Forget space junk — NASA is getting lots of reports of land junk. Like animal bones. Burnt rocks. Chevy alternators. A piece of burnt toast. All of these things have been turned in by well-meaning residents as possible shuttle debris. And then there’s this:

In Shreveport, communications officer Tracy Dossett said an elderly woman (”bless her heart”) called 911 after finding egg yolk on her porch. Were there eggs on the Columbia? she asked.

Hehe.

“Police have not named Scott Peterson as a suspect, but they have not ruled him out, either.” –a KTLA reporter, verbally emphasizing the latter point.

UPDATE, 10:28 PM: KTLA’s male anchor just referred to the year 2001 as “twenty-oh-one” instead of “two-thousand-and-one.” Hooray!!! Surely this trend will catch on soon. I don’t want to still be using the asinine “two-thousand-and” formulation in 2009…

I haven’t posted about this before, because it’s kind of personal and I didn’t know how much I should reveal. But now she’s published it herself, so I guess it’s fair game. Becky has been ill — she’s in Arizona right now, with her parents, though she plans to return to campus Thursday. Here’s what she had to say about it in today’s Daily Trojan.

In a related story, I love Becky very much.

If the argument against war in Iraq was articulated the way this guy articulates it, without all the hypocritical posturing and the “no blood for oil” crap, I might have an easier time buying into it whole-heartedly.

As it is, the peaceniks are so laden with intellectual dishonesty, logical fallacy and outright self-delusion, I often find myself being drawn to the more compelling case being made by the hawks. Not that the hawks are right. Just that they’re doing an infinitely better job making their case. And I remain on the fence.

Anyway, the article is great. (Thanks to InstaPundit for the link.) A sample:

Like the admiral who gave 12 reasons for not firing a salute, the twelfth of which was that he had no powder, a certain kind of doveish commentator’s position can be summed up thus: “I’m against war because I’m not convinced Iraq is harbouring weapons of mass destruction, but even if they are, I’m against war because the UN has not authorised it, but if they do, I’m against war because an invasion would prove a military fiasco, but even if it didn’t, I’m against war because toppling Saddam would destabilise Iraq, but even if it didn’t, I’m against war because it will antagonise moderate Arab opinion.”

This will not do. It is not honest.

To the writer’s list of warnings to the antiwar crowd, I would add this: once the war begins, as it almost certainly will, you must guard vigilantly against your secret unconscious impulse to hope that it goes badly just so you can be vindicated.

If war comes, indisputably the best thing for all involved, including the peaceniks, is that the peaceniks are proven wrong about everything: the likelihood of failure, the nefariousness of America’s intentions, and so on. The alternatives to success, after all, are various flavors of failure: massive civilian deaths, massive military deaths, destabilization, terrorism, despotism, imperialism, mushroom clouds… in other words, all sorts of very bad things.

So, lobby against the war. Argue against it to your last breath. And then when you’re rebuffed, and war happens anyway, feel free to stand firm in your belief that the war was and is the wrong choice, but at the same time as you maintain your moral opposition to it, root for America to win it easily and quickly. Not because you’re a blind patriotic fool, but because if there is a war, it damn well better go well, for everyone’s sake.

UPDATE, 1:04 AM: Okay, now take that article, add this article, mix them together, and — voila — you understand why I’m so frustrated with the Left.

When President Bush first publicly contemplated going to war with Iraq, some members of his administration said he need not obtain approval from Congress before doing so. But liberals insisted, rightly, that a war would lack constitutional or popular legitimacy if the president did not first receive explicit authorization from Congress. Bush complied. Later, some administration officials maintained that the United States could attack Iraq without giving Saddam Hussein one more chance to disarm peacefully through U.N. weapons inspections. But liberals argued, again rightly, that a final push for inspections was necessary to demonstrate that the United States desired war only as a last resort. And Bush complied again, persuading the U.N. Security Council to unanimously approve Resolution 1441, which offered Iraq a “final opportunity” to dismantle its nonconventional weapons. Bush may now dismiss the importance of these steps–”America’s purpose is more than to follow a process,” he said in his State of the Union address. But, in fact, so far the process of disarming Saddam has gone exactly as liberals rightly demanded.

