The aide 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. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Ron Suskind quoting an anonymous “Bush aide” (probably Karl Rove) in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article.
The above quote came to mind as I read today that a British panel has concluded that the scientists whose emails were released in the “Climategate” “scandal” have been vindicated.
Here’s an NPR link, among scads of others. NPR was unable to voice any healthy skepticism or do any thoughtful analysis in real time, when it mattered, but now performs “journalism” by telling us what reality really was. In the U.S., there are no meaningful barriers against the public relations industry. These are the engineers who manufacture our reality, giving us WMD’s and incubator babies, Tweets from Iran and yellow ribbons tied to trees. News and public relations are virtually indistinguishable.
The revelations of the British panel do not matter. The “scandal” oddly resembled a high-level covert operation, with sophisticated hacking and thousands of hours spend poring over emails to find those perceived as damaging. It was a considerable investment of time and money by unknown actors, and the release date was timed to foreshadow the Copenhagen conference, where nothing got done.
Vindication is a clean-up operation. Operation Climategate achieved its purpose. They created the reality, and it is even somewhat interesting now that we are now studying that reality. In the meantime, the engineers have moved on.
Piece of Mindful 