Loose Ends (57)

Scott has his spindle for his accumulated news items, and after nearly two weeks on the road I need a forklift for all of the news items that have landed in my pile. So let’s clear some of them out.

Speaking of forklifts:

Trump Assassination Plot Foiled After Man Stole Forklift to Flip President’s Limo

. . . “The intent was to try to get to the limo, flip the limo and get to the president — he wanted to kill the president,” she said. Leingang tried to escape after the forklift got stuck in a gated area, and was caught by local police, where he allegedly confessed his plan to authorities, including the US Secret Service.

It’s going to take a lot more than a forklift to upend Trump. There is this detail:

A public defender argued in court Leingang was “suffering a serious psychiatric crisis during this incident”, and reportedly started two fires earlier on the same day he stole the forklift.

“Psychiatric crisis”? In other words, you can expect this guy to be in the Democratic presidential field in 2020.

Another day, another campus hate hoax:

Black college lacrosse player, 21, is arrested for spraying N-word and swastika graffiti targeting HIMSELF and other minority students in two incidents that terrorized the campus

A black college lacrosse player has been arrested in connection with two incidents of racist graffiti found in a dorm on the Goucher College campus in Maryland.

Fynn Ajani Arthur, a 21-year-old from Brunswick, Maine, was charged with two counts of malicious destruction of property on Thursday night in Baltimore County.

His arrest came after graffiti aimed at black and Latino students was found on the second floor of a campus dorm, one floor above where similar graffiti had been found on November 14, Goucher College administrators said in a statement.

Despite the fact that this episode, like about 95 percent of all such incidents on campuses these days, was a hoax, the sequel to the story was completely predictable:

Senior Cydnii Jones told the Sun the graffiti incidents were merely symptoms of Groucher’s [sic] larger issue of racism on campus. . .

‘My concern is [officials] will be like: “We got him, we’ve solved all your problems,”‘ Jones said. ‘But this is just the tip of the iceberg.’

A number of students flocked to [a] space on Friday afternoon to sign a list of seven demands.

The demands included the hiring of more black staff on campus, the installation of security cameras in residence halls and the requirement that incoming students take a class on cultural competency.

With CBS’s former CEO Les Moonves being investigated as a Harvey Weinstein-scale sexual predator, this new CBS News news is even more shocking:

CBS paid off ’60 Minutes’ creator’s alleged sex assault victim more than $5 million: probe

An internal investigation of CBS, according to a bombshell report Wednesday, has turned up more allegations of sexual assault from decades ago, as well as a payoff of more than $5 million to the alleged victim of a venerable journalist who died in 2009.

According to The New York Times, a former CBS employee said that “60 Minutes” executive producer Don Hewitt, who created the program in 1968 and produced it for 36 years, sexually assaulted her multiple times and destroyed her career. CBS has paid her for more than 20 years to keep her silent — including as recently as this year, the report said. The settlement, reached in the 1990s, has grown to more than $5 million.

As Glenn Reynolds asks almost daily, why are the leading liberal institutions such cesspits of sexism (and racism, like Groucher College)?

UPDATE: From a reader—this seems right.

Actually, let’s stick with this theme, because the hits just keep coming!

Top Harris Advisor Resigns Over Harassment Settlement. Harris Claims She Didn’t Know.

A longtime staffer for California Democratic Senator Kamala Harris resigned on Wednesday after a harassment and retaliation settlement came to light from his time working in California’s Department of Justice for then-Attorney General Harris.

The Sacramento Bee reports that Larry Wallace, who worked as the director of the Division of Law Enforcement, “was accused by his former executive assistant in December 2016 of ‘gender harassment’ and other demeaning behavior, including frequently asking her to crawl under his desk to change the paper in his printer.”

The lawsuit, which was filed at the very end of 2016, was settled in May 2017 after Wallace transitioned to work for Harris in her new role as a U.S. Senator.

Harris claims she had no knowledge of the incident that happened on her staff.

Changing printer paper? That’s the oldest trick in the book. Dude needs to get some new moves.

I fail to see what the problem is here—except for the “running out” part:

In some disciplines, heavy drinking is part of the culture. That can be a problem

Archaeologists have a saying: “The real conference happens at the hotel bar.” When Barbara Little helped organize meetings of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in the late 1980s, she recalls, the group would issue specific instructions to hotels: “You need way more beer than you think.” The venues would assure organizers that they were prepared. “Hotels think they know,” continues Little, who is now an eminent program manager at the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. “And they don’t! So many meetings have literally run out of beer.”

I’ve got more on my forklift, but I’m feeling the need, like Churchill, for a whisky and soda to get me through the morning.

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