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.

Why Admiral Rickover would not like Fox News

Irrespective of his political affinity, Admiral Rickover wouldn't think much of Fox News because they fritter away their time — and ours — focusing on people and events, rarely ideas. While it is sometimes necessary to mention people and events in discussing ideas, what Fox News does in this regard is analogous to what a child might do when his parents are away for the weekend: gorge on candy and snacks, leaving no room for nourishing food. In the 24 hours of broadcast time they have each day, Fox News manages to fill it with superficial discussions largely devoid of intellectual nourishment, thus figuratively gorging on what's tasty leaving no room for what's beneficial. Merely reporting the news is not the ideal venue for airing ideas, but Fox News is less news than opinions made more palatable by melding them with a bleached blonde T&A show of pulchritude.

The attractive expert syndrome statistically guarantees that when people (in this case, applicants for Fox News) are selected on the basis of their appearance, the chosen ones will not have the best minds. With the laws of statistics being as insurmountable as the laws of physics (some of which are based on statistics and the virtual impossibility of escaping them), the foxes on Fox are inevitably not as bright as possible. Alas, few people are smart enough to see that eye candy carries a hidden price tag, which we pay for by being deprived of the better minds and their better ideas.

The Fox News affinity for attractive people is also evident in their selection of guests and experts. With 50% of the population being below average in appearance, and with virtually none of those folks appearing on Fox News, FNC evidently thinks they aren't worth listening to. The Fox brainiacs think they're doing their viewers a favor by silencing the majority of the population Fox deems not foxy enough, but that group inevitably includes individuals who are brighter and more interesting. Fox News isn't interested in first-rate brains and the ideas they generate; to them, appearance is paramount.

Stated another way, Fox News discriminates against people who aren't attractive. Since being on Fox can make the difference between succeeding and going nowhere, FNC is happy to sweep people aside and relegate them and their ideas to obscurity if they didn't win life's lottery of looks.

For example, on April 16, 2012, Bill O'Reilly interviewed Katie Pavlich, author of Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up, even though he clearly was not impressed by the book or convinced that Pavlich had a smoking gun that made her case. So why give her so much airtime on various Fox News programs? Because she looks like an especially yummy Miss America.

Rickover would likely object to the Fox News claim of being “fair and balanced.” While they strive to present alternative viewpoints, some of their liberal commentators aren't in the same league as their conservative hosts, thus being as fair and balanced as pitting the New York Yankees against the Toledo Mud Hens. Furthermore, Fox News enjoys the home field advantage of being able to cut off or ridicule guests as they debate hosts who are hidebound, not open-minded. Being receptive to new ideas and the opinions of others is the polar opposite of bigotry.

Enlightened and fair-minded people would not quickly demonize, mock, or disparage others with different opinions. Instead, they would consider that their ideological opponents may have valid points, and they would ask themselves why others might hold those opinions.

Fox News shrilly maintains that it is “fair and balanced,” but its fairness does not extend to people who didn't win life's lottery of success, such as one of my relatives whose oxygen supply at birth was cut off by a nurse following an idiotic hospital policy: that only doctors, not obstetric nurses, could deliver babies. Dutifully complying, she pushed her back in so the doctor could deliver her 15 minutes later, cerebral hypoxia be damned.

“Fair and balanced” is also preposterously inaccurate considering their reflexive rejection of any person or idea that isn't inside the box. Collectively, those inside-the-box people and ideas have put us in the mess we're in. Truly intelligent people, or even folks with a shred of common sense, sense the need for real change, not just changing the faces and names of candidates espousing solutions that are fundamentally just a rehash of freeze-dried ideas from bygone American politicians.

If Fox News ran a Baskin-Robbins^® ice cream store, they'd offer vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry but hide the other 31 flavors. The big lies at Fox News aren't what they say, but what they don't report. They carefully whittle reality to show viewers only the slice of it they want them to see, intentionally keeping them in the dark. Fully informed people wouldn't be happy with what they have if they knew what they were missing. Fox News does its part to keep 'em happy on the plantation. Escaping from chains of ignorance is more difficult than escaping from the chains of steel that once bound slaves. Modern people are largely bound by invisible chains limiting their worldview and maximizing their tolerance for being screwed by a system designed to do precisely that.

To illustrate how the close-mindedness of Fox News isn't limited to politics, consider how their health coverage is overwhelmingly biased in favor of Big Pharma: large pharmaceutical manufacturers who use chicanery to trick consumers into thinking their drugs are more helpful and less risky than they really are. Numerous investigators, experts, writers, and former industry insiders have exposed how Big Pharma uses money to hoodwink doctors and patients, yet I've never seen Fox News cover this deception. It affects everyone, impacting our wallets and health, and sending some folks to premature graves, yet I never saw Fox find the time to discuss this subject. They did, however, find plenty of time to show car chases, pop trivia quizzes, and critiquing celebrities.

