I know, I’m being unfair to real sufferers from paranoia and OCD. But how else to describe these pusillanimous nincompoops? Honestly: I don’t recognize the country I was born in. I know this story is from the Daily Mail ((And they get it wrong by describing this as a “PC” issue, which it isn’t.)), but even so…

A leading children’s author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book – because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.
It is just one of the politically correct (sic) cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.
As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

At least these idiots are only screwing around with books. Here in the U.S.A., the paranoid idiots are playing games with people’s lives.
UPDATE: This ridiculous dumbing-down of material for children is in full swing on this side of the Atlantic, too. Today’s NYT reports that DVDs of the original Sesame Street are not suitable for children:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
[…]
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Aldous Huxley nailed this ghastly kind of insipid ((As he put it, “All of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”)) mind-control in Brave New World:

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”