Fred Wilson has an interesting take on the relationship between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist. “I think venture capitalists, first and foremost, need to feel like their job is to make entrepreneurs successful. So I think of venture capital as a service business. The entrepreneur is your client. It’s a very weird relationship because the entrepreneur is not exactly paying you, even though they really are paying you. But they absolutely can’t fire you. In fact, you can fire them. So it’s among the weirdest kinds of service relationships that one could come up with.”

Kundra visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to encourage students there to apply “new international standards for persistent government data (and metadata),” otherwise known as the semantic web or Web 3.0, to Data.gov’s datasets. These standards will make it easier for governmental data to power deep-linked data mash-ups combining various data sources in a consistent way.

No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.

It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.

We all casually throw around words like “crazy” and “fringe” when describing contemporary politics, but once in a while, developments like Rand Paul’s candidacy come along, and the need to reevaluate the blurred lines between Republican politics and sheer madness becomes apparent.