As I’ve written before, technology effectively multiplies everything where it’s applied. The first automobiles were painstakingly hand-assembled, and only the wealthy could afford them. That was also true for a vast array of consumer goods and machines, so that a middleclass American lives in greater personal luxury (except for vast grounds and huge cold or too hot palaces and being able to order people around) than did Louis XIV of France (the Sun King).

We take much of this for granted, and many seek even more in the way of comforts, goods, and conveniences. That, after all, is a supremely human trait.

But there’s one application of technology that human beings handle supremely well, alas, and that’s the development and application of weapons. There are more than a hundred commercial small arms manufacturers in the world, and more than fifty of them are located in the U.S. According to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, there are more than one billion firearms in the world, with almost four hundred million held by civilians in the United States. Most “standard” AR-15 type rifles can take magazines holding up to 100 rounds.

As mass shootings in the U.S. have demonstrated, weapons light enough for 14-year-olds and those even younger can wreak havoc in seconds. And on the military level, the President of the United States and the President of the Russian Federation can, at least theoretically, each launch up to 5,000 nuclear warheads within a matter of minutes, which in practical terms would effectively destroy civilization on the planet, along with the vast majority of human beings.

Not content with creating these weapons, “creative” geniuses are working on ways to weaponize our communications systems, improve autonomous weapons systems through AI, and investigate biological weapons of various sorts.

Is the culmination of human evolution and creativity to come up with weapons effective enough that a single individual can destroy the entire human race (or most of it) with one push of a button, one release of software, or the creation of one killer virus? Possibly without even a human being directly involved?

And if we survive that, will the next step be to invent a way to pulverize the planet?

These questions aren’t quite facetious; human beings are awfully good at weaponization of almost anything, and we’re getting better by the year.

There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems or pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.

Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.

But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?

This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.

In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.

Yet all the downsides of thoughtless anti-abortion legislation, including the negative economics, are ignored or brushed aside by banner-waving pro-lifers who only consider the “unborn,” who, for them, are sacred and inviolate, while ignoring women who will die without proper medical care, girls raped incestuously, and women forced to bear children, often as a result of spousal abuse, children they do not want and cannot properly care for (and whom the right-to-lifers won’t care for, either).

There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems for pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.

Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.

But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?

This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.

In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.

Donald Trump is apparently now saying that the attempted assassinations directed at him occurred because Democrats have labeled him a threat to democracy, and that Democrats should tone down their rhetoric.

Given what Trump has done and said already, his own words and actions demonstrate that he is a threat to democracy. The Democrats didn’t incite the January 6th attempted coup. Trump’s lies and acts did. Then he compounded those acts by failing to call off his supporters for hours, and when he did, he said he loved those who created the uprising.

In the meantime, just in the last week, Trump and Vance’s bald-faced and totally refuted lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have spurred bomb threats, as well as forced the closure of two colleges and several schools, and created wide-spread and still on-going disruption for the entire town. Yet Vance went on to say that he’d continue to lie if those lies brought issues to public attention

Trump doesn’t give a damn about what happens to others so long as he gets his way. He incited the January 6th insurgency, but walked away from the situation and the ensuing carnage that not only injured 140 police, but hundreds of his own followers. That kind of single-minded narcissism is more like Hamas than traditional U.S. Republican behavior.

And that behavior identifies Vance and Trump as threats to democracy.

One of the great weaknesses of democracies is that they too often fail to restrict the unchecked flow of falsehoods from demagogues and would-be dictators, largely because restricting speech on any grounds is the beginning of a slippery slope that can lead to tyranny. The problem, unfortunately, is that not restricting blatantly false assertions can also bring down democratic government – and has done so time and time again, because those who lie blatantly and repeatedly to gain power won’t stop there.

And people who will willingly accept lie after lie because those lies reinforce their beliefs deserve the hell that will ensue if those fallacy-followers become the majority. Unhappily, the rest of us will suffer the same fate, if not worse, given what “true believers” usually do to non-believers.

Recent comments (and I won’t say “the latest,” because there’s always something else) from Donald Trump include the discredited statements that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio, a comment later changed to eating geese from the parks, and that Kamala Harris had tiny receivers in her earrings at the debate. Both claims are preposterous, for differing reasons, but they illustrate Trump’s mentality.

In his mind, he’s the greatest, no one greater, and what he says is the “gospel truth,” even if actual facts refute his words. If he doesn’t come out on top, whether in crowd size, funds raised, poll results, or actual ballots cast, that’s because someone else played unfair or cheated. And of course, when he wins, it’s a legitimate result.

Corporations and corporate types have spent millions on his behalf, perfectly legally, as a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, but now that Harris has raised more money, her fundraising is “dirty money,” obviously because Trump believes that no one else could honestly raise that kind of funding, and that must be because his opponents are somehow cheating.

He’s been found guilty of business fraud in a state court, one that has no legal ties to the federal judiciary, yet he claims that the present Administration in Washington, D.C., “weaponized” the state legal system against him, despite the total lack of evidence, because he couldn’t possibly be guilty, and the fact that he was found guilty proves the state was doing something illegal.

He been found guilty of sexual assault and defamation – twice – again by a state court, and he claims that he never knew the woman. And then he has the nerve to say that the women he assaulted weren’t his type, that they couldn’t be the “chosen one” (his words, not mine), as if being chosen to be sexually assaulted by Donald Trump was some great honor, like Zeus defiling Leda. Not that honor has ever been reliably associated with Trump.