[CNBC] All signs and numbers point to a huge year for the construction industry. Even in December, with much of the nation frozen, the construction industry added 30,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For all of 2017, construction added 210,000 jobs, a 35 percent increase over 2016.
Construction spending is also soaring, rising more than expected in November to a record $1.257 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. That was up 2.4 percent annually. Spending increased across all sectors of real estate, commercial and residential, with particular strength in private construction projects. The only weakness was in government construction spending.
Construction firms are clearly looking to hire more workers. Three-quarters of them said they plan to increase payrolls in 2018, according to a new survey from the Associated General Contractors of America. Industry optimism for all types of construction, measured by the ratio of those who expected the market to expand versus those who expected it to contract, hit a record high.
"This optimism is likely based on current economic conditions, an increasingly business-friendly regulatory environment and expectations the Trump administration will boost infrastructure investments," said Stephen Sandherr, the association's CEO.
Posted by: lord garth ||
01/09/2018 8:08 Comments ||
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#3
The job boards are full of construction manager, superintendent, and design/build director positions...given as how some of these design build jobs are five/six year cycles, it is going to be fun.
Funny as how I spent all those years blowing stuff up and now I make my living building it.
#4
Hope they're concentrating on infrastructure and not just slapping up more housing tracts. The last thing we need in California is construction jobs going to illegal aliens and more cars on our freeways.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/09/2018 11:19 Comments ||
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#5
I just wish it wasn't so darned hard to find competent contractors and tradesmen, even without a boom. I'm getting too old to re-do everything.
[VDH Private Papers] Michael Wolff’s sensational exposé of the supposed chaos of the Trump White House is no doubt largely a mix of fantasy, exaggeration, and some accidental truth. The postmodernist author even admits that his own methodologies defy verification, and so leave it up to the reader to distinguish his facts from fiction.
Wolff’s theme is that Trump is hopelessly petty, childlike, and uninformed. The few adults in the room around him‐primarily, we are asked to believe, Wolff’s chief source, Steve Bannon‐must cajole, pamper, and flatter him to get anything done, when they are not backstabbing one another.
Fair enough‐Trump certainly may be naïve and uninitiated. No one doubts that he is thin-skinned and far too often goes down Twitter cul de sacs. But Trump’s naiveté is not quite what Wolff thinks.
Rather, no sane president should ever have let a writer with Wolff’s dubious and often discredited background into the White House. That such a rogue was even allowed through the door raises the question of administration sobriety.
Wolff at the Door
Not since the late Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone charmed his way into General Stanley McCrystal’s inner circle‐only to trash his benefactors‐has an executive team apparently proved so naïve with reporters. Certainly, in letting Wolff talk "off the record" to high officials, the Trump Administration showed poor judgment. That Wolff claims he easily got such haphazard access, if half true, could be a testament to Trump’s ego or the ego of those around him, such as Bannon. Did they really believe that they could charm and flip almost anyone‐even among a media whose stories and reports are 90 percent negative to Trump?
Of course, any president lax enough to let a Wolff through the door inevitably would be embarrassed by the results, given that all administrations can be petty, even gross.
Lyndon Johnson had a repulsive habit of referring openly to his sexual organ as "Jumbo"‐and occasionally displaying it to startled staffers‐a felony in our present culture. Worse still, he often gave dictation while defecating on the toilet.
John Kennedy crudely seduced dozens of his own female staffers. One, Mimi Alford, who came to work a 19-year-old virgin, wrote an entire memoir of her mechanical trysts inside the White House with JFK, including his inaugural seduction, which, by any contemporary definition, would now qualify as sexual assault. She lamented that he once had pawned her off to fellate one of his aides. A perverted rapist as our beloved commander-in-chief? No need to imagine a Wolff version of the Clinton White House.
I could an imagine a Wolff in FDR’s White House circa early 1945 having a field day: jazzing up the clandestine nocturnal trysts between the wheelchair-bound president and his mistress Lucy Mercer. His daughter Anna would be exposed as the go-between, the upstart young proto-Ivanka who had moved into the White House and became virtually a ceremonial First Lady.
All the while the Roosevelt team would struggle to lie to the press about the president’s sky-high blood pressure, chain-smoking, martini drinking, and growing feebleness. In place of Steve Bannon’s shoot-from-the-hip notions of geopolitics, a Harry Hopkins or freelancing and estranged Eleanor Roosevelt could offer mini-interviews on the administration’s successful politicking with good old Uncle Joe at Yalta. The difference is that FDR had the press in his pocket and even was too crafty to trust any of his "friends" with unfettered access.