That pablum displaces other more critical information, such as how Big Food—the processed food industry with tentacles in most restaurants—is harming our health, happiness, brainpower, and appearance. Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviewed UCSF Professor Robert H. Lustig, MD, an endocrinologist, on 60 Minutes, who presented a compelling case that sugar is toxic, not just fattening.

Dr. Lustig's presentation, Sugar: The Bitter Truth, echoed many of the ideas I presented in high school in 1974 on how sugar causes hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance, which is the metabolic root of many of the diseases and conditions that make us miserable.

Interestingly, nutrition affects how people think, including facets of personality such as empathy and tolerance for different viewpoints — something rarely seen on Fox News, such as when Bill O'Reilly screams that guests who don't agree with him are “crazy” or “nuts.” I had my own problem with lack of empathy and tolerance for different viewpoints, but after I stumbled upon a nutritional solution for it, it opened my (closed) mind and made me realize that the liberals I once loathed as nutty weren't so nutty after all; in fact, on some issues they were right on.

I once was a die-hard conservative who thought that Fox News was exemplary, but their ideological intolerance grated at me, progressively wearing away my patience. If they can alienate me, they can catalyze disaffection in other thinking people.

Fox News, and their ideological clones, have put the flaws and mistakes of President Obama and his wife under the microscope. Considering their role as President and First Lady, that's a good idea. We wouldn't want any killers in the White House, now would we?

Well, we already have. Laura Bush, then Laura Welch, killed her former boyfriend, Mike Douglas, when she ran a stop sign on a clear, dry evening at a level intersection of straight roads in the middle of nowhere—a location where stop signs are easily visible long before they are approached. At that time in 1963, there was no marginal development to distract her as she rushed to a drive-in theater, striking Douglas, who was driving another car.

There is no question that she was was driving recklessly and hence was negligent. By inexcusably violating one of the most basic traffic laws that directly led to the death of a human (Douglas's neck was broken when he was ejected from his vehicle), Laura should have been charged with a crime. Texas law would characterize her criminal act as vehicular manslaughter, a felony. She should have spent years in prison to punish her and to serve as an example to others, many of whom are much less careful driving than they should be. As an ER doctor, I could tell you stories that would break your heart, such as a 10-year-old girl who was paralyzed by a graduate of the Laura Welch-Bush careless driving school.

Why wasn't Laura charged with a crime? The state of Texas prosecutes others who kill by driving recklessly. In this case, they had an open-and-shut case against her. So why didn't they pursue it? Her “father was a home builder and later successful real estate developer.” In the ER, I've seen how affluent or well-connected, popular people are often effectively given a get-out-of-jail-free card and treated more leniently. Some of the crimes they get away with make a mockery of the rule of law, which stipulates that all people are equally subject to the law. That is a great concept, but ultimately laws are enforced by people, who can choose to prosecute or look the other way.

The latter happened locally when people in power should have—but didn't—intervene to stop a physician who was a raging sex maniac (he's the one I refer to as Stud Muffin in my books and websites). While I was interviewing for an ER job in a new town, the ER director, also a physician, told me what the Stud Muffin would do: get an erection and then “press himself” against women during pelvic examinations, apparently trying to impress them with the size of his penis. Kooky. He also had sex with a patient in the hospital chapel and videotaped it, according to the ER director, who seemed amused by the antics of this pervert.

The Stud Muffin eventually impregnated a patient, who reportedly wanted him to support the child. Seems like a reasonable thing to do, correct? The Stud reportedly didn't want to pay—just play—so the justifiably angry patient apparently contacted the State Board of Medicine, which revoked Muffin's medical license.

In this case, the Stud was reportedly still treating her (evidently in his private office; he only moonlighted in the ER), so she was technically still his patient. News of the Stud's indiscretions were old news in that town, so why did local big shots with a duty to intervene look the other way? According to my boss (he hired me), Stud had a son who was a star on the high school football team.

So???

So what??? My expressive face (according to my girlfriend) must have telegraphed how wacky I thought his explanation was. What the heck does having a high-school-football-team-star son have to do with turning a blind eye to a serial sex maniac (the patient mentioned above is only one of his victims; when this hit the local press, others came out of the woodwork to reveal what the Stud Muffin had done to them.

The ER director explained that high school football was a big deal in that town.

I still didn't get it. Such sports mean nothing to me. I'd much rather munch on bitter raw broccoli while reading a dictionary than watch sports, which strikes me as a phenomenal waste of time. There's always something better to do: take care of my chickens, slowblow the driveway of an elderly disabled neighbor, or answer questions from young students who aspire to become doctors (and answer even more questions). I've spent years doing those things and many more. I never have any time or inclination to watch sports, let alone glorify those who engage in them, or their families.

The reverence for sports is a foreign concept to me, as is the double standard excusing unlawful conduct on the part of those associated with sports. The latter contributed to the misdeeds of Penn State football alleged pervert Jerry Sandusky, who “was arrested and charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse of young boys over a 15-year period.” People who should have intervened looked the other way because he was a big shot in sports. The Stud Muffin's reign of unbridled passion continued longer than it should have for a similar reason.

