Science never assumes that if A is correlated with B, then A causes B or B causes A, since there is always the possibility that a third variable, C, is intervening to cause both A and B. —from Psychoanalysis and the Edgar Cayce Readings by Dudley Delany

Ancient of Ways
Sam Aurelius Milam III

That which is, already has been;  that which is to be, already has been;  and God seeks what has been driven away. Moreover I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. —Eccl 3:15-16 The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version

It's good if people have tolerant attitudes but if we try to enforce such attitudes, then we're only yielding to the lust for control.  Forcing a bigot to behave like a civilized person doesn't make him a civilized person.  It makes him a repressed bigot.  If we punish him, then that doesn't make us virtuous.  It makes us as bad as he is.  Intolerance of bigotry is intolerance, the same as intolerance of anything else.
A person doesn't have any obligation to agree with currently fashionable ideas.  He doesn't have to approve of homosexuality, support feminism, despise polygamy, buy Girl Scout cookies, rescue abused puppies, support the troops, condemn smokers, or hold to any other currently orthodox belief or behavior.  He's as entitled to his numskull notions as the political correctness enforcers are to theirs.
However, political correctness has become a new orthodoxy.  Its enforcers aren't yet as openly vicious as were the past perpetrators of such things as the Inquisitions, the Crusades, and the Witch-Hunts, but they're identical to them in spirit, and similar to them in their potential for violence and brutality.  That makes them both wrong and dangerous.  A person should never be punished for merely having politically incorrect beliefs.  He shouldn't be punished even for politically incorrect behavior unless it can be proved that the behavior was harmful to somebody besides himself.  A holy cause doesn't justify the use of unholy remedies but, instead, will always be corrupted by them.
It seems to me that intolerant behavior has always been a problem for us.  I don't think that we'll eliminate it by criminalizing it, however noble that might make us feel.  Repression of intolerance, even in the service of a worthy cause, is counterproductive.  Maybe the problem can't be solved at all.  If it can, then it seems to me that our best hope, maybe our only hope, is for each of us to solve it first in himself.  That's an old and difficult objective.

The most important difference between fictional characters and historical characters is the intentions of the authors who created them. —an undated comment from Milam's Notes

Mrs. Ockham's Razor
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Why do some women stay in abusive relationships?  Undoubtedly, some of them do.  My second wife spent seven years with her first husband who, according to her, was routinely abusive.  I never even raised my voice at her and she left me after six months.  I could be wrong about this but it seems to me, in retrospect, that much of her behavior was calculated to provoke me.  I'll digress briefly here.
Women can be just as abusive as men, but they tend to engage in emotional abuse rather than physical abuse.  The wounds are just as painful and take longer to heal, but it's harder to prove abuse by a woman, in court, because the wounds are invisible.  The point is that women aren't necessarily always the blameless victims that they present themselves to be.
After my second wife went away, an acquaintance commented that I should have hit her.  If you'd have just hit her, he told me, then she'd still be here.  His comment suggests that some women might actually prefer to stay in abusive relationships.  It seems like a bad idea to me, but I have a theory.  Of course, the women who read this theory will probably get mad but, if they've read this far, then they're already mad anyway.  Besides that, my theory makes as much sense as the others and, in keeping with Ockham's Razor, it's a lot simpler than some of them.  Thus, the name of this article.
Okay, here goes.  Women have a genetic mandate to try to control men.  By their very nature, they try to control men.  If a woman can't force a man to do things for her, then maybe she'll try to force him to do things to her.  It might not be ideal but, for some women, it might satisfy the need for control.  If the only thing that she can force him to do to her is to abuse her, then maybe she'll settle for that.  Why else would a woman just keep nagging and nagging and nagging until she finally gets hit, knowing from experience, as she certainly does, that it's going to happen?  Some of them do.  It isn't a pleasant form of control, but it is a form of control, maybe a sort of control of last resort.  She can always force him to do it, whether he wants to or not.
Granted, the theory isn't politically correct, but a theory doesn't have to be politically correct in order to be worthy of consideration.  It doesn't have to be attractive or popular.  It only has to explain the observed data and reliably predict future events.  It seems to me that my proposed theory does both of those things, at least as well as the competing theories.  That makes it worthy of consideration.

Frontiersman c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive Gainesville, Georgia  30507       Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other "studies" was part of the price of academic peace.  All too often, these "studies" are about propaganda rather than serious education. —Thomas Sowell

Blonde Jokes
Original Source Unknown.  Forwarded by Don G.
Q:How do you keep a blonde busy?
A:Write "Other Side Up" on both sides of a piece of paper.
Q:How else do you keep a blonde busy?
A:Ask her to alphabetize a bag of M&M's.

Supposed Fact About 1500's England
Original Source Unknown.  Forwarded by Don G.

I haven't tried to verify this but it's an interesting story, even if it isn't true. —editor.

England was old and small and they started running out of places to bury people.  So they started digging up coffins and taking the bones to ossuaries.  That allowed them to reuse the graves.  However, when they started reopening the coffins and noticed that one out of 25 coffins had scratch marks on the inside, they realized they'd been burying people alive.  So they began the practice of tying a string on the wrist of each corpse, leading it through the coffin and up through the ground, and tying it to a bell.  Someone would sit in the graveyard all night (the origin of the term "graveyard shift") and listen for the bell.  Thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or be a "dead ringer."