From what I can determine, PC, or political correctness, has become almost a tired and trite phrase, and I can see why. It really doesn’t fit the politics and cultural conflicts of the present, and the reason it doesn’t is because there’s very little that’s “correct,” let alone accurate or effective, in most of today’s politics, political policies, and especially in the shouting past each other that passes for political discussion.

Add to that the fact that very few political figures, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders excepted in some, but not all cases, have the political courage to “tell it like it is.” And for that matter, neither do most individuals in positions of power… because almost all of them are afraid that accurate evaluations of situations will cost them power…as well as endless litigation.

I’ll offer a few examples. With the exception of the comedian and political commentator Bill Mahar, no one seems willing to offer a public assessment of the Islamic faith. How can anyone with a shred of objectivity offer a favorable assessment of a faith that predominantly believes that: (1) women are second or third class individuals whose rights should be determined by the men in their lives; (2) that anyone who leaves the faith should be put to death; (3) that anyone who criticizes or mocks the prophet deserves to be put to death; (4) that women are responsible for all sexual violence perpetrated upon them and should be killed for dishonoring their families in such cases. Studies from all around the world confirm that a majority of Muslims believe all of the above, and what a religion truly is must be based on what its practitioners believe and what they do, not by its scripture. This isn’t a just matter of “differing beliefs.” Those beliefs, as presently manifested by the opinions, attitudes, and actions of Muslim believers, denigrate and literally demonize those who do not agree with them, with the results being everything from mass murder to honor killings in the name of Allah.

In historical terms, the Catholic Church wasn’t much better, at one time turning most of Europe into a charnel house with religious wars, and Catholicism still minimizes the worth of women and places their value as vessel for childbearing above anything else, while denying them equality in the theological structure.

The United States certainly isn’t particularly honest in its self-assessments, either. The LDS faith and extreme Christian evangelicals are both essentially and excessively patriarchal and place women in socially and theologically inferior positions, with their greatest value apparently as brood mares, and yet anyone who says this is ignored, dismissed, or attacked.

Yet anyone who mentions loudly these problems is shouted down for being “disrespectful” of other religions. Accuracy in description is disrespectful?

The failure to face facts goes well beyond religion.

The idea that more weapons in more hands will stop crime is insane, especially given that we have both 300 million weapons in private hands, the greatest number of deaths perpetrated by private individuals of any country in the world, and also the greatest percentage of our population incarcerated. Likewise, given those 300 million weapons, the idea of getting rid of privately owned firearms is a pipe-dream. Black male inner city culture is toxic and a disaster, and while poverty, discrimination, and police procedures definitely play a huge role in the excessive murder rate of blacks by blacks, the role of inner-city culture is conveniently dismissed as another facet of discrimination. Yet a comparison of black murder rates to other poor areas with different racial and ethnic backgrounds still finds blacks with a far higher murder rate than other poverty-stricken ethnic groups. When in certain cities, police patrols recently became less intensive, the crime rates in those inner cities went up.

Now, stories are appearing about how college students are actually suppressing free speech and demanding “trigger warnings” because they don’t want to hear news, facts, discussions, or opinions contrary to their feelings or beliefs – and all too many of them see anything that disturbs them as disrespectful or even verging on “hate speech.” In fact, a recent Pew Research study found that forty percent of Americans in the 18-40 age range favored government censorship to prevent speech offensive to minorities. One of the big problems with this idea is that even the most accurate and relevant facts can be offensive to someone’s beliefs, as I’ve certainly discovered over the years.

The largest overall difficulty with all of this is that it’s impossible to even attempt to find solutions to problems if any form of complete discussion of these problems is effectively muzzled by the desire not to offend and the outrage of those who are offended… and when the only people who will bring them up bluntly are demagoguing politicians like Donald Trump or liberal comedians like Bill Mahar.

Many years ago, I was a Navy helicopter search and rescue pilot, and, consequently, I do tend to follow aircraft developments… and their costs. The first helicopter I flew as a full-fledged Naval Aviator was a Sikorsky UH-34, the last large piston-driven helicopter, and, as I recall, each cost somewhere less than a million dollars. Today’s Navy uses Sikorsky Seahawks [SH-60R/S] for carrier search and rescue, and they come with a price tag in excess of $30 million each.

