TED STEVENS EXPLAINS THE INTERNET: God help us all.

MEXICAN ELECTION TOO CLOSE TO CALL so far: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

And Mark in Mexico is liveblogging from Oaxaca.

UPDATE: A.M. Mora y Leon reports from Tijuana.

TWEAKING JAMES WOLCOTT at Pajamas Media. Ordinarily, I’d say the photo was too cruel. But not in this case.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “What’s with Hillary calling herself Mrs. Clinton?”

Meanwhile, her campaign’s getting criticism of a different sort from Greg Sargent and Atrios. It’s a frequent Atrios theme that the Big Media hold bloggers to higher ethical standards than they adhere to themselves, and I do think he’s got a point.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Okay, these aren’t earmarks, exactly, but we’re still talking pork:

Even though Donald R. Matthews put his sprawling new residence in the heart of rice country, he is no farmer. He is a 67-year-old asphalt contractor who wanted to build a dream house for his wife of 40 years.

Yet under a federal agriculture program approved by Congress, his 18-acre suburban lot receives about $1,300 in annual “direct payments,” because years ago the land was used to grow rice.

Matthews is not alone. Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post.

As the Nebraska Guitar Militia put it: Farmin’ the Government beats actual, you know, farming: “Reap what you don’t sow.”

Meanwhile, Stephen Spruiell notes the connection with Doha’s collapse.

UPDATE: You can hear “Farmin’ the Government” here. It just might be the best song on agricultural subsidies you ever hear!

IAN SCHWARTZ HAS THE VIDEO of John Hinderaker and Jeralyn Merritt talking about the press and secrecy, and Hugh Hewitt debating Eric Lichtblau on the same topic, both on today’s Reliable Sources.

UPDATE: The Times is now saying that it didn’t give away secrets. Postwatch notes that its claims for the story were less modest before the heat was on.

EVDO UPDATE: Mark Frauenfelder rounds up reviews of the Kyocera KR-1 router that turns an EVDO card into a wi-fi hotspot. My sister lives out in the boonies, and can’t get either cable or DSL, but she’s got broadband EVDO coverage. I gave her one of these, and she’s been very happy with the results.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Maybe I’m being too “Pollyannaish,” but this sounds encouraging:

“Energy is one of the greatest challenges of the century,” Claude Canizares, MIT’s Bruno Rossi Professor of Physics, told attendees of the conference produced by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME’s) Nanotechnology Institute. “We need significant breakthroughs in science and technology. The promise of nanotechnology provides fertile ground for such breakthroughs.” . . .

MIT’s Vladimir Bulovic said that nanotechnologies such as nanodots and nanorods are potentially “disruptive” technologies in the solar field. That means they could cause a major switch in a primary energy source, potentially proving more efficient than the silicon used in most solar energy devices today. Bulovic is fabricating quantum dot photovoltaics using a microcontact printing process.

On the other hand, this brings things down to earth a bit:

“If 2 percent of the continental United States were covered with photovoltaic systems with a net efficiency of 10 percent, we would be able to supply all the U.S. energy needs,” said Bulovic, the KDD Associate Professor of Communications and Technology in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Two percent is a LOT of land. Though we wouldn’t have to replace anywhere near the whole U.S. energy budget for it to be worthwhile.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear does the math. Anybody know how many square miles of rooftop there are in the United States? Not that many, I suspect.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Allen S. Thorpe observes: “don’t be surprised if the environmentalists don’t turn out to be all that enthusiastic.”

WORLD TRADE TALKS / DOHA ROUND IN “COLLAPSE:” This is much worse news than its placement on page A18 suggests. On the other hand, world trade talks often go badly right up until there’s a deal, as brinksmanship is common.

THE RESPONSIBLE WAY to publish national security secrets. Related thoughts here.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s a cautionary tale:

Rebuffed on several requests for state and federal financing to help rebuild its crumbling bridge, this small resort town was all but resigned to raising the money by doubling the 50-cent bridge toll, increasing property taxes and issuing bonds.

But in a last-ditch gambit, city officials hired a federal lobbyist who had known the local congressman for four decades. Within weeks, the congressman, Representative C. W. Bill Young, called the mayor to say he had slipped a special $50 million appropriation, known as an earmark, into an omnibus bill.

We need to change the culture so that communities will be as embarrassed by stories like this as by reports of racism or environmental destruction.

BRIAN DUNN WONDERS if we’ll be privatizing the war on terror, and isn’t overjoyed at the prospect.

AN “UNSTOPPABLE CUBAN SPRING”?

