BOB LARSON IS A NUT JOB

Here are a few articles uncovering the scam that is Bob Larson. I am headed over to his church on Tuesday. I assume it will HELLA fun. Who knows? I hope I don't have to pay to get in. I hope Bob will be giving a sermon or something, maybe even a few EXORSICMS. Though I think you have to pay to get that shit. Nothing is free. Not even God's love.

Kim Kardashian proves she is "all real" by posting jail bait pictures of her 14 year old body in a bikini. All I can say is thank you!

I am not sure what I am supposed to do with this other than thank god for the obvious gift he has bestowed upon us. I know you think I am an atheist just because I went to see Bill Mahr's movie Religiulous and when the kid in the red shirt jumped up after the movie and screamed, "I am not convinced!" I simply replied, "I am not surprised."

While that makes me a non-believer I still like to thank god for all the little things he gives me like a picture of a untalented porn and reality tv show star when she was just 14 and all natural.

I am pretty sure that shot is right out of OIU magazine circa 1984. I always loved Oui magazine because Oui is way sluttier than Playboy. Oui showed vagina lips and focused on hairy bushed women (a la the famous Demi Moore shot) before we knew that hairy bushes where not ok. I never took a razor or a clipper anywhere near my pubes until I was in my late 30's.I am sure that it way too late for me now to pretend to be down with the clean shave look, but I try because girls seem to like it.

I hate you and I will not stop hating you until you make yourself a better person

I don't have any readers and I don't care. The smaller the audience the less I have to sell out to it.

You don't have to explain yourself to a small readership.

With so few readers I get to write whenever I want which means unlike you, with your giant fan lists and hungry blog roll, I get to wait for inspiration.

I guess it's a good thing that I don't like explaining myself, because nobody ever writes to me demanding that I tell them all the secret symbolism that I hide in this blog. I can't tell you how comforting is for me that you will all take every thing I say so literally. You're like my very own little group of wife stoning Southern Baptists.

I know none of you care, but here is one little secret I will let you in on. I named my blog Bathos for the Misanthropic after you.

You aren't a good person.

You aren't even really nice "after we get to know you." My opinion of you, is that like me, you are a bunch of misanthropes. You are all sociopaths and you hate the rest of your species even more than you hate yourselves. But most of you are just too much of a pussy to admit to it.

The joke is on you though. At least most of the time on this blog it will be. Except when you stop reading me, and then the joke is on the local Mail Box etc. where I bought all those business cards that say 'professional blogger' on them. I bought all those cards with over drafted credit cards. I always run up the maximum credit limit allowed on my credit cards and then never make payments on them.

I do that because my parents never taught me lessons about financial responsibility. The only thing they ever taught me was that the landlord has to give a renter a 3 day notice before you evict them, and that if you cry while handing your son a wooden toy wrapped in newspaper on his 14th birthday, he will cry too and say "thank you daddy for taking me to goodwill and not forgetting my birthday this year like you do most years," and then you can save all the money you would have spent buying stupid things like cake and presents for kids and instead spend all that money on whores and beer. Who do you think really deserves it more? Of course the whores do, and my liver tells me I like beer. The older I get the better I understand my daddy.

I guess I really shouldn't complain about the newspaper wrapping my daddy put on my toy, as my toy was wrapped in the sports page, which just goes to show you that my daddy did love me, as I would have picked out the sports page myself, if I were to wrap my own present. I certainly would not have fought over the comic pages like all brothers and step sisters did, even if I really wanted them and it was my birthday...

I bought a hand mirror today and I can now confirm for you what people have been telling me for years, I am balding.

I am mixed up kid. I am white trash, but I like to read and I never learned how to fix cars. Which just makes me bad at being white trash and really annoying to my middle class friends. I am so bad with cars that I don't even know how to change a battery. I googled it and watched a video and I am still confident that I am going to have to hire a Mexican or a grease monkey to come over to my house and replace my dead battery. I don't know a lot about blue collar workers, other than I think they all look like Erik Estrada, and are probably way more into ass play than you would think.