What does all this have to do with Laura Welch-Bush? If you're somebody, or related to a somebody, you can often get off scot-free while nobodies are given the full force of the law.

What does all this have to do with Fox News and its ideological clones? If you rely on them for fair and balanced reporting, you probably thought the worst thing about Laura was her stiff, uptight, plastic personality that made her seem like a robot too good to be true. Evidently, her persona was too good to be true. However, despite the years I spent watching Fox News and other conservative sources, it wasn't until January 2012 when I learned from a neutral source how Laura is not the perfect princess she is often portrayed as being. That princess has blood on her hands.

Some people have suggested that Laura intentionally killed her ex-boyfriend, but that explanation does not hold water. Almost certainly, the death she caused was the result of a youthful error—one that she deeply regrets. We all make mistakes, and I would be willing to overlook her grievous act if she didn't give excuses for it that cross the line of bullshit, as in Laura thinks we're all really stupid and will believe the following baloney in suggesting that “a host of factors beyond her control played a role” in the crash:

These excuses are an order of magnitude more pathetic than “my dog ate my homework.” No one would bother insulting our intelligence with them, unless they were given by someone, such as a stuffy elitist, so detached from the real world that she thought we'd lap up that nonsense.

However, Laura Bush isn't entirely to blame for being gutsy enough to try pulling the wool over our eyes. She was aided and abetted by news organizations such as Fox News that refuse to pose really tough questions to people in power. Then Fox News has the gall to whine about how some viewers don't fully accept their superficial questions that too easily let big shots off the hook. Bill O'Reilly's trademark phrase is “the spin stops here,” yet I never heard him blast Laura Bush's spin.

Yes, Fox News, some of your viewers are sufficiently intelligent and perceptive enough to realize that what you consider hard-hitting questions are often pathetic softball queries that elementary school children could ask. Can't you do any better?

Ask the really tough questions and dig until there is nothing more to be found, then let the politician off the hook (letting the viewers decide) instead of continuing to drag them through the mud for months with more rounds of inconclusive, amateurish reporting made semi-palatable only by spicing up their broadcasts with the Fox News T&A team of impossibly gorgeous women with bodies hot enough to distract viewers so they can't think straight.

Not surprisingly, researchers found that men have more problems thinking in the presence of exceptionally attractive women. The human mind has a limited capacity to focus attention. When a man is marveling at the resplendently beautiful faces and luscious legs framed in purposely short skirts of, say, Kimberly Guilfoyle or Andrea Tantaros, he is less apt to notice the questions Fox News doesn't ask.

Neither Laura Bush or the Stud Muffin are worth discussing, except to illustrate an important point: in the United States, forgiveness and the rule of law are not evenly applied.

You don't have to be a fat cat political donor to figuratively get away with murder; you can be a cute young girl, as Laura was, whose tears helped persuade local authorities that she'd already suffered enough. Why put her through the stress of a trial? That might upset her senior-year plans! Laura wasn't even ticketed for the accident and the death she caused. She's cute. She cried. That's enough.

Fox News is selective in choosing whose dirt they dig up. That's not balanced, nor is it fair to the other side, which seems comparatively worse, but really isn't. I've yet to meet someone who didn't fall far short of perfection. As a doctor, I was privy to secrets that would make your eyes bug out. Seemingly mainstream folks, celebrities, professional athletes, and assorted big shots, all of whom want the world to believe they're as normal as June and Ward Cleaver, the prototypically perfect parents in Leave It to Beaver. If you only knew!

As an example of how Fox News blows chances to ask tough questions, they interviewed the author of a book who evidently thinks that diets are for women and girls only. Why not challenge his sexist opinion? Not challenging it sends a tacit message to young women that men—even really fat ones, in this case—can lecture women on why it is better for them to be slim. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Fox News clearly thinks that people who live in big cities—especially coastal ones—are automatically more credible than others. For example, Megyn Kelly revealed her cultural bias while interviewing a woman from New Jersey who saw a UFO. Kelly flat-out said that report was more believable because it came from a coastal resident. In Kelly's mind, folks in the heartland of American are naïve, simple creatures less adept at separating fact from fiction. Puh-leeze!

Fox News helps promulgate the notion that Ronald Reagan is a worthy icon of smaller government, but Reagan passed the “largest tax increase in Californian history” when he was governor. His successor, Democrat Jerry Brown, cut taxes. As President, Reagan “expanded the federal government by about 90%.” Ray Medeiros convincingly demonstrated that Republican rhetoric about smaller government is just hot air; statistics tell a different story. Andrew Romano showed that even Reagan wasn't a Reagan Republican. Jonathan Rauch blended facts and humor to reveal that Republicans have Reagan all wrong. Anthony Gregory unmasked how Reagan increased domestic and military spending, and how the latter is often applauded by Republicans even though it devastated the Soviet economy—and will do the same to us.