In March 2003 dozens of leaders of Cuba’s Varela Project and other human rights defenders were detained, subjected to summary trials, condemned to many years in prison, and confined in the most inhumane and cruel conditions. They were treated like — and held in cells with — dangerous common criminals. In this way the regime attempted to suppress the rebirth of the Cuban Spring initiated by thousands of Cubans who overcame a debilitating culture of fear by including their names, addresses and identification numbers in the text of the Varela Project, a document later presented to the National Assembly asking for a referendum on its human rights principles. Despite inhuman treatment and illegal detention, the regime could not stop the rebirth of the Cuban Spring: Many Cubans continue to support the Varela Project even amid repression that includes death threats and physical assault.

I certainly hope that it’s unstoppable. (Via James Hudnall).

OKAY, I LIKE THE CARTOON THAT ACCOMPANIES IT, but Reihan Salam’s piece in Slate on An Army of Davids is a bit puzzling. At least, Salam doesn’t seem to have actually read the book, only Christine Rosen’s rather uninformative treatment, which he cites and praises. How else to explain statements like this one:

But Reynolds’ weakness isn’t that he’s a “techno-triumphalist” who sees robotic solutions everywhere. It’s that he sees only the robots’ upside.

Well, no. Actually, I devote a fair amount of space to the dangers posed by new technologies — from “horizontal knowledge” like cellphones inspiring riots like those in Nigeria over the Miss World pageant, to genetically engineered bioweapons and lethal nanodevices. And I pointed out that terrorism is an early, not-so-positive example of technology empowering the little guy (there’s a whole chapter on terrorism, in fact, so I can hardly be accused of neglecting the subject. Someone else at Slate found the book “frightening.”) As I wrote in the conclusion — in the hope, apparently vain, that even lazy reviewers would read that much:

While a world of hugely and vastly empowered souls may lurk in the future, we’re already living in a world in which individuals have far more power than they used to in all sorts of fields. Yesterday’s science fiction is todays’ reality in many ways that we don’t even notice.

That’s not always good. With technology bestowing powers on individuals that were once reserved to nation-states, the already-shrinking planet starts to look very small indeed. That’s one argument for settling outer space, of course, and many will also see it as an argument for reducing the freedom of individuals on Earth. If those latter arguments carry the day, it could lead to global repression. In its most benign form, we might see something like the A.R.M. of Larry Niven’s science fiction future history, a global semisecret police force run by the United Nations that quitely suppresses dangerous scientific knowledge. In less benign forms, we might see harsh global tyranny, justified by the danger of man-made viruses and similar threats. (As I write this, scientists in a lab in Atlanta have resurrected the long-dead 1918 Spanish Flu and published its genome, meaning that people with resources far below those of nation-states will now be able to recreate one of the deadliest disease agents in history.)

Still, I’m apparently a Pollyannaish techno-utopian because I hold a Faulknerian belief that mankind will not only survive, but prevail. Whatever. In truth, actual Pollyannaish techno-utopians are pretty hard to find — Ray Kurzweil is often charged with Pollyannaism, but his book The Singularity is Near is devoted as much to grim warnings as to rosy scenarios — but the luddite crowd seems to want them so much that where they do not exist, they are invented. Of course, the pop culture is sufficiently loaded in favor of techno-doom, from Paul Ehrlich to Jeremy Rifkin to Al Gore, that anyone who doesn’t run in circles screaming that we’re all going to die looks Pollyannaish by comparison.

As for “cybernetic arms,” well, here’s a start. And here’s much more. Oh, and here.

TOM ELIA looks at changing conceptions of “bigotry” on the left.

ANA MARIE COX reviews Katha Pollitt’s new book, Virginity or Death!

There’s a certain preserved-in-amber quality to some of the thinking here. For example, Pollitt herself confesses that the opinions that underpinned her most controversial column — against displaying American flags after 9/11 — were formed during the Vietnam War; she despairs that her pro-flag daughter cannot see “the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away.” I’m not sure if she’s right about that, but it’s significant that Pollitt would see the world outside her window through a scrim of 30-year-old lefty rhetoric. She simply rejects the argument that the meaning of the flag (like the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance, which was composed by a 19th-century socialist) might change.

That 30-year-old (or 40-year-old, really) lefty rhetoric is blinding a lot of people. The reader reviews at Amazon are quite positive, though.

UPDATE: Eric Scheie is defending ovarian independence.

POPULAR MECHANICS HAS A LOOK at NASA’s backup plans for the Space Shuttle.

Plus, a risk assessment.

MICHAEL TOTTEN locates some moderate Islamists and publishes an interview. Don’t miss the postscript.