I guess everything would be ok if I had taken my love for reading and stuff to college and gotten a degree with it. Then I could afford to pay for the Mexican to take my car apart. As it stands now I can barely afford it, and so I will have to take the look that comes from some "macho" dude rolling up his sleeves and fixing on my car, but I can't shoot him back that look that says, "I don't do this because I can pay you to do this." My guess is that holding my career over a blue collar worker (who can at least fix the things I break) is about as difficult as it is to impress all the 15 year old girls I do. They fuck me. But they never look at me with any respect.

I am going to change the subject to my girlfriend. Whenever I find myself with a girl I try to imagine the things her parents (or especially her girlfriends) are telling her about me. I am sure they are asking her what she sees in me. I know I am not much to look at, so she doesn't even get points for that. I can't dance like a gay man or fix things like a He-man. When I watch movies like Rudy I don't cry like a man should. I don't choke back a few tears or a tiny sob near the climatic end of the story.

I cry throughout the entire movie like a little girl who is watching her pony get punched in the face by an on coming tractor trailer. I weep. I have to wipe away streams of tears. My face gets hot. I get flustered and my whole body turns red. I run a fever and get headaches that last all night at work.

What you would not know from that is that I have been told I have a certain kind of genius. It's not a genius that most folks would ask for. And I would have preferred something a little more bankable. You might take a guess that I am "good with words" or funny or something like that. But you are wrong. I can't make a living typing or writing anything and folks mostly laugh at me in public. I mean maybe I am funny, but lots of people are as funny as me in person. And most people think my kinda funny is mean, and that's because they think I am making fun of them. And I usually am.

To learn about my genius you would have to sit with me for a few hours at a time. Maybe even a few weeks or months or in some cases a few years. But you would start to get it then. I can be entertaining. I tend to accept you, and don't think I need to change you. I am funny. But not always ha ha funny. I don't do jokes well as you can tell, you read this blog. When you read a "joke" by me on this blog then you can bet that I am struggling with what I want to say, and I am not being very authentic about it.

I might be a genius, but I am still broke. And since I am white trash that means I don't have health care. Which is ironic because I am a hypochondriac. A hypochodriac without health insurance is pretty mixed up. Even though I always think there is something wrong with me, sometimes there really is. It's allergy season and I am having a terrible time with my allergies. I think my red runny nose and bloodshot eyes have more to do with the occasional seasonal affliction of allergies which Arizona is now known for, than the Super Aids which I am most probably dying from.

I was taking Claritin until I noticed that it causes liver damage. It also gave me a few more heart arrhythmia than I thought was absolutely necessary. Now whenever I bend over my head hurts. I am still shitting green and yellow and I think that means I have Pancreatic Cancer. I hear you die quickly with that so I guess if I you still see my writing in a few months I can deduct the P.C. from my list of worries. Actually you can deduct the cancer from your probable list of my afflictions, but I still plan on worrying about it.

I have this idea to get a hold of some kind of government services for free health care. I plan on blogging how that goes. My guess is that I am going to die of whatever infection I have right now before I ever get any access to any medical care.

I am about to pick on some of you in the medical profession. I guess it's a good thing we call it a profession and not care giving. If it were care giving you might feel bad about care denying and asking me if I have insurance or suggesting that my only hope for admittance into your e.r. is if I think I am dying. I know you don't plan on admitting me to the hospital unless I am having another heart attack, but the least you can do is take a glance at me and tell me [I mean that person] that I am not going to die or something.

Not every person who walks into your counter is trying to trick you into getting free health care. They just might be overreacting to ascare brought on by a bit of paranoia and a large amount of seeping puss. Your advice to that person to have their doctor check them out later is not much in terms of advice. It's like yelling at someone to be careful right after they fall. Nobody appreciates that kind of thing, and it just makes you look like an ass.

Looking back on the time period when I had me some health care it's kinda ironic that I am now pissed off at someone getting denied medical service. The one time I had a health care "provider" he prescribed Effexor to deal with my depression and some kind of acid reducer that was supposed to help my Acid- reflux. All it did was give me liver failure and yellow shits.

I know you think this rant has had precious little to do with you how I hate you. But you don't work in the medical profession, or if you do, and you read this blog, you diagnose me with real problems from fake symptoms. But I appreciate that. Some of you are my best friends, if I had best friends on the Internet.

