Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

A small asteroid crossed Earth's orbit last week, coming within 75,000 miles of the Mother Planet, three times closer than the Moon. Described as about the size of a "football pitch" -- the field where Europeans and other simps play babykickyball -- it buzzed by into the wild black yonder where it was only spotted by astronomers three days later.

Given the rock's velocity -- 23,000 miles an hour -- and likely mass (nobody's really certain about that; they make a guess at its composition based on how much light it reflects), had it struck our homeworld, it would have hit with a force of 10 megatons, roughly a thousand times the power of the bomb Harry gave 'em hell with back in '45.

This was not a planet-wrecker like the six-mile-diameter flying mountain that crashed into the Yucatan coast 65,000,000 years ago, killing everything in North America instantly, 75% of everything else over the next few days, weeks, or months -- including the dinosaurs -- and pushing up a bulge on the other side of the planet that broke into the kind of open sore we call volcanoes that did almost as much damage as the asteroid did. It's believed that every tree in the world burned on that occasion. But it could have wiped out a large city or a small country, either by direct impact, an aerial burst explosion (like the one that sort of hit Siberia in 1908), or a tsunami from striking an ocean.

Tens of millions of human beings would have died in an instant -- and here's even worse news, friends: statistically speaking, we're about 15,000 years overdue for a vastly bigger hit from a Yucatan-type asteroid that could finish off every last organism on Earth and hit the RESET button on something like three and a half billion years of evolution.

Chicken Little was right: the sky is falling.

Meanwhile, what were the worthies doing, who are supposed -- by socialists, fascists, and ministatists the world over -- to protect us all from such things? They were busy protecting us all from something else, something really frightening -- to them. They were protecting us all from freedom. They were protecting us from the Constitution and the rule of law. They were reading your e-mail, imprisoning American citizens without due process, and groping your grandmother at the airport.

Catch any of them off-guard, and the wretched parasites performing these "services" will admit that everything they were doing, on the day that the asteroid flew by so closely, was strictly for show (or in the case of your grandmother, strictly for fun). None of it would have prevented the horrible crimes of September 11, 2001, and none of it will prevent similar crimes from happening again. Indeed, by standing in the way of genuine reforms that could prevent such crimes, they are making it likelier that such crimes will happen again and again.

I guess the final ignominy is Wimp Jr. in the White House, taking it on himself to declare "war on fat". The man's at war with his own head. By comparison, as Rome burned, Nero was a model of relevance and conscientiousness.

In the meantime, tens of billions of dollars that are currently being diverted from our failing economy and wasted on going through the empty motions of "Homeland Security" could be put to better use, protecting six billion individuals who have no choice but to live on the same planet with the moral and mental midgets in high places who got us into this "terrorist" mess in the first place. That particular undertaking, in addition to protecting our species from extinction, would also yield thousands of times the wealth that was invested in it.

Unfortunately, the democratic system has a glitch that most of its founders failed to anticipate: it selects exclusively for only the most stupid, evil, and crazy among us. The filtration is amazingly efficient. Nobody with any brains, nobody who is truly decent, nobody completely sane can ever hope to be chosen as congressman, senator, supreme court justice, cabinet member, or president. Only a moron, a villain, or a madman can achieve high office in any of the world's democracies, and the United States is the worst of them all in that respect. I know of only one exception, and I don't know how he does it.

Ayn Rand used to say government has three legitimate functions, represented by the army, the courts, and the police. History teaches us how those functions are really performed. The police arrest you if you don't go along with what's politically correct; the courts deny you any real chance to defend yourself, provide a jury selected to convict you, rubberstamp anything the police did to bring you in and anything they want to do with you afterward; and if too many of you object at once, the army will imprison you in your own home, fill it with poison gas, set it on fire, and machinegun you as you attempt to escape.

In acts separate from war, a hundred million innocent individuals were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century. In many instances -- Operation Keelhaul, for example -- the US government, which was supposed to be different, helped them. No wonder Robert LeFevre defined government as a disease masquerading as its own cure.

That being the case, can anyone reasonably expect the government -- any government -- to protect us from what Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle poetically called the fall of Lucifer's Hammer? Does it protect us from crime in the streets, or have violent crime rates only begun to fall since we began relearning to protect ourselves? And hasn't government's role been to do everything it could to prevent that?

Two reforms are needed -- and needed immediately -- to prevent further terrorist acts, and nothing else, no matter what government promises or threats accompany it, will serve as a proper, working substitute.

First, the American government has to get its long, slimy nose out of everybody's business. For more than a century, it has tried to tell the people of practically every other country in the world what to do, often at gunpoint or to the tune of cruise missiles and falling bombs. Its evil, stupid, and crazy embargo of Iraq alone has killed a million children just as helpless, just as blameless, as the 25 children it murdered in cold blood at Waco. September 11 made it clear that more and more of its victims are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Second, the government must remove its nose from the business of Americans, as well, particularly with regard to the free exercise of their rights. It would be nice if it enforced the highest law of the land, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, instead of trying to suppress and eradicate it, but it would be more than enough if it just stayed the hell out of the way.

The lunatics, retards, and baby-killers who own us hate to see the blame for September 11 placed where it belongs, on them and their irrational, idiotic, and murderous foreign policy. They hate even more to hear the single most glaring and unmistakable fact of September 11: that it would never have happened if the passengers of the hijacked airliners had been secure in the exercise of their Second Amendment rights.

Non-intervention overseas, Bill of Rights enforcement at home. Only that -- and not all of the "Homeland Security" fascism in the world -- can prevent another September 11. Ask your poor, groped grandmother.

What can protect us from falling rocks? Only freedom. Freedom from worrying that government will seize the threat of killer asteroids as simply another excuse to beat us up, rob us, and kill us. Freedom from the inhuman burden of taxation and regulation that has crippled us as a civilization and prevented us from achieving our destiny among the stars.

If you want to know more, if you'd like to see a plan to protect our species from "extinction level events", at a profit great enough to change the course of human history forever, without involving the government: http://www.lneilsmith.org/erise2000.html

If you'd like to see the same idea pitched as a science fiction novel: http://www.lneilsmith.org/colp20020518.html

The solutions to all of these problems are relatively simple, but they require that future leaders have a higher regard, and a greater respect, for their fellow beings than the current trash in office -- generalizing from what goes on inside their own skulls -- is capable of.

Democracy's negative selection process has to be dismantled, its filters pulled down, if humanity is to survive this century. If you'd like to be part of pulling down the filters and removing the stupid, evil, crazy products of democracy from our lives, then watch this space.

 

Reprinted from The Libertarian Enterprise for Number 180, July 1, 2002