MICHELE CATALANO wishes a happy birthday to Donald Duck.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up!

IN RESPONSE TO MY POST ON THE SINGULARITY, below, Jim Bennett sends this link to an excerpt on the subject from his recent book.

THE FOLKS AT ANKLEBITINGPUNDITS say that the latest Washington Post poll is wrong. This far from an election, it’s hard for me to get too excited about polls, one way or another. And given their track record even close to elections, it should probably be hard for me to get excited about them, period.

AUSTIN BAY has a long post on the strategic situation in Iraq and Syria that’s a must-read. And consider hitting his tipjar as he heads back that way to do some firsthand reporting.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: “I don’t know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders’ views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty’s recent misuse of the word ‘gulag’ marks some kind of turning point.”

Howard Kurtz: “Excuse me, but did Schulz say that it’s okay to unleash words like ‘gulag,’ even if it’s not an ‘exact or literal analogy,’ because it gets him booked on Fox News? Is that the new standard? Yes, Chris, I called the president a war criminal because it was the only way I could get on Hardball?”

DO IT MAKE IT YOURSELF: My TechCentralStation column is up.

I’M ABOUT A THIRD OF THE WAY into Joel Garreau’s book, Radical Evolution, and there’s much talk about the Singularity (including a very cool interview with Vernor Vinge). (Decent short description of the Singularity concept here).

But while I think that the Singularity is something to take seriously, I also think that the focus — shown in the interview and the passages surrounding it — is a bit myopic. The fear is that we’ll wind up creating superhuman intelligence, and that it will quickly take over the world. Personally, I suspect that superhuman intelligence will be harder to create, and less superhuman, than many suspect. But that’s not the main point. The main point is that the dangers, in my estimation, don’t come from the creation of a godlike (or demonlike) superhuman entity. Or at least, if such an entity exists, the threat won’t be because of its intelligence. As I wrote a while back:

It is not obvious, however, that intelligence has much to do with world domination. Certainly, those currently ruling the world did not attain their positions by virtue of their intelligence, and it may be that, like James Branch Cabell’s eponymous protagonist Jurgen, superintelligent machines would find that “cleverness was not at the top of things, and never had been.” While scientists and computer experts, whose chief pride (as with Jurgen) lies in their intelligence, would tend to regard superior intellect as the sine qua non of power, this view can be quickly dispelled by a glance at the headlines.

The bigger danger won’t be the creation of a godlike artificial intelligence. It will be the creation of many millions (and eventually billions) of individuals with powers that would have been until recently regarded as godlike, in the rather small space that humanity currently inhabits. That problem will be reduced, however, if we expand beyond the earth beforehand. I certainly agree with Stephen Hawking that the alternative is extinction. But I think that we’ll do it in time.

Overall, I’m less afraid of the singularity than some. And one characteristic of entering a singularity is that you don’t generally realize it as it’s happening — like crossing the event horizon of a black hole, it’s not apparent while it’s underway. We may be entering the Singularity already. As my alter ego suggests, cloning seems frightening now. One day it will seem . . . quaint.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

“YOU ALL LOOK ALIKE TO ME:”

Many Republicans probably voted for George Bush dozens, if not hundreds, of times in 2004, according to Democrat party Chairman Howard Dean, “by taking advantage of the fact that Democrat poll workers have difficulty distinguishing individuals from among a crowd of white Christians.”

“Thanks to their pale skin, round eyes and khaki trousers, Republicans just blend in,” said Mr. Dean. “So they vote, get in the back of the line and vote again. And because they’ve never made an honest living in their lives, they could do that all day long.”

Howard Dean is pretty much a one-man ScrappleFace full-employment guarantee.

UPDATE: James Lileks: “It must rankle the moderates to hear him fling this nonsense on a daily basis, after all; it’s like having Pat Buchnan run the GOP and make constant fulminating speeches against Commie-Lezbo Vegans.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL is rather hard on the Raich decision. As it should be.

DISTURBING DEVELOPMENTS IN BOLIVIA: Gateway Pundit has more, and so does Publius.

IMAGINE NO CORRUPT AND INEFFECTUAL INTERNATIONAL BUREAUCRATS — I wonder if you can:

Leahy said too many legislators saw the United Nations as an “easy place to beat up” but that the United States should not be acting unilaterally “simply because the United Nations happens to be here within the borders of the United States.”

“It is hard to think of a world without the U.N.,” he said.

It’s not clear to me what the location of U.N. headquarters has to do with anything, though.

ARNOLD KLING writes on the political implications of thinking vs. feeling.

I know somebody who needs to do more of the former, and less of the latter.

MICKEY KAUS on Kerry’s 180: “He raises as many questions as he answers.”

Including this one: Why are we still talking about him?

