In the continuing saga of the anti-missile defense boondoggle, look at Slate‘s coverage of what’s happening “In Other Magazines”:

A superb article describes how the Pentagon is fixing an important

missile-defense test scheduled for July 7. In the

‘Potemkin’ test, the missile will travel at an

artificially low speed, will have only one lame

decoy, and will travel on a preset path that the

defense team already knows. The test’s success will

almost certainly ensure that the United States will

build and deploy a missile defense.

Is the Pentagon really calling this test “Potemkin”, or is the commentator in the quote above just evoking the phrase “Potemkin villages”?

French Prosecutor Investigates U.S. Global Listening System. More and more uncomfortable European attention is being turned on the once-secret Echelon system.

Advantage Williams: It’s Venus vs. Serena in Wimbleton semi-final match. I’m not a big tennis fan, but this is too nifty to miss.

Happy Birthday, Louis! WBUR’s Connection talk show host Christopher Lydon had an excellent interview with Wynton Marsalis on Louis Armstrong yesterday to commemorate the “official” hundredth anniversary of his birth. Marsalis gives interesting testimony on Satchmo considering he started out as a disbeliever and, asked to sum up Armstrong’s place in 20th century culture, ends up swearing that even a Picasso’s originality pales in comparison to Armstrong’s. Read polymath Lydon’s pithy essay introducing his subject and click on the link for streaming audio of the entire hour. [Yes,The Connection can be worthwhile even when it’s not devoting an hour to the weblogging phenomenon.. Bill McKibben wrote a telling portrait of this show and its host in The Atlantic Monthly last fall.]

Thanks once more to Jorn Barger for pointing to a thoughtful film critic with sensibility. The New York Press‘ Armond White reflects on the state of the cinema, and cinema audiences, so far in 2000, including the ten best films you’ve never seen. “So where does this leave movie culture right now? Suffering a post-Titanic diminution of intelligence with the likes

of Gladiator, The Patriot and The Perfect Storm–a Hollywood triptych of inanity. These movies are unimportant–no

matter how many itchy teens rush to see them. (Besides, how can Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and George

Clooney compete with such real-life excitement and satisfaction as the April 22 liberation of Elian Gonzalez from

his Miami kidnappers?) The excellent movies listed above do more than thrill–they supply wonder and clarity. It’s

tragic to realize that most of them have disappeared from theaters, unlikely to be seen again except in the

diminished formats of home viewing. Though other good movies may yet come, so much beauty has already gone.

Hype culture leaves us bereft; knowing so will, hopefully, inspire your own moviegoing perseverance.”

Salon: The corruption of Col. James Hiett. “In two weeks, a retired Army colonel will stand for sentencing before Judge Edward Korman in the Cadman Plaza federal courthouse. The

colonel’s name has never been uttered on the Senate floor. You can rummage in vain for any mention of him in congressional committee testimony and reports.

Yet the case of Col. James Hiett, former commander of U.S. Army anti-drug advisors in Colombia, due to be sentenced in mid-July for covering up his

wife’s drug smuggling, has everything to do with the passage last week of more than $1 billion in military aid to Colombia. Hiett’s case offers dark hints of

what the United States is in for by turning the Colombian drug-war theater into a large-scale American military enterprise — and it reveals, too, some of the

costs of the drug war on America’s own streets.” Visions of being mired in Indochina make me think this is starting to sound like “deja vu all over again.”

Here Comes Comet Linear

Brightest comet in more than three years, Comet Linear is already visible with moderate-power binoculars and is expected to become a faint naked-eye

object similar in appearance to the Andromeda Nebula

as it glides by the Big Dipper this month.

Thank you Maurice Rickard, who also suspected that <a href=”http://world.std.com/~emg/2000_07_01_blog_archive.html # “>the Dalai Lama’s message (below) was a hoax, and pointed me to the scoop at the Urban Legends Reference Pages:

Much as we can’t help but grin at the thought of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin

Gyatso, head of state and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, pecking away at a computer keyboard

as he sends a chain glurge advising people to “approach love and cooking with reckless abandon”

winging its way around the Internet, we have to admit that this list has nothing to do with the Dalai

Lama.

Neither this chain message nor its “Instructions for Life” originated with His Holiness. The “Instructions

for Life” are a truncated version of a much longer list that worked its way around the Internet in 1999 in

conjunction with an ASCII art representation of a “Nepalese Good Luck Tantra Totem.” (The list was also

sometimes identified as being a “modern Japanese good luck tantra.”)

…The longer list is itself yet another truncation of a larger work, which in this case is Life’s Little Instruction

Book, by Jackson Brown and H. Jackson Brown, Jr. Perhaps the Dalai Lama isn’t concerned with

royalties (in a copyright sense, at least), but we suspect Messrs. Brown are, so finding something other

than a copyright violation to pass around with the goal of improving people’s lives would probably be in

order.