I used to have the definition of Bathos on this blog:

a. An abrupt, unintended transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect.
b. An anticlimax

But somebody convinced me to take it off, and that has probably confused the dumber people who read this blog. They like to pretend they know what I am talking about even though they need a dictionary just to read me. But I have already blogged about why I hate you before. Like I think you care more about dogs and cats than you care about homeless people. And I think that makes you worse than Hitler.

I got attacked by another stray dog today. Which was bound to happen given your careless attitude towards fencing your animal and the 40 billion dollars or so that you spend on feeding them. I think I should have stood my ground and kicked it a few times as the dog was smaller than me and I was pretty sure I could win the fight. But the dog was slow running up to me and the bike I ride is really fast. So fast that I doubt you could keep up with me if you were running along side of me for too long.

Also, I think you'd rather sleep in today than do anything about all those little babies with flies in their eyes in Somalia.

I'm sorry. I don't just want to make you feel bad. I wanted to make you feel good about the path we are on as humans. I had a long speech prepared for you about how tiny we are in the universe. But I composed it while at work and work frowns on me using the voice recorder while I ring up your stupid groceries. And I can't remember anything I told myself while you hunted for exact change.

For the most part my speech went on about how we are evolutionarily speaking still provincial creatures who have barely raised our collective heads out from beneath the muck of creation. Our sense of morality is based more on disgust of the other than anything helpful to us.

That doesn't bother me. Like its white trash cousins, Humankind, can't help where they come from. It doesn't bother me that you prefer sleeping well at night rather than face the forces of evil. I don't blame you for that. I have a hard time sleeping myself, and I know what a good night of rest can do for you.

I can't fault you for being a coward either. I don't like risking things myself. The guy who says it is better to have tried and failed, probably never failed at anything important, and if he did fail, he probably didn't get knifed in the back for trying it. If he did you'd wonder how he ever got around to living long enough to say all of those things about trying so much. Me? I prefer the sidelines of life. I don't need to participate in full contact sports to get a rush.

I can get a rush out of just cheering for the winner.

I don't know many White people, but the white people I do know sure do scare me

I am sure they scare you too. I am white so I don't really have much to worry about from them. If you look white then they pretty much leave you alone.

If you are person of color be happy for every day that goes by without a white person bothering you. But when you are white trash like me, you wonder why you don't have any white friends from the country club that can get you one of those high paying, do-nothing jobs you are always hearing colored people complain about.

What I am saying is that it sucks not knowing any of the right white people, because the right white people have all the money, and all the jobs. I decided to try and meet some of those white people on the Internet, and that's why I started this blog. Only all the white people I meet online are bigger freaks than me because you'd have to be a big ass freak or maybe a hipster to think anything I say is funny, and not mean, offensive and sick like it really is.

I found a site that gives the best advice about how to deal with white people. It's called Stuff White People Like. I looked up this site right after I discovered I was being cyber-stalked by a white chick who's friends enjoy cooking and eating her placenta. I hope I didn't just piss off my first, number 1 superfan, and even though I hate to admit it, I got a bit freaked out reading Frieda Bee. I still love F. B and I don't care if you eat your babies or you are into cannibalism because you can't help those kind of things. Your white people, and it's in your culture, and if there is one thing white people know, it's that you can't make fun of someone because of their culture.

I was warning my only other white friend, greensunflower, about how a lot of the white people next door to her could be closeted (or not so closeted) cannibalists, when she offered to Fed Ex me her placenta after she got pregnant. Sunflower told me that eating the placenta was quite common in other cultures, and if there is one thing we all know about white people, it's that they love borrowing strange cultural artifacts and traditions from crazy ethnic people, and adopting those traditions as some kind of 'alternative' yet also somehow more authentic culture than their own.

All my non-white friends find white-hipsters adopting their ancient ways to be a white cultural peculiarity that is particularly distressing to them. But once again, that's just non-white people not getting white people, and the things we care about, like my Netflix. I've got to admit that the first time I read that hipsters like Netflix on stuff white people like I got like real pissed off and shit, but then I realized that my love of NetFlix is just ironic, so it's cool again, or maybe not. I'm not really clear on this. But I am not as hip as I'd like to be, because I still think everybody wants to be a preppy and not a hipster. I have no idea why white people wear baggie pants past their ass. I thought that was a trick only black people and puerto ricans could pull off. Now I see all the greasy hipsters doing it and I am sure that I am supposed to want to do it too, but for the love of god I really don't.

