Reflections  

Cosmically close call — I am looking at a news article entitled, "Killer Asteroid Headed Towards Earth." This is an opportunity to see what "science" reporting is like today.

The asteroid, "measuring a half-mile in diameter," has in fact never been measured. It may be as small as a quarter mile in diameter, or as large as a half mile. On July 3, this "massive asteroid" passed about as close to the earth as the distance between the earth and the moon.

OH MY GOD IN HEAVEN! WE ALMOST CRASHED.

Or, as the international news report — produced, apparently, by the oracle of Apollo at Delphi — described the forthcoming event, "Even though the chances of it hitting Earth are nil, by cosmic standards, the asteroid will pass alarmingly close to our beloved blue orb next week."

The implication is that earth standards would produce a much more frightening assessment than would be rendered by "cosmic standards." So let's put it in earth language. Suppose you were driving down the street, and you learned that two blocks away there was another object hurtling along, an object one-twelfth to one-sixth the size of one of the periods on this piece of paper. That, in earth proportions, is what happened on July 3.

OH MY GOD IN HEAVEN! WE ALMOST CRASHED. — Stephen Cox

Nasty as she wants to be — Ann Coulter is all over TV promoting her book about "godless liberals." The other night she was on "Scarborough Country" bragging that her book has ended the political participation of the 9/11 widows whom she calls the "Jersey Girls," and who she says have enriched themselves over their husbands' corpses. These "broads," as she terms them, are enjoying their husbands' deaths. Then, godly woman that she purports to be, Coulter asks rhetorically, "How do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies?"

Asked by a Pittsburgh newspaper editor which of her book quotes she'd prefer to have spotlighted now that everyone's heard her attacks on the 9/11 widows, Coulter replied that she'd like people to see the following: "Our book is Genesis and [the liberals'] book is Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring,' the original environmental hoax. Carson brainwashed an entire generation into imagining a world without birds, killed by DDT. Nazi concentration camp victims were bathed in DDT when they were rescued to save their lives."

What's her point? When we're finished pondering the images of Jews being bathed in DDT, are we supposed to clamor for its return?

No one ever said, as Coulter claims, that the 9/11 widows or Gold Star Mothers were above the political fray, but war widows and Gold Star moms have always been honored as a matter of personal conscience. I remember the special honor and respect given to Gold Star Mothers by both sides during the Vietnam War. No one in the pro- or anti-war movement would have savaged them the way Coulter does.

Coulter serves as a green light for GOP political operatives who want no standards of civil behavior or restraints on their own viciousness in the upcoming political season. Crashing through the lines of civil discourse, Coulter has once more coarsened the culture and made a run for the bottom. She is not attacking the "Jersey Girls'" ideas or arguments, but their widowhood, the state of their marriages, their right to activism based on their 9/11 experiences — things that decent people and most liberals, godless or not, wouldn't do.

"I don't particularly care if liberals believe in God," says Coulter. "In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven." Well, she may be in for a big surprise. Whether or not liberals are "godless," as the title of her book proclaims, they usually have higher moral and ethical standards than she does. She is living proof that professed godliness is no guarantee of goodness. — Sarah McCarthy

It's a fair cop — It is always wise to be cautious in commenting on a trial that one has not attended from start to finish. But from everything I have heard and read, the federal jury in Alexandria acted appropriately when it decided that Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, should spend his life in prison rather than be executed.

As he left the courthouse, Moussaoui shouted, "America, you lost . . . I won." Like most of his jejune mock-provocative comments through this trial, this was mere bravado, and inaccurate to boot.

Insofar as a significant aspect of what America is about is the rule of law, America won in this case. The prosecution, having secured a guilty plea, was aggressive in seeking the death sentence. The defense was aggressive in trying to prevent it. An episode in which a government lawyer apparently tried to coach scheduled witnesses in violation of the judge's orders was handled fairly. The jury returned a verdict that will disappoint some people but seems consistent with the known facts.

To justify the death penalty the government had to show that Moussaoui was responsible for people dying. Since he was arrested before the Sept. 11 attacks of which he said he was supposed to be a part, the contention was that by lying and not exposing the plot while being interrogated, he was responsible for its "success," which led to 3,000 Americans being killed.

The government may have been hampered by not being able to call witnesses who had been tainted. But the argument was always something of a stretch. And given what has been learned about how the FBI and other agencies stumbled in bureaucratic rigor mortis before 9/11, it is by no means certain they would have prevented the plot even if Moussaoui had told everything he knew.

Prof. John Eastman of Chapman University's law school was not pleased. "If a terrorist involved in the most heinous attack in U.S. history doesn't deserve the death penalty, who does?" he told me. But Eastman would have preferred to see Moussaoui tried under the laws of war in a military court. In a civilian court this verdict was justifiable.

One consolation: serving a life term in what is likely to be solitary confinement, Moussaoui will not be able to claim the status of a martyr for the holy cause of jihad against modernism. It would be appropriate for him to disappear from the news and appear years later as a minor footnote in our history. — Alan W. Bock

Reefer madness, redux — Karl Marx, building on Hegel, noted that history repeats itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. Had he foreseen the War Against Pot, perhaps he would have added, "but often both at the same time."

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has had manufactured a scientific study confirming that there is, in the measured language we've come to expect from such studies, a "cannabis pandemic" threatening the health and sanity of the world's population. As usual, this finding rests on the enormous number of citizens consigned to "treatment" for their supposed marijuana dependence. Which, given that most people caught holding a single joint are forced to choose between "treatment" and prison, really puts the statist in statistic.

But trust the UN not to leave it at mere tragedy: UN Drugs 'n Crime director Antonio Maria Costa had to toss in his own scientifically unfounded assertions about how today's cannibis is "considerably more potent" than the pot everyone at the UN was smoking a few decades ago, "no longer that different from other plant-based drugs such as cocaine or heroin."

This is asinine, even apart from the fact that there's never been a single documented "marijuana overdose" (it's not clear whether such would even be possible). Put simply, people smoke pot in order to get high. Once high, people either stop smoking, sit back, and relax; or they keep smoking, and fall asleep. With very few exceptions, pot smokers aren't going to wreck the house, beat the kids, or take the car out for a joyride. (They're not even going to accidentally set the bed aflame, because unlike tobacco, pot must be relit for each toke.) At worst, they'll down a couple bags of chips or a box of Twinkies (though the nascent War on Obesity may soon make that its own crime). If anything, the UN drug crew should be lauding potent pot, because it allows smokers to get high with fewer puffs, and thus endure fewer lungfuls of smoke.

Costa had but one sensible thing to say, though of course he didn't understand it as such: "Policy reversals leave young people confused as to just how dangerous cannabis is." His overestimation of that danger is farcical; his ability to craft UN policy based on that overestimation, tragic. — Andrew Ferguson

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