Stromata Blog

The Doomsday Comet of 1883 (Well, Not Quite)

Reading this speculation about a cometary near-miss 128 years ago (via Instapundit), one breathes a sigh of relief while reflecting on how no planetary defensive measure would have much chance of staving off “3275 Tunguska events in two days”.

But then I thought, “Hold on. Wouldn’t a comet with 3,000 Tunguska-sized fragments be surrounded by billions of lesser particles? If it passed within 500 miles of the Earth, wouldn’t the meteor shower be remembered to this day?”

So I asked Dr. Bing about “meteor showers 1883” and promptly learned that, far beneath an alarmist headline – “Revealed: The massive comet that came within a few hundred miles of hitting the earth in 1883 - with enough force to destroy mankind” – even the scarcely reliable Daily Mail had noted,

The report’s claims have been questioned, though, as a comet breaking up so close to earth should have resulted in a meteor shower, and no astronomers detected one.

The regular Perseid meteor shower, which occurred shortly after Bonilla’s photograph, was described in reports as ‘not a fine one by any means.’

It was, admittedly, a spectacular year for the Leonid shower:

One of the most memorable Leonid meteor showers reported was the one that occurred in 1883. It was superlative in intensity that an estimated 100,000–200,000 meteors an hour were seen over North America. People who have observed it from the best locations actually thought that the world is ending. The 1883 event led to the first formulation of the origins of meteors.

But the Leonids are in November, three months after the supposed multi-Tunguska, and have been observed for centuries.

So the world didn’t almost end in August 1883, but, hey, maybe that was a fleet of alien starships cruising by.

While I Was Dozing

During my vacation from blogging, the political world moved along and clarified itself. We now know, with as much certainty as one can reasonably expect in politics (that is, less than a whole lot), that the Republican Party will nominate Mitt Romney for President and Barack Obama will campaign for reelection as a full-bore left-wing demagogue. The guy who deplored the split between Red America and Blue America now strives desperately to exacerbate it and rally the Blues to a titanic battle against the forces of darkness.

A lot of conservatives are agonizing about Governor Romney’s sincerity. Once inaugurated, will he be most at home with “moderates” whose moderation consists largely in leaving hard decisions to the next guy? The pessimistic view is that the “real Mitt” is the RINO who ran against Ted Kennedy and invented the prototypes of Obamacare and cap-and-tax; the optimistic, that he adapted conservative principles as best he could to the highly hostile environment of Massachusetts and is now free to say what he truly believes.

My own hypothesis is that he brings to politics the mentality of a CEO, meaning that he conforms to the demands of the marketplace. The head of a business may have absolutely firm principles. He may, for instance, hate pepperoni. But he’ll sell pepperoni pizzas if that’s what his customers want. Governor Romney saw that the people who had elected him wanted government action to control health care costs and prevent the climate from changing. As CEO of Massachusetts, he set himself to implement those directives as effectively as possible.

The results weren’t very impressive, because the projects were misconceived. The governor would have done his state a favor if he had resisted them. CEO Romney didn’t see resistance to the “shareholders” as his job.

I’m not commending that view of a politician’s role, and I’m certainly not saying that every businessman-turned-politico thinks that way. Herman Cain is, after all, the perfect counterexample, the man who seems determined to eschew every trace of executive suite thinking. When he was running Godfather’s Mr. Cain would have devoted more analysis to a pizza crust recipe than he evidently has to “9-9-9” (and in principle I like his tax ideas).

My suggestion isn’t that Governor Romney is well-advised to be an ideological chameleon but that his CEO instincts may work out very well for conservatism and the country. If the demand is for entitlement reform, tax reform, foreign policy vigor and a rollback of regulatory excesses, President Romney will, so far as one can divine from his record, get busy working on those objectives. Also, if the objectives are feasible, he has shown in the past the energy, intelligence and administrative skills needed to accomplish them.

Mitt Romney isn’t Ronald Reagan. The argument in his favor is that the country, after the 2012 election, won’t need Ronald Reagan. Or, I should say, won’t need all of Ronald Reagan. President Reagan was both a thoughtful, committed, persuasive conservative and a top-notch executive. Post-2012 (unless current trends change markedly), the legislative branch won’t have to be talked into enacting conservative ideas. What will be required is a President able to do the difficult work of carrying them out.

This is not to say that Mitt Romney is the candidate of my dreams, only that he ought not to be the one of any conservative’s nightmares.