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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
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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

This is racism

WARNING! This article contains a shocking photo of a war crime victim that is not suitable for all readers. Viewer discretion is advised.

Shout racist if you are losing the debate

Big-government liberals with an axe to grind have had a tough time deflecting criticism from their spend-spend-spend approach, so in response they search for the flimsiest excuses to label their opponents as racists in an effort to discredit them. If you're not particularly careful about what you call Japanese war criminals who gang-raped everyone from infants to pregnant women to grandmothers before savagely butchering and sometimes sexually mutilating them, such as spearing their vaginas … well, if you don't toe the PC line in referring to those monsters, you might be a racist! Had you seen photographic evidence of what they did, such as this …

… well, in a moment of passion, you might be excused by being less than kind to the savages who brutalized that poor Chinese woman. But when was the last time a liberal exonerated someone who didn't agree with him on everything? I agree with liberals on some issues, but the pure, rabid liberals are great at making excuses for their ideological clones and pathetically incapable of tolerating differences of opinions in others, including folks like me who sometimes agree with them, and sometimes disagree. Pure libs can't have that; disagreement often sends them into an apoplectic rage that manifests their shocking degree of intolerance and hence bigotry:

bigot (noun): (1) a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing opinion, belief, or creed; (2) a person who is obstinately intolerant of any ideas other than his or her own, especially on politics or religion, and has animosity toward those of differing beliefs.

Smart people see right through this liberal tactic of branding their opponents as racists when they cannot substantively counter their arguments, but all people are not sufficiently intelligent to separate fact from fiction. In an effort to help them spot genuine racism, I will post examples of it on this page to supplement my other discussions of it, such as healthcare workers who intentionally murder black patients.

Racism involves valuing—or devaluing—people on the basis of their appearance instead of ability, hence is nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying to those of us who value meritocracies. That the United States isn't enough of a meritocracy is a primary reason why it is struggling.

How humans repress prejudices: Even people who would describe themselves as liberal and open-minded might not be free of unconscious racism
African-Americans live shorter lives due to heart disease and stroke
Excerpt: “In recent years, the life expectancy of African Americans was 3.4 years shorter than that of whites …”
Comment: For this reason, they should be permitted to retire 3.4 years earlier with full Social Security (or other retirement) benefits. The ultimate goal should be to eliminate the gap, such as by improving healthcare. As I pointed out in an article years ago, they are subjected to overt and latent racism by healthcare providers, from ones more deadly than average KKK members to others who don't think of themselves as racist yet treat black patients as if second-rate care is good enough for them.

Beyond these outrages is pervasive ignorance amongst doctors who fail to convey crucial information, such as how black skin filters out more UV rays: less UV → less vitamin D production → more health problems caused or contributed to by suboptimal vitamin D levels. A mountain of research indicates how vitamin D affects much more than bone health, so vitamin D deficiency negatively affects the body and mind. Sadly, almost everyone graduates from high school and college without learning even 1% of the tips to enhance intelligence, creativity, focus, motivation, and other facets of brainpower or factors influencing its potential to fully blossom.

There's so much that could be—but isn't—done to combat racism. I discussed how latent racism can be detected (such as here and here) and how racism (latent or overt) can be quickly erased (such as here and multiple prior postings), but racism remains a festering sore. I risked my life to save a young black man: something few would do.

Give lip service to denouncing racism? Sure, but risk your life to help a stranger? Extrapolating from the sentiment underlying the missing white woman syndrome—that attractive white women are worth more—men might risk their lives to save a beautiful damsel in distress or Bill Gates's daughter, but not someone in a dirt-poor area who is likely also poor and hence unable to reciprocate.
Emmett Till was a handsome young man until two racists, angry that he allegedly whistled at a white woman, severely beat him until his face was unrecognizable, then shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. His mother wisely “insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing.” An all-white jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam “of Till's kidnapping and murder. Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look magazine that they had killed Till.”
Dr J. Marion Sims conducted experiments on slave women from 1845 to 1849.
Film Executives Apologize For Racially Tinged Emails
Excerpt: “Embarrassing, racially tinged emails about President Obama’s imagined movie tastes …”
Blatant example of racism: www.niggermania.com
This is cruel discrimination: Girl asked to leave restaurant because scars were scaring customers, grandmother says
H&M stores stormed in Africa over 'monkey in the jungle' sweatshirt ad
Oberlin cancels classes after person in KKK outfit spotted on campus
Clinton supporter [and pop star] Ariana Grande on video: 'I hate Americans. I hate America'
Rapper Azealia Banks declares hatred for U.S., white Americans, conservatives
From Dr. Seema Jilani, a female physician: My Racist Encounter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
Excerpt: “Let's stop this facade that we are a beacon of tolerance. … All I ask, all I have ever asked, is to be treated as a human being, that bigoted jingoism is not injected into every minute facet my life, that there remains at least the illusion of decency.”
Comment #1: It breaks my heart to see anyone treated that way, yet there are more serious manifestations of racism, such as healthcare personnel intentionally killing patients because they are black, which I reported years ago, and virtually everyone ignored.
Comment #2: Why the spate of articles in recent years encouraging people to be careful what they say online because it might affect their job prospects? Why? Because very few people are as perfect as they pretend to be to impress employers who often are equally or more imperfect. I posted two articles on LinkedIn relevant to this:
(1) Control freaks, creativity, and your career
(2) Self-censoring is bad for your career and the economy
The Cost of Racial Bias in Economic Decisions
Dunkin' Donuts apologizes for blackface ad
Possible false allegation of racism: Waitress, Red Lobster Sued For $1 Million In Alleged Race Hoax
Amazon Prime adds racism disclaimer to "Tom and Jerry" cartoons
This is stereotyping, not racism: Young whites at elite colleges see Asian-Americans as more competent than other minorities
This is also stereotyping, not racism: How winning at cards can help you win at life: Life, like poker, is full of risk, chance and hidden information – which is why the most accomplished poker bots can teach us how to succeed
Excerpt: “ … we have to make simplifications when dealing with the complexity of a game like poker. Rather than considering all possible moves, we tend to mentally bunch similar situations together. We do the same in daily life: we might … use stereotypes to categorize people. This process of abstraction makes the world easier to handle, but means we can lose to opponents that are using a better approximation of the world than we are.”
Comment: Simplification helps people cope with a world filled with too much information for them to digest, but lumping info (such as with knee-jerk reflexive assessments) often distorts it, with its reality obscured by the abstraction they can wrap their minds around. But ultimately dealing with reality is the most effective strategy, not bite-sized mental crutches, so those who see the world as it really is have an advantage over those who don't.
A suspicious mind leads to a suspicious face: Suspicion influences perceptions of trustworthiness
Racism on college campuses is rooted in the small things people say and do: Study finds students who engage in microaggressive acts are likely to endorse colorblind, symbolic and modern racist attitudes
‘Progressive Stacking’ Is Infiltrating College Classrooms and U. Pennsylvania teaching assistant uses racist class discussion technique, calls her critics ‘Nazis’
Hostility towards minorities can be contagious

Kevin Pezzi, MD

This is racism

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