Kevin Pezzi, MD

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“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.

The bloody roots of royal power

If you trace the roots of royal families back far enough, you will find something very interesting. God did not come down from Heaven and anoint anyone as King, nor did men happy to run their own lives think it would be a good idea to make themselves subservient to a man empowered to take some of their possessions and tell them what they could and could not do, imposing punishments for transgressors that often ranged from horrible to barbaric.

So if monarchies did not originate from divine intervention or from men eager for another man to run their lives, how did blue-blooded men gain their power?

By shedding blood: using often lethal force to get other men to live their lives on their knees, doing what the King wanted—or else.

Kings and Queens have special needs. No ordinary home will do; they want majestic castles staffed by legions of yes-men and servants. They want the finest clothing, gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones. They want the best food, and if that can only be had by taking so much from their subjects that they go hungry or starve—well, too bad.

“We sit around year after year producing no valuable goods or services yet literally live like royalty in grand palaces and eating scrumptious food while the peasants live in shacks and eat moldy food—if they have any food at all … ha, ha!—even though they work their tails off to pay for what little they have and the riches we have! Oh, it's so great to have fools dumb enough to fall for this sham!”

What did royal families do to deserve such riches and coddling? They often didn't lift a finger, except to form what we would now recognize as an organized crime ring that used violent force, or the threat of it, to compel others to live as they commanded. In other words, the nobility weren't noble; they were terrorists and thugs, less legitimate than Al Capone and other mobsters who were happy to let most people live their lives as they wished. In contrast, royal families are insatiable, insisting that every person in their country is their subject, who is subjected to their rules. Or else.

Once the thugs who fancy themselves as royalty get a taste of power, they want even more of it, so they often try to extend their rule beyond their borders. The most notorious example of this is Great Britain, which has patted itself on the back for being good guys while sending their imperialistic forces around the globe to make others do as they commanded. Anyone who resisted risked being put in their place, which was prison for the lucky ones, and six feet under for those less fortunate. One could fill an encyclopedia documenting all British atrocities, as I discussed in another article. Their crimes against humanity included massacring children.

God never issued a special exemption to permit the British royal family to behave so savagely, nor did their victims beg to be ruled by terrorists masquerading as a legitimate aristocracy, so the blue bloods of Britain used centuries of propaganda to brainwash people into thinking they have a right to special treatment, titles of nobility, and mountains of cash—all extracted by victimizing their subjects.

Bill O'Reilly got it right when he said, “So, how did they [the British royal family] get all of their carriages and all the maintenance on their castles and everything? Because they stole it from the peasants! From you and me and all the others. I'm Irish, but how do you think the Kings got all their castles and wealth? They stole it!” He added that celebrating royal weddings “would be like in America us celebrating the wedding of Al Capone's great-great-great-great-granddaughter. Come on!” He later added, “They [the royal family] got their money in nefarious ways, in brutal ways . . . the monarchy throughout history has been dubious to say the least.”

Responding to his earlier comments, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum concurred by saying, “They [the British royal family] pillaged the people of Scotland.” And many others.

When force is used against so many millions of people, it is statistically inevitable that not all quickly are subjugated or die painlessly. Countless adults and children suffered tremendously before dying, and many were injured, from hideous disfigurements to blindness and paralysis.

Racists are more likely to overlook or trivialize the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the British royal family because the victims often (but not always) were more heavily pigmented. Even today, as supposedly enlightened people pat themselves on the back for overcoming racism, there is a lingering tacit (but obvious and documented) perception that people with more skin pigmentation somehow matter less. Certainly, they receive less new coverage. I tuned into Fox News daily for months before I saw a brief story on a missing person, Phylicia Barnes, a gorgeous black honors student, while I saw countless stories on Holly Bobo, a beautiful white nursing student who was also missing. The black community is well aware of this bias (see notes).

The technique of propaganda known as “Big Lie” was coined by Adolf Hitler and used by Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who wrote, “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

The British royal family looks more than ridiculous to thinking people; they look like self-centered unprincipled thugs so thrilled with their ill-gotten gains that they are happy to maintain their charade, which has nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with the perpetuation of a sham. Perpetuating an injustice does not erase it; it merely compounds it. Thus, the British royal family, and other aristocracies around the world, should immediately disband, distributing their purloined loot to their people, and get real jobs doing real work. Goodbye crown, hello mop.

If you could open the graves of the men and women whose tombstones were mere stepping stones for the royal families to gain and hold power, and if those corpses could talk, they would surely fill your ears with shocking true tales of how they and others were brutalized so the terrorists who called themselves Kings and Queens could get their way.

Modern people like to think we've cast off all the backwardness of the Dark Ages, but some of what we believe cannot be ethically justified yet persists because folks are so habituated to an injustice that they don't recognize it.

Imagine if aristocracies did not exist and one of your co-workers announced that he was now King, so you'd better fork over a big chunk of your paycheck to him and do what he said from that day forward. His kids would tell your kids what to do, and take lots of their stuff, and your grandchildren would keep bowing to his grandchildren. How would you respond? You might howl in laughter or give him a knuckle sandwich for being so unfathomably arrogant. If he implemented his plan in the United States, the Department of Justice would prosecute him and his co-conspirators under the RICO statutes. Goodbye crown, hello prison cell. Goodbye servants, hello Bubba.

