Your Life – Your Rules

Is it Sunday again? Yes, every seven days. Reliably…

 

 

Bullet Points:

** Shopping for that perfect gift.

** Car buying with WSF. Wait, there’s more!

** Redneck News Network – all the news you need this Sunday.

** Trump is in the White House. His appointees are in place throughout the government. In the halls of power, however, traitors continue to move freely. We will not survive by ignoring them or thinking we can wait them out. The battle is joined, and only decisive action will prevail. We either vanquish the Deep State or it vanquishes us.

** Boating – with EdB.

** In the hospital – with Dr. Mike_C.  Diagnosis?

** When you make your orders online.

** Landing at Sky Harbor Airport, Phoenix, AZ.

**The Russia Collusion Hoax – People need to understand and acknowledge the depth of moral turpitude and corruption involved in the events that occurred here, perpetrated by individuals who had a responsibility to ensure the integrity of the government and enforce its laws. This was a total betrayal of the American people and a disgrace.

** VDH discusses racial issues…

** If you rearrange the letters in “American”, then take out m, e, r, c, one of the a‘s, and add a z, it spells ‘Nazi‘!

** Have you considered immigration?

** A candid moment with the Obamas.

 

Medical Treatment

With EdB…this is your brain on drugs…

 

 

The Utility of Illegal Aliens

The Most Recent Democrat Anxiety – All stems from a March executive order signed by President Trump, which states in part that the Attorney General shall, consistent with applicable laws, coordinate with state Attorneys General to assist with state-level review and prosecution of aliens unlawfully registered to vote or casting votes.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed her team to investigate counties across the United States, with a particular focus on California, Texas, and Minnesota. The DOJ plans to prosecute any foreign nationals who get caught voting. A DOJ source tells Fox News, ‘Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls. That’s the foundation for secure elections.

There’s been a culture of non-compliance from several states that don’t keep their rolls updated. This DOJ is cracking down.’ Now, the Justice Department wants local officials to identify and remove felons, dead voters, non-residents, and non-citizens (reliable high propensity democrat voters) from voter rolls.

Recently, the Department charged an Iraqi man for illegal voting in 2020 in the state of New York. It took several years to catch that one. Last year, a 19-year-old Chinese national was charged in Michigan with perjury and attempting to vote illegally in the 2024 election. Now, the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, played a significant role in stopping illegal voting. Even though Elon Musk is no longer affiliated with that agency, DOGE itself still plays a role in this movement. Finding illegal voters will take time, but the Justice Department is in regular contact with the White House about the latest progress in fulfilling this executive order

 

Mortgage Rates

 

Property Tax

 

Walking Carcass

Pedo Joe – what a frigging joke.

 

Let’s Talk Jobs and Numbers

It’s in the news, and the mainstream media is on a rant. How valid is it? As juicy as the topics and debates are, let’s put aside whether the revisions are a deep-state plot and/or whether President Trump was justified in firing the bearer of bad news. Let’s discuss the difficulty and expectations of the specific process at hand.

How difficult is it to create on-the-fly monthly estimates of national employment in a large, dynamic economy, and what should be our reasonable expectations regarding the accuracy of first-release, unrevised numbers when considering data challenges and putting aside pre-existing political perceptions?

A change of -258,000—like the one in the July 2025 report that revised down May and June job growth—perhaps sounds excessively large, and relative to most recent revisions, it is. But one should consider the scale and difficulty of coming up with these estimates, certainly in anything resembling “real-time.”

In a labor force of about 170 million, that’s roughly 0.15%.

It’s a midcourse correction in a system trying to describe a vast, constantly changing economy in near-real time. Delay releases by two or three months, and they’d arrive after businesses, markets, and policymakers most need them. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explains in its technical notes, revisions flow from additional reports, recalculated seasonal factors, and benchmarking to administrative records—i.e., “how the system works,” not necessarily a sign it’s broken.

The July report is a case in point: payrolls rose by just 73,000, and payrolls for prior months were revised down by a combined 258,000. Those revisions reflect later-arriving responses and updated seasonal filters, not a sudden collapse that statisticians missed last week.

Measuring employment relies on two different surveys that capture different universes. The payroll (CES) survey counts jobs from employers; a person with two jobs is counted twice. The household (CPS) survey counts people, so the same worker is counted once. Their reference periods even differ (pay period including the 12th vs. calendar week including the 12th). These design choices mean the series can and do diverge for good reasons.

