Civil Commotion

If this is I-40 — and I’ve no reason to doubt it — it is also an egregious engineering design failure.

The rationale for the construction of the Interstate Highway System is national defense, to enable rapid transport of troops and supplies from one part of the country to another — and they are designed to be passable without regard to transient weather events.

What has happened, probably, is that it was designed correctly decades ago, and then construction along the Interstate corridor proceeded without consideration of its effects upon the highway and without objection from the feds. Now, we have a highway system that can no longer be relied upon to serve its original purpose.

Shocked by the Pennsylvania grand jury report which found that state’s priests have been raping children for decades, New Jersey decided it needed a hotline for taking clergy sex abuse reports.

What do you know? The line is so busy you can’t always get through.

A hotline created to document reports of clergy sex abuse in New Jersey is receiving so many calls that some can’t even get through. The round-the-clock call center opened last week as part of a new investigation by Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.

I’ve been talking about this for years, and am thrilled the problem is finally being taken seriously. The clergy are the most corrupt class of men in society, and it is past time that we get over the idea that Holy Men are special, uniquely virtuous, uniquely trustworthy. They are no such thing.

A column in today’s New York Times speculates that Trump’s south-based insults of Jeff Sessions have begun to take a toll on his most-loyal supporters.

Working-class whites, particularly in the old Rust Belt, were the main beneficiaries of the expansion of health care under President Barack Obama. In Midwestern states that flipped from Obama to Trump, far more non-college-educated whites gained health coverage than did whites with degrees or members of ethnic minorities, according to an Urban Institute study. And if the president’s party succeeds in choking the last life out of Obamacare, these Trump voters stand to lose the most.

As noted, some of them are catching on. A Quinnipiac poll out this week showed that even among non-college-educated whites — the strongest demographic holdout for Trump — a plurality now say they’d like to see Congress be more of a check on the president. Since his election, he’s down 14 points among the “poorly educated” that Trump once professed to love, a CNN poll found.

Ironically, Trump’s disdain for the south is something I can get behind. Every social– and family-pathology that has a name is more acute in the south than anywhere else, and the reason is the strength of the churches, which relentlessly degrade people into submission; culturally, the south really is inferior.

But, now, at least some of the south has begun to understand that Trump was merely using them when he so artfully channeled their subterranean malice against anybody who isn’t as screwed-up and debased as themselves — that, in fact, The Donald is merely another gaudy carpetbagger. They deserve each other.

Pat Robertson is claiming his prayers protected Virginia and sent Hurricane Florence southward.

Today on “The 700 Club,” televangelist Pat Robertson continued to credit his prayers with changing the path of Hurricane Florence away from his properties in Virginia and toward states farther south.

As we noted the other day, Robertson gathered with staff at his Christian Broadcasting Network earlier this week to establish a “shield of protection” over his properties and order Florence to turn back out to sea so as not to cause any damage to his CBN or Regent University facilities. The storm did not follow Robertson’s command, but the fact that its projected path shifted so that it was likely to make landfall somewhere in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia was nonetheless evidence to Robertson that God had answered his prayers.

No. It’s too ridiculous to even talk about.

What happened is this: Heikki Lunta, the Finnish snow god, answering my personal pleas, shoved the storm south to protect an endangered Michigan Tech grad — me. And if Pat Robertson doesn’t stop claiming the credit, ol’ Heikki is likely to visit a severe case of frostbite on that old fraud.

Hurricane Florence is slogging ashore right now. The coffee-colored zone in the illustration below is under hurricane-force winds, and the yellow zone is experiencing tropical storm conditions.

We are located about 40-miles south of the Virginia border, so we are near the northern edge of the tropical storm zone. We are getting rain and wind, but it’s not too bad and, so far, only a couple of dead tree limbs have come down. Since the storm will soon start to lose energy rapidly, with a corresponding contraction of the diameter of the storm, and decline in wind speed, its effects upon us are unlikely to be too grim. I guess we may lose a tree or two — there is no predicting, really — but so far it appears that the worst is going to miss us.