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

“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

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

A blatant Media Matters lie so egregious it backfired

Media Matters describes itself as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” They say they work “to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and to take direct action against offending media institutions.”

One might think that a multi-million-dollar organization devoted to rebutting false claims would not make false claims of their own, but that's exactly what they did in my case. Here is one of the many examples of how they did not take the time to get their facts straight before making half-baked allegations: they suggested that I lure people “to a page where he tries to sell you his anti-spam software.”

Just one big problem: I don't sell anti-spam software, and I never did. Several years ago, I developed a FREE site (MySpamSponge) that anyone can use to eliminate spam. I never charged for it, and I never will. After waiting years for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and other geniuses to solve the spam problem, I was so disappointed by their amateurish efforts that I learned to program and created that free site. Offering a useful free site like that is a night-and-day difference from what the smear merchants alleged. This blatantly false claim suggests that Media Matters has a credibility problem and they're not ethical enough to eschew fabricating stories. If a lie fits their agenda, they'll use it.

Challenging opponents is one of the keys to keeping them honest, so I don't disagree with organizations or individuals who rebut false claims. Heaven knows, our media is certainly awash in distortions of the truth that cleverly obfuscate reality. When I was wholly conservative years ago, I thought that only liberals lied to advance their agenda, but conservatives do it, too. That's something I couldn't see for the life of me back then, but is now clear as day. It's not that conservatives don't lie, but they do it by cleverly shrouding the truth by confusing correlation with causation, ignoring history, wrapping the flag around complex issues, myopically thinking that might makes right, often trivializing the basic rights of noncitizens and animals, and sometimes turning a blind eye to justice. In time, I will write a book elucidating the misconceptions that enable conservatives to believe what they do, as I once fervently did as a pure conservative.

Conservative principles are laudable, as are liberal principles, but the implementation of those principles sometimes is debased by the eagerness of some to profit (not necessarily in a direct economic sense) at the expense of others. The ruthless distortions of Media Matters were motivated by a desperate need to score cheap political points with members of their audience who are not smart or ethical enough to see the lies or care about them. Good people, conservative or liberal, would be outraged by such a smear. If Media Matters accurately reported about MySpamSponge, they would have said that it is a nifty site that can solve the spam problem and more—all free. Only a twisted or imbecilic mind could conclude that I deserve condemnation for creating or mentioning MySpamSponge.

MySpamSponge functions as a trusted intermediary that allows people to communicate via e-mail without revealing their e-mail address. This enhances their online security and privacy, which helps safeguard their personal and financial information, and saves time. If the Postal Service implemented a trusted intermediary system, we could change our address in seconds—once, with them, not countless times with the many people, companies, organizations, and governmental agencies that need or want our postal address. I once subscribed to over 200 journals and magazines—imagine the time it took to change my address with each one! Phone companies could also benefit their users by offering a trusted intermediary option.

Trusted intermediary systems offer a benefit that might not be readily apparent: they make it easy to grant, restrict, or revoke communications privileges. To illustrate this, consider the mistake I made in giving my home and cell phone numbers to a nurse who became obsessed with me after I declined to date her. She called me day and night for months, hoping to persuade me that she had The Right Stuff to be Mrs. Pezzi. I could have changed my phone numbers, but that would be a bother for me and my many contacts who would then need to take time to update their records. With a trusted intermediary system, I could go online in seconds and revoke her ability to contact me without affecting the ability of others to do that, and without burdening my contacts with the change.

Whether used with online communications, postal (snail) mail, or telephones, trusted intermediary systems save time and enhance privacy, which would be a blessing for the victims of stalkers and other predators.

MySpamSponge enables you to leave your contact info anywhere without worrying about spammers, so it gives you a powerful new way to communicate that unleashes the full power of the Net. Arguably the most important benefit of the Internet is to make it easy for people to communicate. If you think it already does this, consider this example: Years ago, my oven door would not close all the way. I went online and found people in many forums discussing possible solutions to this common problem. I tried all of the proposed remedies and even the best one gave poor results. Then I had a flash of insight that enabled me to easily and quickly (in seconds) permanently solve the problem by using a very inexpensive item (about $1) I already had in my home. After I applied my fix, the oven door closed better than when it was new, creating a tighter seal that saved energy and improved the air quality in my home by reducing emissions from the oven (researchers know those emissions negatively affect health).

Happy with such a wonderful solution to this problem, I was eager to tell others about it. But how to do that? Forums almost invariably require registration before posting, and I simply did not have enough time to register at so many forums. Even if I did, most people who previously discussed their oven door problems would not see my new posting presenting my fix. Had they included their MySpamSponge handle (contact code) in their message or signature, I could have easily contacted them without the hassle of registering and hoping that I might reach a few.

In my years on the Internet, I've encountered thousands of people on myriad forums seeking solutions to often vexing problems that I know the answer to. Those problems often deal with health, but I have others pertaining to home improvements and repairs, such as how I thought of an easy way to remove copper that fused into the surface of my glass-top range after overheating a pan with a copper bottom. I tried all of the suggested fixes, but they worked so poorly that—months later after a lot of elbow grease and frustration—I still had a copper ring. Installing a new glass cooktop seemed to be the only remedy, but then a light bulb went off inside my head as I devised another quick, easy, and inexpensive fix for a challenging problem.

