Government officials and politicians delight in finding reasons for all of us to be fearful.

While there are many reasons for this, perhaps the major (generally unspoken) reason is that fear causes people to seek a savior – a man on a white horse. And government is always up for playing that role. Most of our readers understand this: they really ain’t such a thing, but they love playing one on television!

Anyway, one of the latest reasons we are to fear is seen in this picture. Asteroids!

Not just A asteroid, but dozens, hundreds, thousands! Orbiting almost endlessly up there in the evil darkness of outer space, just waiting their turn to come crashing down upon the earth. And strike a blow for… chaos? Disorder? Taking out a random taiga forest here, a desert or underwater ecosystem there, a city here – another species or dozen of top-o-the-food-chain beasties there.

The Rapid City Journal headline a few days back was “One of NASA’s chief scientists says asteroid risk much higher than previously thought” and boy, is it scary! We obviously must dig deeper – well, let government dig deeper into our pockets to pull out more money for government to waste to use to defend us from the Borg the Bugs the Big Rock cartel. We must stop the penny-pinching of spending only a few hundreds of millions of bucks a year to defend us against space.

Indeed, we must be willing to spend billions. After all, we are spending $800+ billion this year alone (if Uncle Joe and his puppet masters get their budget) to defend against the likes of Russia, China, North Korea, and everyone else that doesn’t let us station a couple hundred or more troops on their soil. And not only are there tens of thousands if not millions of asteroids out there, but! A mere 280-foot asteroid (smaller than a football field) would produce an airburst of 29 megatons, according to Purdue University. Russia’s largest bomb, the Tsar Bomba, is just 25 megatons. And they only have a few of those.

And who better to spend that money to protect us from space objects (at least they are identified space objects) than NASA. After all, NASA has a proven track record of efficiency, economy, and solid results. They are as reliable, as trustworthy as the CDC, the National Weather Service, and the Supreme Court!

(In a totally unrelated question for our readers, can anyone tell us how long it has been since the last time NASA was able to fly one of their own spacecraft to the International Space Station? Not a private spacecraft or a Russian spacecraft with NASA passengers or cargo, but one of their own?)

But it seems like every day we see or hear another article about the latest meteor, asteroid, or piece of space litter to fall or likely fall. And how close the next big piece of rock (or nickle-iron or ice) will come to our Green Hills of Earth. And how we must act before we are all barbequed or just plain vaporized.

If war is the health of the state, “natural” bombardment from space might be the equivalent of giving a human the healthy constitution of Superman – or at least the Six-Million Dollar Man.

Don’t get taken in by con-artists. No matter how many letters they have after their name. Or which agency pays their salary.