ConnecticutMan1 thinks so.

I don’t think that adding Bloomberg to any ticket, never mind one with Ron Paul, is intended to lure in votes from the Democratic party membership or the left in general.

Interestingly, the Independent Green Party of Virgina, who got way more than the 10,000 signatures needed to put Michael Bloomberg / Ron Paul on the ballot, are allied with the Independence Party of America - a party apparatus created in case Bloomberg ran.

Hmmm, maybe that answers my previous post, wondering where they got the money to get all those signatures. There are two ways to get sigs, volunteers, and I doubt the IGVA has enough volunteers to get that many signatures (they got a total of 70,000 for various races), or you pay people to do it. That costs money. Maybe this is a backdoor run by Bloomberg?

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Metavid is a quite amazing site. They provide video archives of congressional transcripts that are searchable by word. That’s because they have the written transcript as well as video. It’s completely free, and in a wiki format, so errors in transcripts can easily be changed by anyone.

I learned about it at SF WordCamp on Saturday when I asked the guy next to me (whose name I forget) what he was programming while we listened to the speakers. It was Metavid. He said it’s still in beta with a more polished interface coming soon.

Metavid looks to be a seriously useful research tool and is a worthy project indeed.

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The Google Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Google, is big on finding new ways to get low-cost renewable energy. One of their main interests is in advanced geothermal, and their blog details their new investments and grants.

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So says former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, adding that the US is halfway through the crisis with the worst yet to come.

Financial stocks got clobbered today in the markets. Lehman Brothers in particular is wobbling badly and was down 13%.

(Disclosure: I own LEH puts)

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Eternal perma-bear economist Nouriel Roubini AKA Dr. Doom says the US is probably in irreversible decline. While he’s usually gloomy, he’s been quite accurate (and early) in predictions about economic matters, especially on the impact of subprime. But do his prognostications apply to geopolitics too?

He says the US is in decline because it squandered its power on stupid wars and built up huge deficits while other countries grew more economically powerful. All of which seems true enough.

He also thinks non-state players will increasingly become more powerful as states become hollowed out. However, the Angry Bear says, how can that be, but such a development is quite accurately predicted by 4th Generation Warfare proponents. No, Russia and China will not dominate, they are in bubbles now, bubbles that are popping, and they are not immune from the rise of non-state actors either.

A multi-polar world with an ever-shifting balance of power is coming, if not already here.

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The Institute for One World Health develops “safe, effective, and affordable medicines for people with infectious diseases in the developing world.”

We challenge the assumption that pharmaceutical research and development is too expensive to create the new medicines that the developing world desperately needs.

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The attacks apparently were directed by Russian sites.

From the comments on Schneier.com

I’ve noticed, as others have on slashdot a large drop in email spam since these cyber attacks - maybe the Georgian’s were big spammers until they got hit - or maybe the Russians took their guns off us while they attacked Georgia.

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From Colin McEnroe

So — in a place called Licking County — they let people take the voting machines home and sleep [with] them? And we wonder why the Ohio count always smells funny?

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But the fine folks at Ziaspace, where we are hosted, fought them off.

(Ok… the truth is a bit more prosaic. The database server got indigestion and needed to be burped.)

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