Refuting another liberal smear: that I dislike welfare recipients
We should give help to those who need it; we should give a kick in the butt to those who only want it, and we should feel good about both.

“We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence.”
Rep. Paul Ryan
Comment: I agree. He could add entitlement to that list. True example: The government evicted a woman from her home after she refused to pay rent and utilities for six years. They required her to pay a grand total of $1 per month for rent and utilities with the government (hence taxpayers) paying the rest. For six years, she wouldn't pay, though she could have earned that dollar in less than an hour by working or just returning soft drink bottles littering her neighborhood.
Reference: Parents' reliance on welfare leads to more welfare use by their children, study finds

Some readers of my True Emergency Room Stories book concluded that I despise welfare recipients. I don't like it when they abuse the healthcare system, but hate them? How could I?

In the past 50 years, the USA spent $21 trillion fighting — and losing — the War on Poverty.

Book by Jason L. Riley: Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

Article: Poor Kentucky has no stomach for Obama

First, some background. My definition of a good patient is one with a challenging problem that I can solve, helping the patient or saving his life. If a person is having a heart attack or even just an ear ache, I am happy to treat the patient regardless of his insurance status or ability to pay. One of my fondest memories is how I risked my future to save the life of a young black man. I didn't care if he had money; I just wanted to help him—a total stranger I had no responsibility to treat—so much I was willing to risk everything I had: my money, my job, my mini-mansion home and my beautiful girlfriend who was attracted to those three things.

“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”
Malcolm Forbes

After my father abandoned my Mom and two brothers, we lived in poverty, sometimes going without decent food, and usually going without medical care.

I saw my older brother moaning in pain for days because my Mom couldn't afford to take him to a doctor. On another occasion when he smacked into a tree while sledding, leaving him unable to speak other than groaning in pain, I pulled him home on a sled, ascending hills that seemed impossible obstacles for a kid. When we arrived home, our Mom was gone (working as usual), so the decision about what to do with my injured brother fell squarely on my 11-year-old shoulders. It never occurred to me to call for an ambulance, because medical care seemed impossibly out of our reach.

Long before I became a real physician and surgeon, I performed minor surgery on myself several times without anesthesia. Consequently, I know what poverty is, and I sympathize with poor people. If they couldn't afford medications, I enjoyed giving them free ones from my personal stash, and I loved to give presents to kids who didn't have much. To see their eyes light up with joy was priceless.

I am not cold-hearted enough to loathe poor people, but I wrote about some of the crazy ways certain welfare recipients waste money, such as by calling 911 and getting an ambulance ride to the hospital because the caller was dying to know if her vagina was tight enough. After countless such cases, I knew I had to include some of them in my book to give readers an idea of what it is really like to be an ER doctor, which was my goal. Judging by what other ER doctors and many readers said, I succeeded.

Some liberals would no doubt have liked my book more if I omitted the zany examples of welfare recipients wasting money, but I thought taxpayers should know how their money was being frittered away. I had perpetually unemployed men on welfare with able bodies and minds come to the ER thinking I'd set them up with a nurse who'd satisfy their libidinal desires, and others who enjoyed hurting people by beating them up or worse: rape, murder, and even torture.

While I hate wasting money, I hate wasting time even more. Time is the limiting factor in most emergency departments. In every ER I've worked in, and every one I've heard about from the countless doctors, nurses, techs, and paramedics who wrote to me, I know that welfare recipients comprise a disproportionate share of the troublemakers. Their shenanigans waste time of the ER staff, which limits the time they have for other patients who just want to be treated, not create a ruckus. Legitimate patients—poor or otherwise—often wait longer to be treated and receive more rushed treatment because of what the troublemakers do, such as turning a simple problem that could have been handled in minutes into hours of pure nuttiness that snowballed out of control, in one case requiring every police officer in the county, and in others, assaults that left ER personnel injured or dead.