Why revisions? Start with timing. BLS has only about 2½ weeks of collection before the first Friday release, so the first estimate is built on an incomplete set of reports; more arrive for the second and third passes. Seasonal adjustment adds another layer: the filters improve as more months accumulate. New firm “births” and “deaths” are another headache; to bridge the lag before startups show up (and closures fall out) in administrative records, CES uses a birth-death model informed by UI tax records (the QCEW), then re-anchors (“benchmarks”) each February when near-census data roll in. After benchmarking, BLS “wedges back” the new March level across prior months so the series connects smoothly. Even with careful methods, statistical noise is genuine.

The 90% confidence interval around the monthly CES change is on the order of ±136,000 jobs, so modest misses shouldn’t be over-interpreted. In addition to sampling error, there are late and corrected filings, payroll quirks (such as different pay-period lengths), strikes, temporary layoffs, and classification edge cases. In short, a lot can nudge the early read.

History also shows that even the “big” corrections are small shares of the labor force.

The March 1991 benchmark revision was -640,000—driven mainly by one-time reporting corrections in UI records, accounting for approximately half a percent of the labor force at the time. The March 2009 benchmark during the Great Recession was -902,000 (≈0.6%). The 2019 cycle saw a preliminary -501,000 (final ≈-505,000), roughly 0.3%.

For March 2024, the final national benchmark was -589,000 (approximately 0.4%), following a widely discussed preliminary estimate of -818,000 (-0.5%). These are sizable in headlines, but they are mid-single-tenths of a percent against the labor force backdrop.

Individual months can swing, too. December 2021 was initially reported as +199,000, but after incorporating late reports and updated seasonal factors, it was later shown as +588,000—an upward revision of roughly 0.2–0.3% of the labor force at the time.

January 2024 went from +353,000 on the first print to +256,000 on the third estimate (-97,000), a change of a few hundredths of a percent of the labor force.

Zooming out, BLS reports that over the last decade, the absolute annual benchmark revision at the total nonfarm level has averaged about 0.1% (with a typical range from <0.05% to 0.3%). That’s a useful yardstick for what “normal” re-anchoring looks like in practice.

During the Great Recession, the birth-death model overstated job creation, as many small firms were closing; the 2009 benchmark corrected the drift, precisely what the process is designed to do. These episodes aren’t necessarily evidence of malfeasance; they’re reminders that real-time measurement during sharp shifts is complex, and that annual benchmarking is there to reconcile survey-based estimates with near-census administrative counts.

All of this is even more challenging outside the United States, where large informal economies prevail and an administrative “ground truth” comparable to QCEW often doesn’t exist. In such settings, establishment surveys can’t reach a significant portion of the labor market, and frequent household surveys are costly. Seen this way, revisions aren’t backpedaling; they’re how the process accrues accuracy.

Treat initial prints as provisional, watch trends rather than focusing on one-month moves, and expect updates in a country this large and dynamic, because demanding instant perfection without revision is unrealistic.

 

Patriot vs. SAMP/T NG, S-400, and Iron Dome

Which Air Defense Shield Is More Effective in the Age of Hypersonic Missiles and Drones

In an era of hypersonic weapons, massive drone attacks, and jamming-rich theaters of war, an effective air defense system must do more than just shoot down missiles—it must be adaptive, networked, overload-tolerant, and capable of operating in real time.

All of the Russian crap that Iran bought didn’t work out for them – at all – which the world takes note of. It’s not unlike the Russian crap that the Ukrainians wiped out early in the Russian/Ukraine war back before it became human wave attacks of North Koreans.

 

Identify the Aircraft

1

Potentially a more difficult ID – only one prototype built. A supersonic interceptor aircraft developed by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. It was designed to intercept enemy aircraft at high speeds and altitudes. An early Foxbat? Yeah, sorta.

 

2

Not a B-29

An aircraft conversion used for photographic reconnaissance duties was fitted with extra fuel tanks, and cameras were installed to photograph a strip of ground 3 miles wide. After this conversion, the aircraft was re-designated. One hundred seventeen were built. Should be an easy ID with the hint – difficult ID without the hint.

 

3

Note the tail hook

 

Identify the Armor

4 & 5

The vehicle on the left experienced engine heating problems, among other things. Once the bugs were worked out, it was one of the most successful tanks of the war, but it was expensive to build and over-engineered.

 

 

End