At the White House, 3pm Eastern. (You can watch it live here)

The President of the United States, in the name of the Congress, takes pride in presenting the Medal of Honor, posthumously, to Master At Arms Second Class, Sea, Air and Land, Michael A. Monsoor, United States Navy. For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as Automatic Weapons Gunner for Naval Special Warfare Task Group Arabian Peninsula, in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM on 29 September 2006.

As a member of a combined SEAL and Iraqi Army sniper overwatch element, tasked with providing early warning and stand-off protection from a rooftop in an insurgent-held sector of Ar Ramadi, Iraq, Petty Officer Monsoor distinguished himself by his exceptional bravery in the face of grave danger. In the early morning, insurgents prepared to execute a coordinated attack by reconnoitering the area around the element's position. Element snipers thwarted the enemy's initial attempt by eliminating two insurgents. The enemy continued to assault the element, engaging them with a rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire. As enemy activity increased, Petty Officer Monsoor took position with his machine gun between two teammates on an outcropping of the roof. While the SEALs vigilantly watched for enemy activity, an insurgent threw a hand grenade from an unseen location, which bounced off Petty Officer Monsoor's chest and landed in front of him. Although only he could have escaped the blast, Petty Officer Monsoor chose instead to protect his teammates. Instantly and without regard for his own safety, he threw himself onto the grenade to absorb the force of the explosion with his body, saving the lives of his two teammates. By his undaunted courage, fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of certain death, Petty Officer Monsoor gallantly gave his life for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

Monsoor is the 4th US Serviceman (and the 2nd Navy SEAL) to be awarded the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror.

The others are:
Sergeant First Class Paul Smith (US Army)
Corporal Jason Dunham (USMC)
Lt. Michael Murphy (USN)

*I replaced the unofficial narrative with the actual MOH Citation.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:30 AM | Comments (23)
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Nutrition-free fun for political junkies, pretty much just like Best Week Ever but with ugly people.

Here's a word we need. Preferably from German, because they're good at just putting lots of words together to make a new word.

The meaning of the word is thus: "The somewhat embarrassing, inexplicable but real thrill of reading crap we already knew and in fact have known for years and years." Sort of like nostalgia, but only applied to abstract and mostly useless detritus of data.

Can anyone else explain why so many of us watch Shark Week every year? Do we really need to be told that the "Whale Shark," despite the name, is not in fact a whale but is the only shark which eats a whale-like diet? And is the largest known living shark or fish?

Yes, we do have to hear that again, over and over again. Men love watching these sorts of shows with girlfriends because we get to show off our accumulated store of Man Lore and preview each Fun Fact before it actually appears on screen. We've seen this shit so many times before we know exactly when we'll be informed, for the thirtieth time, that female polar bears must vigilantly avoid males because the males are cannibals and will eat her young if allowed to.

Why is this so pleasing? I don't know. People always talk about the thrill of "new learning," but no one ever talks about the real thrill, the thrill of "learning" something old you've already learned six billion times already.

Women are of course just as susceptible to this, though they read Cosmo instead of watching TLC nature documentaries. How many times does a smart, educated woman have to read that one of the keys to reviving a stalled sex life is "variety" and "trying new things" and "having sex in dangerous places"?

Did they really have to read that even the first time?

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (47)
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1) Secure an empty two liter bottle of Coke Zero. You will find these conveniently littered on your bedroom floor. Other two liter bottles may or may not work. But you shouldn't be drinking those, as Diet Pepsi is for high school girls and Fanta is for gays.

2) Keeping your hands out of what we will call "The Mess," allow the bottle to fill as much as possible with "The Mess" water. Probably you can only fill it about a third of the way without compromising your cleanliness and health. Hands must be kept out of "The Mess," remember.

3) Poke the partly filled bottled down to the, um, hole. Whatever you call that. Where "The Mess" goes when you've finished your dirty business.

4) Squeeze the bottle as quickly and as forcefully as possible, sending a jet of air and "The Mess" down through the hole and clearing the blockage.

It works. One-shot. Don't ask how I know. I just do.

PS note this only works on a light blockage, or at least that's as much as I'm prepared to say based on the limited number of trials I'm aware of.

This seems about as good a time as any to to link to this Instapundit piece on how much additional housework a husband creates, and how much he actually does.

I know one damn thing: No woman is going to think of, or dare trying to execute, the Coke Zero Bottle solution to a stopped toilet.

Then again if a woman's in the house there would probably be a plunger beside the toilet anyway (along with tampons, candles, and various tiny soaps which are supposed to be "cute" but you can't use them and who the fuck washes their hands with a pink turtle).

Maybe it's a wash, I dunno.

Posted by: Ace at 08:17 AM | Comments (168)
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Artist's Conception, by Slublog

Vote-for-your-favorite-blog polls are notorious traffic-sucks. I'd love to do one myself but I have too much integrity. Or, more like it, not enough technical know-how and not enough ambition.

I'm not sure why Time.com named this site as the only conservative blog in its Top 25; I suspect Ana Marie Cox might have had something to do with it. She appreciates the tit and dick jokes (and doesn't seem to have taken offense at my constant ragging on her).

