Rumsfeld’s Nose

Mr. Minority points out Rummy’s itchy nose.

Daily Debunking: Pedophilia is Widespread Among Catholic Priests

Whenever the subject of the Catholic Church comes up, some wiseacre invariably makes reference to the sad cases of pedophilia among the Catholic clergy, painting the entire Church with the perversion brush. How widespread is pedophilia in the Church? From Wikipedia:

The troops’ fears beginning to be realized

I wrote below about the troops’ (and my) fears that the election results would lead to a premature withdrawal from Iraq. From ABC’s “This Week” we have these statements:

Levin, on ABC’s “This Week,” said he hoped some Republicans would emerge to join Democrats and press the administration of
President George W. Bush to tell the Iraqi government that U.S. presence was “not open-ended.”

Bush has insisted that U.S. troops would not leave Iraq until the Iraqis were able to take over security for their country.

“We need to begin a phased redeployment of forces from Iraq in four to six months,” Levin said.

Speaking on the same program, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), a Delaware Democrat who is expected to head the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he supported Levin’s proposal for a withdrawal.

So the process of another disgraceful withdrawal begins. We have a half a year at most to bring the Iraqi troops up to speed. My earlier post “Security in Iraq” shows our current status in developing the Iraqi security forces. When the next DoD quarterly briefing to Congress comes out (this month), I’ll hopefully be able to update that post.

Opium in Afghanistan

One of the common liberal critiques of the situation in Afghanistan is the level of opium production. Opium is, of course, a major source of income for many farmers in Afghanistan, and is a major source of income for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As many liberal commenters have pointed out, opium production was virtually eliminated under the Taliban, and returned after the Taliban fell. This is strictly true, but doesn’t really reflect what happened, as shown in the chart below (data taken from the UN Afghanistan Opium Survey 2006):

AoSHQ Gripes

People tell me that Ace has become a full-time blogger. So what puzzles me is why he continues to run his blog like an amateur. Pixy Misa seems like a hardworking, responsive guy, but he’s never managed to stem the flow of spam which clutters Ace’s site and sometimes crashes the comments system. He’s also got the two comments systems which can’t read each others’ html formatting.

You’d think that once your site was your paycheck you’d take it more seriously and find a way to make it easier for people to read and comment. As Philip Greenspun pointed out many years ago, a significant part of the value of a site is provided by the commenters via both the insights they bring and the community they build. That’s free money for Ace if he can keep that community thriving. Unfortunately trolls and technical difficulties threaten to disrupt that community.

It’s a shame, and he ought to be proactive in rectifying the situation.

The AoSHQ lifestyle

Actually the “Before” shot at a Polish wedding that several of my friends attended. And those are indeed all bottles of Polish vodka.

AoSHQ lifestyle tip: in Poland the party doesn’t stop until the vodka is gone.

I suspect something like this explains Ace’s whereabouts.