THE MOST OVERRATED INTELLECTUAL IN THE WORLD.

TURKEY AND SYRIA have been firing artillery shells at each other for six days in a row now. And check out this photo of Homs. That’s what it looks like when Syria shells itself.

REALITY CHECK: Abdulateef al-Mulhim, at Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, knows what’s really going on over there, and more Arabs should listen to him.

[W]ho is the real enemy of the Arab world? The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people. These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.

JAMIE GLAZOV interviews me about my new book, Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus.

WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT: The Varianzas polling agency says Hugo Chavez lost the election in Venezuela today. And Chavez says he’ll respect the result once the ballots are counted. But don’t pop any champagne corks just yet. The ballots haven’t been counted. We don’t know for sure if they’ll even be counted at all.

UPDATE: Chavez reportedly “won.” I don’t want to come across as excessively skeptical with the quotation marks, but the man does want to be the next Fidel Castro.

THE GRAND DELUSION: Egypt’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi boasts about his country’s great “victory” over Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a war that Egypt decisively lost.

CLIFF MAY ON JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE and what Ahmadinejad really said at the UN.

THIS IS REALLY GETTING RIDICULOUS: Greece says it will run out of money next month if it doesn’t get yet another bailout.

HMM: The Israeli air force shot down a drone in the southern part of the country near Gaza. No one seems to know where it came from yet, but they’re saying it wasn’t from Gaza.

ALSO RECOMMENDED: Sarah Hoyt recommends Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain for those of you who write fiction. She’s right. That book is a classic. It’s old, but not at all dated.

I also recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King. I’m almost finished with a novel myself and have found it quite useful.

THE WASHINGTON POST’S David Ignatius is in Aleppo.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? “Egypt’s new Islamist president on Friday pledged to ease up on the crackdown in the country’s restive Sinai Peninsula and not pursue hundreds of fugitives from the lawless region that has seen a surge in militancy and cross-border attacks on Israel.”

CREEPY BUT INTERESTING: Alexander J. Motyl on the moral complexities of Soviet art. I find socialist realist art disturbing on a number of levels, but I have to admit it’s also very engaging to look at. It’s also educational. This is how communists saw themselves, or at least how they wanted to be seen by others. Meanwhile, here’s a striking anti-communist installation in Prague.

WHOA: The Tunisian government is seeking the death penalty for suspects who attacked the U.S. Embassy there a few weeks ago.

FROM MY GREAT WRITING TEACHER Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Why Writers Disappear.

I’m not going anywhere.

THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT just approved more military action against Syria. They say they may not do anything with the authorization, that it’s only for theoretical use in the future, but Turkey did shell targets in Syria a couple of days ago.

AWESOME IF TRUE! A comet discovered recently by Russian astronomers may outshine the moon when it passes by Earth next November.

NOT GOOD: Chinese cyber attack hits White House military office.

ARMIN ROSEN on Jeffrey Sachs’ African NGO gone awry: “Sachs gives the impression of being unbothered by leaders who steal elections, imprison dissidents, and meddle in their neighbors’ affairs. Just as importantly, these leaders seem unbothered by him. Sachs’s brand of development doesn’t require systemic political reform—just pliant authority figures who can foster the kind of stability and cooperation that an undertaking like the MVP requires. Considering Sachs and the MVP’s prominence, these are appallingly low expectations.”

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Pejman Yousefzadeh asks a good one.

RED ON RED: Syria Berates Hamas Chief, an Old Ally, on State TV.

THWARTING FREE SPEECH: Europe’s medieval libel laws.

LIFE AFTER ASSAD: Syria’s Kurds are already building their own institutions.

THE SYRIAN WAR HAS ALREADY BEEN REGIONALIZED: Top Hezbollah operative Ali Hussein Nassif has reportedly been killed, along with several other Hezbollah members, in clashes near Homs.

FROM THE “FRENEMIES” DEPARTMENT: A former Pakistani legislator is offering a cash reward to anyone who murders the American man who made the now-notorious anti-Mohammed video, The Innocence of Muslims. Earlier, Pakistan’s railways minister offered a bounty of 100,000 dollars out of his own pocket.