Hereditary monarchies represent the ultimate in unelected power and unearned privileges. Elective monarchies aren't much better, often with a handful of nobles using their illegitimate power to elect a leader. According to the Wikipedia, “Today, almost all monarchies are hereditary monarchies in which the monarchs come from one royal family with the office of sovereign being passed from one family member to another upon the death or abdication of the incumbent.”

Since almost all monarchies are now hereditary monarchies, almost all monarchies are just longstanding criminal organizations. So why do we put up with them? Why do people permit those thugs to pickpocket their paychecks and command respect? They deserve nothing but contempt for behavior that ranges from leeching to brutal dictatorship, as in Saudi Arabia.

Is this merely an academic exercise? No. According to experts, much of the Middle Eastern hatred for the United States stems from how they view us: as hypocrites who profess to support freedom while we give many billions of dollars in aid to support despotic leaders who are loathed by their people. Thus we shouldn't be surprised when those people hate us for meddling in their affairs. If you cannot understand why, try putting yourself in their shoes: How would you feel if the Iranian people put Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, into power with total control over our country? That is what we did to them in 1941 when we installed the Shah as the tyrannical ruler of Iran.

The Shah, who was arrogant enough to anoint himself the “King of Kings,” was a despot who ruled with an iron fist and had grown men literally kissing his feet. His love for himself was so great that he spent $100 million on just one party in 1971—almost certainly the most lavish one in history (in today's dollars, that would be over $500 million). As some of his people lived nearby in abject poverty, The King of Kings was having one heck of a grand time . . . with their money. The wealth of Iran was traceable to oil, a natural resource that should have been equally shared by all Iranians. However, thanks to our meddling, Iranians were given this abominable man who thought that it was his God-given right to take whatever he wanted from them.

The King of Saudi Arabia is a brutal dictator who leaves his people alone only if they don't oppose his illegal regime, do what they are told, and—if they are unlucky enough to be women—behave like third-class pieces of property.

Saudi Arabia is a classic example of how thugs use gunpowder to form kingdoms. Abdul-Aziz bin Saud's power came not from God or elections, but from a willingness to massacre anyone who stood in his way as he consolidated power. His Smith & Wesson tactics of persuasion convinced enough people to acquiesce rather than die. Might makes right.

Saddam Hussein pulled a similar stunt when he invaded Kuwait, which culminated in the Gulf War led by an indignant United States. We attacked him, but President Obama bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia (and was audacious enough to deny it in spite of compelling video evidence), which makes as much sense as bowing to the Godfather. Thus we should not be scratching our heads in befuddlement when Middle Eastern people sense a glaring disconnect between our professed love for freedom and our affinity for Middle Eastern leaders who deprive them of freedom.

The King of Bahrain used lethal force to suppress protestors who sought to end his illegitimate monarchy. His thuggish security forces shot and killed unarmed civilians, fired on homes with helicopters, and attacked doctors treating the wounded. An eyewitness reported:

“One doctor claimed government forces hunted a nearby hospital for demonstrators and shot at them in the corridors.” A terrified surgeon termed this slaughter “genocide.” Another witness called it “a war of annihilation.”

A citizen of Bahrain commented, “Please help us the tyrant Government (so-called Royals) are killing my people . . . Doctors without Borders and the Red Cross wanted to come in but were not allowed. [Security forces] shot at innocent boys with no weapons.”

Ironically, “the government called the demonstrators 'outlaws' for demanding an end to the monarchy.” Saudi Arabia sent tanks and 1000 troops to help the King of Bahrain commit more crimes against humanity.

Since it cannot be justified, why do we help perpetuate the legitimacy of this sham? Why do we not insist that our President not bow to Kings but instead shame them into abdicating their thrones? If we truly think that cheap oil and iPods are more important than freedom, why don't we admit we're less focused on freedom than gizmos that fill our heads with enough sound to mask the cries of freedom from around the world? Are we truly the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the spineless consumers addicted to trinkets made affordable by our leaders who make deals with foreign devils?

Our Founding Fathers had nothing but contempt for people who thought they were special and entitled to special treatment just because they slid down the right birth canal. They knew that Kings and Queens were just synonyms for thugs who used nobility as a veneer to camouflage their fraudulent foundations, so they expressly prohibited noble titles in the Constitution:

Want to select a King or Queen with a more legitimate right to rule? Randomly pick someone out of the phone book, hold a lottery, or even a beauty contest. Choosing a leader that way is better than how hereditary monarchies gained power: by using force, which cannot be justified, period.

Why do people tolerate monarchies when they are smart enough to understand their inherent evil? Understanding that requires a bit of psychological knowledge that gives insight into why people figuratively slip nooses around their necks and beg leaders to tighten them. I discussed this research in another article explaining how we could kickstart our economy and lessen the burden on taxpayers while giving more money to the folks they support.

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