Lee Felsenstein, last heard from regarding his program to hook up rural Laos for “pedal-powered” Net access, is posting again — this time with a recipe for successful, world-changing activism.

There are a lot of interesting new Salon blogs out there. I’ve been remiss in keeping up with them lately. I hope to get out more soon.

In the meantime, check out the bluntly named Why your wife won’t have sex with you — a series of in-depth essays on that very topic, from a woman’s perspective. It’s like a self-help book, only better written and with comments from the readers…

Speaking of comments, those of you who pay attention to the comments on this blog will have noticed a marked increase in the strange practice of spam-posting comments — reposting the same verbiage multiple times. (Sometimes this happens as a result of slow response time from the server, but those cases usually lead to 2, 3 or 4 reposts, not ten and 20.) This is a waste of bandwidth and, more important, a waste of this blog’s readers’ time. So cut it out. If necessary I’ll just turn off comments here, but I’d rather not do that. I’ve got no problem with endless vocal disagreement with me. There’s been lots of good, smart dialogue in there. But I have no patience for juvenile spam tactics.

And yes, I know that Radio UserLand’s comments feature is pretty rudimentary — it should offer the ability to delete posts, ban posters and otherwise moderate those comments boards. I’m sorry it’s not better. Since we don’t develop the software here at Salon, I can’t take this on myself, but will continue to communicate this kind of feedback to the UserLand team.

Californians can now pre-register for the telemarketing “do not call” list. I just did.

Those of you who were ready to write Salon off as dead a few weeks ago can now stop your deathwatches. We announced some new financing last week. Salon now has over 60,000 current subscribers in the subscription program we launched two years ago. (I still have a folder full of e-mails telling us what an awful mistake that was, no one would ever subscribe, didn’t we understand that nobody would ever pay for content online?) We also have a 72 percent renewal rate. Thanks to every single one of you who has signed up. Hell, just think of the consternation you’re spreading among the goons over at Free Republic. (”Harder to get rid of than venereal warts,” one disappointed neanderthal over there posted.)

This blog has been devoted exclusively to war ruminations lately. It’s been hard to keep up with anything else.

John Robb’s recent analyses of the unraveling of the Bush/Rumsfeld war plan have been extremely valuable. John, who runs UserLand — the company that produces the software Salon Blogs runs on — is a former military guy.

Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog has been great lately as well. Josh wrote one of the definitive pieces about Rumsfeld’s war with his own generals at the Pentagon. This has been surprising news to many Americans, but Salon subscribers got introduced to this strange conflict nine months ago, in Aug. 2002.