Get any book of mine free. Here's how.

Kevin Pezzi, MD

I developed technology to instantly
stop school shooters and other criminals,
such as rapists, robbers, home invaders,
and shoplifters. I also created ways to block
airborne germ transmission. Read more >

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life.

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

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

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

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

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

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

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

Reinventing Hallmark movies
and other movies of that ilk

Disappointed by yet another Hallmark movie, I reflected on how a crummy Hallmark actress can earn more than good doctors.

Defining crummy: in movie after movie, sounding as if she reads her lines from a cue card, and rushing them with obviously feigned emotion (except in Royally Wrapped for Christmas, where she shined). Oh, but Jen Lilley is adorably cute! We gravitate to beauty like bugs are drawn to light, often with equal peril. Bug zappers for bugs, needless problems for people.

Appearance discrimination (a.k.a. pretty privilege or lookism) really irks me. Whether it is thinking less of someone because of how they look, or thinking more of those blessed with beauty, it is just plain wrong. It is also a surprisingly big problem that creates others as attractive folks are often elevated more than they deserve, replacing a meritocracy with a beautyocracy. In every Hallmark movie I've seen (several dozen), Blacks are relegated to transparently token roles and frequently molded in simplistic racial stereotypes with a thin veneer of caricatures to camouflage the blatant bias. In striving to be woke, they come off as pathetically pandering.

While a few Hallmark movies are impressively written and directed, most are disappointing, failing to capitalize on countless possible aspects of the human behavioral and experiential gamut that could provide more captivating stories. Great stories could spellbind viewers even if the actors were not attractive, but almost all Hallmark movies are so risibly amateurish that they would be virtually nothing without their male hunks and female foxes — all B-list and White except for the perfunctory tokens.

Thinking of one of the better Hallmark actresses, Cindy Busby, there is considerably too much of her surfacing from movie to movie. In theory, she portrays entirely different characters; in Hallmark movies, there are too many common denominators of her behavior to credibly depict diverse roles, instead heavily tinged with the stamp of Cindy. Ditto for other top Hallmark-ish stars (such as Merritt Patterson, who acts like Merritt in movie after movie after movie after movie until erstwhile fans writhe in frustration), none of whom do as much for others as doctors, so why should they earn more? Why should they make substantially more for forgettable movies than I did in the ER saving the lives of blue babies not breathing?

Now that would be a story worth telling!

In a heated exchange May 22, 2024, U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a physician and Alpha Omega Alpha — the med school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa — member (inducted in her third year of medical school, ditto for me), excoriated a misogynistic government scientist for thinking less of a woman because she is a woman. Some of the smartest people I've known were women with 150 IQs — breathtaking brilliance. As Dr. Miller-Meeks castigated Dr. Fauci's Senior Advisor Dr. David Morens (who seemingly has much to hide), I admired her powerful intellect.

I also ponder the mental ability of Hallmark talent. If they have so much to offer, why would they fritter away their potential making second-rate movies? That would also be a story worth telling.

Perhaps one cannot fault attractive people for capitalizing on their appearance, yet if I looked like a Hallmark stud, there is zero chance I would waste my talent doing what they do. Capitalism and indeed the world work best when people do what they do best. Although I graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school despite crippling obstacles (here are some of them), I am a much better inventor than doctor, so that is what I do, confident that I will ultimately save considerably more lives and help substantially more people.

Coincidentally, after writing this I took a break to make lunch while listening to a Gun Talk podcast interviewing a man who intervened to rescue a woman being viciously pummeled (she required multiple surgeries thereafter) by a man sitting on top of her during the post-Floyd Minneapolis 2020 riot. Not everyone is so fortunate to have a hero appear in time; my father certainly was not, murdered as he was by two thugs who dumped his body in a Georgia swamp, leaving it to rot.

Guns don't adequately fill many self-defense situations, and even legitimate use may trigger prosecutors to put you in their crosshairs if you dare defend yourself, a loved one, or a stranger seconds away from having her life snuffed out or irreparably damaged, as happened to Kaylee Gain in a nationally televised assault that left her with brain damage.

I successfully prototyped many devices to fill the vacuum of self-defense needs. Some of them could be integrated into blockbusters for Hallmark or others, creating movies that people would never forget. Rather than being what most Hallmark movies are (often juvenile obsessing about trivial imaginary problems or ones inflated by extreme neuroticism), they could introduce viewers to novel technologies addressing a persistent real-world security gap. Wouldn't that be a story worth telling?

I have hundreds of other ideas for movies that would better appeal to more adults and help them in ways that Hallmark writers evidently cannot imagine, but the world transfixed by beauty is undermined by it as money is showered on those who have little to offer other than appearance.

In 1944, Hallmark adopted its slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best.” They seem to have forgotten that commitment to excellence, replacing it with complacence for mediocrity and a conviction that beauty is the primary salve needed to heal emotional wounds self-treated with Hallmark escapism.

Researchers reported evidence suggesting that less conformity leads to more innovation. In contrast, Hallmark is enamored with its formulaic recipes for what movies should be, thus blinding them to exciting possibilities. Cuteness cannot possibly compensate for what they have now and had decades ago when I was sufficiently repelled I avoided them like the plague. They've improved in the interim, but not nearly enough to dispel my bitter disappointment.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
— Sam Walton, founder of Walmart and Sam's Club (source)

Jen and Cindy, you're fired. Before I go, a bit of advice for them: Dr. Miller-Meeks is still attractive at age 68 and was likely a ravishing beauty in her youth, but that didn't stop her from doing consequential things: first an esteemed doctor, then a member of Congress. She is thus a great role model that actresses and others would be wise to emulate.

Now some advice for everyone: perceived beauty defects — such as cellulite, stretch marks, wrinkles, thinning or gray hair — sting more when people focus on them rather than what is truly important: accomplishments that help others. Einstein had wrinkles, but he was still Einstein.

Speaking of wrinkles reminds me of another top Hallmark star, Christopher Russell. Comparing his appearance in a 2015 movie to those made not many years later, I and a friend were struck by how his almost boyish youth was replaced by wrinkles, change in hair color, and a face that is rapidly hollowing out. He is still extraordinarily handsome and has an exceptional physique (note to bodybuilders: what he has is the epitome of what most women want), but his accelerating facial aging reminds me of another star who prematurely fizzled, then popped.

It was painful to watch Luke Perry in Love in Paradise, filmed in 2016, three years before his death from “a massive ischemic stroke” at age 52. I knew none of that watching the movie, but it was obvious he was aging at a furious rate. Did his doctor see it, too? Take steps to address that disaster in progress? He didn't belong in that movie; he should have been in an advanced medical clinic with smart doctors scrutinizing every aspect of his body and exposome to avert that brewing catastrophe.

Beauty is only skin deep, but appearance can be a valuable window into individual health. Unfortunately, doctors are not trained to capitalize on this and consequently miss endless opportunities to help people live better lives.

Notes:

The views expressed on this page may or may not reflect my current opinions, nor do they necessarily represent my past ones. After reading a slice of what I wrote in my various websites and books, you may conclude that I am a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Wrong; there is a better alternative. Just as the primary benefit from debate classes results when students present and defend opinions contrary to their own, I use a similar strategy as a creative writing tool to expand my brainpower—and yours. Mystified? Stay tuned for an explanation. PS: The wheels in your head are already turning a bit faster, aren't they?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”

Kevin Pezzi, MD

Reinventing Hallmark movies and other movies of that ilk

Notes:

Comments (0)

Reinventing Hallmark movies
and other movies of that ilk