SOPA and PIPA protest

As many may have noticed, yesterday I joined in the protest against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out this website. I realize that may have inconvenienced visitors but I felt a strong statement had to be made. These onerous proposed laws would have really put a damper on free speech and open expression. For an interesting (albeit a little too conspiracy theory for me) perspective on all this read this article.

Ag-gag laws

I find it deeply disturbing. It is being made illegal (and already is in parts) in some states of the United States to tell people how their food is being "produced." This is going to the point of attaching prison time to filming inside slaughterhouses exposing terrible conditions for the animals and workers. Horrible! I wrote about this before but just wanted to reiterate after reading the above linked blog entry. Mark Bittman also recently wrote another, longer blog entry recently about this.