I write about unusual ER stories, which include ones that are funny, exciting, poignant, heart-breaking, happy, and just plain interesting. If the police need to cut through a home with a chainsaw to bring in a woman who could easily fit through a door, should I omit such an intense case just because she was on welfare? I don't think so, but some crazy liberals used their below-the-belt methods trying to persuade readers not to read my books, which are sufficiently interesting that I've had offers to turn my stories into a new TV series or movie, including one from an Emmy-award-winning producer of one of the greatest blockbuster movies of all time. Unfortunately, the latter offer came when my Mom was dying of cancer, so I didn't follow up on his e-mails to me as I should have, but if a Hollywood producer thought I had some great stories, they are obviously more than just complaining about welfare recipients, as some liberals would have you believe.

With their characteristic ability to misunderstand, or understand and smear anyway, various liberals tried to paint a picture of me as a cold-hearted conservative who doesn't like welfare recipients. Nonsense. First, I am not fully conservative; I've criticized them and Fox News with justification, such as for “fair and balanced” reporting so skewed it kept me in the dark that Laura Bush was a killer who escaped justice. So Mrs. Obama's vacations are newsworthy and Mrs. Bush's grave secret should be glossed over? If I were in that pressure cooker called the White House, I'd want to escape from it every day.

Years ago, I thought of a way to ensure that welfare recipients receive as much as they now do and potentially much more, while reducing the welfare burden on taxpayers. I am not opposed to welfare or welfare recipients; just the ones who are troublemakers or the ones who choose welfare as a career option—which is still possible, even years after welfare reform, proving how easy it is to dupe the system. One of my relatives (by marriage) still does that long after Michigan's reforms supposedly ended such abuse. Dream on, you fools in Lansing.

“You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.”
Henry Ford

My Mom had worked nonstop from the age of 17, but in the 1960s, women were often viewed as second-class citizens and given second-class wages. My Mom was employed by a wealthy attorney (rich enough to have solid gold tiles in his home bathroom), but he didn't pay her much. He believed men deserved more pay because they were men—and she wasn't.

We struggled on her meager salary, sometimes being fed food my Mom found on the side of the road. Then she lost her job when her boss and his wife were shotgunned to death by their son. Divorced and without child support from an ex-husband who refused to pay, we were temporarily forced on welfare until she found a new job.

We went one day to get new government-issued shoes, which made army boots look stylish and concrete seem comfortable. The worker who fitted me in this outlet open only to welfare recipients did her snarly best to make me think I was dirt for getting free shoes from the government. She was as pleasant as a rattlesnake and manhandled me in such a way that I knew she enjoyed inflicting pain and humiliation. Although I was still in elementary school, I knew why she dug the metal shoehorn into me and why she treated me with such contempt: because she knew she could get away with it. If she couldn't make us pay with money, she'd make us pay with mental and physical pain.

That brief introduction to how welfare recipients are treated made me refuse to ask for government help one time in college when I applied too late for financial aid (primarily student loans) and was forced to live on free packets of sugar and coffee creamer in the college cafeteria; starving was better than humiliation.

With this as a preface, it should be obvious that I don't loathe welfare recipients just because they are welfare recipients. I've been in their shoes—literally—and I would never treat anyone the way I was treated. Instead of being treated like dirt, I would have loved to be treated with decency and kindness. A stuffed animal or some other gift by a smiling doctor would have been infinitely better than having a seething, sadistic welfare worker mash the edge of the shoehorn into me—just a helpless kid who had nothing to do with my Mom's sudden unemployment.

The dictionary definition of liberal is very appealing, with positive characteristics almost anyone would proudly associate with:

Liberal is supposed to mean:
(1) not limited to established, traditional, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry;
(2) open to proposals for reform or new ideas for progress;
(3) tolerant of change or the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded;
(4) accepting; not criticizing or disapproving;
(5) showing respect for the opinions, practices, or rights of others;
(6) full of love and generosity;
(7) tolerant and forgiving under provocation;
(8) inclined to forgive and show mercy;
(9) indulgent, easy-going, charitable, open-minded, understanding, sympathetic, kind-hearted, unprejudiced.

