Cheeeldren!

Love them or hate them, you're not allowed to kill them.

The Daily Outrage tells us that the bullet-headed brother of someone who has served time for murder has been charged with being a kiddie fiddler. Then, they publish a load of pictures of sleeping babies which could well have been taken directly from Darth Paedo's hard disk. You figure it out.

Actually, the baby photos are harmless. They are the sort of photos everyone's parents love to bring out when their child brings home that first adolescent boy/girl/thing friend. The parents of those particular infants will be able to show off newspaper clippings. Which is cruel but since none of them are me, also very funny.

Real photography rules are: You can take pictures of anyone in public and you don't need their permission. The Daily Mail and practically every other newspaper should be well aware of this because every day they publish pictures their hacks have snapped and nobody would ever give permission for most of them. They range from the embarrassing to the downright humiliating. They even photograph celebrities' children and publish them. It's almost as if someone cares.

There is no special law saying that anyone needs your permission to photograph your child in any public space, but I can say now that you don't need to worry about me doing it. I find spiders, insects and rocks far more interesting subjects. Prettier, too, in many cases. And much quieter.

So it's no surprise that the police dismissed parents' complaints about someone posting photos of school sports day on Farcebook. It's not illegal. The paranoid delusion of the Winghams is breathtaking.

I wonder if modern school sports includes shot-putting and javelin-throwing? Ours did, but I was never involved in sports day because they never included dominos, cribbage, poker or pool. Not even chess. Sports day focused on mindless exercise rather than logical thought. Ours didn't include any shooting even though most of us had airguns. In younger days we'd all had cap guns, pop guns, spud guns and as a last resort, pointy fingers with manually-operated 'Bang!'. Nobody died. No adult seemed even to notice.

Yet now, it seems that children will all demand Uzis for Christmas if they so much as see someone shoot a gun. As JuliaM notes, the future of that particular sport is doomed. No potential Olympic shooter can take an interest if they're not allowed to know the sport exists. The gangsta culture continues as before because shooting at each other is not an Olympic event so they're allowed to keep doing it.

All this in the name of child protection. And yet, babies are paraded around in full view of dribbling molesters while bearing the iCandy label above their heads. By the same parents who will later object to their grown child being photographed running, jumping or looting. Here's a picture to explain how this all looks to me.




Finally, I am going to Hell in business class for laughing at this. Fortunately the child has now been de-obo-fied and is therefore fair game for the Daily Ooo-matron's paedo drooling section. Oddly, the parents have not decried the publication of those images and in fact did, I suspect, actually provide them. Now that is a baby photo that's just waiting for her to bring her very first boyfriend home.

I wonder what she'll make of circuses?