The other day I was reading a report on the Air Force’s proposed new long range bomber. Each one is projected to cost something like $564 million, and the total program cost of the one hundred planned high tech stealth bombers is expected to exceed $80 billion. This may seem expensive, but the most expensive bomber procurement ever was that of the B-2. Only 21 B-2s were built, and the total program cost for each amounted to $2 billion per bomber.

The newest U.S. advanced fighter plane is the F-35, rated with a top speed of Mach 2.25, each one of which will cost a minimum of $163 million. Unhappily, the program appears to have run into a number of problems, including a flight test in which an F-16 apparently bested an F-35 in a trial dog-fight, which created some consternation, given that the F-16 is a far older aircraft with a forty year old design, giving rise to concerns that the F-35 might not live up to its billing.

Prior to that, the unit cost for an F-22, a stealth air superiority fighter, was $155 million each in 2009. By comparison, in 1965 a Mach 2 capable F-4E Phantom jet fighter cost $2.4 million [$18 million in today’s dollars].

So, we now have a fighter aircraft that is only ten percent faster that the top-rated fighter of fifty years ago, but which costs nine times as much. Why the difference? A good aircraft designer could give a better answer, but some of the most obvious reasons for cost increases are the need for stealth technology and design and the incredible advancement in avionics and missile technology.

As an old-line pilot, though, I have to wonder. Even years and years ago, the F-14 had an incredible “stand-off “ capability and was theoretically able to destroy aircraft beyond the pilot’s range of vision… and so far as I know that capability was seldom if ever used, simply because there was no way to reliably determine whose aircraft the F-14 could destroy. Now we have even greater stand-off capability at far higher costs… but do we dare to use it?

Let’s ask a question. What do Cyrus the Great, Alexander, Ramses II, Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mao Zedong, Vlad the Impaler, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mohammed, and Jesus Christ all have in common?

Besides the fact that thousands, if not millions, died either because of their actions or policies, or as a result of their teachings… they were all men. And I could have made the list longer, a lot longer, but it does bring up another question. With the record that males have compiled while they’ve been in charge of countries, religions, armies, institutions, corporations, and other groups… why do human beings continue to allow men to lead anything?

The simple answer is, of course, that men in general have been and remain larger and physically more powerful, in most instances, than women. Another answer is that studies show that men, either for genetic or cultural reasons, tend to defer to other males who are taller and present an image of greater personal power, often even when it’s obvious that such men are largely lacking in other areas, such as foresight and intelligence.

From historic times onward, and possibly before, men have almost always controlled societies, and in almost all of them used their power to keep women in a secondary position, invariably opposing attempts to give women legal and social status and power equivalent to men. Even today, the vast majority of women across the world are still in a secondary position and a significant percentage are little more than slaves.

All this leads to yet another question. Just how well have men done at ruling and directing societies, governments, and organizations? The “boys” in control over the last century have presided over two world wars, a long-running “cold war,” not to mention more than fifty smaller wars, rebellions, insurrections, and various other lethal conflicts across the globe.

Because so few women anywhere have political and military clout, it’s difficult to make a direct comparison, but, recently, studies have shown that U.S. corporations where women have voice and power close to that of men outperform corporations dominated by men. But it certainly doesn’t seem that this is welcome news to the good old boys in the boardroom. Might it be that, despite their insistence that they’re looking for the best talent, they’re only looking for the best male talent, and performance comes second to maintaining male superiority?

Now… where would I ever come up with such an outrageous idea?

One of the problems that tends to get overlooked with belief systems, particularly religious belief systems, is their inherent hypocrisy, which can be illustrated simply by taking given tenets of the belief system and comparing that tenet to actual statistics. I’ve seen a number of articles and statements that claim the violence we’ve seen from Islamic terrorists is not typical and certainly not representative of what the Koran says.

Such violence may in fact not represent what the Koran states, but a wide range of statistics show that such behavior is in fact typical and highly representative of the beliefs of a majority of Muslims, particularly in the Middle East.