However, as I discussed in an article, some liberals are anything but liberal. Instead, they are mean, nasty, petty, small-minded bigots who enjoy nitpicking and looking for any flimsy excuse to stick a knife into the backs of anyone who doesn't agree with them on everything.

nitpick (verb): to be concerned with or find fault with insignificant details; to be overly critical.

petty (adjective): marked by: (1) contemptible narrowness of mind, views, outlook, or ideas; (2) meanness, especially in trifling matters; deliberately nasty for a foolish or trivial reason.

small-minded (adjective): intolerant; mean; petty; narrow-minded; bigoted; lacking tolerance, flexibility, or breadth of view.

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.

Mentally healthy people give others slack for being imperfect—because who is perfect? Or even normal? The most normal people I've met led boring lives and never did anything great or even close to it.

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

“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”
Nikola Tesla (source)

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”
H. L. Mencken
(some interesting science suggests why that is true)

Genius often comes with quirks and an edge. As Albert Einstein and other geniuses proved, it often comes with an avid interest in sex. Some scientists think they know why. America has a shortage of super geniuses, the ones who advance civilization and science, but an abundance of newlywed couples who make love two or three times per month instead of per week or per day. Perhaps there is a connection.

In an effort to combat this, and to share the many lessons I learned after a prescription drug virtually erased my libido for almost 20 years, I wrote a book about sex. That is part of medicine, but too few doctors know as much as they should about that subject and too many others. The presumption is that doctors know all they need to know, but after graduating in the top 1% of my class in medical school, it took me many years of nose-to-the-grindstone effort to even help myself. More about that in a minute.

Let me spell this out for the liberal haters: I've had a hellacious life; you can read more about it here, here, here, here, and here. I've been called “nigger nose,” “nigger lips,” “bucky,” and “Mr. Magoo” (because I was legally blind without Coke-bottle glasses) during my childhood and later “Chief” because of my Native American ancestry.

I was also called “nigger” during the years I experienced intense episodic dark red to violet facial, neck, and ear flushing (that flushing was so pronounced I worried that I had carcinoid, a type of neuroendocrine tumor, but the tests were negative).

I spent the day before Christmas in an emergency department waiting room worried that I'd soon be dead because a cardiac arrhythmia (abnormal heartbeat) made me short of breath, but I feared signing in for treatment because I had no medical insurance and knew the hospital bill would be so astronomical I'd almost wish I were dead. So I took my chances, treated myself, and recovered better than I would have had a doctor given me one of the antiarrhythmic drugs that often solves one problem and creates another. In retrospect, I'm sure no cardiologist would have found the solution, which wasn't a drug. But when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I broke my neck and—still without medical insurance—have tingling and odd sensations (dysesthesias) in my hands and feet that can last for days after I roll over in bed, move too fast, turn my head, talk too loudly, or do countless other seemingly trivial things—even sitting too long. After all the free medical care I've given, you'd think the medical system wouldn't turn its back on me, but it did; most doctors and hospitals care more about money than patients (despite all that sappy talk about caring so much), so they'd rather sit on their butt than help someone who could later repay them manyfold.

I have objective tinnitus, a condition that runs in my family (see My nightmarish experience with objective tinnitus) that for many years made restful sleep all but impossible until I learned to control it—again, in a way that mainstream medicine would never consider. The two treatments offered by an ENT doc were (a) barbaric and irreversible or (b) had side effects arguably worse than the condition itself.

