Kevin Pezzi, MD

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

Home | Contact me | Updates | Terms | Sitemap | My books | My websites | Bio

TSA: Stop wasting our time and do your job before the terrorists do theirs

After nine years and untold billions of dollars, the TSA has never caught a real terrorist but they've hassled countless millions of people, including disabled children, pilots, flight attendants, and hot Main Street USA soccer moms. They've subjected our military personnel returning from Afghanistan to searches so comically ludicrous and unnecessary that the TSA seems more at war with common sense than terrorism.

Is TSA now an acronym for
Touching Sexual Areas?

Or:
Touching Stuff Aggressively?
Trampling Several Amendments?
Totally Senseless Aggression?
Teaching Submission to Americans?
The Soviet America?
Totally Statist and Asinine?
The Socialist Agenda?
To Subjugate Americans?
Terrorists Succeeded Abundantly?

TSA screeners touched the “breast and vaginal areas” of a 12-year-old girl and put their fingers inside a pilot's pants. They exposed a woman's breasts and laughed about it. They insisted that a pregnant passenger lift up her shirt in front of people standing in line and arrested her husband when he complained about what they did to make her cry. They left a retired special education teacher covered in urine. They slammed a gal to the ground as she begged them to stop and forced another woman to remove her nipple rings with pliers. They pulled the pants off a 71-year-old man in public view after yelling at him. When he asked to speak with a supervisor, she beat on her chest and bellowed, “I have power! I have power! I have power!”

The TSA cannot stop terrorists by groping the genitals of six-year-old children, so Osama bin Laden and his many followers must be howling in laughter as they watch the federal government waste our time to put on a show of security—what one expert termed security theater: making us feel safer while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.

Terrorists could very easily bring down a jet—or dozens of them simultaneously—any time they wish. They know where the TSA looks for contraband, so they could hide explosives in other places: the stomach, rectum, other parts of the GI tract, vagina, external ear canals, nose, and nasopharynx. I had ER patients who placed drugs or even cash in a condom, which they stashed inside the vagina for safekeeping. If they can figure that out, the terrorists can, too. It's not rocket science.

If the TSA hired doctors to peer into every conceivable body cavity, terrorists could circumvent this offensively intimate screening by surgically implanting explosives in breast implants, the abdomen, or any part of the body. A little anesthetic, make an incision, insert the bomb, and suture the wound closed. In fact, it's so easy that anyone could do it in a few minutes. Hiding a bomb inside a uterus wouldn't even require a scalpel or sutures, just something to dilate the cervix. A Bic^® pen would suffice.

Unless the TSA plans to do exploratory surgery and literally dissect passengers as part of the screening process, terrorists are bound to figure out how to foil the TSA screening procedures. Anyone nuts enough to blow himself up on a plane won't care if the explosive is in his rectum or surgically implanted where no finger or scope can reach. At least one Jihadist surgeon is contemplating this method of concealing explosives to create a wave of undetectable Frankenbombers. If they can't find enough suicide bombers willing to die for the chance to meet 72 virgins in Heaven, they could implant explosives inside unsuspecting people during routine operations and create incentives for the patients to travel afterward.

UPDATE: US warning of airline plot to implant bombs in people.

The TSA announced that it won't perform cavity checks because secondary screening procedures and technology can find fuses and detonators, which they claim must be outside the body. Wrong. I won't give Al-Qaeda a tutorial on how to construct an integrated bomb, but this is so simple that they are bound to figure it out.

An article published in the Journal of Transportation Security reveals that airport x-ray backscatter units are almost worthless when terrorists know a simple way to defeat them:

If the TSA could buy some yet-to-be-invented miracle scanner that could see through the body to detect any hidden explosives without making people glow in the dark afterward, then would we be safe?

Hardly. If a terrorist knew what I know about science, he wouldn't need to bring any explosive on board to blow up a plane. Urine, sugar, and flour can each easily be turned into an explosive during a flight. I assume that at least a few terrorists read science books and can think outside-the-box. Furthermore, explosives are just one of our many worries. Terrorists with ingenuity but no weapons could easily commandeer an airliner and achieve their goal of planting a jet into the White House.

If the TSA wants to do its job instead of pretending to do that, it must begin profiling the obvious suspects, but our spineless politicians won't give TSA the green light to do what needs to be done. Federal leaders are more concerned with being politically correct than correct. It is easy for them to be so cavalier about safety when they know they are safe on their chartered jets. They won't die for their bad decisions; Main Street Americans will. Perhaps you or a loved one. Perhaps your entire family, snuffed out so Barack Obama can continue to pat himself on the back.

“The probability of dying from radiation from a body scanner and that of being killed in a terror attack are roughly the same. About one in 30 million.” If the sole purpose of body scanning is to save lives, aren't these expensive and intrusive scanners doing just as much harm as good? Given that body scanners are certainly not the only defense against terrorists targeting airlines, it seems that scanners are much more of a threat to your health than terrorists are.