And they may have known I'm one of the few bloggers self-serving enough to eventually come around and beg readers to go over and vote the site a 10 (link fixed) and therefore give Time.com the cheap traffic spike it was looking for all along.

Well played, Time.com. Well played. You smelled weakness and desperation and you pounced.

Posted by: Ace at 07:30 AM | Comments (37)
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I had written before that "Reverend" Wright's version of "Christianity" seemed pretty much a rehash of Nation of Islam black-nationalism-with-Islamic-cachet but with the serial numbers filed off and all references to "Mohammad" changed to "Jesus."

Yeah, I guess there's a reason for that.

Incidentally, Allah Pundit finds the fact that Obama's father was a communist to be irrelevant and furthermore an unfair rap.

I disagree.

The man has surrounded himself with radicals and stews in the same bubbling soup of crazy as Louis Farrakhan. He hangs out with terrorist like Bill Ayers. He courts black liberation "theology" firebrands, bigots, and conspiracy theorists as political (and not really spiritual) mentors.

Every politician is examined not just as to what he claims to believe but as to what he actually does believe but does not say so in an effort to appear more moderate and acceptable to the greatest number of voters.

If Obama were truly a moderate, it would indeed be irrelevant as to his dad's hardcore socialism/communism. But given that Obama seems by all available evidence to be a fairly hardcore lefty/radical himself, it seems reasonable to inquire as to the nature of his political education and real political beliefs.

Given the cast of characters surrounding Obama, his dad's communism is not merely an irrelevant biographical trivium. It seems that he's devoted to many of, perhaps most of, his father's egregiously bad ideas and intends to smuggle them into the White House in a Trojan Horse, or rather a Trojan Change Hope and Healing.

Bear in mind he's never been asked about any of this, and even confronted with Rev. Wright's vile anti-Americanism and apparent anti-semitism still the press gives Obama a pass.

If Obama never shared his father's ideology, or did once but abandoned it, I'd like to hear when, how, and why on that. And I'd like to know why, if it is the case he's not a radical like Pops Obama, he seems to prefer the company of political radicals.

All politicians are limited by political reality as to what they can actually achieve. Nevertheless, it's a worthy inquiry as to what Barack Obama would do in office if he could pass every bit of his agenda -- the unstated agenda that he doesn't talk about much, I mean. We generally inquire into politician's true psychopolitical make-up and, in fact, treat assumptions about that as more important and more indicative of actual performance than a politician's stated agenda, which, we all know, is 99% bullshit and blather anyhow.

Why does Obama get a pass on all this? Why is this the one politician we're expected to take at his word?

On faith, if you will. Which seems to be the more appropriate word here.

h/t Man of Substance/The Only Important One on That Lighting Board.

Posted by: Ace at 07:02 AM | Comments (58)
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Who doesn't? Light Content Warning for a pic of a large pink penis idol.

Thousands gathered here Sunday for the Kanamara Matsuri, an event with roots dating back centuries and now one of Japan's best-known fertility festivals.

Kanamara Matsuri, literally the Festival of the Iron Penis, had its beginnings in the Edo Period (1603-186 with the prayers of women called meshimori onna, according to Wakamiya Hachimangu, the Shinto shrine in Kawasaki where the event was held.

More (Stronger Content Warning) pics here, including a somewhat amusing vendor selling "penis" for 600 Yen, and also "pussy" for the same price of 600 Yen, indicating the Japanese really have given up on sex. They're like sexual Rainmen, figuring that a pack of cigarettes is worth 100 dollars and that Boeing 787 is also worth about 100 dollars.

Supposedly the festival is held partly to raise AIDS awareness. I'm always amused by hook-up festivals, as on American college campuses, where the stated aim is to increase AIDS and STD awareness. Learn by doing, I guess.

Thanks to Alice H, who writes:

Wikipedia says the giant penis was made to break the teeth of a demon who used to hide inside young women and castrate men on their wedding night.

No wonder they're so fucked up and turning off to sex. If I thought a woman has a penis-eating demon in her snootch, well, I guess I wouldn't go near that with a ten foot alien rape-tentacle, either.

Posted by: Ace at 06:49 AM | Comments (21)
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Hmmm...

Allah is appropriately skeptical; we've heard this sort of thing before and we have little to show for it.

But... those WMDs did go somewhere, didn't they?

Put it in the Don't Get Your Hopes Up File.

An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday.

Furthermore, according to a report leaked to the TV channel, Syria has arrested 10 intelligence officials following the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh.

What's up with that last bit? Seems like more vapornews, if I'm guessing, and what the hell, why not.

Posted by: Ace at 06:35 AM | Comments (89)
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But probably not.

The 40-year hunt for the holy grail of physics – the elusive “God particle” that is supposed to give matter its mass – is almost over, according to the leading scientist who first came up with the theory.

Peter Higgs, whose work gave his name to the elusive Higgs boson particle, said that he was more than 90 per cent certain it would be found within the next few years.