I mean I am a slave to fashion as much as the next guy. I wore bell bottom pants when I thought they would never get back in fashion. And now I am slowly warming up to the idea of being turned on by women in skinny jeans and flats. When enough hot chicks start wearing something, I begin to associate all that hottness not with the chicks, but with the clothing style. And since I think 35% of all women are hot, you can bet I love me some skinny jeans. Go ahead and taper your jeans white girls and throw some of those creepy fug boots on, even though fug is out of style, so much so that I guess it just got back in style for people who love saying that they don't care about style by being the most stylish person they know.

I guess I just summed up why I hate hipsters in one long run on sentence. I'm not sure how this rant went away from me protecting colored people by explaining why white people scare me, to me hating on hipsters, but I never promised you any real helpful advice on anything, did I?

Why I Hate Danielle Dax and the Hipster Record Store Bitch that got me to buy her album

When I was a lot younger I used to buy a lot of new music. Then I discovered UFO. Since my discovery of the worlds greatest rock band I don't buy any other kind of music.

But there was a time when I did buy new music. I went out searching for it. I was young and impressionable. What I am saying here is that I was easy pickings for any cute record store worker with an agenda.

I met one worker with such an agenda. She must have been a Fem-Nazi and not just a hipster. Dax is known for calling powerful men "mean people." And by "powerful men" I mean record company executives who decided her music sucked. And I suppose the rest of the world, because her last album was called:

Comatose Non Reaction: The Thwarted Pop Career of Danielle Dax

And this recommendation for an obscure avantegarde artist came after I mentioned I like MSG and Queensrÿche. I took the Nazi-hipster's suggestion and to this day I regret it.

You need to hear this crazy women yourself.



Just for comparisons sake check out my favorite band in 1985. At least I think it is 1985. The only original band member I can spot is the lead singer, Phil Mogg. A review of the album they are promoting on this UK TV show suggested that it sounded worse than Karaoke.

"Wow. I'm stunned by how much I dislike this mid-80's offering by the once mighty UFO. It's more like Phil Mogg doing karaoke to some rejected Starship backing tracks. Sissy sounding eighties keyboards wash over everything and the guitar is treated like an afterthought."

And that review came from a FAN of UFO. Now push Play. If you dare.



The last video is a very rare live performance of one of my top 5 favorite songs from the "classic" period. The classic period included Micheal Schenkner. The classic period is regarded as the best by UFO fans though the "early years" features some great stuff that is highly underrated. The song featured on the video "Space Rock" was never given the kind of respect it deserved. Space Child marks a transition from the Space Rock of the "early years" to the Hard Rock and Metal of the "classic period."

What is so awesome about this song is the remarkable restraint and subtlety you find in it. Much of that subtlety is lost in the poor video quality of this video.

Why I still hate Oprah Winfrey

For a while I thought I had gotten over my hatred of Oprah Winfrey. My last post inspired some rather nasty racist name calling. So I thought about taking it easy on her.

None of the commentors in my original post did. Those commentors used the N word. People like that just seem plain dangerous to me. Not in the controlled anti-social way, like myself. But in a primal I-just-shot-your-mama-now go-to-your-room kinda way.

Nevertheless, Oprah does deserve a fair amount of the criticism she gets. For instance in a recent Salon article took her to task over her endorsement of a silly self help book The Secret.

The article mainly rehashes several points that many other critics have been making for years. But the author does a good job of showing how the criticisms when taken together show that Oprah is endorsing and promoting a kind of "culture."

For instance, Oprah writes about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day."

That statement is just sickening and offensive. And I do sickening and offensive for a living. I don't need to tell you that her idiotic statement is an indictment of starving children. Who I guess brought all of their misery on themselves by crying too much when they got hungry.

Actually I probably did need to tell you how stupid her belief system is. Way too many people in the United States fall for this New Age Hocus Pocus. Allthough Oprah did not come up with this nuttiness, she has profited from it. And while she did not create Oprah Culture from scratch she is hyping it to an eager and gullible audience.

What's Oprah Culture?