The United States, led by Republican war hawks, is following the same pattern, digging its own grave with its military spending. Fox News does such an abysmal job of coming to grips with this reality that they reflexively ridicule anyone who objects to national economic suicide via excessive defense spending. Fox News doesn't employ anyone with enough brainpower to know the predictive value of demographics, which provides rock-solid reasons for slashing military spending now so we can afford to defend ourselves in the near future.

Obama is the only President in history wise enough to realize that our long-term national defense will be strengthened by scaling back the military we now have—military we can't afford. Without cutbacks, our military expenditures will bankrupt us, leaving us with either no military or with domestic spending so low people who counted on the government to survive will not survive, unless you consider cardboard box homes and fillet of cat sandwiches to be survival (see The endless wars we cannot afford in my article The collapse of the U.S. economy: inevitable unless we do this). However, Fox News paints Obama as being dangerously misguided about defense when it is their Republican darlings who don't realize that our bloated and inefficient military is doing less to save us than to decimate our prosperity and long-term national security. Fox News inculcates the “you're crazy unless you're a war hawk” notion so effectively that FNC fans root for the wrecking ball that is shattering their dreams and the dreams of their children.

Incidentally, Katie Pavlich's Facebook page lists Laura Bush as one of her Activities and Interests. Perhaps Pavlich doesn't know that Laura Bush is a killer, or perhaps she forgave her for making that fatal mistake. Forgiveness is something all good Christians should do, correct? Leave the judging to God, correct?

Laura Bush killed one person, but ended the lives of many. When she killed Mike Douglas, she didn't just end his life, but the lives of the children he would have had, and their children, and their children, ad infinitum: potentially many thousands of people.

Now that she is rich (she and her husband are currently worth $26 million), has she given millions of dollars to her victim's family to compensate them for their mental suffering? Is she so bereft of ethical values that she needs a court order to do the right thing? Or does she have something better to do with that money, such as give it to her coddled daughters?

Do the right thing, Laura. This mission has not been accomplished.

Not quite. As I'll later prove, many Christians give Bush a pass for what she did, but don't forgive considerably more minor mistakes made by others. Why does Bush get a pass while others who did far less get hammered? Because Bush fits the Republican mold for what a darling princess should be. By fitting into that mold so well she is often put on a pedestal, it proves the mold is warped. That's one reason I lost my affinity for Republican ideology, which gives killers a pass if their hearts and minds are judged by judgmental people to be in the right place. Laura killed one and George killed many, yet they're judged beyond perfect by their adoring fans. Pavlich likes George W. Bush, too. No surprise there. And Dana Perino, who is intelligent, educated, articulate, and attractive, yet has never said anything interesting or conceived a single brilliant idea. The winners of the Republican genetic lottery club have predictable affinities. You fit the mold, and you're in.

Republicans clamor for good ideas to save our nation, but they don't realize that the outside-the-box people who generate those ideas are precisely the ones they are allergic to. Nonconformity is a fatal sin at Fox News and in the Republican world, where Ronald Reagan is often viewed as the epicenter of intelligence. Conservative Republicans and virtually everyone at Fox News flock primarily to politically unimaginative minds with unoriginal thoughts—that sounds harsh until you read the definition of conservative.

Republicans adore our Founding Fathers, but the most supremely brilliant and indispensable one, polymath Ben Franklin, would not pass the current Republican puritanical litmus test. Franklin was a patron of prostitutes and lifelong womanizer who loved women, loved sex, and wrote about it in detail, such as unabashedly discussing the sensate characteristics of vaginas as women aged, that would cause Republicans who value fitting in the mold to break out in hives. What would people at the country club think?

Of course, Franklin was the most revered man in the world at that time. Walter Isaacson called him “the most accomplished American of his age,” and he was the foremost heartthrob of the 18^th century—a time when people valued brains more than appearance, and substance more than style.

Our Founding Fathers are often idolized as saints or demigods, but some of them had Clintonian sexual appetites. Besides Franklin, there was Thomas Jefferson—another polymath—who had a longstanding affair with Sally Hemings (one of his slaves) that produced several children.

In today's world in which a PC blunder or two can end a career, as it did to Dr. Lazar Greenfield, Franklin and Jefferson would be outcast as if they had leprosy, and the United States would have lost the Revolutionary War. Ironically, the Puritans weren't sexually puritanical: their reputation for “dour prudery” was a “misreading that went unquestioned in the nineteenth century.”

Is it any wonder why the USA is failing? Then and now, the best ideas come from people who don't fit in a rigid mold of acceptability. Inside-the-box ideas are not novel; they're just a rehash of old concepts that don't advance the world. Outside-the-box ideas come from outside-the-box people who don't fit in molds—folks who detest molds and the small minds that thirst for them. No inside-the-box idea is going to save our nation and restore the kind of prosperity Americans want for themselves and their children, but Fox News won't permit any outside-the-box idea to be expressed without immediately trashing it. Let's just keep doing what we've been doing, right FNC brainiacs? Remember Einstein's definition of insanity?