GLOBAL VOICES Podcasts.

NOT WITH A BANG, BUT WITH A WHIMPER: My thoughts on Kerry’s Form 180, over at GlennReynolds.com.

DAVID PLOTZ’S BOOK, The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank is out. He writes about his own experiences as a sperm donor in Slate today.

CECI CONNOLLY’S “100 MURDERS” STATEMENT has been corrected. Follow the link for video.

YES, THE INSTAPUNDIT STORE IS BACK: Actually, it never went away, I just took it off the “Recommended” links a year or so ago and forgot to put it back. But hey, Father’s day is coming, and what would make a better present for Dad?

UPDATE: Reader John Thompson emails: “An Instapundit thong? Glenn, really…”

He’s right. An InstaPundit Thong for Mom is the perfect present for Dad!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Betsy Gorisch emails: “Hmmm. Well, I think an Instapundit Thong for Dad is the perfect gift for Mom!”

THE ANSWER IS: “Because homeland security is still a joke.”

The question:

At a time when the United States is tightening its borders, how could a man toting what appeared to be a bloody chain saw be allowed into the country?

With apologies to the Amazing Karnak.

INDEED: Eugene Volokh points to this story with the jokey headline “Blame Canada:”

The 17-year-old Bucks County boy charged with having bomb-making equipment in his bedroom and threatening to blow up his school is a Canadian who hates Americans, prosecutors say.

Obvious headline. On the other hand, the CBC, according to a just-released Fraser Institute study, is engaged in what sounds a lot like paranoid hate speech:

The CBC’s television news coverage of the United States is consistently marked by emotional criticism, rather than a rational consideration of US policy based on Canadian national interests, according to The Canadian released today by The Fraser Institute.

This anti-American bias at the CBC is the consequence of a “garrison mentality” that has systematically informed the broadcaster’s coverage of the US. Garrison mentality was a term coined by Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye. He used it to describe a uniquely Canadian tendency reflected in our early literature, a tendency, as he put it, to “huddle together, stiffening our meager cultural defenses and projecting all our hostilities outward.”

One hopes that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will review its stance before any more innocent schoolchildren are threatened. . .

UPDATE: Reader Chris Buchholz emails:

I must say I don’t buy it. It reminds me of when the liberals were blaming Tim McVeigh on Rush Limbaugh. It wasn’t Rush’s fault McVeigh was crazy.

Well, yes. The presence of ellipsis is generally a tipoff that I’m tongue-in-cheek here, you know. Canadian reader David Peer, meanwhile, emails: “I tried to detect the satire in your concluding remark about the CBC and ‘anti-americanism,’ but I just can’t see it.” Look harder!

I guess I should put that Andrea See quote about my dry sense of humor back up.

I HAVE A LIBERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM: Over at The Corner we’re seeing a rather large number of abortion-related posts today. In this one (which really goes beyond the abortion issue) Kathryn Jean Lopez decries a poll showing that 80% of Americans think that pharmacists ought to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives even if they’re personally opposed to birth control.

Of course, this only matters because pharmacists enjoy a government-created monopoly on the dispensing of prescription drugs. Just take that away, and the problem disappears, too. In the meantime, like others who enjoy government monopolies, they are forced to make some concessions to public convenience. That doesn’t strike me as an overwhelming imposition, but if the pharmacy profession feels otherwise, I’ll be the first to support a move to eliminate its privileged position.

A FEW SNARKY LEFTY READERS want to know why I haven’t written about Kerry’s reported Form 180 release. They’ll no doubt be delighted to discover that it’s the subject of today’s MSNBC post, which will be online whenever MSNBC gets it there. In the meantime, Tom Maguire has a roundup.

HUMAN/WILDLIFE ENCOUNTERS: Daily Pundit notes a story of a woman eaten by a grizzly bear at a Canadian golf course.

David Baron’s excellent book, The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, is a must-read on this subject, which will grow more important as predators come back. (We have our own issues in my area, I’m told, as black bears reintroduced into the Big South Fork are wandering beyond its boundaries.) Here’s a column I wrote on Baron’s book back when it came out.

ISN’T THIS STORY KIND OF, WELL, STALE? Yale grades portray Kerry as a lackluster student.

The photo, on the other hand, looks like a career-killer to me.

No wonder his campaign was trying to keep this stuff out of the news!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse, who was way ahead on this story, is now saying I told you so. In the blogosphere, no story is ever too stale for that!

More perspective here. Multiply election-damning facts: (1) French was one of his best grades; (2) It was still a lousy 77; (3) And that’s even after living in France and Switzerland. And with that, let’s breathe a(nother) sigh of relief and let this story go.

MORE: Soxblog has another I-told-you-so. It’s never too late in the blogosphere!