Petty and Petulant vs. Sober and Judicious?
For all his gossip and intrigue, Wolff offers little insight into why such a supposedly disruptive and dysfunctional campaign team won the presidency. The victory, according to Wolff, was to the surprise of Trump and his advisors themselves! The logic of Wolff’s argument is that a pathetic Trump team that did not really wish to beat Clinton, Inc. If true, that paradox would say what exactly about Hillary’s fate? That wasting a mere year to win something you do not want is preferable to spending 17 years scheming in vain for your life’s ambition?
#2
That Russian collusion thing is wearing thin so they had to come up with something new.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/09/2018 11:49 Comments ||
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#3
Absent, then, in Wolff’s supposed Confederacy of Trump White House Dunces is any explanation how such supposed clueless amateurs reset economic and foreign policy in such a way as to achieve startling improvements in less than a year at home and abroad.
As usual, with VDH, you hafta reada the whole ting.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/09/2018 12:48 Comments ||
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#4
IMO: usual Trump job - watch the red rag, not the hand with the sword.
FTFA:
[FrontPage] In October, 125 psychologists and assorted mental health professionals marched to New York’s City Hall while wearing red tags warning, “DANGER.” Leading the march was Peter Fraenkel, author of Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage, mournfully beating a drum in a solemn march. Fraenkel, a psychologist and “professional drummer” was able to combine his love of drums and hatred of Trump.
The ‘Duty to Warn’ march had begun at New York Law School where the experts demanded that Trump be removed from office based on their inability to understand the 25th Amendment. And then the mental health experts marched to the beat of Fraenkel’s drum in what they insisted was a “funereal and dignified” procession.
"Please wear professional attire or dark clothing," the mental health experts were instructed. "There will be a slow drum beat, ‘DANGER’ tape, and flashing warning lights.”
The paperwork urged, “Bring a drum if you have one” and, “come as your solemn, concerned self.”
If only the organizers had put a fraction of their obsessive delusions into actually trying to justify the claim on their shiny blue banner that, “Trump is psychologically unfit to lead this country.”
There were no drums when Bandy X. Lee, the organizer of Yale’s ‘Duty to Warn’ conference showed up on Capitol Hill to “brief” Dem politicians about Trump’s mental illness that she diagnosed over Twitter. Lee, a self-proclaimed expert on the prison system, apparently isn’t even currently licensed to practice. Read the whole thing.
#1
Well, we all know a psychiatrist who can count his/her/its fingers twice in the row with the same result hasn't been born yet. Goes twice for Marxist ones.
#2
Three Christs? When it comes to insanity,
Manhattan is uppin' the ante.
Here's ten dozen shrinks
And each one of 'em thinks
He's a god. Whatcha got, Ypsilanti?
#3
Every one of those psychiatrists should be hauled in front of the licensing board and get their asses reamed. They have no basis whatsoever to express a professional psychological opinion on someone without an examination of that person. If they did it a second time I'd suspend their licenses for a few months, maybe longer. Preening douchenozzles.
[BearingArms] If there’s anything that you expect the military to keep a pretty close eye on, it’s explosives. However, even then, things work through the cracks and not everything can be accounted for. Maybe it was listed as used in training, or maybe it was just considered lost. Who knows?
What we do know is that a sizeable cache of explosives was recently found in Northern Arizona, and when I say "sizeable cache," I’m not using that in the mainstream media sense of the term where I’m talking about a couple of M-80’s and an old stick of dynamite. No, this is the real deal.
Authorities say military explosives were buried for two decades before being found by construction workers in Northern Arizona.
The ATF says the military explosives were found by a construction crew in a rural area of Pine, Arizona on October 25, 2017.
The military explosives found at the scene include:
- 80 M112 blocks of military C4 explosive
- Nine M18A1 Claymore antipersonnel mines with firing devices
- One roll of military detonating cord
A $10,000 reward is being offered by the ATF for any information on just where these came from.
