If he wanted a scammer televangelist, he could have at least gone with Kenneth Copeland.
Yeah. That has been my life. First tree cutting, then fabrication & welding. It certainly can have its ups & downs!
My two favorite pics.
I like being able to go to almost any town, anywhere, and see my handywork. Thats the rebuilding of a church in Indiana that got blown down by an F5 tornado.
1 Like
Evangelicals act like God is in control when their candidate wins, and then somehow He has lost control when their candidate loses and it’s the other party’s fault for causing such trouble.
Blessed by the Royal Toe ! Haha… I get it 100… I still look at places I helped build as an Ironworker that way
1 Like
A nice greek orthodox I happened upon over in Ohio while going to a concert.
Looked over and went “Hey! I remember those!”.
1 Like
It all makes sense now! Like a lucky rabbits foot!
Got to help build… a Federal Reserve Bank, largest concrete plant in the world, bridges, large buildings… no skyscrapers though… laid a lot of rebar
2 Likes
The Ironworkers don’t mess around! They go big!
2 Likes
One of the best developments in the Republican party over the last two decades is the diminished influence of evangelical Christian theology in government. There’s not much political incentive to cater to them at all in 2025. They sure ain’t breaking for Democrats, even if Trump hasn’t signed an EO to put The 10 Commandments in every classroom, or whatever it is they want from government. Parental opt-outs for evolution instruction remain among the least concerning government proposals of my lifetime.
Speaking in tongues seems downright normal to me compared to transgender ideology.
Back to DOGE, I’d like to give people who may not be familiar with just how powerful sophisticated data management systems are a basic idea of the scope here. From 2005 to 2010 I worked on the implementation team for the Nestle GLOBE project, the largest private sector SAP implementation project in history.
What that project aimed to achieve, and did, was to leverage Nestle’s global purchasing power through process and language standardization and, perhaps most importantly, data standardization and data management. My last few years there were as a data governance analyst, where I worked with business leaders and subject matter experts to describe the rules for maintaining a part master in SAP, which had something like 300 different fields available to describe it.
Prior to the project, there was a vast landscape of databases managing many different subsidiaries and sometimes individual locations. There was a staggering number of problems to solve, but justifying the nearly $2B per year implementation cost came down to three things.
Sugar. Cocoa. Milk.
The GLOBE project brought all of Nestle from thousands of duplicate item records for those three ingredients down to just three. Now, with a click of a button, the evil capitalists running Nestle can know exactly how much sugar they are buying, from who, where it gets used, how much gets rejected for quality reasons, and every other piece of information someone could possibly want to know.
All through the same type of information systems that the government uses, but painstakingly set up to achieve the goal of modeling a complicated international business. It had to work well, as Nestle could not simply extract more money from people if it failed.
Most importantly, Nestle would not have tolerated anyone on that project team who wasn’t working towards the same goal. If you were there to “subvert a power structure”, you would be off the team.
I see no fundamental difference with what DOGE appears to be doing, or Trump with his loyalty tests for staffing the federal government. Of course he should be looking for people who share the goals he campaigned on.
1 Like
Pretty epic at times
1 Like
Yeah. Shell just built a cracker plant one county over. My neighbor was on it with the Millwrights, but they pulled trades in from all over the US.
Some of those projects can go for like 5 years. Just gigantic.
Millrats ! Bahaha
Ya Holcim was an absolute monster of a job
1 Like
I’d like to see what becomes of US Steel. Trump had some big plans that got dropped, then it has been a bunch of back & forth for the last 4 years.
Now Japan/Nippon is showing interest to the tune of about a 1trillion dollar partnership.
My criticism was just of Christians, as a Christian. Wasn’t political. I specifically didn’t mention a politician or party, even though we all know who supports who.
It is actually one of the positive aspects of broader polarization. 20 years ago the evangelicals were much more influential and would suck up a lot of oxygen in the room with their policy proposals like evolution debates and Christian displays in government.
Their influence was a major factor in me being a 1990s and early 2000s democrat.
Meanwhile, we were being robbed blind by corrupt swamp creatures from both parties and people my age were going off to fight in forever wars.
All of the religious extremism is on the left in 2025, even if they don’t see their own beliefs as such.
Parties do switch in ways. The Democrats have always supported race based policies and devising new ways to take things from one group and give them to a more politically advantageous group, but they weren’t always for big government. You need to go back to the 19th century for that, when Republicans were busy crushing states rights with an increasingly powerful federal government.
Today we are definitely seeing the working class breaking for Trump, which is another “switch” I wouldn’t have predicted 20 years ago.
In 2025 they have a real problem. Woke holdouts who truly believe in their cult. I do not think any parent who has raised their child as transgender, for instance, will be emotionally capable of ever believing they were horrifically wrong to drug and mutilate them.
Most will need to tell themselves they were right for the rest of their lives, even as the fad is losing popular appeal.
That is not a radical theocratic policy that’s going to impose religion on Americans in any way, shape or form. I actually agree with it’s stated intent, based on what I have observed with Christian discrimination in Maine.
One of the biggest, most undeniable ironies in Maine politics was when Democrats finally achieved the Maine Klu Klux Klan’s only political goal of the 1920’s in the year 2022. Apparently we required DEI commissars in the government, justified in part by Maine’s Klan history, before the Klan’s political goal could be achieved.
What was that goal? Ending public funding for Catholic schools. This was finally achieved by requiring all schools receiving public funds to fully incorporate gender ideology, among other things Catholics don’t believe in.
Now, one of the only institutions reliably churning out good graduates in the entire county is stripped of public funding. That had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of principles about government, it was simply the same politically expedient, anti-Catholic bias held by the Maine Klan.
All while many heavily Muslim nonprofits continue to receive vast amounts of funding, as does Catholic Charities of Maine, who are an immigrant resettlement agency.
I’m 100 percent on board with this executive order as well. There are legitimate nonprofits doing good public work under a religious banner and those ought not be treated as enemies of the state.
Trump directed the office to identify ways to reduce burdens on the free exercise of religion and direct all federal agencies to designate a “faith liaison” within 90 days.
But he’s keeping religion out of the government.
You are confusing keeping religious discrimination out of government, which is the intent of this EO, with a flawed idea that religious people have no place in public policy. At least it would seem so, as you have a tendency to completely misinterpret things.
Compared to 2005 Republicans, the 2025 party reflects a major diminishment of evangelical influence within the party.
I imagine you believe these faith liaisons are there to force government workers to declare that Jesus was God’s son in the same kind of way that you believed my words in the size and strength thread were evidence of me being abusive on the mats towards females in your efforts to derail that thread.
Meanwhile, actual religious tests exist for employment in my local public school. You must say the same words that someone who believes in transgenderism does to work at LPS.
Thanks for linking another W from team Trump!
When has that ever been a thing?
Like which presidents were undeclared of their faith or kept their administration strictly non religious?
1 Like