The medical school I attended had a mandatory unit with a singular purpose: to erase the puritanical crap we'd acquired from our sick culture. The professors said the goal was to have us treat sex as openly as any other medical topic so we would give better care. They stressed that sex, not just the cold biology of reproduction, was an integral part of medicine.

Most cultures around the world treat sex in a matter-of-fact, mature way, but in the United States, where people often conflate sex with pornography, sex is frequently treated as if it were so radioactively juvenile that it almost makes sense to think less of Franklin, Einstein, and a slew of Nobel Prize winners who loved sex.

The American culture is disgustingly judgmental and eager to cram people into molds that penalize outside-the-box thinking. And who's leading the way on this national economic suicide? Fox News and anyone who can stomach their ideological intolerance.

Guess what? If you penalize outside-the-box thinking, you get less of it. Guess what that leads to? The kind of economic misery we're now enduring, but to put it colloquially, you ain't seen nothin' yet. In the late 1980s I read the writing on the wall and concluded that we were headed for an economic collapse—an opinion I put in a book I published in the 1990s when we were riding high and seemingly destined to stay that way.

Frankly, you don't need a crystal ball to realize that we need good outside-the-box ideas to save our country, you need only do the math. If you're one of the few Americans smart enough to understand demographics and make economic predictions from them, you know that our goose is cooked unless we quickly break out of the ideological prison we've shackled ourselves in—one that Fox News seems hell-bent on enforcing. Fox News didn't dig the American grave, but it is merrily hammering in the final nails of its coffin and hence blocking our chance to escape. The one thing we need—outside-the-box thinking—is the one thing Fox News won't tolerate. That's Fox News. That's insanity. And that's coming from someone who once worshipped them. Bonus points for anyone smart enough to explain the psychological etiology of their close-mindedness, which has a common root in their big stars. You don't need to go to medical school and have training in psychiatry to figure this one out.

Fox News: We deceive. You believe.

I used to be an über-war hawk, über-Republican, über-conservative, and über-fan of FNC, but I slowly but surely realized that following the paths they favor will lead us down the wrong road. Their primary allure—that small government is better—is evidently such a big lie that even they don't believe it, but they're happy to pull the wool over your eyes to dupe you into believing it.

Periodic self-assessment helps me recognize errors I've made. I've become a better person by not clinging to the flaws I once possessed. I think that Fox News is long overdue for a self-assessment of whether they might benefit from change. I say yes. What do you say?

The common denominator between our affinity for Fox News and our politicians helps explain why we're sliding down the economic slope: how the American obsession with beauty is helping destroy the USA

Many studies prove that American voters are more likely to elect physically attractive politicians: ones with pretty or handsome faces, more hair and height, and in the case of men, deeper voices (see Notes for references). We often give more credence to good-looking people, unconsciously falling victim to an innate tendency to equate a better appearance with better leadership skills and more brainpower. This is but one facet of our tendency to generalize the attributes of attractive people, such as when men are eager to think that hot women are more interesting, funny, wonderful, great, and amazing.

Our obsession with beauty is decimating our prosperity, because by giving power to attractive politicians and attention to attractive pundits—like the foxes on Fox—we run smack-dab into the statistical realities of the attractive expert syndrome: that selecting for an uncommon attribute, such as extraordinary appearance, takes most people out of the running, including many people who could run circles around the hotties.

Beauty and brains don't go hand in hand, so by making appearance one of the primary selection criteria, the brightest people with the best ideas, who usually are not the best looking, often lose out to those who have less on the ball but appearance that people just can't resist—like Katie Pavlich, who has off-the-scale appearance but run-of-the-mill ideas. While she is indeed commendable, what sets her apart from the pack is her appearance, not her ideas. I have many conservative friends who could leave her in the dust. They have higher IQs, are more compellingly persuasive, and write so impressively that I can't help but admire their brilliance even though I no longer agree with all of their conclusions. Yet you'll never see even one of them on Fox News, because they don't fit the disgustingly restrictive mold for Fox News eye candy, but Pavlich is bound to appear again and again.

How many people repeatedly appear on Fox News? Much less than one person in 100,000, and much closer to one in a million. What is it about Pavlich that explains the Fox News fascination with her? Her appearance is close to one in a million, but her brainpower is more ordinary than exceptional. Yes, she wrote a book, but countless authors with better ideas and more persuasive presentations are given the cold shoulder by Fox News and other media to make room for the babes.

By participating in this charade and feeding the American addiction for pulchritude, Pavlich is helping destroy the United States. If she were the patriot she professes to be, she and other hotties like her would step aside, admonishing their adoring fans to focus on the brightest people with the best ideas to save America, not the best looking folks who rehash what many others are saying. We desperately need people with outstanding ideas, not outstanding appearance. We're awash in beauty and bereft of brilliance. Katie's 15 minutes of fame ought to come decades from now when she has more wrinkles but more life experience, more wisdom, and keener arguments to influence people who might be swayed by hearing what obscure people on Facebook and elsewhere are saying even better.

