ALEC and the Beast.

I hope I can be forgiven for bringing this up out of phase with fashion, because it's not about a crime wave that isn't happening or Republican intransigence or the psychotic fugue brigade out to prove Obama is Satan's evil twin.

It's about pigs.  Perhaps it's because I enjoyed a piece of bacon for breakfast and shortly before viewing this video.  It's not that I'm against eating meat.  If farm animals are given a better but shorter life, free of the constant fear and the disease and parasites and hunger that define the lives of wild beasts, I can live with it.  What I can't live with is the brutality quite on a par and sometimes worse than what happened at Sobibor or Auschwitz.

I don't want to eat something that was skinned alive or that lived its entire life unable to move or that died in prolonged screaming agony.  Pigs are intelligent as animals go and yet people who get all moon eyed at kittens and puppies which may be less intelligent and aware, are themselves unaware of piglets being tossed around with pitchforks like dead meat or tossed squealing into machines of slaughter. None of that is necessary.  There are ways to slaughter animals without pain or terror and to raise them without extreme misery.  But no, it's not just about pigs, at least not the four-legged kind. It's about the monsters who own these houses of horror, the factory farms, the slaughter houses that not only scoff at the law, but want to put you in jail if you expose the satanic operations that sicken any but the most depraved and inhuman amongst us.

ALEC, a conservative business advocacy group is attempting to criminalize meat industry employees who might neglect to tell an employer how they feel about the illegal torture and abuse of animals on job applications. I'm talking about laws that mandate jail time for filming illegal activities and fulfilling a legal requirement to report them to authorities. Yes, it's already a jail-time crime in some states to expose the crimes of your employer and ALEC seems to want a country where although the government can capriciously carry on surveillance and seizure over individuals, the privacy of meat packers is sacred no matter how many heinous offenses to decency they commit.

There must be something we can do, short of  taking the family Kalashnikov down to the farm and expressing your opinion ballistically.  There are congressmen, senators and others who may under duress be tempted to ignore the blood soaked contributions of  slaughterhouses and factory farms.  Some of them can read.  Some of them do read -- and you can write, can't you?