For longtime commenters, as well as new ones, the comments appear to be back. So if you see anything you feel like talking about, please feel free.

A lot of the big changes are on the backside. The website should definitely run a lot faster and be able to handle a lot more traffic.

Still need to add a little bit of windowdressing, particularly to the top, but pretty much this is the way the website is going to look like from now on. Hope you like it. It’s certainly a lot cleaner. If you have any suggestions or serious complaints, please post your comments in this thread.

Once again thanks to everybody for donating to help make this possible. It should be a big improvement in a lot of ways.

I admit it: part of me thinks that a default by the United States on its bonds, notes and other obligations following the failure of Congress to raise the debt limit would not necessarily be a terrible thing.

I don’t doubt that it would be bad for the economy. But I think the system is headed towards collapse. And although I would personally suffer as a result of another economic downturn, I think the sooner this corrupt, bankrupt, unworkable capitalist system comes crashing down…

Well, the better it’s going to be for the world. And for us in the long run.

The truth is, collapse is a zero-sum game. If you recognize that the system sucks and has to go, anything that hastens that is good. If you decide to ignore that reality, then what you’re doing is supporting the existing system. There are no other ways to look at it.

So this morning I saw an editorial cartoon is by one of my friends and colleagues that stated that Malala was robbed.

I don’t get it.

The purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize, at least ostensibly before they gave it to Pres. Obama, is to award people who work toward and promote the cause of peace.

She doesn’t do that. She promotes education. She promotes gender equality. She certainly deserves to be considered for prizes related to those topics. But peace? If anything, her work is been divisive in her own country, Pakistan.

Seems to me that the Nobel Peace Prize has become an award that you simply goes to people we like. Not people who necessarily promote peace.

Even the peacemakers who get it – Nelson Mandela, Henry Kissinger, etc. – have to participate in causes that kill people, then stop killing people, before they get considered for the peace prize.

Meanwhile, your garden-variety schlub never kills anyone doesn’t get considered for anything. Something is clearly wrong when a bloodsoaked maniac like Kissinger or Obama can get a peace prize and someone who leads their life in an ordinary fashion, killing nobody, gets no attention or praise whatsoever.

This isn’t to say that Malala isn’t praiseworthy. Although I do think that she is increasingly serving as a puppet of secular Western interests. But a Nobel Peace Prize? Doesn’t make sense.

Sunday night at 9 PM Eastern time, there will be a documentary featuring my work as a cartoon journalist in Afghanistan and elsewhere airing on Al Jazeera America. Here is the promotional information from their website:

“Comic Books Go To War” – Sunday, October 13 9E/ 6P
In this age of hundreds of television stations, 24-hour news, worldwide instantaneous satellite transmission and thousands of web sites updated hourly, the lowly comic book has become a documentary medium, providing a real understanding of the human dimensions of war, genocide and revolution. It’s a new journalistic form. Comic Books Go To War explores the journalistic, aesthetic and political implications of reporting the most violent and terrible of human experiences through “comix.”

There will be several cartoonists included, and this should be well worth watching.

Aside from the ridiculous proposition that it is currently against the law for someone in the United States to send non-military aid to one side in a civil conflict in another country, this piece in the New York Times reveals the extent to which the media is in bed with the US government.

Check out these quotes below:

“Two New York City men have been arrested on charges that they sought to supply the Taliban and other terrorist fighters with warm clothes and equipment for use in wintertime battle with United States forces in Afghanistan, the authorities said on Thursday.”

The sentence explicitly states that the Taliban are terrorists. This is, at best, in opinion. In truth, the Taliban are indigenous resistance fighters against foreign occupation forces, and during the 1980s we called the same exact people freedom fighters.

More to the point, no journalist or quasi-independent newspaper should characterize the Taliban as terrorists. Just call them the Taliban and leave it at that. Everyone knows who they are.

“But in a statement, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the arrests “demonstrate the spectrum of terrorism threats” that the police must guard against. He said the equipment that the men sought to provide “could have endangered the safety of Americans as much as supplies of guns and ammunition.””

The implication, obviously, is that the Americans referred to here are living in the United States. But of course, when you think about it, that’s not the case at all. The Americans who would be in danger of being attacked by the Taliban are US occupation troops engaged in an illegal war of imperialist expansion.

“Sean A. McNicholas, a lawyer for Mr. Alsarabbi, said that his client had “no idea” that the outerwear was heading for terrorists in Afghanistan, and that Mr. Alsarabbi was swept up in an investigation reliant on the work of an informant with questionable motives.”

Again with the terrorists! Again: calling them terrorists is ridiculous. This is just one of zillions of examples of why people like me say that this media is not free, and is merely a puppet of the regime.

…you think Breakfast Club surl icon Kirstie Alley is inexplicably involved in high dudgeon.

That’s how I read “Christie Ally,” anyway.