With television being the visual medium that it is, people with more confidence in their appearance have an advantage over others, but this confidence is often a smug manifestation of narcissism. In Narcissism: the secret sauce of self-delusion and Narcissists Look Like Good Leaders, but They Aren't, I explained the danger of falling prey to people with overly inflated self-esteem. There is a world of difference between healthy, justified self-esteem and the narcissistic conviction of greatness based on trifling (e.g., appearance) or imaginary reasons.

Speaking at a TED Conference, Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, said, “There is zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

Fox News is chock-full of great talkers, but has even one of them ever had a single original great idea—that is, one not parroting a bright idea conceived by someone else? However, their mesmerizing appearance is so spellbinding that few viewers ever consider how they would be better served by watching programs hosted by people with better brains but less attractive bodies.

Physical attractiveness combined with narcissism is a malignant combination that often blinds onlookers, preventing them from seeing even obvious flaws. When we are dazzled by the veneer, we often cannot see the rotten core.

Let's face it: most of us are followers, not leaders. We look to the man with something extra—the man (or woman) who radiates self-confidence—to lead us because, deep down, we feel inferior. We feel that anyone audacious enough to brazenly display so much ego must have good reason for it. They must be smarter, more creative, capable of generating brilliant ideas, wise, judicious, decisive, conscientious, and every other attribute from A to Z. But no, it's often just plain ol' ego masquerading as competence.

Americans flock to attractive candidates and pundits so fixated on rewarding what they possess that they preferentially focus on and recommend the politicians with the best appearance even if they don't have the best ideas. This malignant transformation of values has warped the United States from an idea meritocracy into a frigging big beauty contest in which the best-looking politicians write our laws and the hottest pundits tell us what we should think and whom we should vote for, with sheeple predictably flocking to über-hunk Mitt Romney who edged out über-handsome Rick Santorum—and that concentration of Ken doll clones is just a coincidence to unthinking voters.

If you can wrap your mind around elementary statistics that explain why selecting for appearance lessens the chance of striking a mental goldmine, you know why the American obsession with beauty is helping destroy America. If Fox News were truly fair and balanced, they'd lose their fixation on mold conformity and obsession with appearance. All of their inside-the-box thinking and all of their foxes are doing a very ugly thing: eroding the values that made America great. Fox News will give airtime to hot embryos just out of college, but if Ben Franklin were still alive, he wouldn't pass their litmus test of acceptability. One of the greatest minds of all time would be silenced so that one of the greatest beauties of all time can echo what many others are saying even better.

Fox News panders to the proclivity for pulchritude, which takes us ever further from the pinnacle of greatness. A true patriot would not participate in this charade, which tramples the hallowed values of our Founding Fathers and replaces them with the Hollywood values of the Fox News T&A Team that deserves reprobation, not veneration. Fox News is home to narcissists so in love with themselves they'd rather stay on the air than resign so their shoes could be filled by people with better minds and better ideas. In other words, their success means more to them than the success of America, which is succumbing to the inimical effects of gravitating to beauty, not brains.

Without the inventions of this man, our modern world would not be possible. He invented things experts swore were impossible, which proves once again that people who ridicule new ideas and those who conceive them are often manifesting their exiguous intelligence and small-mindedness.

“Fair and balanced” questions you'll never hear on Fox News:

1. To Mitt Romney: In your senior year of high school, you led a group of students who hunted down a classmate you hated because he dared to be different. Evidently one of the things that bugged you about him was his long blonde hair, which draped over one eye, so you and your friends held him down and cut off his hair. One of the participants, now an attorney, said he considers the attack to be “assault and battery.” You laughed when discussing that barbaric incident. What do you find amusing about it? You claim not to recall the assault, but memory experts say that forgetting such an unusual incident is highly unlikely unless you are demented or unless such attacks were routine for you. Your intolerance for nonconformity was so extreme that you felt entitled to commit a crime to punish it, but history suggests that those who don't follow the pack are more likely to achieve great things and conceive the big breakthroughs that advance civilization and our economy. There is no magical inside-the-box solution that can optimize our economic growth, which requires good outside-the-box ideas, such as those proposed by Dr. Pezzi (here's one). Your campaign rhetoric so far indicates that you are still so enamored with conformity that you are basing your plan for recovery on rehashing freeze-dried ideas from bygone American politicians. Your ideas have been tried before, and some have led us into the mess we're in. Einstein said it is insane to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Why should voters not question your morality, judgment, and sanity?
   
