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Illinois Mirror Poll Shows Republican Bruce Rauner is up 13 Points Over Incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn in IL Governor’s Race

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My friend Eric Kohn runs a terrific new site: Illinois Mirror.

Here is his opening manifesto.

Illinois’ legacy, calcified media long ago abdicated its obligation to provide useful knowledge that engenders an informed public. I don’t really care if it’s out of disinterest, laziness, partisanship, or cozy relationships with those in power, but the establishment media outlets stand by and tap their keyboards while Illinois crumbles. So, if the air-brushed, teleprompter-fed local media won’t do its job, Illinois Mirror will.
 
We accept the responsibility that they abandoned. We’ll offer a perspectives that they ignore to reveal how Illinois government really works and its effects on the public.

Right on.

And so far, so good. In fact: So far, so outstanding.

The Illinois Mirror today published the amazing results of its poll for the Governor’s race.

This is the first poll for this race.

The Illinois Mirror poll shows GOP candidate Bruce Rauner up THIRTEEN POINTS over Donk Pat Quinn!

Wow. We know Pat is awful, and we know the state is an ongoing train wreck. But still, for a purportedly Blue state, that is a surprising number.

Barring a disaster, we will elect a GOP governor who at least talks like a reformer and, fingers crossed, will actually be one.

I, and many others like me, ask only this of Bruce Rauner: Be what you say you are, do what you say you will do.

Please.

The old timers in the GOP were against Rauner. And the teachers unions pushed their members to switch-hit and take GOP ballots to vote for Kirk Dillard, the main establishment GOP candidate. As a result, Dillard got within a couple of points of Rauner, confounding many polls which predicted a Rauner blowout.

In fact, the only poll that correctly showed the race would be close was the Illinois Mirror poll!

Nice work.

Question for the studio audience: Is there any chance this lopsided poll result will be a bellwether for the USA generally in November?

I sure hope so.

And keep your eye on the Illinois Mirror!

History Friday: Do Not Cross the 1836 Time Line

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(During the months of February, March and April, reenactor groups are busy in Texas, at the sites of key events in the War for Independence, doing encampments and recreations of events: The siege of the Alamo, the Coleto Creek fight/Goliad Massacre, and the Battle of San Jacinto. Below the jump are pictures that I took a couple of years ago at the first event Next week – the Goliad reenactment)

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When is 5 Percent Not 5 Percent?

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The Iranian nuclear deal (more on the deal and the secret side agreement; see also this) refers to uranium enrichment thresholds of 5% and 20%. These may not sound too threatening, given that a nuclear weapon requires enrichment to around the 90% level. BUT the percentage enrichment of the uranium is NOT a good indicator of the amount of work required to get there.

Start with a tonne (2204 pounds) of natural uranium feed–to enrich it to 5% will require about 900 Separative Work Units–SWUs being an indicator of the amount of energy, time, and capital equipment required for the process. Take to 5% enriched product and continue enriching it to 20%, and the incremental cost will be only about 200 SWUs, for an accumulated total cost of 1100 SWUs. And if you want to turn the 20% enriched substance into weapons-grade 90%-enriched uranium, you need add only about another 200 SWUs of effort, for a grand total of 1300 SWUs. Thus, the effort required to get to that seemingly-harmless 5% threshold is already 69% of the way to weapons grade, and 20% enrichment is 84% of the way there. See this article, which explains that “the curve flattens out so much because the mass of material being enriched progressively diminishes to these amounts, from the original one tonne, so requires less effort relative to what has already been applied to progress a lot further in percentage enrichment.”

There has been very, very little media coverage on this point. One place the issue was discussed was in February and September 2012 reports by the American Enterprise Institute, which were discussed and excerpted at  PowerLine in November 2013. Note that the AEI analysis shows an even flatter enrichment curve than the one in the article I linked above–AEI is showing 90% of the total effort for weapons-grade as being required to get to 5% enrichment, rather than “only” 69%. In either case, it should be clear that possession of large quantities of material enriched to 5% is a very nontrivial milestone on the way to constructing a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, 4 billion dollars worth of frozen Iranian funds are being unfrozen and sent to Iran. Money is fungible, and almost certainly some of this money will go to support Iranian-backed terrorism, funding operations intended to kill American military personnel, Israeli civilians, and quite possibly American civilians in this country as well. And some of it will probably go to support R&D on advanced centrifuge technology, allowing Iran to move even more quickly to a nuclear weapon when it decides to do so.

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History Friday: Pacific Paradigm Shift in the US Navy

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I have written in my columns on the end of WW2 in the Pacific about institutional or personally motivated false narratives, hagiography narratives, forgotten via classification narratives and forgotten via extinct organization narratives. Today’s column is revisiting the theme of how generational changes in every day technology make it almost impossible to understand what the World War II (WW2) generation is telling us about it’s times without a lot of research. Recent books on the like John Prados’ “ISLANDS OF DESTINY: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun” and James D. Hornesfischer’s “NEPTUNES INFERNO: The US Navy at Guadalcanal” focus in the importance of intelligence and the “learning by dying” use of Radar in the Solomons Campaign. Both are cracking good reads and can teach you a lot about that period. Yet they are both missing some very important, generationally specific, professional reasons that the US Navy did so poorly at night combat in the Solomons. These reasons have to do with a transition of technology and how that technology was tied into a military service’s training and promotion policies.

WW2 saw a huge paradigm shift in the US Navy from battleships to aircraft carriers and from surface warship officers, AKA the Black Shoe wearing “Gun Club,” to naval aviators or the Brown Shoe wearing “Airdales.” Most people see this as an abrupt Pearl Harbor related shift. To some extent that was true, but there is an additional “Detailed Reality” hiding behind this shift that US Army officers familiar with both the 4th Infantry Division Task Force XXI experiments in 1997 and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq will understand all too well. Naval officers in 1942-1945, just like Army officers in 1997-2003 were facing a complete change in their basic mode of communications that were utterly against their professional training, in the heat of combat. Navy officers in 1942-1945 were going from a visual communications with flag semaphore and blinking coded signal lamps on high ship bridges to a radio voice and radar screen in a “Combat Information Center” (CIC) hidden below decks. US Army officers, on the other hand, in 1997-2003 were switching from a radio-audio and paper map battlefield view to digital electronic screens. Both switches of communications caused cognitive dissonance driven poor decisions by their users. However, the difference in final results was driven by the training incentives built into these respective military services promotion policies.

In many ship photographs taken between about 1916 and 1940, there are what appear to be large clocks on the front and rear superstructures or masts. These are actually devices to tell the other ships in the formation at what range that ship is firing at. Together with "Declination Marks" on the sides of turrets; these mechanisms allowed the other ships in the formation, whose view of the target may be obscured by fog, gun smoke or funnel smoke, to have their guns at the proper elevation and bearing when their view becomes unobstructed. This greatly reduced the time needed before they were ready to fire
In many ship photographs taken between about 1916 and 1940, there are what appear to be large clocks on the front and rear superstructures or masts. These are actually devices to tell the other ships in the formation at what range that ship is firing at. Together with “Declination Marks” on the sides of turrets; these mechanisms allowed the other ships in the formation, whose view of the target may be obscured by fog, gun smoke or funnel smoke, to have their guns at the proper elevation and bearing when their view becomes unobstructed. This greatly reduced the time needed before they were ready to fire. Source — http://www.patriotfiles.com/forum/showthread.php?t=111568

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… natus ex Maria virgine …

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And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

Luke, 2:8-12.

Merry Christmas to all of our Chicago Boyz contributors, readers, friends and families.