Bright sunshine with just a slight touch of an ocean breeze this near-noon Tuesday on California’s north coast — no decent chance of rain until maybe tomorrow night or Thursday.
Warm all over the region today, but supposedly to be ‘short-lived‘ as in today only.

In this era of pure-crazy driven by unscripted psychological trauma, a new study reveals why assholes can get away with being assholes, and even has a name, according to the paper (via Quartz): ‘“Unethical amnesia is driven by the desire to lower one’s distress that comes from acting unethically and to maintain a positive self-image as a moral individual.”‘

Lying hypocrisy…

And with the GOP and the George W Bush era, there’s ‘collective amnesia‘ on the actual horror resulting from those eight terrible years. In that particular case, it’s well-beyond ‘unethical’ to just being lying assholes.

The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and indicates the phenomenon is a clash of ethics and your own personal comfort zone
Further at Quartz:

To investigate, Maryam Kouchaki, a behavioral research specialist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and her colleague Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School conducted nine separate studies with over 2,100 participants.
Over the course of their work, they found that people remember the times they acted ethically, like playing a game fairly, more clearly than the times they probably cheated.
“We speculated…that people are limiting the retrieval of memories that threaten their moral self-concept and that is the reason we see pervasive ordinary unethical behaviors,” Kouchaki wrote in an email.
Intuitively, these results make sense.
We don’t like to think of ourselves as immoral people, and may come up with justifications for our behavior that would indicate the contrary.
The authors write that these results could indicate why certain acts of dishonesty are so pervasive, like hitching free rides on public transportation, stealing from the workplace, and even cheating on taxes.

Of course, self-righteousness is in itself ‘unethical amnesia‘ justified.
And in the case of George W — the biggest attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor; a massive illegal war in Iraq, which lead to the rise of ISIS; the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression; and that’s just three noted incidents, the shit-list could go on, and on, and on.
Memory in reality is a bitch…

(Illustration above: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Portrait of Woman,’ found here).