General Discussion

Things will just get worse until we figure out how to combat this:

In October 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote a first-person article for The New York Times about the presidency of 43rd U.S. President George W. Bush, in which he included a grandiose quote from someone described only as a "senior adviser to Bush."

Many have assumed the comment was made by Bush political adviser Karl Rove, though there isn't any publicly available evidence to that effect. Here is what Suskind wrote:

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."