Micro-resistance
Opportunities arise when you do not expect them
I once had lunch with Dustin Hoffman. It was at Morton’s Steakhouse in downtown Chicago. His party was seated at the table right next to mine. He sat with his back to the door, keeping a lower profile, but since I was seated with my back to the wall, we faced each other. He smiled at us when he sat down. Fame is the state of being where lots of people know things about you but you know nothing in particular about them.
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Kristi Noem has recently seen her profile raised as ICE Barbie, the head of the American Gestapo. Photos of her posing inside an El Salvadoran slave camp while wearing body armor and $60,000-worth of Rolex on her wrist
have been used to sell the macho femininity cloaking human rights violations (her photo posing with prisoners a violation of the Geneva Conventions).
Noem had her wallet stolen while celebrating Easter dinner with family at a DC restaurant. This made the news for more than one reason. First, as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, it is her charge to keep America secure. Having her wallet stolen from right next to her undermines her vigilance. Second, the contents of her wallet were a little much. It contained her driver’s license and credit cards, of course, but also her passport, her DHS security badge (the thing that gets her into the Top Secret meeting spaces), her checkbook (Okay, X-er), and $3,000 in U.S. currency. Third, the follow-up story, explicating her reason for carrying a literal stack of cash around downtown DC on a Sunday night was her plan to pay for dinner and Easter gifts.
Here’s where they were eating dinner…
With $20 burgers and $15 “boozy shakes,” Noem could have treated a party of 50 and still been able to tip the staff over $1,000 in cash.
It’s got to be rough, being the doctored-up face of Fascist Deportation and trying to find a DC restaurant that does not employ recent immigrants. Not least for the chance you might be caught frequenting an establishment employing folks your boss claims are an invading army. There’s also a lot of faith demonstrated by eating food prepared by a person who perhaps knows you want him and his family to be deported without a trial. A LOT of faith.
We don’t know for certain how much cash was in Kristi Noem’s wallet, and given the people she works with, we will never be sure of the truth. Opportunistic insurance fraud is certainly a possibility—it’s the very opposite of unthinkable. Surround yourself with thieves and grifters and do not be surprised when you are suspected to be one, too.
But what else might be bought in downtown DC on an Easter Sunday evening, with $3,000 in cash? Friends on social media have offered three suggestions:
Cocaine
Escorts, and
Protection.
The first two would involve Noem doing the buying; the last one, the selling. Those selfsame restaurants where employers rely on illegal labor are in exactly the same position as the Bamboo Lounge’s owner in Goodfellas, but with Kristi as the one saying, “Fuck you. Pay me.”
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Purse-snatching is a crime of opportunity. There is little chance the patron sitting close enough to Noem to do the pilfering planned to rob whatever woman would be seated at the table next to him, as he was heading to Sunday dinner. He just found himself with the opportunity to offer a little resistance, and took it. Maybe Noem is still North Dakota dusty enough to flash a $3,000 wad of cash in public, but I doubt it. The thief likely had no idea of the contents of her wallet. I hope the $3,000 ends up with the ACLU.
I, on the other hand, knew that wannabe Drug Czar Kevin Sabet was lying when he claimed that one of the two bags of candy he was holding was “sprayed with THC,” so when I stole them both, I knew what wasn’t in the bags. Mine, too, was a crime of opportunity, and I was seeking to embarrass the owner of the pilfered property. Sabet had spent his portion of the prior hour warning of the dangers of THC, had claimed no one could tell which candy had been tainted, and then stopped caring about the danger, once the cameras were off. Excerpted video and my confessional below:
I brought some props, if that’s okay. I think parents should ask themselves whether they can tell which bag of candy here is marijuana and which one isn’t…If you can tell, if you can’t tell, which you probably can’t, I bet you your kid can’t tell either. When these things are lying around—the reason the emergency room admissions in Colorado for kids under five … has gone up significantly, uh, doubled, is because these kinds of things are lying around that are marketed—of course they’re marketed to young people, and young people are ingesting them.They are essentially—again, one of them is real and one of them isn’t—they are the real candy here that are simply sprayed with THC. And there’s no way to tell the difference.