In addition to such attacks as the 9/11 attack on the United States and the recent terrorist killings in Paris and Mali, not to mention the horrific violence perpetrated by ISIS, last year there were over five thousand so-called “honor killings” of women internationally, with over a thousand in Pakistan and another thousand in India. Even in the United States, there were at least thirty, and probably more, given that some of these killings were simply reported as “domestic violence.”

Almost one in five Muslims in Indonesia, considered a “moderate” Islamic nation and the largest predominantly Islam nation in the world with a population of 250 million people, with 87% of the people being Muslims, believes in the honor killing of women who have been raped or otherwise “dishonored” their families.

According to a BBC Poll, one in ten British Muslims support killing a family member over “dishonor,” and a Daily Mail survey reported that two-thirds of young British Muslims agree that ‘honor’ violence is acceptable.

A 2013 Pew Research poll reported that, among Muslims, stoning women for adultery is favored by 89% in Pakistan, 85% in Afghanistan, 81% in Egypt, 67% in Jordan, 58% in Iraq, 44% in Tunisia, 29% in Turkey, and 26% in Russia. Also, a 2010 Pew Research report showed that 84% of Egyptian Muslims, 86% of Jordanian Muslims, 30% of Indonesian Muslims, 76% of Pakistani Muslims, and 51% of Nigerian Muslims support the death penalty for leaving Islam.

In addition to the murder of those who are not believers in Islam in the ISIS controlled areas of Syria, the ISIS “modesty police” in Syria are now beating [and most likely doing worse to] women whose garments are too tight or who wear make-up.

This is not a “moderate” religion, nor is it one that respects women, no matter what the Koran says, and while extreme religious believers in the United States also have problems with respecting women, for the most part, they aren’t murdering them wholesale. So, while the Koran may say that men should respect women, that’s definitely one tenet that’s being ignored by the majority of Muslims… and they’re ignoring the fact that they’re ignoring it… and many appear to be proud that they are.

The terrorist attacks in France illustrate that there exist within the human population people who are not only willing, but apparently eager, to lose their lives for a “cause” so that they can slaughter hundreds of people even if the actual victims of their efforts are innocent bystanders who personally have not fought against them and whose only “crime” is being a citizen of a country fighting against those terrorists, or in some cases, only being present in that country. In the case of ISIS, what makes it worse is that ISIS and its sympathizers believe, or at least publicly declare, that their struggle is to create an Islamic Caliphate. Unhappily, this struggle for “freedom” is to create an “Islamic State” in which they are free to kill or enslave anyone who does not believe exactly as they do and in which women are slaves and brood mares.

Tens of thousands of angry young men who feel disenfranchised and marginalized have flocked to this cause, and it’s clear that a great many of them, if not a majority, are fanatics in every sense of the word. As history has shown, negotiating, talking, or compromising does not change the mindset of a fanatic. Most people cannot drastically change their mindsets once they become adults, and that means changing the mindset of a large body of extreme fanatics, i.e., those willing to kill repeatedly for their cause, is highly unlikely, to say the least.

The only successful remedies in dealing with such fanatics are either isolation from those fanatics or the application of greater force. In the modern high-technology world, as events in France and elsewhere have demonstrated, complete isolation or containment of fanatics is not possible, and since fanatics don’t ever give up, greater force essentially means large-scale slaughter of those fanatics, because small-scale slaughter only creates more anger and more fanatics.

This leaves the “West” with in an extraordinarily difficult position, either to beef up security and containment measures almost to the level of a police state, and still recognize that such measures will not stop all terrorist attacks… or enter into an all-out war in the Middle East, in which millions will likely die.

But then, all those ISIS fanatics will go to Paradise, while all the other combatants and non-combatants who perish will just die ugly painful deaths because the ISIS fanatics KNOW that anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs deserves to die for their apostasy, just as less violent fanatics know that everyone else’s beliefs are wrong and that non-believers should be required to comply with the beliefs of “the chosen.”

The Founding Fathers, of course, drawing upon their knowledge of past centuries of European religious fanaticism, designed a Constitution to keep the fanaticism of religion out of government and law, for exactly these reasons, reasons that American religious extremists seem to ignore, even as ISIS provides another example of the evils of extremism in pursuit of the true faith, whatever that may be.