The Higgs boson was the professor’s elegant 1964 solution to one of the great problems with the standard model of physics – how matter has mass and thus exists in a form that allows it to make stars, planets and people. He proposed that the universe is pervaded by an invisible field of bosons that consist of mass but little else.

As particles move through this field, bosons effectively stick to some of them, making them more massive, while leaving others to pass unhindered. Photons, light particles that have no mass, are not affected by the Higgs field at all.

The mysterious boson postulated by Professor Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, has become so fundamental to physics that it is often nicknamed the “God particle”. After more than 40 years of research, and billions of pounds, scientists have yet to prove that it is real. But Professor Higgs, 78, now believes the search is nearly over.

A new atom-smasher that will be switched on near Geneva later this year is virtually guaranteed to find it, he said. It is even possible that the critical evidence already exists, in data from an American experiment in Illinois that has yet to be analysed fully.

...

Tantalising glimpses of the boson from other, less powerful particle accelerators, have suggested that unequivocal evidence should emerge almost immediately when the LHC begins its experiments.

The Higgs boson is hard to detect because it is hypothesised to exist only at very high energies, which last existed in nature in the moments after the Big Bang, hence the need for an atom smasher.

And after that, anti-gravity, warp drives, direct mass to energy conversion, and, dare to dream, that Flyin' Car I've been waiting on all my life.

Posted by: Ace at 05:44 AM | Comments (39)
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O RLY?

Via Instapundit, who also notes that the media's declaration of a Sadr victory was not only premature, but preretarded.

And on Sadr: one report says he's Shiite clerics have told him not to disband his Army of Assholes,, but he has called off his plan for a Million Maniac March through Baghdad, apparently due to lack of juice enough to pull it off.

Sadr called it off, he explained in a statement, because he was afraid his supporters would be attacked. Really? The Western media take great pains to remind us how many supporters he has in Baghdad’s Sadr City, with over 2 million residents. Surely a man with that kind of popularity would have no trouble finding enough people for a demonstration with hundreds of thousands of people at the least — and with that kind of strength, who would attack them?

It looks a lot more like Sadr couldnÂ’t gin up enough people to meet the lofty expectations he set for the demonstration.

Dope. Doesn't he know if that if he just gets a couple dozen idiots to wave signs it will be the lead story on MSNBC for the next three weeks? Am I going to have to go over there and run this terrorist mafia myself?

Question: If, as I surmise, the media would have given great play to a sizable march by Sadr's minions, shouldn't the rule of symmetry in newsworthiness suggest that his failure to pull off such a demonstration is equally newsworthy?

Of course we know the answer is "no."

Jules Crittenden has a great big old round-up on all this. He also reflects on the five year anniversary that just passed, the day American troops rolled into Baghdad. (Not the day the Marines pulled down the statue of Saddam, by the way, which was April 9.)

He also links this piece by Max Boot on political progress in Iraq.

According to the U.S. Institute for Peace: "It may be that Feb. 13, 2008, will be remembered as the day when Iraq's political climate began to catch up with its improved security situation -- or, more to the point, when Iraqi leaders discovered the key to political compromise and reconciliation."

Overall, according to Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the government of Iraq "has now met 12 out of the original 18 benchmarks set for it, including four out of the six key legislative benchmarks. It has made substantial progress on five more, and only one remains truly stalled." The one benchmark that remains stalled is the hydrocarbon law, but its purpose (the equitable sharing of oil revenues) is being accomplished de facto through the budget.

Liberals have long charged that Bush and Republicans pushed a war on the country only to advance their own political fortunes. This charge is so jackass as to be beneath response, however, it does seem to me now that liberals are deliberately contriving to lose a war that could be won -- and thus severely damage US national security interests -- simply to "win" a five year old political argument.

Posted by: Ace at 04:56 AM | Comments (19)
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This reads like one of those many, many media stories which is basically nothing but hype and bullshit. They figure because a story is about something trivial and frivolous like sex, dating, or the War in Iraq, there's no point digging too far to confirm it.

But I guess something like this must be going on at least sometime.

A feller can dream, though:

At first glance, the man and woman at the nightclub look like any other couple on a date. He flirts and pours champagne. She looks at him and laughs.

This isn't a date, though. It's business.

The woman, a successful executive, has joined a growing number of professional women in Japan in forking out from $1,000 to $50,000 a night for male companionship.

...

"I give women things that men normally don't do, like complimenting their appearance," says one host, 24-year-old Yunosuke, who only goes by his single host name. "I make women happy."

And they make him happy: Yunosuke says he earned more than $200,000 last year, enough to let him visit a salon once a day to have his hair dyed and blow-dried.

"Women see us as one of their accessories," he says. "They like to wear nice things, so I try to look prettier for them all the time."

Prettier? Shyah, let's see how "pretty" you are, bub.

Oh. Ohhhhhh.

How sad is it for us guys to realize that when a woman feels like spending $50,000 on the man of her dreams she spends it on a chick?

Posted by: Ace at 04:10 AM | Comments (44)
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