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.

Refuting another liberal smear: that I dislike welfare recipients

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

First, some background. My definition of a good patient is one with a challenging problem that I can solve, helping the patient or saving his life. If a person is having a heart attack or even just an ear ache, I am happy to treat the patient regardless of his insurance status or ability to pay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With their characteristic ability to misunderstand, or understand and smear anyway, various liberals tried to paint a picture of me as a cold-hearted conservative who doesn't like welfare recipients. Nonsense. Years ago, I thought of a way to ensure that welfare recipients would receive as much as they now do and potentially much more, while reducing the welfare burden on taxpayers. I am not opposed to welfare or welfare recipients; just the ones who are troublemakers or the ones who choose welfare as a career option (which is still possible, even years after welfare reform, proving how easy it is to dupe the system).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I care about the future of this country, so I began writing about some of its problems—and, unlike people who can only complain, I also offer solutions, as I did in suggesting how to slash total welfare payments without hurting any welfare recipient. The federal government is hell-bent on involving itself in medicine, so in the USA, politics and medicine are inseparably linked. Any author who writes about problems in medicine without mentioning problems and waste created by welfare recipients is giving his readers an inaccurate depiction of reality. When the liberal smear machine saw what and how I wrote, they knew they had to stop me, fearing that my messages would resonate with common-sense people, yet they couldn't attack the facts I discussed except by nitpicking at a few of the many thousands of things I've written about—so many things over so many years that even I strongly disagree with some things I've written! Instead, they did what liberals usually do when the facts aren't on their side: resort to ad hominem attacks and character assassination. They alleged that I hate welfare recipients, that I'm racist, and that I work on inventions that can't possibly work. They're wrong about that and their other wild accusations, which I'll prove in a series of articles discussing the far-left smears.

When I complete them, I think fair and civil people would agree that their characterization of me was far from accurate; it was deliberately distorted, a vile smear, and a caricature. Myriad liberals swallowed that caricature hook, line, and sinker and even gleefully welcomed it, parroting their attacks without taking the time to first verify if they were accurate.

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

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

• Racists defend racism, not blast it, as I did.
• I am part Native American and long before partisan hit men with reading disabilities alleged that I think Native Americans should be grateful for their subjugation, I did a better job than anyone (IMHO) of illustrating the unfairness of that subjugation, which really irks me.

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

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

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