Somewhere in the midst of all that sleep deprivation and endless problems (the above is just the tip of the iceberg), I wrote two articles critical of Chinese businessmen who intentionally poison their customers and Japanese soldiers who gang-raped everyone from infants to pregnant women to grandmothers before savagely butchering and sometimes sexually mutilating them, such as spearing their vaginas. Here's one of their victims from the Nanjing Massacre in China:

Nanjing Massacre rape killed

That dear lady was someone's wife, mother, and grandmother. The monstrous war criminals treated her worse than animals should be treated. They felt justified in doing that because they possessed crazy ideas of racial superiority. They referred to Americans as “kichiku (mongrel beast or mongrelized apes).”

I returned the favor and blasted them, but the liberals so fond of political correctness think it should be extended to savages who made the mass-murdering Adam Lanza seem almost civilized. I thought it was useful to differentiate between the good and bad Japanese, so I used a word I've heard hundreds of times (even in the politically correct 21st century) on television war documentaries and casually used in upscale liberal yuppie towns without generating any reaction.

If I were racist, why would I jump for joy if Dr. Ben Carson were President and Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory were Vice President? Because they are black? No, because I agree with them on most topics, and even when I don't, I know their good hearts and minds led them to conclusions I don't share because reasonable minds can differ.

My father's murderers have yet to face justice, so unable to lash out at them and still grieving from the death of my mother, I vented by lambasting those monstrous war criminals who laughed about their crimes against humanity. That was too much for the libs eager to ensure that they be called nothing worse than other Japanese, so they alleged that I'm a racist, painting with their overly broad brush as they do to everyone who doesn't agree with them on everything. There's a name for petulant folks who throw a conniption fit when others dare disagree: they called bigots.

Liberals are so generous with the money of others, so fixated on superficial manifestations of justice they bend over backwards to protect savage war criminals yet give only lip service to righting historical wrongs and, like most people, are so reluctant to admit they're wrong they don't have the decency to admit their characterization of me as being fond of the subjugation of Native Americans is as accurate as saying Barack Obama is the founder of the Tea Party. The loony libs who never let facts get in the way of their smears overlooked some not-very-minor points:

  1. I am part Native American, so to suggest that I or my ancestors should be grateful for their subjugation is pure lunacy.
  2. Every ethical historian acknowledges that subjugation was one of the most abominable acts in history, and I strongly condemned it in writing (in one of my books and websites) long before I learned of my Native American ancestry.
  3. You could spend the rest of your life searching but not finding someone who is more irate about that issue than me. In my humble opinion, I did a better job than anyone, ever, of illustrating the unfairness of that subjugation, which really irks me. I've spent months researching and writing about that and other injustices, such as what I call the Asian Holocaust, evidently doing it so well that Dr. Michael Brett-Crowther, Editor of the International Journal of Environmental Studies, asked me to submit a paper on this subject: the horrors inflicted by Japan on China and other Asian nations before and during World War II.

I am fair and balanced. I admire what's admirable about Rush Limbaugh and I loathe what's loathsome. If more conservatives were less myopic about the leaders they hold in such high esteem and the hot embryos they prefer as spokespersons, they could appeal to a wider slice of the population and win more elections without violating conservative principles. Here's how they could do it, instead of listening to their clueless leaders, from Limbaugh on down, struggle to find a path to victory that isn't founded on fantasies.

No one has yet had enough brainpower to accurately put me in a box. I am not conservative or liberal; I agree with each on some issues but I think both are dead wrong about too much. Unlike the hidebound crowd, I sincerely listen to others, and when I find evidence suggesting I am wrong, I change my opinions, as I did on the issue of illegal immigration after learning that a huge chunk of the western United States once was part of Mexico. We bought a small part of that land fair and square, but the rest was acquired using might makes right principles of coercion. As fond as I am of the U.S., I am even more fond of doing the right thing, and might makes right is never a justifiable part of that equation.

The U.S. government and even too many liberals think that time erases sins, making wrongs into rights that give the government the right to brush off Native Americans, Mexicans, and the Japanese-Americans unconstitutionally interned during World War II, who received insultingly inadequate token reparations (about $20,000) paid as a result of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Would you be happy with that pittance if the government did that to you?

