Watch: Historian tells Paul Krugman how the midterms could trigger a 'dark' period worldwide. AlterNet  Alex Henderson August 24, 2025 During his four years as president, Joe Biden worried that if Donald Trump ever returned to the White House, it would pose a major threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Trump, during his first term, toyed with the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO — whereas Biden, as president, aggressively championed NATO's expansion when Sweden and Finland opted to join the alliance.Seven months into Trump's second presidency, the U.S. is still a NATO member. But author/military historian Phillips O'Brien, during an interview with economist Paul Krugman, stressed that Trump's return to the White House marks a dramatic change in U.S./Europe relations. Krugman, on August 23, posted video of the interview on his SubStack page and also published it as a Q&A article. And O'Brien voiced major concerns about the United States' relationship with Europe.

Francis’s approach was to follow in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Pope John XXIII, who said on the eve of the modernising Second Vatican Council in 1962 that he wished to “open the window and let in some fresh air”. In a memorable dressing down of the Vatican’s civil service, the first non-European Pope of modern times railed against a “pathology of power” and excoriated insiders who “feel themselves ‘lord of the manor’ – superior to everyone and everything”. The Roman Catholic church, he said, needed to “come out of herself and go to the peripheries”; to become “a church of the poor for the poor” and a “field hospital for the faithful”. Over the next decade, traditional Franciscan themes of poverty, humility, solidarity with the poor and with the natural environment dominated the style and substance of the new papacy. His decision to live simply in a clerical guest house in Vatican City, rather than the papal palace, made for a dramatic contrast with Benedict’s grander lifestyle and taste for ceremonial splendour. A plain white cassock and black boots, and a blue Ford Focus for getting around instead of a papal limousine, sent a message regarding what a “poor church” should look like. Financial structures that were all but unregulated began to be reformed, as the Vatican bank was required to conform to Council of Europe anti-money laundering rules, and an independent auditor general was appointed. Initially, much of this was so novel and, to a progressive eye so beguiling, that some western liberals were tempted almost to view Francis as one of their own.

The intensity of that love affair was never going to last. An early informal conversation with journalists caused widespread astonishment when the pope replied “Who am I to judge?” to a question about gay people in the church. But well over a decade later there is no question of the Roman Catholic Church endorsing same-sex marriage. A more compassionate approach was being signalled, but in doctrinal terms Francis remained firmly within the letter of existing canon law. It would be a mistake, therefore, to view Francis’s papacy as a liberal one, but in significant areas it exerted a major progressive influence beyond the church, especially in relation to the climate emergency and the treatment of people migrating between countries. The 2015 papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, subtitled ‘On Care for Our Common Home’, made headlines around the world and offered a powerful critique of unregulated capitalism’s destructive effect on the planet. Delivering the church’s weightiest and most trenchant analysis of the implications of global heating, Francis’s call to hear “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” linked the causes of social and environmental justice. At Cop climate summits – which in 2023 he missed due to poor health – the pope repeatedly emphasised the responsibility of the developed world to mitigate the impact on poorer nations of its unsustainable consumption of resources.As the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis invested personal passion into his advocacy on behalf of migrants. Laudato Si’ noted that, for economic and climate-related reasons, mass migration would be a permanent 21st-century phenomenon. As western governments have increasingly battened down the hatches and adopted draconiaread n short-term responses to the new reality, the pope at times appeared a lonely and isolated ally of millions of vulnerable people on the move.......there's more- on     https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/21/pope-francis-outsider-whose-reforming-mission-made-him-an-ally-of-progressives

"We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish"Dezeen Pooran Desai | 3 January 2025 A perfect storm is upon us, and to confront it designers must this year help to lead a fundamental shift in the way we see the world, writes Pooran Desai."We have two years to save the world." So said Simon Stiell, United Nations climate chief, in April last year. We are now nine months – more than a third of the way – into those two years. We have run out of time. We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish. "Reimagine".......... Take this option and by 2050 we'll be enjoying a planet where the living systems on which we depend are regenerating and able to support a population of 10 billion. We are crossing numerous interconnected climatic, ecological, social, economic, technological and geopolitical tipping points We will be improving our personal health and the health of our communities. We will have transformed from a consumer species, consuming the rest of nature, to a regenerated one, working as part of the rest of nature and returning the living planet to a healthy state. The second option is far less comforting. In this option we continue with our consumer economy with some incremental moves towards circularity and targets like net zero. They avoid saying it in public, but multiple scientists have told me they genuinely fear that if we follow this path, by the middle of the century we will be trying to survive on a planet only able to support maybe one or two billion people.

A stark choice. Why two polar outcomes? It is because we are crossing numerous interconnected climatic, ecological, social, economic, technological and geopolitical tipping points which interact and cascade in ways that move us away from a stable state. Climate change leads to drought, collapse in food production, mass migration and war. The big question we need to ask ourselves: can we tip from a degenerating to a regenerating state? I think so, and I believe it is simple. The good news is that a paradigm shift in science, culture and consciousness is emerging. This rebalancing from reductionism to holism, from rationality to intuition, from science to art, and from materialism to a sense of the sacred will be essential for resolving the polycrisis.