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.

Yesterday MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that, due to the government shutdown, surviving families of US servicemen and servicewomen killed in Afghanistan and Iraq would have to wait until later to receive the $100,000 death benefits to which they were entitled.

Within hours political pundits and politicians from both parties were howling that this was an outrage. Yet neither of them proposed to do anything meaningful to ameliorate it.

This post is directed to those of you who are 17 or 18 years old, and who might have a passing thought to join the US military: don’t. This is why.

Not only is becoming a paid – low-paid – assassin for the US military immoral, it is stupid. When they’re done with you, they throw you away. That’s why the rates of poverty and suicide among veterans is sky high and going up all the time.

At bare minimum, you have the reasonable expectation that they will take care of your family if you pay the ultimate price for your role as a cog in the imperialist war machine, but no. Even when you think about it, $100,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to even a working-class American’s lifetime expected earnings. But when push comes to shove, they don’t even pay that out.

Frankly, there really isn’t any excuse anymore to claim ignorance about this sort of thing. The US military has cheated its veterans going back to the Revolutionary war, when land grants that were promised in the then developing West didn’t materialize. World War I veterans cheated of pay formed the famous Bonus Army in the 1930s, which was wiped out by federal troops as they camped out on the Washington Mall. And anyone who lives through the 1970s and 1980s saw the detritus of the heroes of the Vietnam War littering the streets of New York City and other major metropolises.

Don’t be an idiot. Don’t sign up.

Listening to NPR just now, Pres. Obama was quoted saying that one negative repercussion of the current standoff between House Republicans and the White House over the federal budget and the debt limit is “missed opportunities” such as the inability of the United States to pimp a free trade deal in Asia.

Given the effect of such free-trade deals in the past, such as NAFTA and the WTO, which have cost Americans millions of jobs and have helped cripple the US economy more than anything else in recent memory, that can only be considered a good thing.

Let’s not get into the fact that Pres. Obama infamously promised to revisit NAFTA while running into 2008, only to cavalierly announce 2009 that that was just one of the things that he had said to get elected.