A Three Story Life-Censorship

google wears a black rectangle today. Wikipedia is blacked out (you can still access it from Canada if you're desperate to find information you cannot live without) and I'm thinking about freedom of speech, piracy and censorship. I do not know whether SOPA, PIPA, or LMNOP is good for the internet or not, but I do know that any time government tries to sort something out, it gets tangled tighter. And the bad guys have already figured out a way to get around the law before the last Congressperson has speechified to an empty house on C-Span. My blog is served by google. Just now, the most views I have are from domar (not putting the .ext here to discourage further stupidity), and another long domain name with a slew of forum posts wondering how to get rid of the damn thing. I post art with every blog entry, and the art lives forever on google images. Over 636 images at last count. These are regularly hijacked on the internet high seas, by people who think any art is free to use, entities that spam, and nasty enterprises that use other people's work to flip the viewer to porn or ads. Can I stop it? Nope. Can google or any other provider? Eventually, once there's enough forum traffic to identify a serial spammer. Can the U.S. government stop it? Hell no. Can the U.S. government muck it up so badly that my Dad can't reach his favorite sites without swearing? You betcha. From long personal experience, I know if I try to stop anyone or anything from bad behavior, it just gets worse, whether for me or someone else along the way. Stifle speech, freedom of movement, a sense of forging one's own destiny, and history shows the result repeatedly. Congress needs to make up its collective mind that America is still a free country.