Afraid of terrorists? Ready to clear-cut the Bill of Rights so they’ve got no place to hide? John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State (he holds the Woody Hayes chair of national security policy) wants you to calm down. Writing in the September/ October issue of Foreign Affairs, he ponders the assertion by the Department of Homeland Security at its creation in 2002 that “today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.”
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Mueller has a book coming out soon, Overblown, so his argument isn’t going away. But there’s one piece of it–a point I spotted him making not only in Foreign Affairs but in an interview on the Web site reason.com–he should dump. To put terrorism in perspective, he offered this in Foreign Affairs: “The lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000–about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor.”
We know in our bones how small a chance that is. So far as anyone knows, the next person killed by a falling star will be the first. It’s possible for mathematical logic to be both impeccable and ludicrous, and the parable of the asteroid fits the bill. “The asteroid threat strikes me as so imponderable,” I e-mailed Mueller, “that I’m curious about how anyone was able to calculate any odds at all.”
The reasoning behind the terrorism-asteroid equivalency goes like this: Terrorists will continue to kill in unpleasant but tolerable numbers. At some point in the next half a million or million years an asteroid will strike earth and wipe out a big chunk of the human race. In half a million or a million years the overall numbers will look pretty much the same, meaning tomorrow one’s as likely to happen to you as the other.
Sick Day
“They made a beeline for me,” says Page, who claims Thomas told him, “You don’t look sick.” But Power says Thomas said that to Page from across the parking lot and when he and Thomas turned to go back into Francesca’s Page stormed up to them.
That ended the confrontation. “I’m flabbergasted that he would make these outrageous, derogatory comments,” says Power.