I’ll be honest, the C4 is less troubling to me than the Claymores. I can think of a lot of reasons why someone would want C4 that have nothing to do with hurting folks. It’s an explosive, but there are legitimate uses for explosives. For example, farmer’s trying to remove large tree stumps. While C4 isn’t something typically used for that, I could see some enterprising young soldier thinking about his family farm and squirreling some C4 away for farm life after the Army.
But Claymores are different. While they do contain explosives, their power rests in the shrapnel they project outward, much like a shotgun. While they might be used for innocent purposes, that’s clearly not their intended use. It’s also not something I’d risk my career and freedom over unless it was exactly what I wanted.
It’s interesting that authorities believed this was buried 20 years ago. Recall that this was the height of tensions between the government and many American citizens, often referred to as the militia movement.
In 1992, you had the Ruby Ridge standoff. A year later, the Waco siege. Two years later, in 1995, we had the Oklahoma City bombing?
To say times were tense then would be a bit of an understatement. Were these hidden by someone who believed he’d need them to fend off an oppressive Clinton regime?
Who knows?
What we do know is that this is a lot of "boom" to be buried in the Arizona dirt. A lot. More than enough to make me nervous, even if it was 20 years ago.
If you know anything about this, I urge you to contact the ATF at 1-888-ATF-TIPS. I can’t help but figure whoever buried this had bad intentions in mind when they buried it. It’s entirely possible the person who put it there has long since passed away, but again, who knows?
What I do know is that this is stuff you and I can’t pick up at the local gun store.
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ||
01/09/2018 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Natural response to the Clinton socialists by militia with access to military munitions? And it did not have to come from the military. Could have come straight from within the manufacturing facilities. Key to that theory is, where all of these from the product inventory of one manufacturer.
#3
Steven, you go put that back into the arms room where you got it and don't trigger the JSIDS alarms again. You know that is missing off the property books for .... Whom?
#5
Might not be too difficult to examine the clackers and C4 lot numbers to determine a manufacturer, shipping and end-user. Judging by the proximity to the southern border, a northern migration as mentioned by badanov is certainly a
possibility.
If the manufacturer and end-user cannot be determined (unmarked), then simply reverse the badanov theory and add an explosive cache to the Fast & Furious debacle. Lastly, a blinding flash of the obvious, there could be others.
#7
Swat teams usually have inventories of C4 for entry but not usually this amount. I would think this is tightly-controlled though and they don't use Claymores. This ought to be able to be tracked back to the manufacturer. If not, the badanov theory is viable.
[FrontPage] Not all that many years ago, the worst things you could say about Minneapolis were that it was very cold in the winter and, for an American city of its size, it was somewhat dull. On the plus side, this traditionally Scandinavian-American burg was a model of safety and cleanliness.
Well, that's ancient history. Minneapolis is now the world's #2 capital of Somali Muslims. (#1 is Mogadishu.) In the Somali community, unemployment and welfare dependency rates are high. The city is a major recruiting center for ISIS. At least a couple of ISIS recruits have used taxpayer-funded student loans to fly to the Middle East to become jihadists; many other local Somalis are suspected of wiring welfare cash to terrorist groups. Violent crime is epidemic: as recently as December 13, a Somali Muslim immigrant stabbed a Minneapolis woman no fewer than fourteen times on her way home from work.
None of this has kept government officials and news media from boasting of the success of Somali integration. Last February, CNN ran a collection of photographs designed to show just how delightful a contribution Somalis have made to Minnesota. In August, Ibrahim Hirsi of the Minnesota Post lauded the "Somali community's success" in the state. Hirsi's article began by summarizing the "classic American success story" of one Abdirahman Kahin, who emigrated to the U.S. two decades ago and, after founding a restaurant called Afro Deli in 2010, built it up into "one of the most successful immigrant-owned businesses in the state."
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune routinely waxes effusive over all the cultural enrichment: last March, in a glowing portrait of life in the city's Muslim enclave, "Little Mogadishu," reporter Allie Shah applauded the fact that the neighborhood, cut off from the rest of the city "by the Mississippi River and two freeways," functions "like a self-sustaining village" and has thus been able to "retain its character." Ah, the joy of euphemism!