"It's a culture where superstition is "spirituality," illiteracy is "authenticity," and schoolmarm moralism is "character." It's a culture where people apologize by saying, "I'm sorry you took offense at what I said," and forgive by saying, "I'm not angry at you anymore, I'm grateful to you for teaching me not to trust shitheads like you."

And [here's] the part that should bother us most: the diminishing, even implicit mocking, of genuine goodness, and of authentic spiritual concerns and practices. Engagement, curiosity and active awe are in short supply these days, and it's sickening to see them devalued and misrepresented."

Oprah Culture combines some of the worst aspects of Eastern and Western Philosophy. One part of hedonistic materialism with an equal dose of "false spiritualism."

I wished Americans were strong enough to resist the false positism that Oprah offered, but I bet we aren't.

Ask me why I hate Ninjas

You guys aren't going to believe this. The single worst podcast ever was nominated as one of Itunes favorites.

This just goes to show you that Apple doesn't have a fucking clue.

I seriously invite all 3 of my readers to click on over to Mr. Ninja and ask him just how the hell he has the nerve to don his costume and sully the good name of every ninja out there.

Better yet just go over and click on any random post. If you make it through an entire show your head will explode. And you will be banned here for life.

This might be the worst day of my life. I always assumed every blogger needed an enemy. Why did I have to pick one that was so powerful? Now that AskaNinja boy has corporate backing I fear for my life. I am sure Apple has a way of spying on me from my Ipod. They are probably giving AskaNinja my GPS as we speak.

If you don't hear from me everyday call the cops on him.

Why I hate Cops!

Hang around me long enough and you'll get exposed to one of my diatribes against police officers.

Why I hate them so much:

You are more likely to get killed by a police officer than terrorist. That's right. And that's after accounting for 9/11.. If you are sitting at the local Donut shop you'd rather see Osama Bin Laden walk in the door strapped with a backpack and a detonator than the have local county deputy stop you in the wrong part of town after midnight for being brown.

Being a cop is safer than you think.

Working at Circle K or driving a taxi is more dangerous than being a cop. Yet you never hear chicks speak in some cultish glow of affection about gas station attendants.

They don't do anything.

Most of a cop's time is spent doing paperwork, or dealing with arguing spouses and busting celebrities for pot. It is extremely unlikely that cop will ever save your life or even be around when a crime takes place against you.

What is possible is that if you are unlucky enough to get mugged by a mob of prostitutes while exiting from a strip club the cops will only look to avoid filling out a police report.

Cops get laid more often than I do.

Because too many women many still worship these guys as heroes. It's not because their jobs are dangerous, it's just that women are all to eager to submit before the power and authority that police represent.

In defense of insanity. Tom Cruise is.

Science, like all human endeavors, has a long history of causing unintended suffering. If you knew the wrong doings of surgery, you would surely condemn it to the dustbin of history. For instance in the beginning of surgery (according to Wikpedia: )

" and before advent of anesthesia, surgery was a traumatic painful procedure and surgeons were encouraged to be as swift as possible to minimize patient suffering. This also meant that operations were largely restricted to amputating and external growth removals. In addition, the need for strict hygiene during procedures was little understood, which often resulted in life threatening post-of infections in patients."

But it is not without regard to your safety that today when your hernia hurts or when your appendix ruptures we suggest surgery as a sensible and sane option.

A just case against the practice of surgery could have been made in ancient times, the same case made against medical surgery can be made about psychiatry and those practitioners who attempt to soothe and comfort those who suffer from mental disease.

It is true that Psychology is a new Science and we may not be very far removed from the times of out right barbarism. But the contention that the mental sciences have not progressed is false.

There may very well be validity to criticisms that we are an over medicated society. And I must completely agree with the notion that we must be careful with the labeling of "deviant" behaviors as mental illness. That said, much suffering has been eliminated and a greater understanding of the mind and it's operations has occurred over the last 40 years.

Critics of psychology like Tom Cruise do not have this in mind when when they suggest that psychologists cannot tell the difference between sane persons and the insane. The critics of insanity would suggest that there are no mind illnesses just the labeling of behavior; however, even the most strident critic of psychology must admit to the reality of "damaged brains" leading to mental and behavioral abnormalities.