I want to help people with those countless problems, but the current Internet does not make it practical to contact them. MySpamSponge makes it easy to connect without incurring a risk of spam. These connections can be one-to-one (one person writing to another) or one-to-many, such as one person writing to a group, by using handle (contact code) prefixes or suffixes. For example, if you want to look as young as possible for as long as possible, you could use antiaging_blueeyes if your primary handle was blueeyes, and I could easily pass along relevant information, such as the surprising info I learned this morning from researchers who won't reach one person in 10,000.

No matter how you slice it, MySpamSponge is a good idea with multiple benefits. In their desperation to smear me, Media Matters manifested that they are willing to lie through their teeth. By saying that I tried to sucker people into buying something I never sold, they were clearly jumping the shark: so desperate they resorted to absurd content. Giving away a very useful free service is praiseworthy, but they painted me as a scam artist hoping to trick people. No, I am trying to help people; Media Matters is trying to trick them into accepting their twisted version of reality that appeals to dupes who cannot differentiate fact from fantasy.

Media Matters could substantially boost their effectiveness by abandoning their lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks, and character assassination. They genuinely believe that conservatives are wrong about many of the big issues, and frankly I agree with them. Having once been such an inveterate conservative that I couldn't imagine ever thinking differently, I can in retrospect clearly see the errors in my thought that led me and other conservatives to be on the wrong side of those issues. For example, in another article on why I am selling my Sea-doo, Ski-doo, and shed to help a deported person reenter the U.S., I explained why my opinion changed on the issue of illegal immigration.

Media Matters hopes to change hearts and minds. That is a laudable goal, but the way they do it is woefully ineffective. If they followed the road map of how I changed my seemingly cast-in-stone thinking, they could influence so many people they could achieve their objectives and even exceed their goals, going beyond their wildest dreams. Instead, they are mired in petty nonsense, such as knocking me for MySpamSponge, which makes the Net exponentially more useful and less bothersome and risky. Thus, their motto could be Media Matters, but the truth doesn't.

I've heard that Media Matters is led by a man who used to be a conservative. As an erstwhile conservative, he would seem to be the ideal candidate to change the hearts and minds of conservatives instead of preaching to the liberal choir. He could benefit by following my road map and by drumming into the heads of his staff a simple notion: that all good people, conservative or liberal, care about the truth and deplore inaccurate characterizations.

Of all the conservatives they could target, why did they target me? They obviously had time on their hands after smearing Bill O'Reilly and their usual big-name targets, but they could have picked someone such as one of my conservative ex-friends on Facebook who writes as if bullets are the solution to disagreements. In fact, she specifically wrote about shooting a particular Member of Congress, in addition to using guns for other nefarious and nutty purposes. (See my article on Was the next Jared Loughner on my Facebook friend list?) Since the Left is so eager to depict conservatives as violent extremists, she would be an ideal target. While her rants are traceable to mental illness (likely the borderline personality disorder mixed with a vile streak of vengeance), an even more interesting topic is why so many of her friends tolerated and even defended her protracted nuttiness. Both the Right and Left have nuts in their ranks (see my article on Liberals claim to be more tolerant and civil—but are they?), so I question the merit of trying to condemn a group based on some of its fringe members.

So why did Media Matters target me? They feared the impact of my writing, presuming that I was wholly conservative, not knowing that my ideological transformation was already well underway. They read one of my current articles and ones I'd written before I'd seen the liberal light, concluding that my writing ability posed such a threat to the Left that they had to marginalize me by any means possible, including lying.

If so, please tell me about it.

Having been wholly conservative and having heard what many conservatives say about liberals, I know that more than a few people on the Right think those on the Left are stupid, misinformed, or mentally ill. One of my sisters-in-law is a staunch liberal (she knows Michael Moore personally, and he loves her home cooking). She is very intelligent and has a gift for writing that helped her former husband write a book that made him famous. She isn't crazy or misinformed; she just looks at the world differently than how I once did. Interestingly, now that I am better informed, I see that some conservative positions are morally, logically, and factually untenable. I naturally gravitate to opinions that are morally, logically, and factually accurate, so when I learned more, my ideological allegiance shifted.

Although I now agree with liberals on many issues, I am stunned by how ineffective most are in changing hearts and minds. One notable exception is a man I met on Facebook who expressed a clearly liberal opinion but phrased it in such a brilliant way that I, then 100% conservative on that issue, instantly realized that he was correct and that I was wrong. Instead of attacking him as other conservatives did, I defended him and now wholeheartedly side with him. If Media Matters were smart, they would hire him, follow my road map for illuminating the merits of certain liberal positions, and become much more effective as they stepped onto morally higher ground.

Media Matters frequently expresses outrage at what they say is conservative misinformation and lies. They scream bloody murder when Fox News isn't fair, yet they don't hold themselves to that same standard of fairness, as they did in lying through their teeth about me. They can't have it both ways; liars have no right to demand the truth for others but give a pass to themselves.

