A few days ago former President Jimmy Carter announced that he has cancer and it is spreading. While it would be premature to assume this spells the end for the 90-year-old, it does present an opportunity to take stock of the tenure of a President who, like the current occupant of the White House, entered office with a promise to respect human rights, but failed miserably when given the opportunity to do so.

Carter just last month published a memoir about his Full LIfe. Others have begun to look back at his four years as President. David Macaray noted that despite his reputation as a President so hapless his fellow Democrats tried to knock him off in a primary, "a closer look shows that Carter accomplished some fairly important things during his single term in office - things that, given the near-paralytic gridlock that defines today's politics, seem all the more impressive in hindsight."

Macaray lists 10 accomplishments which were, indeed, impressive. Among them were supporting SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks); brokering the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty through diplomacy at the Camp David Accords; granting amnesty to Vietnam draft-dodgers, and presenting a plan for universal health care.

However, the self-professed advocate for human rights demonstrated quite the penchant for bloodshed. While he didn't initiate any aggressive invasions of foreign nations the way his predecessors and successors did in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries, Carter proved remarkably generous at providing financial, military, diplomatic and ideological support for fascist dictatorships that tortured and killed millions of members of their domestic populations in an effort to crush popular movements for social justice. Some of the regimes he backed carried out mass slaughter that amounted to genocide.

Win or lose, Trump's campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid

"The people that are following me are very passionate," Donald Trump said recently.

So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that "Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported."

When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on:

"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."

This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

The thing is, even as Donald Trump said and did horrible things during this year's incredible run at the White House, most sane people took solace in the fact that he could never win. (Although new polls are showing that Hillary's recent spiral puts this reassuring thought into jeopardy.)

In fact, most veteran political observers figured that the concrete impact of Trump's candidacy would be limited in the worst case to destroying the Republican Party as a mainstream political force.

That made Trump's run funny, campy even, like a naughty piece of pornographic performance art. After all, what's more obscene than pissing on the presidency? It seemed even more like camp because the whole shtick was fronted by a veteran reality TV star who might even be in on the joke, although of course the concept was funnier if he wasn't.

Trump had the whole country rubbernecking as this preposterous Spaulding Smails caricature of a spoiled rich kid drove the family Rolls (our illustrious electoral process in this metaphor) off the road into a ditch. It was brilliant theater for a while, but the ugliness factor has gotten out of control.

Trump is probably too dumb to realize it, or maybe he isn't, but he doesn't need to win anything to become the most dangerous person in America. He can do plenty of damage just by encouraging people to be as uninhibited in their stupidity as he is.

Trump is striking a chord with people who are feeling the squeeze in a less secure world and want to blame someone - the government, immigrants, political correctness, "incompetents," "dummies," Megyn Kelly, whoever - for their problems.

Back in August 2007, just as the quant funds had their first taste of what the upcoming collapse would look like and when the Fed for the first time realized that the subprime woes were "not contained" despite what Ben Bernanke had promised previously to Congress, financial comedy TV's best known mascot, Jim Cramer had a meltdown on CNBC following Bear Stearns' CFO admission that the fixed-income market turmoil was the worst in 22 years, ranting how the Fed "knows nothing" and how it should promptly bail out the financial system.

Palestine is a free-fire zone. No safe havens exist. Mass murdering and ethnically cleansing defenseless Palestinians are longstanding Israeli policies.

So is targeting them one at a time. No miranda rights. No due process. No judicial fairness. Summary judgment approves brutalizing and killing them unaccountably.

It happens repeatedly - each time justified by fabricated claims of responding to nonexistent Palestinian threats or attacks. Victims are blamed for cold-blooded Israeli murder.

In the past week alone, Israeli forces shot three Palestinians. Two died. An IDF spokesperson lied claiming they stabbed or attempted to stab soldiers. No evidence proves it.

Killer soldiers and cops are considered heroes. Investigations when conducted are consistently whitewashed.

On Monday, soldiers lethally shot 26-year-old Mohammed Bassam al-Atrash. He bled to death left unattended without emergency medical attention.

On Saturday, Israeli forces murdered 16-year-old Rafik kamel al-Taj - claiming he tried stabbing a soldier, the same Big Lie repeated often.

On August 9, Israeli soldiers lethally shot 20-year-old Anas Taha - this time claiming he stabbed a settler.

In late July, the Al-Haq human rights group said "Israel's indiscriminate, excessive and unlawful use of force against Palestinian civilians persists in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)."

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing, which crashed in Donbass last year, may have been shot down by a military aircraft, former Russian Vice President Air Force Major General Alexander Rutskoy told Kommersant FM.

In 1985-1988, Rutskoy participated in the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan and served as commander of an assault squadron. During the war, he conducted 485 combat flights on the Su-25 assault fighter.

According to him, the left side of the Boeing's cabin was damaged which resulted in the deaths of the crew members.

Rutskoy said that fact disproves the version that the aircraft was shot down from an anti-aircraft missile system because it does not hit a specific part of the aircraft's body.

With Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras calling snap elections in Greece, the boom has been lowered on that country's rebellion, at least in its current form. Even before Syriza - arguably the first truly leftist government in Europe since Spain pre-WW2 - came to power in Greece in January this year, the EU central powers' knives were out for them.

