Hannah knows I’m much more agreeable to certain suggestions than her mother. So Hannah has asked me on multiple occasions if I’ll take her to the candy store. But she has a particular candy store in mind. Usually the conversation goes something like this:
Hannah: Daddy, I wanna go to the candy store, please.
Me: What candy store?
Hannah: The pink and white candy store.
Me: Where is it?
Hannah: It’s on the sidewalk.
I have not figured out much beyond that. I’ll ask her where the sidewalk is, and we go around and around that it’s near the candy store.
My current theory is that it’s a recurring dream of hers. She wakes up and remembers the dream, and asks about it. The reason I think it’s a dream is because when she talks about it, she hold her and up to her face and makes the OK sign. Frequently, she’ll do this when recalling a visual aspect of something in her mind. It is not necessarily something that doesn’t exist. She’ll recall seeing something real this way too.
I’m not entirely sure she made it up, but that seems like the most likely scenario at the moment. I have to be careful about injecting my own ideas into this. So I decided to interview her to see if I could get to the bottom of this mystery. You’ll notice my line of questioning takes two kinds of approach. Sometimes I’ll suggest an idea which she confirms or denies. Sometimes I ask more open-ended questions for her to fill in the blanks.
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I don’t usually taste beer in my perfect beaker, but this is a kind of beer that deserves very little respect.
It’s a gimmick can. The color is a clear copper, which is also a gimmick because the can said they use artificial caramel coloring. It has a sorta whitish head. Slightly grainy/citrus aroma and flavor with a dry finish and lasting bitter/graininess. I think the bitter is from the artificial color, maybe. Thin texture and moderate carbonation. I sabotaged the lacing with my (plastic) beaker.
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Lieutenant Stephen D’anjou says that the suspicionless checkpoint (covered previously) was announced to the Daily Breeze on September 2nd. Again, I find no mention on the Daily Breeze website, so we still have an effective Internet blackout of this information.
The Lieutenant believes it was also posted on Torrance Police Department website, but he said the website program never published it. An honest mistake. I’ve seen first hand that this can be a common mistake in any web publishing environment.
But there’s something else I’d like to point out. See if you can tell the difference between the two announcements. One announcement was for the 11th, the other was for June 19th.
The information published about June 19th, 2009 listed the intersection as well as the time. But the information published about September 11th, 2009 does not list the intersection.
It’s already beyond recognition of what it was originally. They’re just going to keep tweaking and modifying this.
If you still don’t understand why this is bad, please review my previous article on the subject. Also consider an article called “Bloodsuckers in Blue” on Lew Rockewell’s web site.
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Last night, I observed a suspicionless checkpoint on Artesia going eastbound toward Van Ness. All eastbound traffic was being stopped. A lot of cars were being towed.
I contacted Torrance Police Department to inquire as to why these activities were not announced ahead of time. The initial response from Lieutenant Stephen D’anjou (via Blackberry) was that the press release was sent out last week.
I believe Lieutenant D’anjou is mistaken. I checked the Torrance PD web site and no such press release was listed on their press release page. Maybe a press release was sent out but just not posted on the web page. The local paper would have gotten a copy if that’s the case.
But this is not the case from what I can tell. Daily Breeze (the local newspaper in Torrance) has announcements for other such activity in the past, but not the one regarding last night. Was it announced only in hard copies of the newspaper? Is this an Internet blackout?
Yet indeed, here is a view of the actual suspicionless checkpoint from the corner of Artesia and Van Ness, looking back to the west:
This is a shot of the parking lot next to the activity:
Torrance Police Department believes the “DUI” checkpoint is a proven effective method for increased awareness of the dangers of impaired driving.
In the past, by publicizing these enforcement and education efforts, Torrance Police Department believes motorists can be deterred from drinking and driving.
Typically, funding for these kinds of operations is provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But last night, they broke from their previous motivation and imposed the suspicionless checkpoint without even prior notice.
Whatever your belief of the effectiveness of these suspicionless checkpoint, know this. It is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution to demand evidence of a crime without probable cause. The suspicionless checkpoint, by definition, lacks probable cause.
It is much easier to introduce an intrusive measure by watering down the most intrusive aspects. It is harder to be against suspicionless checkpoints when they are announced ahead of time. But is easy to just stop announcing them once they become commonplace.
We are no longer on our way to a police state. We live in a police state now. It’s only going to get worse.
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