Death by a thousand stupidities

It was G.K. Chesterton who once said that when you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws. The big law that our enlightened and hip post-modern culture got rid of some time ago was the law of common sense.  After all, you can't *prove* common sense, can you?  You can't win arguments with it.  You certainly can't win court cases with it. Nor can you defend yourself in court cases with it.  Hence, we have protection against litigation.  Everything has to have something to protect itself, no matter how ludicrous, and the slightest bit of research that suggests squares are round receives a hat tip over common sense that suggests squares can't be round.  So we end up with little stories like this on a daily basis.  Consent forms?  In the day, I'm not sure they even had consent forms.  When I was young, my Mom doesn't remembering signing such things for us.  If our picture inadvertently appeared in the newspaper, my Mom thought it was good news and told everyone about it.  No forms required.  But in our intellectually superior society, we can't rest on anything so quaint as common sense.  Hence, you have cartoon smiley faces interposed upon the head of a student who failed to provide a consent form to the school for class pictures.  Death by a thousand idiocies will be the epitaph of our nation I'm afraid.