The foremost responsibility of the government is to protect our rights, not our safety. That's why the federal government has compelled millions of citizens to become soldiers and put their lives on the line. Most American men didn't need government threats to force them to fight and die if necessary to defend our freedoms, so it is alarming when the government violates our constitutional rights on such a widespread scale and expects us to accept this infringement so it can congratulate itself for being politically correct.

John Mica (R-FL), the Congressman who helped create the TSA, now says he refers to it as “my bastard child, or the monster that we created.” On Freedom Watch (11-20-2010), he added that airports can opt out of TSA screening; “about 20 have chosen to opt out.” He agreed that current TSA screenings cannot detect explosives placed in body cavities.

Since traveling in airliners is safer than driving, by insisting on offensive but pointless searches and scans, the TSA is deterring people from flying. With more people on the road, more will die in traffic accidents. This is not a minor point. About 40,000 Americans die each year in traffic accidents—an amount that dwarfs the 9-11 death toll. If TSA searches and scans are solely intended to maximize safety, they cannot be so much of a deterrent to flying that people choose to drive instead.

If the TSA isn't making us safe, is it doing anything besides wasting our time and money and subjecting us to searches that even a former TSA official admitted are unconstitutional?

Yes! As TSA workers paw their way through checked luggage, they are bound to touch underwear soiled by feces and oozing STD lesions. If the TSA cared about your health, they would insist that screeners don fresh gloves so germs from someone's infectious diarrhea or genital pus won't be transferred to your underwear, handkerchief, or toothbrush. TSA screeners do pat-downs with gloves contaminated by other passengers or by idiotic hygienic practices, so you could contract herpes or worse.

FOX News suggested that Obama and his family demonstrate their support for TSA procedures by going to Washington National Airport and receiving the same scans and pat-downs as other passengers—as if that would ever happen! In my opinion, touching their bodies and especially genitalia with gloves contaminated by other passengers is an assault, but if it is an assault to risk their health, it's equally criminal to risk ours.

You are inconsequential cattle to the TSA, so gloves aren't changed, becoming fomites: inanimate objects capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one person to another. You don't matter. Your health doesn't matter. Your constitutional rights don't matter. They are the federal government, and in their minds, you are just one of the many sheeple who let them get away with murder. You don't put your foot down and draw a line in the sand, so they walk all over you.

And the worst part? It's all for naught. The TSA can give us nightmares, but can't stop any terrorist with a brain. We get security theater, not security.

However, terrorists aren't the only ones laughing at us. TSA workers jokingly refer to backscatter x-ray scanners as “penis measuring devices” (although they typically substitute the four-letter locker-room slang for “penis”).

Some people suspect this X-rated Neanderthal behavior is one of the many not-so-subtle ways our federal government is deliberately provoking us, testing our willingness to endure unconstitutional indignities so our leaders can safely up the ante and continue to wage a more effective war against us than the terrorists. Federal leaders want to teach us an important lesson: no matter how harebrained or unconstitutional their rules are, we must abide by them or face fines, imprisonment, assaults, or ridicule from boorish TSA workers. While running for office, politicians pretend to care about us. After winning elections, most of them write laws to force us on to our knees.

When asked why Americans think so little of Obama's policies, Vice President Joe Biden replied, “I think what it is, is he’s so brilliant”—implying that we aren't smart enough to understand the many inscrutable decisions he makes, from abusing the Constitution, to siding with terrorists, to letting TSA workers contaminate your toothbrush. That's so brilliant that no one can understand it, or defend it, yet Obama refuses to rein in the TSA.

Oh, guess who ordered the nude body scanners? Barack Obama. He's probably laughing, too, along with the terrorists and TSA cretins joking about measuring genitalia.

The biggest joke of them all? That the government thinks we still owe it respect when they've worked overtime to earn our contempt. If Barack is foolish and delusional enough to run for reelection in 2012, he will find out how much we respect him.

Thomas Sawyer, the retired special education teacher left soaked in urine, said, “I want safety for all passengers … but if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”

On November 22^nd 2010, three FOX & Friends hosts (Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade) interviewed TSA Administrator John Pistole and not one asked him the obvious question: why subject millions of innocent travelers to screening that cannot detect explosives in body cavities? If terrorists want to blow up planes, that's exactly where they will place them. Just wait and see.

Related topics

1. Former Director admits TSA is violating the Fourth Amendment
2. Woman groped by TSA screener

Comments (0)

Post a comment or subscribe to my blog

Errors in Google Chrome will prevent this site from displaying correctly
Copyright © 1987 – 2024 Dr. Kevin Pezzi | Terms and Conditions of Use | XML sitemap
Website design by Dieter Schneider www.csstemplateheaven.com | Modified by Kevin Pezzi, MD

Notify me when this blog is updatedTrack updates or additions to this blog using the free Track-this.info (TTI) service created by Dr. Pezzi.
• TTI permits people to track (or follow) information; it doesn't track its users or what they do—unlike Facebook! | + More optionsUse Track-this.info to:
• Contact Dr. Kevin Pezzi
• View or post blog comments
• Network with others following this blog