In a famous experiment in 1973, sociologist David Rosenhan, designed a study to examine the the social construction of the "mentally ill" label. I will use this experiment because it is purported to disprove the notion that psychiartrists can tell the difference between the mentally ill and normal people.

Rosenhan's experiment used eight healthy "pseudopatients" who were admitted to twelve psychiatric inpatient units in five states by feigning psychotic auditory hallucinations — hearing unfamiliar voices of the same sex saying "empty", "hollow" and "thud". None had a history of mental illness. After being admitted, the experimental subjects acted normally and did not display any obvious psychopathology. Subjects were to remain as inpatients until they were discharged by the staff at their hospitals, who were not privy to the experiment and believed the subjects to be real psychiatric patients. Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days and the average was 19 days, all being discharged as schizophrenic "in remission."

That sounds terrible right? But the truth is that schizoid cases only rarely remit(about 1% of the time). The fact that all of these patients were "hearing" things is unusual in itself and and it's not at all that odd to rely on patient complaints and self reports to help diagnose disease. Doctors are taught that people know when something is wrong about their bodies or feeings and take these reports seriously. Doctors in general are more likely to find something wrong with you than find you healthy regardless of whether they look at your body or mind.

When you think about it, who wouldn't want people, who were so alarmed by the fact that they are "hearing voices" they checked themselves into a clinic, to be "looked at" a while? But the critics of psychology and the sociologists who ran this study thought it odd that patient complaints would be validated so easily.

The suggestion that the doctors do not distinguish between sanity and insanity does not bear out. If a person came to you complaining of voices in his head you would take it as a sign that all is not well. So quite prudently the medical profession investigated. And all of the patients where released, most after just a brief stay.

And all of them were found to be sane again (though in remission.) Of course this does bring us in to issues that go beyond the scope of this blog entry like malingering and the stigma of mental illness labels, but these issues have nothing to do with the correspodence of mental illness as phenomenon to reality. The Rosenhan experiment in no way invalidates mental illness as a reality, but rather provides a cautionary tale about expectations and the consequences of medical practice.

Why I hate Wolf Blitzer and Why Tyra Banks Scares the Shit out of me.

I am certainly not the first guy to insult Wolf Blitzer's "Situation Room."

But I just can't understand how any grown man can stand and deliver lines like "We are getting live feeds in now on that overturned bus ..." it's beyond me.

Especially since live feeds means nothing more than television feeds from other networks.

Do we really need a stituationon room to inform us that Paris Hilton's new TV show has been cancelled?

"We are getting reports now that Paris Hilton has had a Tuna Sandwich."

The Situation Room is always "just getting reports." Stealing live feeds from Shobiz Today or that insufferable upbeat program entitled The Insider with former football guy Pat "Oh Your so fucking Hot!" Brien.

Which naturally leads me to this awkward segue, Tyra Banks scares the shit out of me!!

In her new program she plays big sister with attitude to a stunned and cattle prodded audience. Not that you would dare to fuck with Tyra. That's one sister who will put the beat down on you.

Tyra leans in to her guests who have some rather serious problems and fixes their mascara, she's a girls best friend. But all this good natured advice from a women who could snap any second and throw an alarm clock at you is unnerving to watch.

Trya Banks cares? She is like a rabid dog bringing back a dead canary to her master. You're sure you don't want to thank the dog, you're darn sure you didn't want a dead cananry, but the fucking grin on her face demands some kind of aknowledgement.

Careful where you pet boys and girls, careful where you pet.

Why I Hate Oprah. An Open letter.

Yesterday Oprah had Anderson 'I swear I am not gay' Cooper on her TV show talking about Poverty in America.

A host of different TV celebrities were shown ringing their hands over the poor. Oprah even made sure we knew she was down with the Kanye Westian notion that "it would have been different if it were white folks in New Orleans."

Meanwhile it was Anderson Cooper who tried to reassure all those anxious Soccer Moms who watch Oprah religiously that there "might have been a different response" if New Orleans was filled with minivans and Born Again's in trouble, but he wasn't "quite sure how it would have different. "

"I am grateful for Anderson Cooper. He took away my gnawing sense of guilt, and replaced it with something I am more comfortable with... ambiguity."

