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Kevin Pezzi, MD

I developed technology to instantly
stop school shooters and other criminals,
such as rapists, robbers, home invaders,
and shoplifters. I also created ways to block
airborne germ transmission. Read more >

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life.

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

The perfect way to kickstart our economy and put people back to work

Barack Obama is talking about re-building our infrastructure, such as schools, bridges, and roads, as a way to put people back to work and invigorate our economy. I have a better idea. What we need is something that will literally transform our nation, rocketing it well into the 21^st century, and doing just as much for the physical world as the Internet did for the information world.

If we did this, in the end we'd have USA 2.0 — a country far ahead of the world in terms of productivity, efficiency, energy efficiency, convenience, and modernization. By reducing our demand for energy, it would also reduce pollution. However, the primary benefit of this project that I have in mind, and the one that would justify its enormous cost, is how it would kickstart huge improvements in productivity — that's one of the fundamentals that determine how vibrant any economy is. As secondary benefits:

It would reduce the need for roads and bridges — things that are so 19th century.
It would enable police to provide much better protection at lower cost.
It would enable businesses to rapidly expand, reaching far more customers than is currently feasible.
It would save lives and improve health in many ways.
It would save everyone hundreds of hours per year … perhaps giving them more time to read my books (most are free, by the way), spend more time with their families, or help our furry little friends in the wild.

This project would give investors something to get excited about, so money would pour into our economy, which would roar to life now and accelerate toward even higher peaks in the future.

You're probably wondering what I am talking about. It can be boiled down to a single four-letter word … but not one of the profane ones that many folks are uttering now that our economy is crashing! :-) I'll soon write a short book about this and offer it as a free download from one of my web sites (such as www.ER-doctor.com), but before I do that, I'd like to see if anyone can guess what my idea is.

UPDATE December 11, 2015: I was discussing what Elon Musk calls the hyperloop. I later found this presented in the November 1950 Popular Mechanics in an article entitled This business is next to nothing (page 108). According to Popular Science magazine (Spring 2019, p. 55), the hyperloop concept originated in the 1870s.

I'd also like to hear from anyone who has good, outside-the-box ideas for stimulating our economy. Our future is too important to leave to the politicians. What's especially notable about them is that even the brilliant ones — yes, there are some with high IQs — are characteristically hidebound, with a paucity of original thought.

While you have your thinking caps on, here is something (totally unrelated) else to ponder: How could we eliminate every cell phone company, and every cell phone tower, in the world while giving people MUCH better cell phone coverage at much lower cost? Hint: You and everyone else could make money off this idea, even while you sleep, eat, or browse my many web sites. Why haven't the geniuses at Google or Microsoft thought of this one?

Here's another question for anyone who owns cell phone company stocks: Why would you invest in them? You could obtain a much greater return on investment by investing in my inventions, some of which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Yes, really. If you have money and are not satisfied with investing in companies that are stuck in the 20th century, contact me.

Notes:

Robert H. Goddard: Patent # 2,488,287 (Nov. 15, 1949): Apparatus For Vacuum Tube Transportation.
Excerpt: “Patent settlement: The Guggenheim Foundation and Goddard's estate filed suit in 1951 against the U.S. government for prior infringement of Goddard's patents. In 1960, the parties settled the suit, and the U.S. armed forces and NASA paid out an award of $1 million: half of the award settlement went to his wife, Esther. At that time, it was the largest government settlement ever paid in a patent case. The settlement amount exceeded the total amount of all the funding that Goddard received for his work, throughout his entire career.” (source)

Comment: Those who study history see this repeatedly: even stellar geniuses are ignored, underfunded, or underappreciated. Einstein was another classic example, toiling away as a patent clerk because others could not see his figurative gold. This reminds me of what Elbert Hubbard famously said:

“There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. The sternest comment that can be made against employers as a class lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and encouragement.”

This dovetails with another famous observation, this one by Job E. Hodges: “Lots of people know a good thing the minute the other fellow sees it first.”

Most people cannot spot exceptional ability until someone else does and points it out to them. However, I disagree with Hubbard's suggestion that ability usually surfaces in spite of it not be nurtured; today, people with good and great ideas are often so frustrated they give up.
The First Subway in New York City Was a Cylindrical Car Pushed by Air: Scientific American editor Alfred Ely Beach revealed the secretly built wonder in 1870
Futurama-inspired vacuum tube travel could get you from NYC to London in an hour
Evacuated Tube Transport
Vactrains
Futuristic High-Speed Tube Travel Could Take You From New York to Los Angeles in 45 Minutes
Ultra-efficient 4,000 mph vacuum-tube trains – why aren't they being built?
Comment: Thinking this is impractical because we don't yet know how to safely make a 4,000 mph vacuum-tube train is like automobile pioneers going back to horses because the first cars couldn't travel 100 mph and give their occupants air-conditioned comfort. Sheesh!

Shooting for lower attainable goals and improving speed as technology improves is the way to go, with extensive precedent: virtually every new product is released before it is perfected. Cars and airplanes have been around for well over a century, and they are still being improved.

A store 20 miles away could deliver a purchase to me in about 3 minutes using a 400 mph train (vacuum or not) versus 18 seconds if the train traveled 4000 mph and could instantly accelerate and decelerate (which it could not, so in such a short distance the time savings would be much less).

Getting things in 3 minutes would be a quantum leap over what it now takes: getting ready to go to town, clearing my driveway in wintertime, driving there (and thereby risking my life, wasting gas and polluting the environment, and wearing out my car), finding the part, waiting in line to pay for it, driving back, crossing my fingers and hoping that the lady who coughed on me in the checkout line won't get me sick, blah, blah, blah — that's generally now 1.5 to 2.5 hours, and sometimes more. Three minutes would be a miracle. The 3-minute transit time wouldn't take 3 minutes out of my life (I could be doing something else while waiting for the part to arrive), and it'd always be 3 minutes, unlike the mail service and package delivery services that don't work certain times and days of the week.

Some people question how things quickly zipping around the country would benefit us, but I could fill a few books with the benefits. Not too long ago, even people like Bill Gates questioned the value of the Internet, wondering if it could do anything practical, but it literally changed the world and our lives. It seems far-fetched, doesn't it? People gave up many of the activities they did in the pre-Internet era and devoted a huge chunk of their lives to zipping bits of data around the world, often to strangers. Who'da thunk it?

Prediction: Quickly transporting physical objects will do even more for us, with benefits that Bill Gates and others could never imagine.
Revealed: Elon Musk Explains the Hyperloop, the Solar-Powered High-Speed Future of Inter-City Transportation
ELON MUSK REVEALS THE HYPERLOOP
Elon Musk’s Tesla Is “Boring” Compared to Hyperloop So Build It Now: Henry Blodget
Elon Musk: Hyperloop
Elon Musk's 57-page Hyperloop PDF

The views expressed on this page may or may not reflect my current opinions, nor do they necessarily represent my past ones. After reading a slice of what I wrote in my various websites and books, you may conclude that I am a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Wrong; there is a better alternative. Just as the primary benefit from debate classes results when students present and defend opinions contrary to their own, I use a similar strategy as a creative writing tool to expand my brainpower—and yours. Mystified? Stay tuned for an explanation. PS: The wheels in your head are already turning a bit faster, aren't they?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”

Kevin Pezzi, MD

The perfect way to kickstart our economy and put people back to work

Notes:

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