Chicago Boyz

Sure feels like it but what do I know.

Dudes and dudesses, hear ye, hear ye, the place to be on Saturday December 20, 2003 is Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, Illinois for the Los Straitjackets Christmas Pageant with The World Famous Pontani Sisters:

Shake off that winter chill and welcome in the holidays with the return of LOS STRAITJACKETS‘ CHRISTMAS PAGEANT, a festive music and dance extravaganza featuring the winning combination of the America’s foremost instrumental band coupled with the WORLD FAMOUS PONTANI SISTERS‘ burlesque/go-go choreography and retro-glam original costumes. After the phenomenal success of last year’s holiday tour, Los Straitjackets, fresh from touring for their new release, “Supersonic Guitars in 3-D”, have once again enlisted The World Famous Pontani Sisters, a trio of choreographed cuties who travel the globe on their quest to bring glamour back to entertainment, to kick start the holidays with a tour not even the Grinch could resist.

I saw this team tear the roof off last 4th of July. Get in the mood by listening to the Straitjackets fabulous Christmas album ‘Tis the Season for Los Straitjackets. (This features their cover of “It’s a Marshmallow World”, a song made legendary by Dean Martin, among other delectable seasonal morsels.)

No kidding kids, it doesn’t get any better than this. Be there. Aloha. (And Ho Ho Ho.)

(Check HERE for other locations on this tour, including Providence, NYC, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago …)

Covert CIA operative, my ass. Maybe she and her husband, who are not in any way milking her CIA employment, and supposed victimization by the eeevil Bush administration, for self-promotional purposes should head over to Geneva. They could help out with the unofficial Israeli-Palestinian “peace negotiations,” which are about as on-the-level as Wilson and Plame are.

Plame also mingled unobtrusively last month at a party at the home of The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. But there has been an invisible bubble around her as reporters have respected the desire of “Jane Bond,” as Wilson calls her, to remain in the Washington shadows.

Plame talked to Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward on a not-for-attribution basis, and the only direct quote was “It’s such a mess,” referring to her under-renovation kitchen as she fussed over their 3-year-old twins. But the article contains such passages as: “Plame herself instantly thought that the leak was illegal.”

Wilson, who is pursuing a deal for a book that he says will be about more than just “the outing of my wife,” said they have had to make compromises to maintain Plame’s privacy.

Jerks.

(via Trend Macro)

Mickey Kaus thinks she may be positioning herself to run. (Via Instapundit) She is certainly coming up with something resembling a facially coherent critique of Bush’s Iraq policy, which is more than the Loathsome Nine have been willing or able to do. I have to say I was suprised that she let the November 21 deadline for New Hampshire pass, which I referred to as “D Day”. And I have been wavering on withdrawing my prediction that she’s running in ’04. But I still think all the same forces are in play, especially the wasting asset of Clinton creature Terry McAuliffe sitting atop the bags of money, and that it is still too early to rule out an HRC run. Perversely, Bush’s astronomical approval ratings, back up to 61% today, make me think she’ll get in even more. Bush, Sr. was at something like 90% when Bill got in back in ’92. The Clintons are clever political tacticians, but when the moment to strike comes, they are willing to take political risks.

I’m a lot less sure about Hillary than I was last January. But I have this nagging sense that as Dean seems more and more inevitable as the nominee, and more and more likely to be crushed by Bush, the more sensible Donks who actually want to try to win in ’04 are going to get more and more desperate. This all sets the stage for some kind of “surprise” intervention by HRC to “save” their bacon. So, I’ll stand by my prediction. She’s going to get in. I don’t know how, or when, or on what pretext, but she is.

(And if not Hillary, then Ralph. I can only hope … .)

As the old U of C cheer goes: “We are great and we are grand; we make bombs beneath our stands!” Well, not exactly, of course, but I cannot imagine that this event will ever be surpassed at Chicago.
In last year’s anniversary post over on Arcturus I concentrated on the prospects for nuclear power, and some of the risk-management issues associated with it. There are other points of departure … far too many for one post: it was the beginning of Big Science, the beginning of the Atomic Age, the beginning of the first true weapon of mass destruction, the beginning of the end of Imperial Japan, and the beginning of the first real check on Soviet power. Were it not for Project Apollo, it would have been remembered as the greatest milestone of science and technology in the 20th century.
And in spite of Apollo, what happened in Chicago that day has led to a thus-far-inextricable association of military rockets with WMDs. We can project indiscriminate military force to any point on Earth’s surface in three-quarters of an hour. We have had this capability since before I was born, and I am well into middle age. Any use of an intercontinental missile necessarily means mass death; the development of even intermediate-range missiles by authoritarian regimes is among the greatest existing threats to civilization.
Conversely, conventional military capabilities take much longer to act on their targets. Whereas nuclear missiles can be dispatched at a moment’s notice, travel at speeds of the order of 10 km/sec, reach targets anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and involve energetic events of tens of kilotons or greater — non-nuclear weapons, by contrast, may require days to months to prepare for use, are delivered at (low) hundreds of meters per second over many hours (more than a day, in the case of B-2s flying out of Whiteman AFB to Kosovo), cannot reach some areas at all, and pack a punch of, at most, a few metric tons TNT equivalent.
The graph below is a crude representation of this duality (quadrality?). In quadrant I are the WMDs, characterized by energies of up to 10²² ergs or thereabouts, and deliverable in timeframes as short as 10³ seconds. In quadrant IV are the much less destructive devices, down to less than 1 kg TNT equivalent, deliverable only over much longer periods, up to months.

At present, quadrant II weapons do not exist. But what if it were otherwise, that is, if we could deliver non-nuclear weapons (and other military assets) onto targets with the ease and at the speed of weapons in quadrant I? What if rockets could somehow be used to apply discriminate force, to conduct the kind of precise, nonlinear operations that are the centerpiece of US military strikes?
This is not a remotely original idea. Here is a diagram from Bono & Gatland’s Frontiers of Space:

This vehicle, proposed over 30 years ago, was intended to deliver two battalions of soldiers halfway around the planet in less than an hour. A smaller version was to carry 200 troops. Other configurations were to carry heavy weaponry and materiel. But the best present-day application might be something that could deploy a squadron of these.
Just as I was drafting this post, Mike Daley earned “regular contributor” status on Arcturus by sending along Speed Kills, Military Wants More, in which we read that

Speed is becoming an increasingly crucial component of how American forces fight. In the Gulf War, it took days for the U.S. military to identify a target and put a bomb on it. In recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, that process was cut to as little as 20 minutes, in some cases.
But this quick response only happens when there are bombers and cruise missiles in the immediate neighborhood. If U.S. forces receive a tip that terrorists are in a part of the world where they don’t have American planes in the sky, it can take hours, or days, to act on that information.
With its proposed speed and range, the Falcon project — co-sponsored by the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm — aims to make just about the whole world a dangerous place to be a bad guy.

(You can read more about Falcon here, and thumbnails of graphics are here. Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of thing was, of course, Project Thor. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I wrote the rest of this post before reading the Wired News article.)
In general, quadrant II weapons would greatly ease the constraints of time and expense imposed by the need to have bases located within a few hundred kilometers of the target area. With an array of such vehicles in place, we need no longer spend precious days and weeks in negotiation with jittery allies, or spend billions laboriously staging the relevant weaponry just over the border from an obnoxious regime’s territory. One more reason to keep an eye on the X Prize.

What about quadrant III — slow WMDs? As originally conceived, nuclear weapons fell into this category. Obviously, they don’t now — for us. But terrorist WMDs might fit Einstein and Szilard’s description all too well: “A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”