So we now have reached the conditions under which, according to the standards once urged by most liberals, the United States must disarm Iraq by force. Yet the moderate, respectable opponents of the war–those who claimed they would favor military action if other steps failed–remain, for the most part, unmoved.

Precisely! Under the explicit terms of Resolution 1441, we should go to war now. That’s it, end of story. So, the only reason to oppose war is if you opposed Resolution 1441’s terms. But most antiwar folks were positively thrilled when Bush went to the U.N., made a few concessions to France, and produced a unanimous vote in favor of Resolution 1441. They hailed it as a towering achievement of multilateralism.

Liberals supported the resolution, and the resolution has now been breached, which, under the resolution’s own terms, means “serious consequences” (i.e., war) must result. So, having supported the resolution, liberals should be in favor of war now. Actions have consequences, people!

But, the fact is, antiwar folks only supported Resolution 1441 because they thought it had a chance of averting war. They didn’t support it because of what it said; they supported it because of what they thought it might do for them. Now it’s doing something else, so they’re dodging the logically unavoidable consequences of their initial support. And they don’t even see the hypocrisy of that.

Andrew, I think, would elaborate on that point further to say that liberals seem to have a general habit of doing precisely this: citing laws and frameworks and paradigms, as if to be objective about things, but really employing them only when it’s beneficial to a liberal cause, and otherwise ignoring or subverting them. (Robert Torricelli, anyone?) And you know what? In my heart, I fear he may have a point.

Read the whole article. It’s good.

It looks like the axis of evil has a new member.

I’m watching a police chase on KCAL. I’ve been watching it for over an hour. I feel so trashy… but I can’t take my eyes off. :)

UPDATE, 10:49 PM: The driver has managed to evade five spike strips so far. (He’s driving at like 30 miles per hour.)

UPDATE, 11:06 PM: People are going to the freeway overpasses to watch the chase live. Well, I would do that too, if it wasn’t in Glendale. :)

Earlier, this guy drove through a movie set and almost hit a leer jet prop.

Oh, and this is the second police chase today in Los Angeles.

UPDATE, 11:11 PM: They just successfully got him with a spike strip, so his right tires are flat — and his left rear tire fell off. And he’s still driving!

UPDATE, 11:14 PM: I wish this guy would stop. I have to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want to leave because I might miss the dramatic conclusion!

UPDATE, 11:23 PM: He just gave up.

A major breaking news story? I’d rather be golfing.

University of Connecticut men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun was diagnosed Friday with prostate cancer, and he announced Monday he will have surgery Thursday to “attack this thing,” the UConn Daily Campus reported. Calhoun is taking a leave of absence from the team, and is expected to be off the sidelines for three to four weeks.

Here is a news article, and here’s a sports article, from the Hartford Courant website. And here’s a story from CNNSI.com.

It all started with an InstaBoost. Then came the domino effect, in the form of links from Cursor.org, Slate, MSNBC, and others. The result: nearly 5,000 hits in the 30 hours since InstaPundit put me on the map. That’s roughly 40 percent of all this site’s previous hits — ever — since Feb. 23, 2002.

The final daily total for Feb. 3, 2003 was 3,326 unique hits — a record that seems likely to last for a while.

The Lyndon LaRouche cult was on campus today (I don’t know why, but they seem to like propagandizing on Mondays; perhaps the government is especially nefarious and conspiratorial at the beginning of the week), so I took the opportunity to ask my favorite LaRouchie — I forget his name, but I always have loud debates with this guy — whether his leader believes the Columbia catastrophe was a conspiracy.

I figured maybe he would share my theory about Saddam’s light-speed SuperScud, or would perhaps propose something slightly less outlandish, such as a sabotage committed jointly by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Margaret Thatcher, and the ghost of Richard Nixon.

But alas, apparently LaRouche doesn’t believe it was a conspiracy at all!!! Lyndon, Lyndon — you’re betraying your loony base!

My LaRouchie friend laughed at my Saddam theory (I bet he was taking mental notes, though), then responded to my inquiry with some sort of weak explanation about how the government is to blame because of “accounting problems” (aha! Enron brought down the shuttle!) and a lack of funding for NASA. I believe he cited a phony statistic about how our space missions fail 50 percent of the time. (Yeah, remember all those shuttle crashes in the 90s? Damn, those sucked.) But no vast conspiracies, no shady government agents, no wide-eyed rhetoric — nothing!

