The Singularity
_____________President Bush's use of the phrase "time horizon" is so apt for his non-plans on troop withdrawal from Iraq. So perfectly elegant a description of the obfuscation surrounding the entire enterprise.
Time horizon is reminisecent of the event horizon surrounding a black hole, an object so dense that no matter or radiation can escape its gravitational field. Matter or energy passing the horizon is doomed to disappear from the visible universe.
From Wikipedia,
"In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, an area surrounding a black hole, inside which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side is never seen again."
Relativistically speaking, it's a bit fiendish. Bush can allow events to approach the ever-receding horizon in every confidence that should the horizon be met, his wrong-doing would drop off the face of the map.
I wonder that he has a physicist with a wicked sense of humor on his team.
Labels: black hole, event horizon, PWOT, singularity, time horizon
posted by Lisa at 11:38 AM
2 Comments:
I like the analogy. Check out Juan Cole's blog for an explanation on how the term came to be. "Ali al-Dabbagh, who is usually described as al-Maliki's spokesman but actually seems to work for the CENTCOM or Pentagon Middle East command, was trotted out to make vague statements about Der Spiegel's having mistranslated or misinterpreted what al-Maliki said. This denial was issued through CENTCOM! When the original demand came from al-Maliki for a timetable for US withdrawal, it was al-Dabbagh who reinterpreted it as a 'time horizon.' Al-Dabbagh was contradicted by National Security Counsellor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, who seems actually closer in this thinking to al-Maliki. My guess is that al-Dabbagh has been recruited by some agency in Washington, DC, to explain away al-Maliki's statements whenever they contradict Bush's."
Thanks for the Juan Cole ref.
Amazing that the denial came via CENTCOM. Good guess that al-Dabbagh is on a Washington pork roll.
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