Jed Rothwell wrote:
> The Bush administration's contempt for facts was made famous by this quote: > > "The aide [who was upset with the author] said that guys like me were > 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as > people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of > discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about > enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the > way the world really works anymore,' he continued. ''We're an empire > now, and when we act, we create our own reality. Straight from George Orwell: He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. The trouble is, it's not true. There is an objective reality, and those who forget that are in danger of running headlong into it. Here's a related quote, this time from an engineer regarding design of the data paths between boards in a computer: "You may ignore the need for a ground return. Mother Nature won't care, she'll gladly provide one for you. But the ground return she provides may not be one you like." You can play "let's pretend" for a very long time, like the Soviet Union did. They pretended to be profitable, and they were so big, and so secretive, that nobody could gainsay them. But in reality -- the objective, it's-really-out-there reality, the one that can be so hard to pin down -- they were operating their overseas empire at a loss. You can operate with negative cash flow for a very long time if you're big enough but you can't do it forever, and they finally went broke. In China, the sleazoids running the show were less enamored of their own vision than the leaders in Russia, and saw what was happening, and started making decisions based on reality. And that's how we got the China we have today, which is a capitalist oligarchy (and disgusting), and no longer "communist" in any meaningful sense of the term. (Not that they were any less disgusting under Mao...) If the United States continues to be run by people who operate as if there is no reality out there, the end result will not be beneficial to the United States.