Gee whiz, I must love Japanese because I want fair compensation for them, or I must hate them because I blast their war criminals who raped and butchered babies, or their leader who led their evil. I must love Chinese because I deeply care about the war crimes they suffered, or I must hate them because I detest their businessmen who value their profits more than the lives of their customers, leading to human and animal suffering and death.

This is nuts, spearheaded by liberals who find lots of time to talk about allegedly racist political opponents but never any time to do anything about real racism. Years ago, I wrote about healthcare practitioners who intentionally murder black patients, but I've yet to hear a peep from any liberal or conservative about that; they're too busy making political hay to care about things that matter.

The only sin I've committed is the sin of thinking for myself. That's a mortal sin to the bigots who attempt to camouflage their hatred and small-mindedness by hiding behind the liberal label. True liberalism isn't just good; it is great, but many folks who think they're liberals are just greedy bigots who think they have a God-given right to use government power to steal money from others.

Very few liberals would be as generous as I have been, even when I could not afford to be generous. I paid a programmer in India twice as much as my contractual obligation at a time I desperately needed the money for myself, and I am selling my Sea-doo, Ski-doo, and shed to help a deported person reenter the United States even though I previously was adamantly opposed to “illegal” immigration. I also offer to give away free eggs, meals, firewood, and microhomes. I've devoted years of my life helping thousands of students succeed, thus I know my dunce to doctor tips can produce miracles.

I helped two people who were trapped in dead end jobs. Both are now doctors. One is a professor at the medical school I attended and chair of her department at a hospital in the Detroit Medical Center, and another is a neuroradiologist, med school professor, and president of a prestigious medical organization. Others are now in medical school, such as a young man who wrote to me years ago while mired in depression, the hopelessness that comes with it, and college grades that seemed to doom his chances of becoming a doctor. He aced the MCAT exam (95th percentile), was accepted into a US medical school, and is doing so well that he is thinking of specializing in neurosurgery.

I've baked umpteen cookies for neighborhood kids and babysat for free, even buying free pizzas. I'd take them boating, swimming, bicycling, hiking, and snowmobiling. I'd play baseball, take them to a movie, help them with their computer or homework, and so on. I hauled my snowblower and shovel a mile to the home of an elderly disabled man and spent the afternoon digging him out of chest-deep snow. He never asked me, but he did thank me after meeting me for the first time when I was almost done.

I've done so many thousands of similar nice things for people and animals I'm very skeptical of liberals who pat themselves on the back for being wonderful but don't do even 1% of what I've done. Evidently they think that believing in their progressive agenda gives them a license to be selfish, self-centered bigots.

Liberals often think they have a monopoly on empathy, but I stumbled on such a good way to increase it that some of my opinions are the polar opposite of what they were in my purely conservative days. That tip is just one of the many thousands of ones I learned that prove that doctors and their pills are not the answer to many problems—in fact, they often cause them. Considering what modern medicine did to me and couldn't do for me, it is no wonder why I know that doctors need to know much more about health.

Too many liberals derive a malicious, juvenile satisfaction from tearing others down. In their haste to smear people, they often don't get their facts straight before opening their mouths, as they did in my case.

I am definitely not opposed to welfare—just the abuse of it—yet they twisted what I wrote because they are too close-minded to permit any discussion of topics they deem taboo to broach. Well, too bad.

Liberals and big-government Republicans have bankrupted this country, and things will get much worse before they get better. People have woken up and focused their attention like laser beams on politicians who need adult supervision to act like responsible adults.

Most people realized this country was in big trouble in 2008, but I reached that conclusion much sooner. When I traveled with a friend to Chicago in the late 1980s, she showed me public housing that seemed to go on forever, all filled with people she said made careers out of sponging off taxpayers, not working. I thought of all the money I saw frittered away on defensive medicine and catering to oddballs in the ER—a disproportionate number of whom were on welfare. I added that to all of the government waste I'd heard about, and then I put 2 and 2 together, leading to one unmistakable conclusion: the USA was headed for economic disaster when everyone else thought we were headed for a stock market of 20,000 and beyond.