Immediately following Syriza's victory at the polls, the Eurocrats began shutting off the cash flow from the European Central Bank to the Bank of Greece. They also began a sustained campaign of 'capital flight', withdrawing billions of euros from the Greek economy, thereby encouraging private investors to follow suit. They then put 'capital controls' in place, ostensibly to dampen the capital flight they themselves were causing, and which had the foreseeable effect of increasing Greece's total outstanding debt by one third to an unpayable 312 billion euros. Greece's economy has shrunk 30% since it first went into recession 8 years ago, a contraction worse - in both duration and depth - than the American Great Depression of the 1930s.

Throughout this campaign of financial terrorism, the Eurocrats stone-walled or otherwise thwarted all efforts by the Greek government to implement reforms that would relieve the Greek people and make the their economy productive again. They did this because they sought to bring the country to its knees, then institute the raft of austerity measures we've seen the Greek government accept now, in one fell swoop, and without resistance. For those of you familiar with Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, this is economic shock therapy 101: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change," said monetarist schizoid-in-chief, Milton Friedman. In the process, the idea that the EU is based on social justice and solidarity has been exposed as nothing more than manipulative and cynical rhetoric. The European central powers sought to make Europe's peripheral member-states aware of the real rules that govern the EU: 'We rule, you comply. We pillage, you submit.'

During the crisis, the plucky Greeks brought up Nazi-era war reparations, and spoke out against anti-Russian sanctions, but at no point did they publicly mention a 'Grexit'; rumors in that direction always came from the Eurocrats and the bankers. Like a psychopath gaslighting its prey, they painted Grexit as a nightmare scenario, and then used it - ruthlessly - as leverage with which to financially terrorize the Greek population and 'mentally waterboard' their leaders.

Pakistan's National Security Adviser (NSA) Sartaj Aziz said Saturday he was ready to go to New Delhi for talks with his Indian counterpart without any preconditions.

The comment comes as Pakistan's High Commissioner invited leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, Kashmir separatists, to a meeting with Aziz before the India-Pakistan talks in New Delhi, scheduled for August 23-24. India said that the meeting would be distortion of the agreed talks agenda.

"It was not Pakistan but in fact India which introduced a new precondition through its advice that Pakistan could not meet Hurriyat leaders, thus assuming the right to determine the guest list for the High Commissioner reception... I am still prepared to go to New Delhi for NSA level talks without any precondition," Aziz told reporters.

The meeting between Indian and Pakistani national security advisers is part of the peace efforts announced by the leaders of the two countries at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the Russian city of Ufa in July.

A former guard at Australia's infamous Nauru immigrant processing center has come out with shocking testimony pointing to waterboarding, saying he witnessed inmates coughing up water as they were leaving guarded tents.

The former Wilson Security guard had walked back on his earlier statement that he had witnessed asylum-seekers being actually waterboarded at Nauru. However, John Nichols told a Senate inquiry that he saw what pretty much amounted to direct evidence of the practice that first gained widespread notoriety at the United States' Guantanamo Bay prison, which involves simulated drowning.

He further said he had heard guards "brag openly" about the activity.

Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Peace Committee, said that US President Barack Obama "should really consider" an immediate surrender of his Nobel Peace Prize Medal. According to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Jagland, accompanied by four other members of the Committee, said that they had never asked for the return of the Peace Prize before, "even from such a war criminal as Henry Kissinger." The Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Barack Obama in 2009 after he had managed to convince everyone that he was supporting "the creation of a new environment ... of multilateral diplomacy" and emphasized the role of the United Nations, and such tools for resolving international conflicts, as dialogues and negotiations.

But reality has shattered the illusions of not only members of the Nobel Prize Committee, but also of the majority of the international community that is witnessing barbarity, cynicism, impudence, frank insolence, demagogy, cheap manipulation of facts incompetent members of the administration and the President himself freely use. "During the Obama's reign, and through the fault of the United States, the world has become even more insecure place," noted the Indian newspaper, Hindustan Times. "It is scary and creepy to live in it, and the future looks bleak, pessimistic and hopeless."

Kiev has been deploying anti-personnel mines in Donbass in breach of Ukraine's own laws as well as international treaties, claims a former high-ranking Ukrainian officer and chief of the engineering service, who refused to obey the "illegal" and "inhumane" order.


In February 2014 Vadim Yatsulyak served as chief of the engineering service of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine, before being appointed as a commander of the Army Corps of Engineers of the National Guard. According to him, one of the first orders he was given in his new role was to receive a supply of anti-personnel mines from military warehouses, that would be later deployed throughout the territory of the so-called "anti-terrorist operation" to reinforce Ukrainian army positions.

"I was given, to put it mildly, inhumane or in legal terms unlawful orders by my superiors," Yatsulyak told Russian tabloid Komsomolskya Pravda (KP) daily. "The deployment of anti-personnel mines in particular."

Yatsulyak explained he was basically told by phone to accept the delivery of OZM-72 and MON-50 munitions and sign for it, while superiors would "stay aside assuming no responsibility."

Refusing to implement the order, he notified his superiors, going as far as sending letters to the Minister of Defence, Ukraine's parliament, and even the president, but "never received a single reply" to more than 85 complaints which he had sent to various ministries and officials. Eventually Yatsulyak was sacked as "unfit" for the position, and later left the country.

Even though he was never ordered to actually install anti-personnel mines, Yatsulyak speculates that Kiev eventually circumvented the law to deploy them, given the number of reports of deadly mine explosions in Donbass.