Have you heard of this little applet called Evernote? It is a great little utility that can store your places of interest, images and information  on any platform or device. It also makes it accessible plus searchable at anytime from anywhere. For instance, you find yourself at an airport parking lot and you will be gone for several weeks.  Just take your cell phone and snap an image of your parking spot with row etc.   Perhaps you are at an unusual event and want to record information about the gathering - just record it and send it to Evernote.  Business cards, wine labels, to do lists and many other possibilities are at your fingertips. The slickest thing about Evernote is that it searches text within images  So if you have three dozen business cards imaged on the site, you can search through them for your targeted info.  Did I mention that it's free?

Last June, I wrote O=Zero, offering an O=Zero bumpersticker (there's also an O=Zero T-shirt).  Somebody, I haven't the foggiest idea who, excerpted 398 words from the article and emailed all his (or her) friends, who proceeded to do the same with their friends. When this happens exponentially, and the email ends up in umpteen gazillion inboxes so that people tell you "this is the fourth time I've been sent this!", it is said to "go viral." An example of how viral is that a columnist for Townhall, Doug Giles wrote a column about it .  He starts by saying:

A buddy of mine in Texas sent a friend of his, an Obama backer, a devastating article written by Dr. Jack Wheeler in which he spotlights in 398 words the fact that Barack, in reality, is much different from the fabricated Jesus image the Dim-o-crats would have us worship. Yes, in just a few keystrokes Wheeler deftly dismembered the notion spun by the scribes of Obama that he is the fresh breeze blowing in our land and reveals, instead, that Barack is a typical uberliberal slim shady politician who simply blows.

Rank the following taxes from best to worst: individual income taxes; payroll taxes, corporate income taxes, sales or consumption taxes, and residential property taxes. The vast majority of economists would rank the corporate income tax as being worst and the sales tax and residential property tax as the best. Unfortunately, the corporate income tax is often the favorite tax of fiscally irresponsible politicians because it is not easily seen.   In fact, the corporate tax is paid by workers in lower wages and fewer new jobs, by consumers in higher prices and by savers and investors in lower rates of return. Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study that showed 28 percent of large companies paid no corporate income tax in 2005 almost always because they had made no profit. Rather than thoughtfully considering whether the corporate income tax should be reduced or abolished, several bluster brains in the U.S. Congress used the report as an excuse to attack corporations.

Wonder why Barack Hussein Obama's been plunging in the polls?  Consider how he's elevated a policy dispute into a character issue. Sen. Obama thinks he can sell icicles to Eskimos.  That self confidence is likely what brought him to Pastor Rick Warren's mega-church last weekend to woo evangelicals. Mr. Obama thought he had an opening, because religious young people are as attracted to what's hip and cool as much as their less religious contemporaries, and young evangelicals tend to be very concerned about the environment and helping the poor. But far and away the most important issue for evangelicals, young and old, is abortion, and Sen. Obama has one of the most radically pro-abortion records of any politician in America.  The less evangelicals -- and most ordinary Americans -- know about it, the better for Sen. Obama.  So a politician with less ego and more judgment would have stayed as far away from the Saddleback Church as possible. As Arnold would say, big mistake.

As Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, it was John McCain who launched the investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.  Those investigations provided the springboard for the incredible media frenzy of the "Abramoff lobbying scandals."  The Washington Post, for example, ran over 50 above-the-fold front page headline stories on Abramoff to feed the frenzy. Jack Abramoff is in jail today because of John McCain.  Now it's payback time.  Abramoff will be setting off a bombshell timed to do maximum damage to his nemesis right before the election.  And in so doing, he will be ripping the lid off and exposing the dirtiest secret of how Washington really works.  The way it works is like this.

We've got war already, and it was a big war, long before the invasion of Georgia. The battlefield runs from Afghanistan into Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel, across northern Africa, and deep into Europe. The latest Russian gambit is part of that big war, as any of our friends and allies in the war zone will tell you. Insofar as America is seen as weak, our enemies will redouble their actions and our friends will hold back, fearing that association with us will not protect them, and single them out for attack. Those consequences are immediate, traveling across the airwaves of the BBC and al Jazeera and the other propaganda outlets favored by our enemies. Once you grasp the full dimensions of the war, it becomes easier to conceive useful options, military and other. We are well placed to demonstrate that this is not a one-way street. The Russians think they have shown that it's costly to be a friend of the United States. We need to show that there can be a high price for friendship with Russia.

Did you see the huge crowd outside the Russian Embassy in Washington DC protesting the war in Georgia? Neither did I. Now that we have a genuine war of aggression, the silence on the Left is deafening. "You might think, at a moment such as this, that the moral calculus would be pretty well understood," the Washington Post said in an editorial today (8/14).  "Russian troops are occupying large swaths of Georgia, a tiny neighboring country, and sacking its military bases.  Russian jets have roamed the Georgian skies, bombing civilian and military targets alike. Russian ships are said to be controlling Georgia's port of Poti, while militia under Russia's control reportedly massacre Georgian civilians.  Yet in Washington, the foreign policy sophisticates cluck and murmur that, after all, the Georgians should have known better than to chart an independent course." It is scandalous to liberals that terrorists at Gitmo don't have easy access to lawyers, but most don't care how many Georgians the Russians kill. Vladimir Putin is counting on this.

There are hundreds of years of oil supplies (at present and projected consumption levels) if oil in oil sands and shale is properly included in reserves.   And it can be produced at a cost of $35-$50 a barrel. Does it seem a bit odd that the current price of oil is between two and three times the cost of producing all the oil the world presently needs and will need long into the future? The reason the price is so high is that the supply has been artificially constrained by governments. Take our Congress.  Some politicians there argue that even if the U.S. government started to allow increased production, that it would be seven to 10 years or more before there would be additional output. This is nonsense. Yet the very same politicians who claim we cannot increase oil production quickly are often the same ones who tell us we need to move to alternative forms - windmills and solar, etc. - without seeming to understand these desirable technologies will take far more time to meet the goals of "energy independence" than ramping up oil production.