Gray skies this Wednesday evening on California’s north coast — rain coming tonight, and a much-bigger storm scheduled for late tomorrow to carry over into the weekend.
Next sunshine, reportedly, will be on Sunday…maybe.

The T-Rump bullshit continues in the so-called Susan Rice escapade, creating a lying apparatus — an insight into this ‘new media ecosystem‘ from Media Matters this morning: ‘This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world.’

Nasty bottom line here is T-Rump practices perfidious behavior ‘for the pure joy of it.’

(Illustration: ‘Pinocchio‘ by Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910), found here).

Also a smokescreen practitioner, T-Rump plays lies upon lies, and then skips off from the fact of the lie. He cited no evidence of Susan Rice’s criminal activity, but that doesn’t really matter. The lie matters.

Lying seems to be heavy in the air nowadays. Does the T-Rump know he’s lying? Has he lied so much, for so, so long he can’t really distinguish between reality and falsehood? It’s been said his lying is really bullshit, which is worse, and in T-Rump’s case, the entire scenario is embedded/enmeshed with lies.
Or as in noteworthy words of Pinball: ‘“We be fucked.”‘

In lying, supposedly we lie to ourselves first. New research/study from the Journal of Economic Psychology reveals we seek information that supports what we want to believe, while avoiding that which does not — sound familiar?
The study focuses on an analysis from 1976: ‘We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others…’
From Scientific American yesterday:

Psychologists have traditionally argued we evolved to overestimate our good qualities because it makes us feel good.
But feeling good on its own has no bearing on survival or reproduction.
Another assertion is self-enhancement boosts motivation, leading to greater accomplishment.
But if motivation were the goal, then we would have just evolved to be more motivated, without the costs of reality distortion.
Trivers argues that a glowing self-view makes others see us in the same light, leading to mating and cooperative opportunities.
Supporting this argument, Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, showed in 2012 that overconfident people are seen as more competent and have higher social status. “I believe there is a good possibility that self-deception evolved for the purpose of other-deception,” Anderson says.
…
Von Hippel offers two pieces of wisdom regarding self-deception: “My Machiavellian advice is this is a tool that works,” he says.
“If you need to convince somebody of something, if your career or social success depends on persuasion, then the first person who needs to be [convinced] is yourself.”
On the defensive side, he says, whenever anyone tries to convince you of something, think about what might be motivating that person.
Even if he is not lying to you, he may be deceiving both you and himself.

Louis C.K. spoke truth to lying last night on Stephen Colbert’s show:

“I guess he’s not as profound as I thought he was,” the comedian said before the audience erupted into applause.
“I thought he was some new kind of evil, but he’s just a lying sack of shit.”
He then described Trump as the type of liar who “likes” to lie.
“Someones people lie — ‘That guy lied, they found out he lied.’
Then there’s somebody who lies once in a while and can’t quite stay inside the boundaries of truth. Somebody who lies sometimes,” he began.
“Then you have a liar — almost like a problem; they can’t help it, they lie a lot.”
“Then you have just a lying sack of shit,” he added.
“They like it — he likes it. He goes, ‘Heh heh, it wasn’t even true. Wasn’t even true. Then I said, ‘They were liars.’”
“It’s just an insane. It’s just gross. He’s just a gross, crook, dirty, rotten, lying sack of shit,” the comedian said.

And that’s no lie…