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

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer

I care about the future of this country, so I began writing about some of its problems—and, unlike people who can only complain, I also offer solutions, as I did in suggesting how to slash total welfare payments without hurting any welfare recipient. However, the best way to help the poor isn't to give them things; it is to give them ways to succeed.

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
Ben Franklin in On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor (November 1766)

“Too often the reformer has been one who caused the rich to band themselves against the poor.”
Elbert Hubbard
Comment: Poor people often think Democrats are their friends. Wrong.

“Unencumbered by marriage, women are also more prone to poverty, addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. Their children, a third of whom are being raised in households headed by a mother only, are paying the price in a greater propensity for poverty, and higher dropout, addiction and crime rates. Witness the black family. Having survived the perils of slavery, it was still intact until the 1930s, when the dead hand of the Welfare State finished it off. As a social unit, the black American family is near extinct.”
— Ilana Mercer in A Sad Christmas Story

“The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning. … All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything; they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.”
Aristotle
Comment: Substitute “liberal” for “young”: the young are often more likely to be liberal.

The federal government is hell-bent on involving itself in medicine, so in the USA, politics and medicine are inseparably linked. Any author who writes about problems in medicine without mentioning problems and waste created by welfare recipients is giving his readers an inaccurate depiction of reality. When the liberal smear machine saw what and how I wrote, they knew they had to stop me, fearing that my messages would resonate with common-sense people, yet they couldn't attack the facts I discussed except by nitpicking at a few of the many thousands of things I've written about—so many things over so many years that even I strongly disagree with some things I've written!

Instead, they did what liberals usually do when the facts aren't on their side: resort to ad hominem attacks and character assassination. They alleged that I hate welfare recipients, that I'm racist, and that I work on inventions that can't possibly work. They're wrong about that and their other wild accusations, which I'll prove in a series of articles discussing the far-left smears.

When I complete them, I think fair and civil people would agree that their characterization of me was far from accurate; it was deliberately distorted, a vile smear, and a caricature. Myriad liberals swallowed that caricature hook, line, and sinker and even gleefully welcomed it, parroting their attacks without taking the time to first verify if they were accurate. Sheeple don't think for themselves.

I agree with liberals on some issues, so I am not in a position to ruthlessly bash them. However, I think it is fair to say that too many of them are further from the dictionary definition of liberal than many conservatives, libertarians, and independents. Small-minded people are frequently in a rush to think the worst of others, but true liberals should not be small-minded.

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
— Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, quoting someone he termed an "unknown sage" in The Saturday Evening Post article "The World of the Uneducated" (November 28, 1959)

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.”
— Eric Hoffer

“Small things affects small minds.”
— Benjamin Disraeli

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

Shout racist if you are losing the debate

In conclusion, I don't hate welfare recipients, but I know of some healthcare practitioners who do. Their animus is so strong they murder some black patients just because they receive welfare. That's disgusting, that's racism, but that was ignored by all of the liberals who dug through everything I wrote to find a few things they could distort to make it appear as if I am racist. If I were, would I have taken days to research and write that article? Note to the geniuses who evidently don't know what racism is: Racists defend racism, not blast it, as I did.

I wrote the exposé on racially motivated murder of patients years before race became a hot political issue that clever but dastardly politicians and political hit men use to divide Americans instead of bringing us together. Despite all their rhetoric, bringing us together is the last thing they want; they want us fighting one another, which they can achieve only by keeping people so stupid they think other Americans are the problem instead of the politicians and fat cats screwing people on the Left and Right.

Anyone who wants a pat on the back from me won't get it by sticking a knife into the backs of other Americans.

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 …”

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