Watching our government in action is truly a remarkable sight. Yesterday, congress convened to hear vote on and hear amendments on the “Stop Online Piracy Act” otherwise known by it's catchy name SOPA. A name that no doubt conjures images of slightly overweight Greek Americans, shouting at a flaming piece of cheese. Thoughts like this are strangely apt for our congress.

During yesterdays cheese shouting, the idiots met in a big ornate room to argue whether or not big immortal people, who are made up of normal sized mortals should have carte blanche to shut down a website.

A quick crash course for you “non-nerds” out there. A website is like a scrap book page, electronically put on to a thinking machine. You can “click” in things on the page, and they take you to other pages. These “sites” go on the “internet,” which is easily described as: a big net.

Some of you may say:” big whoop” or, “what's the problem? Why do we need this?” Well as far I can tell this is a bill to stop people from infringing on copyrights. Apparently there is a big problem where people get things off of websites without paying for them. Some of the very intelligent primates who support this bill, say that pirating things online is like going into a store, and stealing it, an act that is apparently illegal as well. Well those people are wrong, it is not like stealing from a store IT IS EXACTLY like stealing from a store. I have read somewhere that when a giant immortal American puts a movie on the big net, (the immortal in this example is the MPAA, which stands for "Morkreth the Punisher, Archduke of Agrathia") they only put something like a million downloads up for that film. And they have to keep copying the movie off DVD's or tapes or whatever to get more downloads. So if you download without paying for it you are LITERALLY stealing it in the most ancient sense of the idea, and action of stealing.

Understandably "Morkreth, he who makes pictures come to life" is upset that this nonsense is happening, and congress is rightly taking swift, brutal, and unapologetic action. Unfortunately this bill in it's current state, can do some collateral damage to people and companies that have done nothing wrong. The most awesome part of the bill says that if you make a website where people can make dumb videos of their friends getting hurt, and someone uses copyrighted material in their dumb video, then the all of the “supremely powerful immortal giant persons made of people” can vaporize your whole site. That includes the stuff that was just dumb, and had nothing to do with their immaculate supreme copyrighted product, now on sale for $19.95

That brings me back to congress, many trained mammals can see that this might give a bit too much power to the super persons, who are exempt from criminal prosecution, and completely lacking morals. So a small band of congress people, tried to explain that this could prevent anyone from making any creative sites that host user generated content, because as soon as anything under copyright is used, even if it is changed enough to merit artistic expression, will be photon torpedoed into oblivion. This leaves us only with sites made by the all powerful overlords, may their reign last the lifetime of a thousand suns.

The bigger group of congress people were proud of the proton charged, laser sighted, missile launching, chainsawing, mega cannon of a bill that they had drafted. After all they had written it using a higher ratio of complete sentences and there was barely a subject verb disagreement to be found. But then these other congress people had to try and ruin everything, they couldn't just say no to the bill, because there were too few of them, so they tried to change it.

“You want to take off the chainsaw?! That's the best damn part!”

“Well maybe if we introduced a version of the bill that doesn't shoot missiles at small entrepreneurial upstarts trying something fresh and creative.”

“If you take out the missiles... then... then that would defeat the whole purpose of the bill!”

“Well can we at least agree that the bill should not give anyone, all the powers of the werewolf, with, and I quote: none of the weaknesses, specifically silver?”

And so it went on, one group demanding that their perfect internet death machine remain uncorrupted and terrifying, while another pleaded that they remove parts of the bill that do the most damage. Finally after almost a full day of arguing, both sides agreed that they know almost nothing about the internet, and postponed the discussion to bring in experts. Yes, it took them over twelve hours to think of experts, but then again, they aren't experts on experts, so you can't really blame them.