Even the "goodies" look evil. Watch Dragonball Z--on cartoon network, it is positively disturbing, it must affect the psyche of the youngsters it's aimed at, the world is always threatened with total annihilation. Our children are fed a daily diet of gratuitous violence, for entertainment. IT'S SICK!

an interesting concept

dear editor, you may recall some time ago (seems like a year or more !) i wrote some articles about what i saw as the pernicious effect and worrying implications of the harry potter 'phenomenon', which was attached to your "debate" page, now seemingly defunct, unless i just cant find it. perhaps it might be worth reattaching the discourse here, for i'm most glad that people are waking up to the perils of commercial fiction.

yours, vince