We need to start taking the garbage out more often. Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) says so. We have to compost. This could end up being a challenge. In our house the question “Is this food?” doesn’t always have a binary answer.
“Is this caked-on stuff on the floor food or a potential pet?” “Where does the food in the container in the back of the refrigerator end and the container begin?” “Can’t I just call this plastic container food? It was once hadrosaur food, wasn’t it? I don’t want to open it right now. Ever.”
It’s really nice of SPU to offer to give me a free kitchen compost container, which I can conveniently obtain by simply flying my AirCar to the South Transfer Station near South Park and showing them my get-one-compost-pail-free coupon. Only, my AirCar is in the shop, darn it.
Speaking of taking out the garbage, there have been some news stories that have annoyed us lately that have been sitting around the house and need to be dealt with. Some of these will take more strength than I have today. I don’t see myself trying to find amusement in the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo any time soon, for example. Let’s see what else is lying around.
Here’s one. Your United States Supreme Court was a bad court last month. Your bad court said 8-to-1 that it was all right to use evidence obtained from an unjustified traffic stop if the officer making the stop was a dodo brain. Only my own Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, disagreed with this bad decision.
I know what everyone is thinking right now. “Why don’t you just switch to the legal weed, Wes? You shouldn’t be carrying those hard drugs around. You’ll get in trouble.” It’s true, I shouldn’t have anything to hide. We should walk around naked and hand over all our personal effects to any jackass in a uniform because jackasses in uniforms are just like doctors: They’ve seen it all, and they’re all dispassionate professionals.
But, seriously, I had two police officers threaten to take me in for having taken one of my shoes off in an alley and putting it back on. If removing and replacing a shoe can constitute incriminating evidence, how can I possibly avoid being arrested for some fool’s idiot idea of “suspicious behavior” or “suspicious contraband”?
“But, officer, it says on the bottle it’s styptic powder.” “Exactly. I’m taking you in for illegal possession of styptic.”
But now it’s worse. Until last month’s decision, the understanding we had was that if the police officer stopped you in error and searched your car or whatever, found some powder and arrested you, that not only would he be laughed at if the powder turned out to be styptic, but even if it was illegal powder the evidence could not be used in court because the stop wasn’t justified. And if the stop wasn’t justified then the search wasn’t justified.
After all, they are already stretching the Fourth Amendment to allow searches of your car on the spot anyway. A traffic stop is hardly a substitute for a warrant. If an officer has reason to suspect a crime was committed, he could arrest you for that, have the car impounded and then a warrant could be obtained and the impounded car searched. But, no, it was decided years ago that following the U.S. Constitution that far was just boring.
So they let the police search without a warrant, based on some principle that if you’re driving in a car on a public street you’re “asking for it.” But they had left this one slim protection in lieu of not requiring a warrant, namely the provision that if the stop wasn’t justified then the tacit presumption that a warrant would be issued also wasn’t valid and so the evidence wasn’t evidence. Make sense?
Except now, there’s no Fourth Amendment on the road. Good thing the Constitution is compostable.