It’s safe to say our relations with the British have probably never been worse in our lifetimes. Recall that just before he went to London and bowed to beheaders, the newly inaugurated President Obama let it be known he had returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. He might as well have tossed it out of the Oval Office into the snow.

Then, he gifted Her Majesty with, what else, recordings of all his speeches. He followed that up with the amazingly thoughtful gesture of bestowing on Prime Minister Gordon Brown a $29.95 collection of DVDs of Hollywood’s greatest films. Mr. Brown is doubtless enjoying them now, in his retirement, if he can get an adapter.

The “Special Relationship” fostered so carefully by the World War II alliance of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt is in tatters. The Obama State Department is happy to tell us that Britain is no more special to us than any of the other 192 countries in the UN. (Of course, President Obama is known to think the U.S. itself is no more exceptional than Britain, or even Greece.)

It was fairly easy to be the new broom sweeping clean – back in 2009. Now, however, as Rev. Wright might say, Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost. Along with his sagging approval numbers is coming increasing disrespect. Rep. Maxine Waters is asking permission from her constituents to take the president to the woodshed. Former backer Peggy Noonan briskly calls him a “loser” on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and asks aloud if he might just be “snakebit.”

The worst example of dissing the commander-in-chief, doubtless came from leftist Bill Maher. He told a nationwide audience, in an obscenity-laced routine, that he had been hoping for a president who would shoot the BP executives after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A short review of our Special Relationship might be in order. When Churchill crossed the U-boat infested North Atlantic seventy summers ago in the HMS Prince of Wales, he forged an alliance that lasted through World War II, the Cold War, all the way into the hills of Tora Bora, in Afghanistan and the oilfields of Basra in Iraq. Churchill, it was said in that 1941 First Summit, felt as if he was “going to meet God Almighty.” FDR’s son told the British Prime Minister his father thought him “the greatest man in the world.”

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Abby Johnson has opened a window to the world inside Planned Parenthood, the nation’s abortion giant, and it’s disgusting, worse than imagined.

If you dare, read on:

Abby Johnson Recalls: Planned Parenthood Alarm Was 2229 (BABY)

It took a few weeks before I got the alarm code to our clinic. I guess it takes that long for them to trust you. I remember getting the code and feeling shocked. The code was 2229. That seems innocent…until they told me what it spelled out…BABY. Really. Wow. We were really joking about that…our alarm code was mocking the murder of children.

A few weeks later I was introduced to our freezer in the POC (products of conception) lab. This was the freezer that held the fetal tissue until the biohazard truck came for disposal. I found out the name for that freezer…the nursery. Again, that was a joke. How had that become a joke?

Read the rest at Life News.

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That Was the Week That Was was a BBC satire show of decades ago. It set the pattern for many American imitators. I almost feel the past two weeks have been a satire of reality. The last week in August seems like it was a month ago. We began normally enough. With Congress out, the commute in to Washington was eased. Then, on Tuesday, August 23rd, the East Coast shuddered through the strongest earthquake since 1897. Happily, there were no reported deaths or serious injuries. And most property damage was limited. In Washington, the foundations of the Washington Monument seemed more seriously damaged than was originally thought. And the National Cathedral lost some portions of its century-old towers. They’re stringing netting inside the Gothic structure as a precaution. The stained glass windows of that magnificent edifice contain a fragment of Moon rock. It would not do to have the Moon land on worshipers.

I was on the sixth floor of my building when Earthquake Elvis started–a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on. “Out we go, by the stairs,” I yelled to co-workers as I made for the exits. Those twelve flights of stairs never seemed so long. The next day, I was mildly chided for doing the wrong thing. Earthquake Advisories from Janet Napolitano—Big Sis—say you’re supposed to stay inside your building in the event of earthquake. But the local news acknowledged that a decade after 9/11 there is no way to persuade folks to stay inside.

We had just recovered from after-shocks when Hurricane Irene, blew in over the weekend. Downgraded to a tropical storm, she hit the Metro area hard enough. My home in Annapolis was one of the 750,000 customers without power. Not just for a few hours, but for days. We had summoned our son home from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where the storm was forecast to be most intense. Salisbury might flood and lose power, we heard. So home he came.

As it happened, he was on hand to help us pitch a 12-foot limb that had fallen into our backyard. It was like Scottish games—tossing the caber. Others in our neighborhood would spend the week without power as crews chain-sawed huge uprooted trees. Now, just days later, the street is all spruced up, if not oaked or mapled.

Once the earthquake aftershocks were over and power had been restored, life could return to some semblance of normal, we thought. My wife and I sat down to watch a movie. The windows were open to receive cool breezes, the first time in days the night air was not being torn by the roaring of generators. Ah, peace and quiet returns.

Brrr-rrr-ring! The phone seemed more insistent than usual. A robo-call—from the Anne Arundel County Police and Emergency Services. We’d never received such a call before.
The call was to inform us that one Bonrick Lee Barksdale had escaped from the District Court Building while awaiting extradition to North Carolina. The caller said he was armed and dangerous.

Off went the TV; we closed and locked the doors and windows. The robo-call advised us if Mr. Barksdale should come rapping at our door to call 9ll.

