In the course of an otherwise interesting article on the overseas growth of American service organizations — think Rotary — Washington Monthly editor John Gravois lets slip the following:

And while the decline of these groups domestically is certainly not a good thing for America, their growth abroad is hardly unwelcome.

Certainly not. That’s a staggering presumption. A more reasonable assertion might be that service groups, like Playboy Clubs, had their day, and that day ended more than a generation ago. Times change.

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[Us Magazine]

Our guest columnist is the Anti-PowerPoint Party of Switzerland. The incessant asterisks refer to PowerPoint as “representaive of all presentation software”.

The serious problem with PowerPoint* is that speech is forced into a structure, which works against the natural flow of speech. Speech is cut up into small bites.

PowerPoint* leads to substantiation and the formulation of word-monstrosities, which can only be processed by the mind, where your emotions are not triggered. That, which is normally expressed with a verb, becomes a noun in a PowerPoint*. An example: The two freely spoken sentences: “The rain sensor recognizes if it’s raining and turns on the windscreen wipers. The rain sensor senses, how hard it is raining and switches the wipers to faster”, get hacked into noun-slogan sentences with PowerPoint*.

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Wacky private pilot James Inhofe is mad as hell that he can’t execute sitcom landings without getting his wrist slapped:

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, a veteran pilot who agreed to take remedial training after he landed on a closed runway in Texas, announced Tuesday that he has prepared a bill to add more fairness to Federal Aviation Administration enforcement actions.

“It’s our job in Congress to ensure that there are appropriate safeguards in place to prevent agency overreach,” the Oklahoma Republican said in a preview of what is expected to be called the Pilot’s Bill of Rights. “This bill provides that.”

If you’ve forgotten what landing on a closed runway entails, let’s revisit the FAA report:

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This is a dust storm, or “Haboob”. It’s about ten thousand feet high, and fifty miles wide. It is not a trailer for Roland Emmerich’s new movie about the Dust Bowl.

Watch a 50-Mile Wide Dust Storm Devour Phoenix [Atlantic, with more video and photos]

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Georgia congresscritter Paul Broun, delivering the invocation Monday at the Cobb GOP Independence Day Celebration & Bar-B-Q: “Father, there are many who want to destroy us from outside this nation. Folks like al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists. But there are folks that want to destroy us from inside, the progressives and the socialists, who want to make this nation a nation that’s no longer under you, under God, but a nation that’s ruled by man.” [Marietta Daily Journal, via Political Correction]