“THE TEST RESULTS ARE IN: PROHIBITIONISTS LIE”
Written by DR. KEITH SAUNDERS
Posted October 5, 2016
The candy was just laying there, in two bags, at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Columbia Point in Boston. Dr. Kevin Sabet, a self-styled “drug expert,” avid prohibitionist, and assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida, had waved the treats around during a September 21 forum on cannabis legalization hosted by WGBH News. Sabet claimed one of the bags contained THC-laced candies that posed a danger to children, but then stepped away from the alleged edibles to engage in conversation. After he abandoned his “dangerous” substance for a couple minutes—plenty long enough for a child to get into the bags and eat a handful—I decided to secure those candies, and to bring them for THC testing in a Massachusetts lab. Those results came in this week, but before addressing the purity of Sabet’s stash there are some important things to consider …
Marijuana prohibition is built on lies, from lies about the substance, to misconceptions about its effects on people, to fabrications regarding who users are and their motivations for use. So it should come as little surprise that Dr. Sabet, a notorious fabulist on the anti-cannabis circuit, is gallivanting around with bags of sweets that he apparently bought at an airport candy chain store, and lying to Massachusetts voters as they get ready to vote on the question of legalizing and regulating our state’s existing cannabis market in November.
As a long-time reform advocate, five-term past president of MassCann, and current NORML board member, I do not want to see responsible adults treated as criminals for possessing cannabis. We are able to keep children from mistaking vodka for water, prescription pills for candy, and Ex-Lax for chocolate bars, but the prohibitionists want you to believe that your kids will be in special danger from a $5-per-piece edible that cannot cause a lethal reaction, and that you don’t want them to eat.
This is the 20th anniversary of the re-integration of legal cannabis in America—California legalized medicinal marijuana in 1996, and that whooshing sound is society passing Sabet. Even if otherwise respectable outlets like WGBH continue to give him a platform to rail against increased access to cannabis candies while having to pretend to possess the proof of looming dangers.
Sabet doesn’t even take prohibition seriously himself. For years he advocated in support of sending marijuana users and others to jail, and only recently shifted to mandatory rehab for pot possession. Yet there he was, claiming to be using a counterfeit substance for his own political and personal gains.
I never believed Sabet should face criminal charges, or the rehab he flanks, for that far-off-chance that he actually scored several ounces of edibles. After seeing the results of the tests on his stash, however, I do think he should be prosecuted for proffering a counterfeit substance, which is both a state and federal offense. I think he should be prosecuted for lying with criminal intent for claiming to be in possession of more than an ounce of THC. His words:
“I brought some props, if that’s okay.” [Pulls out a sandwich baggie filled with round candies and a second baggie filled with gummy bears.]
“I think parents should ask themselves whether they can tell which bag of candy here is marijuana and which one isn’t.”
“… If you can tell, if you can’t tell, which you probably can’t, I bet you your kid can’t tell either. When these things are lying around—the reason the emergency admissions in Colorado for kids under five … has gone up significantly, uh, doubled, is because these kinds of things are lying around that are marketed—of course they’re marketed to young people, and young people are ingesting them.”
“They are essentially—again, one of them is real and one of them isn’t—they are the real candy here [motioning with gummy bear bag] that are simply sprayed with THC. And there’s no way to tell the difference.”
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the lab test results showed that Sabet’s candy contained no detectable amount of cannabinoids. In other words, he was lying. I wonder if Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is actively campaigning against Question 4, will prosecute Sabet for his apparent criminal activity, or if she sees it all as an inconsequential game, as long as he is sharing in her opposition. Similar to how the Walpole chief of police was left alone by authorities despite his seemingly transporting edibles from Colorado to Massachusetts to use in a similar demonstration, prohibition laws apparently do not apply to Sabet.
The funniest part? Sabet called on local TV reporters to check the video, claiming, “Someone stole the edibles.” Turning this into something bigger than a joke among myself and a small circle of reform activists.
#BankruptElon