For whatever reason the proprietor of Bark Bark Woof Woof has tagged my dismal effort as a blog that makes him think. This is may be a result of so many years spent writing in Russian, or writing official reports, which makes my syntax “unusual.”

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote

While “I don’t need no theenking blogger award,” I’m including it for completeness [and the cheap joke].

I believe everyone on my blogroll makes me think, but five people who lead me to stories I might not otherwise notice would be:

Andante of Collective Sigh
Michael of Musing’s musings
Karen of Peripetia
Jams of Poor Mouth
Ellroon of Rants from the Rookery

They are free to post or no, based on their own inclinations.

Just so no one misunderstands my position about the Middle East. The governments and political entities of all types from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean are a bunch of murderous, misogynist bastards, without regard to their proclaimed religious affiliations. I don’t want to hang out with any of these people, and wouldn’t trust them with a nickel.

I’m not talking about the ordinary people, who have almost no voice in what happens, but their political “leaders” who all think violence isn’t simply the best solution, but the only solution. They all work on the basest level of human feelings to find justification for their atrocities. They all deal in hatred and death.

All of these people support murder as a matter of policy, and participate with money, weapons, and training to increase the pool of assassins. The Sunni officials support Sunni killers, the Shi’ia officials support Shi’ia killers, the Jewish officials support Jewish killers, and Christian officials support Christian killers. From time to time they will all support the killers of another faith to assist the murder of people they don’t like. Violent death is the official policy of the entire crowd.

The only reasonable course of action for the United States is to get out and stay out of the area. We should be spending our wealth on weaning ourselves from the only thing we currently need from the area, oil. We should have learned from the Oil Embargo that we cannot depend on Middle Eastern oil being available. The area has never been stable, and there isn’t much hope that stability is on the horizon. We have wasted years and hundreds of billions of dollars with nothing except death and destruction to show for it.

Force is not the answer, and until someone in the area figures that out, there is no point in engaging with any of them beyond normal diplomatic relations. We need to reduce their importance in our lives, because they have no reason to wish us well. A curse on all of their houses.

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on this day in 1809.

[Update: see Fonts Again up above for corrections and more information.]

This a chart of the Persian/Farsi alphabet. It has a few more sounds and letters than Arabic, but the alphabets are very similar. Like Arabic and Hebrew it is written and read from right to left, the reverse of English. Today’s date would be written 7002/21/20 5831/11/32 in Farsi numbers. [My bad, I forgot that Iran has its own solar calendar, as they should since they started the whole solar calendar craze. Other Islamic countries tend to use the Muslim lunar calendar.]

Don’t expect people to believe that Ahmadinejad made a particular bomb in his basement because you have stenciled “Made in Iran” on the side. If you are claiming to trace serial numbers, those numbers had better be in the Farsi alphabet, not the Latin alphabet.

Pierre Tristam’s article on the Baghdad dog and pony show, Bush Junta Locks and Loads has a picture of some of the “proof” of Iranian involvement, an RPG-7 round. The RPG-7 was introduced by the Soviets in 1961 and has been manufactured in many countries, including IRAQ, but with obvious ENGLISH markings, I would guess it was produced in Pakistan faked by Americans.

[Update I corrected the sample date to show the calendar differences, but then I looked at the markings again and saw “Lot: 5-31-2006” and it took me a bit to realize that the Pakistanis, like the Brits and most Europeans use day-month-year when writing dates in numbers. The US is rather unique in the world in using month-day-year. That rocket propelled grenade was probably stenciled by an American.]