As always a Kennedy was in tow. Though this time it was only Maria Shriver. She was there to pay homage to rural Appalachia. What's a report on the poor in America without a hillbilly or two?

So what did we discover about these "Unseen Americans"?

Like us most of them make bad decisions, they just don't have any safety net to catch them. Then they are caught in the self defeating catch 22 of the culture of poverty.

"You know, lots of people make mistakes in their lives," Oprah says. "They get a break, and you get another chance, and you get another chance. But when you're poor, one strike, and you're out. "

When you don't have money in the bank, and when you don't have a family who loves you or who can care for you, the only place to fall back on is the street," Anderson says. "And the street is pretty damn hard."

So even when Oprah gets it "right," poor people make mistakes, she goes about asking her questions all wrong.

When you attack the problem of poverty from an Individualist Perspective you will always find causes and solutions for that particular individual. But does it really account for the widespread distribution of poverty?

Why not ask serious questions about lack of social services, education, jobs, rather than view the poor from the microscope of morality. Once you attempt to view the locus of decisions, you notice that they are all contingent.

Poor decision makers are made not born. If the alternative where true, then what could we do as society? Throw away persons won't make for a stable and secure future.

In their final analysis Cooper and Oprah hope to provide the answer to why poverty exists in the U.S. They claim poor people lack "drive."

When Oprah tells the poor they don't have the "drive of the middle class and other successful people" her incorrect analysis hurts poor peoples chances to find favor with the middle classes.

Because Oprah is supposed to be from the 'hood. She represents the rags to riches story. If she places the blame for poverty squarely on the backs of the poor themselves , everyone else will. They will say "If Oprah can rise up to be a billionaire, anyone can do it!"

It wasn't so long ago that Oprah herself was dirt poor so when she forgets it it's a crying shame and hypocritical.

To be fair, during her report Oprah didn't completely forget about her roots. She remembered them when saw herself in the personage of small poor black girl.

"This little girl has star quality." She oozed.

Oprah should realize that just like that little girl, the vast majority of poor are poor through no fault of their own. Most poor are children. Oprah should stop telling children they don't have the heart to be rich. Oprah lost your billion dollar heart a long time ago.

I hate to say this, but Oprah is different. She has a power over millions of people, the power to make them think.

Few people in America are viewed as an intellectual. Because so many people view you that way, you have the power to engage the intellect of the American psyche.

Instead you allow your contradictions to control you. Didn't I see a "tease" about an upcoming show where you will "beautify" ugly women? Don't you profess to hate the beauty industry and the male chauvinists who objectify women? Oprah, haven't you fallen into the same trap? Do you really need supermodels to show "average" people how they should really look?

Oprah you had a chance to correct the sad stereotypes of the poor, but you failed to do so. You had a chance to explain in depth and identify the structural problems which prevent wealth creation at the bottom of the rung, but you chose not to. You could have explained why the gap between the rich and poor is increasing, but you preferred emotional tales of imorality.

The poor don't need your misplaced pity, what we need is for you to engage the anger of the righteous middle classes into class warfare. The rich are at war everyday with the poor of this country. It's too bad their strongest defender hasn't joined with them in the trenches.

Upcoming posts:

A defense of Insanity.--with my apologies to Tom Cruise I do know the history of Psychiatry.

Why I hate Wolf Blitzer and Why Tyra Banks scares the Shit out of me.
The Case for Race in Science.

Misanthrope of the Month!

This months nominee for "Misanthrope of the Month" (c.2005) goes by the name Terry Liddle. Mr. Liddle made this curious comment:

"For sure, the enslavement of millions of Africans by Europeans and Americans from the late 15th to the mid-19th century merits close comparison with the position of non-human animals in today’s capitalist society."

An Asshat like that is far more Misanthropic than I could ever be! Attention all of you PETA members , you all suffer from a form of pyschopathology. - you hate your species.

Mr. Liddle goes on to defend himself against charges that he is evil:

"Many animal rights activists are rightly suspicious of the Left which they see as manipulative and dishonest, interested not in furthering the cause but solely in recruiting to the vanguard party. They are not, however, misanthropes and terrorists despite all the scare stories."

You hate your species. Join the blog of choice, Bathos, and take the award, you deserve it!