One recent occasion for celebration was the election, in 2016, of the first Somali American to the Minnesota legislature. As it turned out, the legislator in question, Ilham Omar, had married her own brother in 2009, apparently to enable him to enter the U.S. ‐ and if that weren't enough of a transgression, Omar was already married at the time to one Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children. When blogger Scott Johnson, who uncovered these irregularities, asked Omar's campaign for a comment, he heard back from a lawyer who basically accused him of racism, sexism, and Islamophobia: "There are people who do not want an East African, Muslim woman elected to office and who will follow Donald Trump’s playbook to prevent it. Ilhan Omar’s campaign sees your superfluous contentions as one more in a series of attempts to discredit her candidacy." On the contrary, some Minnesotans were apparently so eager to see an East African, Muslim woman elected to office that they gladly overlooked Omar's criminal offenses. Omar remains in the legislature, while her shady past has been neatly whitewashed on her Wikipedia page.
#2
On the contrary, some Minnesotans were apparently so eager to see an East African, Muslim woman elected to office that they gladly overlooked Omar's criminal offenses.
I saw a very similar movie back in the 2007-2008 time frame.
#5
It's all relative. I remember several years ago the Swedes sent a fact finding mission to the twin cities to find out why our Somalis were integrating so successfully. Many Somalis had lived in Sweden before coming here.
They said they were able to get loans to set up shops that were simply impossible to get in Sweden.
The truth is those Somalis who integrate into society have a great deal of success. For the rest there's "Little Mogadishu."
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
01/09/2018 13:10 Comments ||
Top||
[DAWN] PRESIDENT Trump’s New Year tweet has sent the Pakistain-US relationship into a tailspin. Incidentally, the decision to cut assistance to Pakistain had been in the works for some time. In fact, when this US administration came into office, there was chatter about "giving Pakistain a year" to see if things changed for the better. The year is just about up.
Last week’s decision isn’t a one-off. What we’ve witnessed is an initiation of a brinkmanship exercise ‐ the firing of an opening salvo that declares intent to impose pain on Pakistain to get it to deliver on America’s principal ask: action against the Afghan Taliban ...Arabic for students... and Haqqani network.
Brinkmanship is a battle of nerves in which both sides believe they have more resolve to stay the course than the opponent. Failure to get the opposite number to cave in adds to the pressure to try harder in the next move. Neither actor necessarily wants a total breakdown, but in the process of out-nerving the other, either can make a miscalculation.
The pressure to climb the escalation ladder was built into the US’s first move as it was sure to draw a blank. Even proponents of last week’s decision in Washington who argue that Pakistain can be moulded by leveraging US assistance agree that withdrawing security aid and the Coalition Support Funds was going to do little to deliver any strategic gains for the US. The fiscal year 2017’s appropriated amount of US security assistance to Pakistain was around $300 million. Actual disbursements are often lower. CSF authorisation was around $1 billion annually for fiscal years 2015-17, but between a third and a half of it was already conditioned on Pakistain’s anti-terrorism performance and withheld.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/09/2018 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[4 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
Just a reminder:
In 2001 Pakistan, a declared nuclear power, facilitated an attempted decapitation strike on the US' National Command Authority.
The US reacted with extreme restraint to which Pakistan in turn responded with mostly passive aggression that still had further deadly consequences for Western troops and Western nations.
[Townhall] Over at RedState, Jennifer Van Laar had a rather disturbing post coming out of Ohio. There appears to be a campaign from an abortion provider, Preterm, that is specifically targeting the black community in Cleveland. Van Laar cited local residents who took photos of the billboards. Some doulas have called the campaign racist, with the outrage becoming loud enough that members of the city council have reached out to Preterm to have a conservation with their executive’s leadership about the controversy. The signs read, "abortion is good medicine" and "abortion is necessary."
#2
If they are in favor of killing Innocent babies for the crime of being alive, then why are the same people so opposed to the death penalty for killers and scum who probably gave their victims a painful death?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[FrontPage] Not all that many years ago, the worst things you could say about Minneapolis were that it was very cold in the winter and, for an American city of its size, it was somewhat dull. On the plus side, this traditionally Scandinavian-American burg was a model of safety and cleanliness.
[Townhall] Over at RedState, Jennifer Van Laar had a rather disturbing post coming out of Ohio. There appears to be a campaign from an abortion provider, Preterm, that is specifically targeting the black community in Cleveland. Van Laar cited local residents who took photos of the billboards. Some doulas have called the campaign racist, with the outrage becoming loud enough that members of the city council have reached out to Preterm to have a conservation with their executive’s leadership about the controversy. The signs read, "abortion is good medicine" and "abortion is necessary."