My friend did leave himself a little wiggle room for future lunacy, however. After intitially saying “no” when I asked if it was a conspiracy, he amended his answer slightly, noting that the usually omniscient LaRouche “doesn’t know yet” what happened. So, just wait — and when you see a headline in next month’s New Federalist proclaiming that Lyndon LaRouche has single-handedly uncovered Saddam Hussein’s secret SuperScud program, you’ll know where he got the idea!

CONTEXT AND PERSPECTIVE: In classic Dan Rather tradition, I should give you some background information on my relationship with the campus LaRouche folks.

In 1996, Lyndon LaRouche sued my father’s office (the Connecticut Secretary of the State) for failing to put him on the Democratic presidential primary ballot. (He lost.) So, in one of my initial confrontations with my campus LaRouchie friend a couple of years ago, I mentioned the lawsuit and explained that I didn’t like LaRouche because “he sued my dad.” I was basically just trying to craft an excuse to get away from the LaRouchies and go to class, but my friend responded on the merits, implying that LaRouche was justified in suing my dad because, in essence, my dad is part of the shady government conspiracy that seeks to crush all dissent, destroy the civilized world, etc.

Now, I tend to agree that Connecticut’s primary law is imperfect, even if my father did draft it. But it’s one thing to disagree with a policy, and it’s another thing entirely to say that somebody’s dad is part of the governmental axis of evil. So, needless to say, I lost it. I believe I loudly uttered several words that I don’t often utter, certainly not loudly and in public. The LaRouchie was stunned, and he backed down somewhat.

Ever since then, I’ve had a cordially antagonistic relationship with him and his fellow cult members. On the way to class one morning last semester, I walked past the LaRouche table — which had more propagandizers than usual that day — and, standing in the middle of a large crowd of students, I cried loudly, “Oh my GOD! They’re MULTIPLYING!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! IT’S LYNDON LAROUCHE!!!” My friend laughed, but one of his cohorts was incensed, and yelled back, “What do you call a fool in the Dark Ages?” I suppose she intended this cryptic description to apply to me, but I responded with the first thing that came to mind: “A LaRouche supporter!”

Sometimes things are exactly how they seem: NASA is now pretty much saying tile damage is the leading suspect in the investigation of the shuttle disaster.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces have set up a special e-mail address where you can send condolences to the family of Colonel Ilan Ramon, the Israeli killed in the Columbia crash. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

Here is NASA’s official site with information about the disaster.

And here is Dave Barry’s blog post about his own personal connection to Columbia.

NOAA has created a permanent archive of the radar loops showing the shuttle debris over Texas and Louisiana on Saturday. Thanks to InstaPundit for the link.

I’ve also got graphical images of Monday’s front pages from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

UPDATE, 6:11 PM: RANT, a blog site, describes the growing belief in the “zipper theory,” and links to this Space Wire article elaborating on what was seen over California.

Space Wire also proclaims that, since any tile damage could not have been repaired in-flight, “the astronauts would have been condemned to their fate, even had they known they had a problem.” I’ve heard that before, but here’s the new part: Space Wire also explains why the astronauts could not have taken refuge on the International Space Station. “We would have needed much more fuel to change orbit than we carried on board,” a NASA official said.

The moral of the story: carry extra fuel! Space flight is inherently risky; everyone involved knows and accepts this. But that is no excuse for failing to prepare for mid-flight contingencies. Granted, a shuttle-docking contingency probably would not have saved Columbia, since NASA seems to have earnestly believed that there was no risk of a re-entry problem, and thus would not have activated the contingency plan. But imagine if they had known there was a problem — and were unable to do anything about it, despite having a giant freakin’ space station right near by, because they didn’t have enough gas in the tank to get there. That’s just asinine.

One of the lessons NASA must learn from this tragedy is to do a better job of expecting the unexpected.