Some of the Media Matters statements about me clearly seem to be premeditated lies (their employees strike me as too bright to get the facts so mixed up), while others are likely the product of deliberately ignoring exculpatory evidence and smearing on the basis of an isolated tidbit that just doesn't fit the larger picture. For example, they inverted my opinion on Native Americans by writing that I claimed they “should have been grateful for their subjugation by whites.” That's absurd. I am part Native American, so to suggest that I or my ancestors should be grateful for their subjugation is pure lunacy. 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. If you read my blog and From Bailout to Bliss, you'll see that I loathe anything that smacks of might makes right. I pillory that thinking with a vengeance and, if I may pat myself on my back, I don't think that anyone could do much better than me in using shirtsleeve English to explain why that subjugation was dead wrong.

Consistent with their shoot from the hip mentality, Media Matters ignored that writing of mine and instead twisted what I wrote in a blog posting, suggesting I thought they should be “grateful for their subjugation” when I was merely stating they should be grateful for opportunities afforded to them in the United States. There is a world of difference between being grateful for opportunities and grateful for subjugation. Anyone who cannot detect this glaring difference is manifesting his stupidity or reckless irresponsibility as a journalist to get his facts straight before opening his mouth.

If Fox News were to report such a twisted opinion as fact, Media Matters would have a field day assailing them, and they would be eminently justified in doing that. While I don't think that Fox News is as fair and balanced as they claim, I think they would have the decency to speak with someone, to get his or her side of the story, before trashing them. Had Media Matters done that in my case, I could have pointed out things I've written that make their hyperfocused, biased, one-sided attack seem either a classic example of outrageous unfairness, laziness, or a small-minded tendency to assume the worst about someone.

That's very odd for people who claim to be liberal. The word liberal has somehow been tarnished so much that even dyed-in-the-wool liberals are often reluctant to admit being liberal, but every good person would be proud to be a liberal if he or she knew its definition. People are entitled to their own opinions but not their own word definitions; dictionaries are the arbiter of that.

I presented the definitions of liberal and related words in another article. If you read it, you will see that some folks who claim to be liberals are anything but; they are actually bigots.

I am one of the least bigoted people you'll ever find. By sincerely listening to others and considering that they may be correct and I may be wrong, I've substantially changed my opinions on many topics. By listening to liberals with a good heart and brain, some of my inveterate conservative opinions evaporated like water hitting a red-hot grill. Media Matters and others who want to change hearts and minds would do well to emulate that approach.

A few years ago, it was unthinkable to consider myself as anything other than a strong conservative. I went on Facebook to preach to the conservative choir, and—bam!—who did I meet but a man with a knack for expressing liberal ideas in such a way that I instantly knew he was correct and I was wrong. As I praised and defended him, I noticed that other conservatives saw the light, too.

Media Matters should figuratively find the switch to that light so they can be more effective and less bigoted.

One of the keys to overcoming bigotry is to put yourself in the shoes of others. Arthur H. R. Fairchild said:

What Mr. Fairchild just gave is one of the secrets to being a good person who harmonizes with others. Anyone who truly cares about people will do more than acknowledge its veracity; he will live by the spirit of that message. Doing that compelled me to abandon some of my firm political beliefs.

I don't side with liberals on everything, but on matters in which we agree, when it comes to persuading others, I think I could do a better job, except for the Facebook friend I mentioned above. He's gifted and seems to be in a class by himself. If you encounter him, prepare to look at the world in a different perspective.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a deep-thinking genius filled with wisdom, wrote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I analyzed that in an article in which I explained why I never attempt to be consistent.

No one is born wise and brimming with knowledge. We all make mistakes—some small, some big—as we go through life. Smart people learn from their mistakes and dissect what led to them, much as NTSB investigators piece together flight data and aircraft wreckage to determine what went wrong. Knowing that no one is correct about everything, wise people don't attempt to reconcile the revelation (what they learned) with their prior world-view. Minimizing that discrepancy is key for folks without much mental horsepower; for them, it is too difficult to possess nuanced and sometimes disparate ideas. They want everything to be black-and-white; to fit in their conceptual framework. Nice and simple, just like them.

This conceptual harmony comes at a price. Since no one is born all-knowing and all-wise, changing ones mistaken ideas and opinions is the only path to improving, yet the leap cannot remedy all errors at once. This ensures that anyone on the path to perfection, who hasn't yet reached that unreachable goal, will possess ideas that don't mesh with others. That inconsistency is markedly better than stagnating at the level we're all born at.

Some people are smugly convinced in their righteousness. They cannot consider that their opponents may be correct. They can't put themselves in the shoes of others. If they encounter an idea that doesn't fit with their world-view, they will reflexively reject it. Those folks are bigoted.

It is never easy admitting you're wrong. We all want to be correct. The pain of admitting an error often exceeds the pleasure of moving beyond it, so too many of us don't improve as much as we should. Some of my greatest lessons came from my greatest mistakes, so I don't try to hide them; I embrace them for being a catalyst for betterment.

Related articles:

Why Admiral Rickover would not like Fox News

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