   Comment: Fox News would never ask such questions because they themselves love to reflexively bash anyone who doesn't conform in every way. If you're not inside-the-box, Fox News will put you in its crosshairs and pull the trigger. If Fox News were “fair and balanced,” they would welcome intellectual diversity, but their conservative stormtroopers wage war on it every day, every chance they get. Here are some articles Fox News doesn't want you to read:

   Ridiculing good new ideas

   1. A new way to pay taxes: with a smile
   2. How to slash welfare without hurting anyone

   Why Weird is Wonderful (and Bankable)

   Why Innovation Dies

   Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

   Creating Innovators: Why America's Education System Is Obsolete

   How To Be More Interesting (In 10 Simple Steps)

   The Six Enemies of Greatness (and Happiness)

   Loopholing: Seeing the Options Between the Rules

   And here's a book Romney won't read:

   Rapidly Overcoming Racism, Bigotry, and Homophobia

   Shirley Sherrod changed for the better, I changed for the better, and many others have, too, so I don't mean to suggest that Romney couldn't also change for the better. Mitt 2012 certainly wouldn't repeat the mistakes of Mitt 1965, but my concern is that while his method of punishing nonconformity has changed, his weapon of choice went from scissors to intellectual intolerance, which can inflict more damage. Romney needs to squarely address this issue, not laugh it off with the help of the foxes on Fox, who are happy to give him a pass he doesn't deserve.
2. To Mitt Romney: One of your central campaign narratives is that you will make a better President than Obama because you made so much money. However, your father was a wealthy industrialist and Governor of Michigan who gave you a huge head start in life. Some people say you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you had priceless name recognition, and you look better than most Hollywood stars. Multiple studies have shown that exceptional appearance helps people succeed, and is specifically linked to more pay as a CEO and a greater chance of winning elections. How can you persuade skeptical voters that you would have been equally successful had you not enjoyed all of those advantages?
   
   Comment: That may seem to be an unfair question because Romney cannot assuredly insist he would have been equally successful if he were not attractive and born into a famous family that gave him advantages that very few children enjoy. Romney wasn't just in the top 1%, but the top 0.000001%. Perhaps he has concrete examples of how he helped virtual nobodies on Main Street succeed. If so, I want to hear them.
   
   I was born with a lead spoon in my mouth, was abandoned by my father, sometimes ate food my Mom found on the side of the road and sometimes starved, was ridiculed by my sixth-grade teacher as being “slow,” was physically and mentally abused in and out of school, and had so many other strikes against me (some so painful I won't admit them until I'm old) it's a wonder I succeeded, but I did, graduating in the top 1% of my class in medical school. Years before I did that, I started a successful business mowing lawns, making as much money per hour (adjusted for inflation) as I later earned as a doctor.
   
   I've helped friends transition from low-status occupations to medicine. For example, one is now a neuroradiologist, medical school professor, and president of a prestigious medical organization, and another is a professor at the medical school I attended (Wayne State), and chair of her department at a hospital in the Detroit Medical Center. I've helped many others (including strangers I had no contact with except via the Internet or phone) succeed, too, including people who thought they had a snowball's chance in hell of making it. By doing that, I proved that my dunce-to-doctor transformation wasn't a fluke, but a reliable way to augment intelligence and creativity that others can replicate, paving the way for their success.
   
   My Mom suddenly lost her primary job when her boss, an attorney, was shotgunned to death by his son. We temporarily ended up on welfare, which led to me—still in elementary school—being manhandled by a welfare worker who clearly viewed unemployed people as worthless scum. I was shot, stabbed, punched, kicked, and beaten to a pulp when I was a kid, targeted by people who evidently hated me so much for my appearance that they felt entitled to do something about it; calling me “nigger nose,” “nigger lips,” “bucky,” “Mr. Magoo,” and “retarded boy” apparently wasn't enough to vent their rage. The fear and anxiety triggered a peptic ulcer that bled so much I repeatedly went into stage 2 hypovolemic shock, I developed two diseases stemming from nutritional deficiencies, and the lack of medical care led to rheumatic heart disease and other problems that caused agonizing joint pain. I was so blind that I couldn't see what teachers wrote on the chalkboard unless I pressed on my eyeball with my right hand to partially correct the astigmatism, but—being right-handed—that made it difficult to write. My face was so pockmarked by acne that I performed DIY dermabrasion in high school because I couldn't afford a surgeon. I have a genetic condition that makes getting restful sleep all but impossible and I broke my neck, which made refreshing sleep even less likely.
   
   I'm not the curmudgeon I may seem to be online; my psychologist girlfriend is amazed by how happy and well-adjusted I am in spite of what I endured. I succeeded, against all odds, and many Americans have challenges more formidable than those I faced. If Romney wants us to turn the economy over to him, he should explain how he can help even severely disadvantaged people triumph over their problems and excel, as I did, outperforming the children of doctors and assorted big shots who I left in the dust in college and medical school in spite of their myriad advantages.
   
   I don't doubt that Romney can help rich kids succeed, but I want him to help everyone succeed. His track record as governor suggests he is just another inside-the-box politician with inside-the-box ideas. Would he be receptive to the dunce-to-doctor tips that catalyzed my intellectual metamorphosis? Almost certainly not. If you don't fit into their disgustingly restrictive mold of what a good little clone is, snobby Republicans would rather hobnob with other silver-spoon recipients who owe their success to Daddy and the genetic lottery.
   