A few headlines this morning from Fark.com:

“82% of Americans want manned flight to continue. Other 18% wants NASA to stop faking them” (link | discussion)

“Kyrgyzstan votes for president, more vowels” (link | discussion)

“122-year-old Egyptian dies; was sick of hearing about that punk kid Strom” (link | discussion)

“Police hunt piglet-rustlers. Pooh, Tigger offer reward” (link | discussion)

“Nothing irritates people quite as much as ‘nuc-yoo-ler’” (link | discussion)

This, too, is from Fark.com… a picture of the TV screen showing CNN stating that the space shuttle was travelling 18 times the speed of light. Uh, yeah. Good job, guys.

(Discussion)

Actually, I shouldn’t make fun. I briefly made the same mistake in one of my early shuttle-related blog posts, before noticing it and fixing it within a few minutes. But, then again, I’m BrendanLoy.com. They’re CNN.

Speaking of funny stuff, have you seen The Onion’s top story for this week? U.N. Orders Wonka To Submit To Chocolate Factory Inspections? Hee hee.

The Onion also reports:

HOLLYWOOD, CA—The new Jerry Bruckheimer comedy “Kangaroo Jack” has successfully tapped into America’s longstanding love affair with rapping kangaroos, taking in a box-office-best $17.7 million in its opening weekend. … Warner Bros. has already confirmed plans for a sequel, “Koala Bob,” featuring a computer-generated beat-boxing koala who steals $50 million in gold bullion… and he’s not giving it back.

Hehe. I remain convinced that Kangaroo Jack and the current wave of reality-show hits are the best vindication any anti-American bastard could hope for. Not that the anti-American bastards are right, of course — but we’re giving them way too much to work with!

A Lord of the Rings fan with too much time on his hands (wait, that sounds like someone I know) has obtained a copy of a Asian bootleg DVD of The Two Towers with horrible English subtitles, has taken screenshots from scenes with particularly bad translations, and has posted them all on his website. Hilarity ensues. A few samples:

Ah, and those are just samples. There are so many more where they came from. You gotta check out the whole site — it’s absolutely hilarious. There are nine pages of screenshots, and they are all thoroughly worth giggling at.

In other Lord of the Rings news, it seems Peter Jackson is planning to do the same thing with The Two Towers that he did with The Fellowship of the Ring: add a several-minutes-long trailer at the end of it, several months into the movie’s release, so die-hard fans can go back and see a preview of the next movie. Hurrah! I can’t wait! It’ll be my fourth time seeing The Two Towers… :)

The Stephen F. Austin University student newspaper, The Pine Log, has extensive coverage of the tragedy, as expected. (The university is in Nacogdoches, Texas.)

Unfortunately, they left out a word from the lead sentence of their lead story: “Nacogdoches became the center of the international early Saturday morning when debris began falling over East Texas from the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia…” The center of the international what?

Aside from that article, the Pine Log also features a brief history of the shuttle Columbia, a story about geography students helping with the debris search, and a warning to stay away from the debris or else. There is also an editorial re-iterating the no debris tampering message. (I guess this is a big problem. Did you hear about the eBay thing?)

Perhaps the most revealing Pine Log article about life in Nacogdoches at the moment is an opinion column by a student named Kathryn Morton, whose mom woke her up Saturday morning to ask “if you got hit by it” (the shuttle). Comparing two days of tragedy, Morton writes, “I’ll remember that it was absolutely splendid weather, almost identical to the skies on Sept. 11, 2001.” She also recounts a friend’s shock at seeing her town’s name scroll across the TV screen while she was obliviously watching “MASH.” (That reminded me of my own shock and amazement when, after the deadly lottery shooting in my town in 1998, I logged onto the Internet and saw an article that began with the words “Newington, Conn. (AP)–.” I never thought in my life I’d see those words.)

Morton notes, “I reckon it’ll be a while before I hear someone say, ‘Nothing ever happens in Nacogdoches,’ again.”

Finally, there’s a photo gallery and an editorial cartoon.

Speaking of editorial cartoons, here are a few from Sunday papers:

From the Clarion Ledger:

From Florida Today:

Thanks to an evening “InstaBoost” from mega-blog InstaPundit.com, My world received a month’s worth of traffic in just a few hours Sunday, finishing the day with 1,586 hits — 1,385 of them after 7:27 PM — and promising, perhaps, even more on Monday. The daily total was nearly 12 times the previous daily record of 135 hits, and well over half the total for the entire month of January.

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