A wonderful phrase that Rumsfeld just used in his press briefing. He means that in the mathematical sense, of course. Catastrophe theory is about how one can see huge and abrupt changes from small inputs, and it’s exactly applicable here. USA Today (via Donald Sensing) has a good wrapup of how it happened, including the story of how a captured colonel resulted in the rapid fall of Baghdad.

He really went off on the doom’n’gloom reporting today as well.