   I wasn't always this cynical about Republicans. If you look at my past writing in books and websites stretching back to the mid-1990s, you will see that I once was a fervent supporter of them. I wrote From Bailout to Bliss at a time when my conservatism was waning, being replaced by a willingness to embrace liberal ideas I once would have pilloried—and did so well that a famous Republican lauded my writing in a private message sent to me on Facebook. Katie Pavlich might be shocked to learn that Republican is someone she reveres.
   
   I once thought the Tea Party was the answer to our economic problems, but I now think it is doomed to be nothing more than a band-aid fix that gives voters the rhetoric they crave but not the savings they expect. We're past the point of no return for conventional, inside-the-box solutions to give us the prosperity we want, but many Tea Party supporters think their pixie dust can magically solve our problems and permit us to continue the excessive military spending that is digging our grave.
   
   Even if the Presidency and Congress are filled with politicians who assiduously implement their Tea Party promises and eliminate all government waste, they still won't be able to repay our debt and meet other government obligations without draconian cutbacks, all of which could be avoided if they could free themselves—and us—from the restricted ideological prison that gives them such great comfort, basking in the mold of conformity that permits them to rubber-stamp their robotic adherence to antiquated ideas proven to be nothing more than hot air. Cognizant of voter skepticism, savvy politicians like Mr. Conservative Visionary Paul Ryan invent clever new ways to screw Americans by giving us plans that sound great until you realize how they could be a Trojan horse that just shifts the misery.
   
   Our country is so dysfunctional that we give rapt attention to beautiful people with average ideas, such as Katie Pavlich, who says that she “really dislike[s] Leftists,” but with about half the nation voting that way, that means she loathes about half of the Americans from sea to shining sea. I once did, too, but after I discovered a way to get more than one good night of sleep every five years and stumbled upon a way to increase empathy, I no longer had it in my heart to crave for my economic betterment at the expense of others.
   
   Perhaps that is why I am selling my Sea-doo, Ski-doo, and shed to help a deported person reenter the United States, writing about the priceless benefits of sponsoring immigration, and offering to give free firewood, meals, and microhomes, and suggesting ways to help the government provide essential services at zero cost to it. I've helped many Americans and people in foreign countries, including a programmer in India, who I paid twice as much as we contractually agreed upon. I've given lots of free medical care and written about helping people with medical and other expenses. I was cheated by my health insurance company and I've seen how they've cheated others, so I think that Republican solutions to the healthcare crisis are doomed to fail. In fact, they don't even target the primary problems.
   
   Consequently, I am skeptical that yet another Ken-doll, silver-spoon Republican who won the genetic lottery and picked the right parents has The Right Stuff to help all Americans, including the half that another genetic lottery winner, Katie Pavlich, seems to loathe, not love. Brilliant people should be able to succeed in spite of disadvantages far more onerous than a slightly higher tax rate, so if they are truly great enough to repeatedly earn a spot on Fox News, I want to hear tangible ideas to help everyone, not just bellyaching about politicians who won't give them an even larger slice of the pie.
   
   Former Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said “that both parties–the "duopoly," as he calls it—are paralyzed by polarization and inertia, and that the Republican Party in particular is pursuing an "unsustainable" course.” They are indeed. When Huntsman first debated his rivals, he said he thought, “In a nation of 315 million people … is this the best we can do?”
3. Question to Bill O'Reilly: With a substantial proportion of our population obese and even morbidly obese, surely some of them have stellar minds with meritorious ideas worth considering, yet you seem to favor drop-dead gorgeous women even if they are wet behind the ears. Would you have interviewed Katie Pavlich if she were ugly and morbidly obese? Have you ever interviewed any woman who was? When will you replace your penchant for pulchritude and give us the best minds with the best ideas? No offense to Katie Pavlich, who is impressive for someone her age, but a million Katie Pavlichs doing what she is doing can't solve our problems. To use a medical analogy, Bill, the United States is circling the drain. We need to get in gear, stat. If you really care about “the folks,” as you profess, forget about the foxes.
4. Question to President Obama: What didn't you do in your first term that you would do in a second term to stimulate the economy?
   
   Comment: That's a fair question that many Americans are now wondering. Does President Obama have any new tricks up his sleeve? Anything new he'd try? If he does have new ideas, why doesn't he implement them now? If he doesn't have new solutions, why should we give him a second term? The current ones aren't working well enough for many Americans.

Anti-Fox media

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

NewsHounds: We watch Fox so you don't have to!

Poll Finds Fox News Is Worse Than No News at All

Fox News v. Media Matters

Sean Hannity Challenges Guest and Viewers To Find Evidence of Right-Wing Boycotts

Comment on boycotts: They usually aren't sufficiently effective to achieve their objectives. A much more powerful weapon is needed, and I have it: the one alluded to above.

Still think Fox News is fair? Watch this:

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