US citizens: phone your Democratic senators at 833-346-1256 and call on them to hold a prolonged debate on the voting rights bill, as pressure on senators Manchin and Sinema.

To avoid being infected by anti-mask Justice Gorsuch, Justice Sotomayor never attends Supreme Court sessions in person.

*America has taken its eyes off the ball on Iran.* The US has not tried offered enough to get a return to the non-nuclear deal with Iran. The unfortunate consequences could be unending.

The next mass extinction, the first to be caused by humans, is slowly accelerating, but most people hardly pay attention. The IUCN Red List of threatened species covers only 5% of the species we have identified, and many more species are extinct already than it mentions.

China and Russia are increasing their military and economic power while that of the US is crumbling.

Many of us have hoped to see the weaker parts of the world overcome US imperialism and violence, for the sake of justice and human rights. Now it seems that the US may lose its power, but not in a way that benefits human rights for anyone weak.

China and Russia have become vicious mad dictatorships. Different, of course — the Chinese Communist Party cares to some extent about the well-being of Chinese and China, whereas Putin and his barons are more short-term greedy — but they both vaunt their contempt for human rights to discourage anyone who might thing of trying to defend them. Each has rehabilitated the mass-murderers that ruled them in the past (Mao and Stalin).

Against them, the only bastion in the world is the United States, whose evil aspects are quite familiar to us, and which teeters on the edge of falling into a dictatorship as mad and vicious as China and Russia already are.