As my friend, Sig Swantstrom, a former SWAT team member, likes to say: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. We listened to helicopters and sirens wailing in the cool night air. Our house is pretty secure, especially since we had new deadbolts installed. But I had taken Sig’s advice. This soft-spoken, calm and deliberate law enforcement veteran and his friends at Texas Republic Firearms Academy hope to persuade all Americans to take seriously their Second Amendment rights—and responsibilities.

With the morning light, our neighbor told us her teenage son had already learned that Mr. Barksdale had been apprehended by police. The neighbor boy learned all of this on Facebook.

We also learned that Barksdale had been able to overpower a female security guard from a contract firm—not even a city or county police officer—who had been assigned to accompany him to his hearing. The Baltimore Sun’s website noted: “The authorities in North Carolina wanted Barksdale on numerous charges including kidnapping, attempted 1st degree rape, first degree sex offense and robbery among other charges.”

How was it that such an accused perpetrator, with a previous record of escape attempts, had been placed in a situation where he could easily overpower a hired security guard and take her weapon? Does this record convince us we should put our family members lives in the hands of the authorities?

I was prepared if Mr. Barksdale came rapping at our door. He was described as armed and dangerous. I wanted him to know: So was I.

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The Associated Press reportsthat China’s “one-child policy (is) a surprising boon” for that nation’s girls.

The remarkable story notes that “Since 1979, China’s family planning rules have barred nearly all urban families from having a second child in a bid to stem population growth. With no male heir competing for resources, parents have spent more on their daughters’ education and well-being.”

Only later in the piece do we learn the following:

With the arrival of sonogram technology in the 1980′s, some families no longer merely hoped for a boy, they were able to engineer a male heir by terminating pregnancies when the fetus was a girl.

“It is gendercide,” said Therese Hesketh, a University College London professor who has studied China‘s skewed sex ratio. “I don’t understand why China doesn’t just really penalize people who’ve had sex-selective abortions and the people who do them. The law exists but nobody enforces it.”

To combat the problem, China allows families in rural areas, where son preference is strongest, to have a second child if their first is a girl. The government has also launched education campaigns promoting girls and gives cash subsidies to rural families with daughters.

Still, 43 million girls have “disappeared” in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year.

Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF’s representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls “but they have to be born first.”

As Science Magazine writer Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men documents, the U.N. Population Fund has provided funding such that, in total, 160 million Asian women have been aborted in recent decades.

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Canadian scientists have published data that indicate exercise stimulates adult stem cells to form bone instead of fat. The scientists used a mouse model to study exercise effects on adult bone marrow stem cell and blood production. Using treadmill-conditioned mice, they found that aerobic exercise triggers adult stem cells to become bone more often than fat. The bone environment provides better conditions, called a “niche”, for adult blood stem cell development. When the mice were sedentary, the stem cells tended to form fat, which impairs blood production in bone marrow cavities.

Dr. Gianni Parise, senior author on the study, said:

“The interesting thing was that a modest exercise program was able to significantly increase blood cells in the marrow and in circulation. What we’re suggesting is that exercise is a potent stimulus — enough of a stimulus to actually trigger a switch in these [adult] stem cells. Exercise has the ability to impact stem cell biology. It has the ability to influence how they differentiate.”

The results were published online before print in The FASEB Journal.

Previous studies have shown that exercise can increase the number of muscle adult stem cells, the number of new brain neurons from adult stem cells, and the number of neural adult stem cells.

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Did that 12-foot limb from the oak in my back yard actually fall on my head when Irene blew through? I have never before agreed with an editorial in the Washington Post.  This time, though, I have to agree with them: the Washington region’s utility companies deserve kudos for the way they handled the hurricane/tropical storm.

Yes, if you’d been watching the Weather Channel, you’d probably figure that the Battle of Armageddon would be child’s play compared to the punch Nature had in store for us.

For nearly a week, the TV stations hyped the coming hurricane. By the time the storm actually hit, Irene had been downgraded to a Category One tropical storm. Still, she was bad enough.

Did I mention we had an earthquake last week, too? Say, how come they don’t name earthquakes the way they do storms of wind and rain? Let me suggest to the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey that they name earthquakes for Al Gore, Prince Charles, and some of the planet’s more famous Greens.

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Scientists have published evidence that eating chocolate can decrease risk of heart disease. The paper analyzed and combined the results of seven separate studies, involving over 114,000 participants. Results indicated that high levels of chocolate consumption might be associated with a one third reduction in the risk of developing heart disease. The scientists also note that more studies are needed to determine whether it is actually the chocolate consumption or some other factor that they didn’t analyze, that was responsible for the increased heart health. The studies looked at the consumption of dark chocolate as well as milk chocolate, chocolate drinks and other chocolate confectionaries.

Dr. Oscar Franco, senior author on the study, said:

“Chocolate may be beneficial, but it should be eaten in a moderate way, not in large quantities and not in binges. If it is consumed in large quantities, any beneficial effect is going to disappear.”

The analysis was published in the British Medical Journal, as an open-access study; that means you can read the paper for free (but the chocolate costs extra.)

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